Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  “And most of the time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  Beth looked somber and lit a Carlton. I don’t know exactly how it happened to Trish, but at any rate she became a chronic runaway. There were some meetings with her parents but they didn’t go anywhere. You can see why. Her stepfather has it firmly fixed in his mind that she’s a piece of trash, and her mom goes along with it. They signed her over to the state. The state placed her in a series of foster homes and she ran away from all of them. It’s not surprising. The foster care system in Washington is a disgrace. A lot of people take in kids just for the money and there’s no real way of checking up on them. Some of them abuse the kids, physically and/or sexually. The kids have no rights and no recourse, except to run. Other foster parents will take in a lot of different kids—so a kid from a relatively sheltered background will find herself in a house with drug addicts and shoplifters, kids who’ve never had a home, kids with a string of arrests, kids who can be abusive themselves.

  “All this time it looks like Trish got little or no one-on-one counseling. She was in and out of school, failed the ninth grade, even though her test scores show that she’s a bright girl with a high aptitude for English. It wasn’t until she got institutionalized last spring that they found out she was on drugs, and that anyone seriously started to work with her. That’s how it happens—and by then it’s almost too late. A kid has such an internalized sense of degradation and hopelessness that it’s hard to even get to her, much less get her out of the life. That’s especially true of young prostitutes. Their sense of themselves as female has invariably been damaged. They’re so distant from their bodies—they’ve had to become that way to survive—that they slip back into prostitution at the least opportunity. It’s the easiest and for many the only way to make money. Especially if they use drugs.

  “But Trish got some help and in some ways she was one of our success stories.” Beth smiled briefly. “Not that we have overwhelmingly great standards for success. If a girl can get herself on birth control pills, that’s a big step, and if she can remember to use a condom, that’s another. Most of our girls have had VD and a lot of them have been pregnant. They know little or nothing about their bodies and their health is often really bad. I mean, you’ve seen them out on the streets in winter wearing practically nothing—and they don’t eat right, Coke and french fries for days on end. We try to tell them about birth control and nutrition, but it doesn’t usually sink in.

  “Anyway Trish got placed in a halfway house about six months ago and started coming to weekly meetings for a group of young prostitutes, though, as I told you, she didn’t always make it. But the group is good. It’s a way for the girls to share some common experiences around pimps and customers and to get them talking about their feelings. Trish was also doing some school work here, working for her high school diploma.

  Then she ran again. It was in September and we lost sight of her. She wasn’t picked up on the streets. I don’t know if she stopped hooking for a while or if she was working through some massage parlor under a phony ID. But it was the last I heard of her until you turned up.”

  “You didn’t go looking for her?”

  “I tried. A little. But it’s a big city and Trish is a smart girl, with an even smarter guy behind her. You don’t get far with Wayne. And I’ve got my hands full with the kids who actually come here for help. I just figured—hoped—that Trish would pop up again.”

  “What do you know about a guy named Karl? A friend of Wayne’s?”

  Beth shook her head. “Trish never mentioned anyone besides Wayne.” She looked tired. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more, Pam, but my group for gay kids starts in ten minutes. I feel bad though … you know, you do care about each kid individually—but there are too many of them. Each with his or her own history and problems. You do what you can.”

  “I know,” I said, and I felt the hopelessness of it.

  19

  PASSING BACK THROUGH THE front room I saw the girl who had directed me to Beth in the first place, the paper-skinned teenager with the dyed black hair and glittering nose stud, who looked like she’d just dropped her teddy bear.

  She was with another girl and studiously avoiding my eyes.

  I went up to her anyway. “Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

  Her companion looked me up and down, not unfriendly, just wary. She was probably all of thirteen, in a too-large Army jacket and black beret. “You work here?”

  “No, but I’d like to talk to your friend a minute. What’s your name?”

  She made a helpless attempt to stare me down. It didn’t work. “Cady,” she murmured. She still had her cold. She waved her companion away.

  Thanks for telling me about Beth,” I said. “I’ve talked to her and she’s really been great. I’d just like to ask you two things—Do you know where Rosalie lived? And if so, will you take me there?”

  “What makes you think I know anything?” Cady tugged nervously at her black forelock and looked sideways at the video game players.

  “Because you came up to me the other night. It makes me think you care about Trish and want to do something to help.”

  “Well, even if I knew, I couldn’t do it now cause I got something to do here.”

  “Beth’s group?”

  She nodded. “And I’m late anyway.”

  “I’ll wait for you then, over at the Clock restaurant. I can get you something to eat if you want and then you can show me.”

  I didn’t think she’d go for it, but after a minute she sighed and agreed. It might have been the promise of food, though I liked to think it was because I was such a nice person.

  I watched her go over to her friend and shrug. Then they both disappeared in back. I maneuvered my way through the crowd and walked two blocks to the all-night Clock restaurant.

  I had a cup of coffee and thought about Carole. I found myself going through the same thought process I had all winter just before I slept with someone. The reasoning went something like this: First of all, Hadley was never going to come back to Seattle, admit it. I couldn’t spend my whole life waiting around for her. Second, even if she came back to Seattle, what guarantee was there that she’d be interested in me? None. I mean, she’d been the one to break it off, right? Third, even if she did come back and was interested in starting up again, should I immediately fall into her arms and tell her yes?

  Of course. I mean, of course not. She needed to be taught a lesson (even in absentia) and what better lesson to teach the girl of your dreams than that she was not the only game in town?

  I let the waitress fill my cup again and grappled with a very simple reality: I wanted sex. And Carole promised sex and lots of it. Naturally June would be furious. Penny and Ray were couple enough in the collective and Carole was a dingbat besides (I could hear June already). But that was easy for June to say; she had Eddy. And I had no one. And no immediate prospects. Except Carole.

  I put my head in my hands. Why had I thought that becoming a lesbian would solve all my problems? I’d thought that because last summer I’d fallen in love with Hadley and that had solved all my problems. At least temporarily. So why hadn’t that damn woman stayed around? We could be having a Meaningful Relationship right now, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all those stupid affairs to prove to myself that I was a lesbian. And to prove to my sister and everyone else that Hadley had been no mere flash in the pan. It was all her fault that I was even contemplating sleeping with Carole—an irrevocable act that I knew would bring me nothing but trouble.

  Cady had the appetite of a horse—and she was as jumpy as one too. She gorged down steak and eggs and a piece of apple pie as well as two large Cokes, but the whole time she was looking around, at the waitresses, at the other customers and occasionally at me, as if she expected someone to come and snatch the food away from her any second.

  I tried to put her at ease as much as possible, but her attention span seemed much shorter than Trish’s, and she was
n’t all that interested in the little I told her about myself, even when I mentioned I was a lesbian. I thought she might think we had something in common, but it was clear I just made her nervous. I was going to have to come up with a better life story if I was planning to hang around much with kids like these.

  It wasn’t until she’d finished her dessert that I brought up the subject of Wayne. “You know him?”

  “Yeah,” she answered briefly, warily. “He’s cool.”

  “Is he Trish’s old man?”

  “She’d like to think so.”

  “But he’s got other girls?”

  “A couple.”

  “Are you one?”

  “Me?” Cady looked upset. “I’m gay now. I don’t go with no pimps. I’ve got better things to do with my money than give it to some dude.” She slurped her Coke and blew her nose, a red lump with a glittering rhinestone in her soft, pallid face. “We were talking about pimps in our group. There’s nobody who’s ever had a good one.”

  “What about Karl—is he a pimp too?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Are you sure? Bald guy, with a black beard? An artist who’s a friend of Wayne’s.”

  Cady shook her head. “I don’t hang out with Wayne, I don’t know his friends.”

  “What about Rosalie?” I persisted. “Was she working for Wayne?”

  “Maybe she used to,” Cady said and put down her fork finally. “But she wanted to quit, she was trying to get off the street.”

  “You mean she wasn’t working as a prostitute?”

  “She stopped. When I saw her she said she didn’t want to do it no more, she was sick of it. I know what she means.”

  “But Trish and Rosalie were staying together and Trish was working for Wayne. Did Trish want to stop too?”

  “I guess,” said Cady indifferently. “But probably Wayne wouldn’t let her.”

  “You said Wayne was cool.”

  “Yeah, they’re all cool, till they bust your head open. I had one guy when I was straight, he was more my boyfriend, another guy on the street my age. But it got to be a hassle, when I was making money and he was spending it. And I wasn’t going to get pushed around by no dude who couldn’t even support himself.”

  “Is Wayne different?”

  “Wayne’s got some class. I mean, he deals coke and shit so he doesn’t have to live off girls or nothing. He’s more like a friend. Like, he’d help you if you got in a jam, talk to people, get you a fake ID, loan you money…”

  “And he doesn’t ask anything in return?”

  “Oh sure, you got to pay him back sometime….” She pushed away her plate and snuffled loudly into her napkin. “But you got to pay everybody back. He’s no different.”

  Rosalie had lived in an old hotel in the city center, one of those pay-by-the-week fleabags. I guessed that Rosalie must have been paid up and that the desk clerk hadn’t been reading the papers and didn’t know she was dead, because he told us her room number without asking any questions and hardly a look at us. Since his job was not to see what was going on around him, that wasn’t surprising.

  “How are we going to get in?” Cady asked.

  I’d read you could open doors with a credit card, but had never, before now, had occasion to try it. The lock was weak and my Sears card worked—another small side benefit of the market economy.

  The room wasn’t much to look at. There were the cactus plants on the sill and a few rock group posters tacked up on the wall. The double bed was neatly made and a Black rag doll, faded and once beloved, sat on the pillow. There was a small chest of drawers under a mirror; it had a large assortment of eye makeup and fingernail polish on it but not much else. The drawers were empty. Rosalie’s—and perhaps Trish’s—few clothes were hung in the closet or spilled out of a suitcase on the floor. The room had a stale, pathetic odor; two teenage girls, living on their own, one of them working as a prostitute, the other trying to stop. Had Trish supported Rosalie then? Or had Rosalie found other ways to make a living? Dealing dope, stealing? However they’d made their money, they hadn’t ended up with much of it themselves.

  Cady looked sad and uneasy. She picked up the Black doll and held it with unconscious longing. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  I shook my head. Maybe just a sense of Trish and Rosalie, a feeling for their life here. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything to explain why Rosalie had died or why Trish was missing. Nevertheless I started looking through the clothes. There were T-shirts and underwear mostly, a few socks and stockings, a pair of Levis and a couple of sweaters. I went through the closet and found some fancier clothes: a red rayon dress, a kimono, a hanger full of cheap necklaces. Dress-up, play-acting clothes.

  The last thing I did was take the blanket off the bed to reveal the faded, stained sheets, and run my hand between the mattress and box spring, where I hit something hard. I’d been looking for drugs; what I found was a diary with a broken lock. It was the padded, girlish kind that conjured up sweet secrets and emotional outpourings. I’d had one myself when I was thirteen—a yellow one for me, a blue one for Penny.

  “I’ll take this,” I said, and put it into my bag. “I guess we can go now.”

  But before we left, I took one thing more: a tiny, silver-gray cactus in a ceramic pot. Cady kept the doll.

  20

  “I FEEL LIKE KILLING MYSELF,” the diary began. It was in November, over two years ago, when Trish was thirteen, in the eighth grade. “I don’t have any friends. Yvonne was my friend but she moved away. All my teachers except Mrs. Smith hate me, she said I wrote a good paper for English. It was about Nagasaki, a book I read. It made me feel so bad to know what we did in the war to the Japanese. I hate people, especially Rob. Now he has been married to Mom six months. At first he pretended to be nice, he said he would teach me to play softball, but then he said I was getting too old. I guess Mom told him I got my period. I hate my Mom how she is around him. She and I used to get along and talk and everything. Now he’s here every night the fat slob, he sits watching TV and doesn’t say anything. If I get a bad grade he yells at me. Yesterday he said something mean about my boobs, I can’t help it if they’re getting big. My Mom never says anything. I hate her. I feel like killing myself.”

  Outside my apartment the night was quiet and cold. I was drinking tea under the quilt but I was still cold. Ernesto maintained an injured distance on the rocking chair.

  “December 10. Rob hit me last night, it was the first time he hit me so hard. I forgot to take out the trash this morning and so the trash collectors didn’t pick it up. Big fucking deal. My Mom started crying but she didn’t do anything. She just said Patti why can’t you do what you’re supposed to do so Rob doesn’t have to get angry. Then she said why can’t you be like you were before. She should know. I’m the same as I always was. It’s him that’s the problem.

  “I told Heather about it in PE today. She said her Dad hits her too and once he gave her a black eye. She asked if I wanted to eat lunch with her and her friends. Heather is cool, she has a lot of friends and a boyfriend Sam, he’s in high school and he has a motorcycle.”

  “December 26. I gave Heather a necklace and she gave me a stuffed bear. We went to the park and Sam came over and gave us a ride on the motorcycle. He said he would introduce me to his friend. He gave us some pot. Heather said she smoked it all the time, so I said I did too, but I never tried it before. Her parents were gone so we went back to Heather’s house and got high. First I didn’t feel anything then I felt dizzy. I pretended I liked it though. We made brownies because we were hungry. I came home late and Rob slapped me.”

  The first entries were in a large, well-formed script that got smaller and more sloping as it went on, as if that could help minimize the events. I followed Trish through the eighth grade, through Rob’s beatings and her increasing lack of feeling about them. She seemed to take them for granted and only reported them when they were especially bad, like the time he raised w
elts on her back. Her grades dropped and she got high more often. Heather’s boyfriend disappeared from the picture, but then the two girls met Jamie and Mark, two boys in the ninth grade, and hung out with them. So far it was a childish diary that was not so different in many ways from what I wrote at her age. In spite of being filled with thoughts about the stupidity of her family and of school, it was unselfconscious and gave no hint of what was to come.

  Then, that summer, Wayne arrived to stay with them.

  “June 20. Wayne and I spent all day talking today while Rob and Mom were at work. He speaks Spanish and has traveled all over the place. He said they tested him when he was a kid and they found out he had an IQ of 180 so his Mom didn’t care if he went to school or not. He’s read everything. I never talked to anybody about books before outside of school. He asked me what I was reading and I told him I was reading David Copperfield. We had to read part of that in school and I wanted to finish it. He said he was reading Frowd and Young when he was my age. He said he’d been psychoanalyzed (I looked that word up, also it’s Freud and Jung), and you can tell a lot about yourself from your dreams. They have symbols. A lot of the symbols mean something about your sex life. A woman is a circle and a man is a stick. So if you dream you’re playing ping-pong with someone, the shape of the paddle means you’re having intercourse with them. I didn’t know that.”