Listening to Billie (7 page)

Back in her own house, an hour or so later, Eliza was tired, but some of the day’s earlier trouble had drained or evaporated from her mind. With a cup of tea she sat comfortably at her kitchen table, savoring the rare luxury of no thoughts at all.

And then the phone rang. And because it could be Catherine saying something about when she was coming home—saying anything—for the third time that day Eliza answered the ring.

It was a friend from college, Peggy Kennerlie, inviting her to a party in Belvedere, some weeks off. Eliza accepted, out of habit, and then wondered why: she was tired of both the Kennerlies; she had been tired of Kennerlie parties for years. Maybe she wouldn’t go.

She began to see this series of calls as some form of punishment—or possibly a test?

Another call. An unmistakable soft voice said, “Hey, Eliza, this is Miriam. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, real okay.” She laughed, her rich rounded laughter that meant affection for Eliza, and that also signaled that she was high, on God knows what. “Say, Eliza, do you know the last name of Lawry? Kathleen’s Lawry?”

“Lawry? No, I don’t.”

“Well, it’s got to be the one. He call me, say he seen me, say could I meet him for a drink.”

“Christ, Miriam. Kathleen would kill you.”

“You right, and anyway I’m not about to meet him for a drink. I don’t drink!” And she laughed again, prolonged, and
high.

•  •  •

Eliza’s last phone call was from Daria, calling from New York, to say that she was pregnant. “Two months, a baby next August—it could come on your birthday! Eliza, isn’t that fantastic! I can’t believe it. I’ve always wanted—we’d like a dozen children, Smith and I. Eliza, isn’t it
great?
”

Tall and beautiful, stoop-shouldered, Miriam shuffled across the hard bare neglected yard of the Project, in the morning, on her way to work. She was wearing tight new black shoes and a big brown coat. Even though the coat hid most of her body, she still stooped—she always had; and she walked with her head lowered, through the bunches of skinny little kids on their way to school, with their books and funny little bags of lunch.

She was hungry; quarreling at breakfast with her mother, her stomach had closed up and she couldn’t eat. Her mother was light-skinned and had dyed her hair blond, and she was mean. Her mother said Miriam was mean: “The blacker the meaner. You just like your father, just exactly. Sulking. Black and mean.” Maybe she was mean, but just because she got a raise at work was she supposed to make payments on her mother’s living-room sofa from the Emporium? Even if some of the stains were from Cokes and things that she and her friends had spilled when they got high?

She wanted a Coke now, but she was late, and it was faster to walk than take a bus to the hospital, the office. Where Kathleen might or might not be mad.

Quarreling with her mother, in those small crowded rooms, with her brothers and sisters watching, filled Miriam
with need. She needed to scream and hit and cry, and she wildly wanted everything in the world that was not her mother, not the Project. She wanted more shoes and outfits, and velvet sofas and tall gold lamps with pleated shades, and big white refrigerators full of food, and fast white cars—things like you could win in a contest. Like the Christmas windows at Macy’s or Sears. All that wanting sometimes made her sick.

Along Fillmore Street, where she walked, among the small greasy restaurants that had barbecue and hamburgers and Mexican food, there were a lot of new little stores that sold funny things: old dresses with yellow lace on them, and old-timey men’s suits with big shoulders and big white buttons. Who’d want that stuff? But some of the stores sold real nice things, some nice new outfits, in these bad colors. But it all cost money.

She stopped to look at some purple velvet pants with a tunic top, wondering, Would I look good in that? Look long and thin? There was always layaway. In front of the outfit, reflected in the glass, she saw her own face, big and black, with kinky hair that she hadn’t had time to iron out that morning.

Then, making her jump and turn around quickly, a man’s voice said, “You’re a girl that likes nice things.”

She turned toward him, and he had to be a pimp, in those sharp tight clothes: wine suede bell-bottoms and a black silk turtleneck stretched tight across his chest. But he looked nice, too; he looked good.

“Some, not too much,” she said, and she lifted her head and started to walk on up the street.

Being tall, he kept up with her—no trouble for him. “You look good,” he said. “I really dig the way you look.”

“Lucky you.” She walked faster, because it had crazily come to her that what she wanted to say was: Okay, then, why don’t you pay me for looking good? You think it happens free?

“You work?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Her sigh said what she thought of her job: the details that made no sense and that turned into mistakes, the
boredom, Kathleen, who was always talking and mad, and her low, low pay.

“Maybe you in the wrong line.” He laughed.

A pimp. They all came on the same. She knew. She said, “Maybe
you
in the wrong line of work.”

He laughed again. “You think you know? You ever think to be a model? Get money just to wear nice clothes?”

Knowing better, still her heart raced. Had she ever thought? Just all the time. Herself in long white fur coats, with shoes that matched, and cameras all turned on her. Ten, fifteen dollars an hour.
Could
he be not a pimp? “I’m late for work,” she said.

“You come back this way? When you get off? I’ll be looking for you after five. I might have a little Valentine for you.” He touched her arm, so that she stopped, and she looked at him again. He was blacker than she was, with eyes that slanted up, and a sharp little beard on his chin. “Well, so long,” he said, and he made a sort of salute to her with a casual, loosely clasped-up fist. “I’ll see you, baby,” and he laughed.

She scowled, not knowing what to make of him, what to do, and she turned away with her chin up. Let him find her again if he could.

“Miriam, you’re late!” Kathleen screamed out, in the office.

But Miriam, who listened for tone more than words, knew that Kathleen was mad because she had something to tell.

Miriam changed into a lab coat, which hid her almost as well, and she said, “You hear from Lawry?”

Not at all intuitive herself, Kathleen was always amazed by Miriam. “You Geminis,” she said. “I think maybe he’s coming up this weekend. I got another see-you-soon card.”

“I reckon he could be coming.”

“God, the crumbs I live on! And after that last no-show trip. I
know
I should dump him.”

Kathleen had this idea that she, Miriam, understood everything she said, but Miriam did not; nothing about Kathleen made any sense to Miriam. There she was, white and over twenty, been to college, making good money being a supervisor, but she never bought any clothes, just paid rent and spent money on her little car, and all hung up on this guy who had no money and moved to Los Angeles and only came up every four or five weeks to see her, and then half the time didn’t show.

Even Eliza made more sense to Miriam than Kathleen did; she missed Eliza, and didn’t understand about her getting fired. “I made him fire me so I could get unemployment,” Eliza had explained, seeming happy about the whole thing. Kathleen did not miss Eliza, and said mean things about her all the time.

“Tonight I’ll have to wash my hair and bake bread, in case he comes,” Kathleen said, as she so often had before. “God, why can’t I just tell him to shove it, will you tell me that?”

“You like him.” She did not say—of course not—that Lawry called her; not postcards—phone calls, from Los Angeles. Said he had to meet her. But she refused.

“Oh, I guess.”

It was hard for Miriam to listen to Kathleen all day. Miriam felt that her own life was terrible, but at least it was familiar to her; she knew all her own troubles even if she couldn’t lift them off. But Kathleen’s pinched and furious world was strange. And so sometimes Miriam talked just to make Kathleen be quiet.

“There was this guy talking to me on the way to work,” she said. “And he looked real good, in these bad pants, but I don’t know if he be a pimp. He had on these far-out clothes?”

This was of course not a question, but Kathleen chose to answer. “Miriam, you stay away from people like that! Like that guy who said he was going to take you to Vegas. Don’t you read the papers? Girls beaten up, stabbed to death?”

“I know, but he
might
not be one. He did look good. There anything you’d like for me to do?”

Kathleen sighed. She would rather have gone on talking,
but she was conscientious, in her way—or, rather, terrified of being caught lacking. And so she said, “You can go to the cath lab and see if the caths on Gonzales and Hardy are ready. And have them copied. You know.”

Miriam walked out of the research building and across the street, to the hospital. Some people didn’t like her and they frowned whenever they saw her. Mr. Graham, who was head of something in the business office. Or several of them didn’t know what to do and so they pretended she wasn’t there. Several of the doctors did that: Dr. Branner, Dr. Stern. But there were a couple of interns who were pretty nice, and they liked her and kidded around with her. “Hey, Miriam, you look like you’re high!”

“Oh, I wish I was!”

What would it be like to have a white boyfriend? She had wondered about that sometimes. She thought that she would like to. But you didn’t see near as many white boys with black girls as black men with whites. One of her brothers had a girl friend who was Spanish.

Kathleen hated everyone in the hospital, and sometimes Miriam thought she had been hired by Kathleen to make them all mad. The only other black people who worked there were orderlies or maids, and they looked at Miriam funny as she walked past in her white lab coat, with her black, black hair.

She got the typed cath reports and crossed the street back to the copying room, where a girl from the business office was using the machine, so Miriam had to wait. The girl had on this little short skirt and a bright yellow sweater; she was dressed in a hip way but you could tell she wasn’t. Miriam did not know how. She was friendly—Lord, so friendly Miriam wanted to run.

“Miriam, how are you? I really love those shoes. You really look good in them but I just don’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all my skirts. You only got those three things to do? I can wait while you do them.”

“No, you go on ahead.”

Miriam sat down in a chair and closed her eyes, and she almost went to sleep, and she thought about these girls she knew who were whores, who lived in a big apartment on Twin Peaks; they’d had an interior decorator and had white carpets and white velvet sofas and gold lamps, and they wore all these different kinds of fur coats, and white shoes. She shuddered, thinking about it: what all did they have to
do?

The friendly girl said, “Well, bye. Have a nice day.”

As soon as Miriam got back to the office, Kathleen started up talking again. “And I’ve just realized there’s a full moon in Scorpio this weekend! Anything could happen! He has three things in Scorpio, that’s really heavy. I’ll bet he does come up. I wonder how much dope I’ve got left. Why do I always have to provide everything, will you tell me that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I must really dig punishment. I guess I got it living all those years with my mother. Beating me up all the time. But if he doesn’t like me why did he pick me up at the bar and come on like that? No one’s ever come on at me in my life, not that way.”

Miriam wondered about that, too. She wondered why anyone would pick Kathleen. Kathleen was so unlike being a woman at all; she was more like some skinny little boy who got in fights all the time. Lawry was good-looking in his pictures, with lots of straight light hair and those big pale eyes, but maybe a little girlish-looking. There had to be something funny about him somewhere, choosing Kathleen. He sure acted funny, from the sound of it.

Kathleen asked, “You want to come over to my house? I’ll make some tuna sandwiches.”

“Okay, I’ll get us some Cokes.”

They walked along Fillmore Street, in the opposite direction from where that man would be waiting for Miriam at five, or maybe he wouldn’t be there—the man whom she would or would not go to meet.

Kathleen’s place didn’t have anything nice in it, just old furniture and Indian-looking things, but at least it was her own
place. Miriam thought about getting herself a place, but she didn’t want to until she could fix it up nice. At Kathleen’s there was steam heat; it was always too hot there. In the Project nothing worked, and cold wind leaked in through the windows.

Sometimes Miriam wondered: Would she rather be her or Kathleen? Be Kathleen or be a hustler on Twin Peaks? Sometimes all the thinking that she did made her dizzy.

Kathleen brought in sandwiches and their Cokes, straws in the bottles, and they both sat on the wide day bed, which was the only place to sit.

Kathleen said, “If he could just settle down and we could have some kids. He really digs kids, we both do, and we could have one that was really beautiful. We wouldn’t have to get married or anything like that.”

“Be nice if he was at least
around.
”

“That’s true, you’re absolutely right.” Kathleen lit a cigarette and began to blow out smoke. Then she said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that Eliza was really more of a Leo than we always said. That grandstand way she left. I think basically she was a real Leo snob, and she couldn’t stand it that Dr. Branner wouldn’t pay any attention to her. She probably expected him to ask her out!”

Back at the office, there was really nothing to do. Kathleen stood at the window, staring out, smoking and cursing at random. “Damn you, Dr. Branner, I hope you break your neck. You, too, Dr. Stern.”

Miriam in her mind could still see the man from this morning, see his slant devil eyes, and his black face, and it came to her that he could be anything at all: a photographer, looking for models; a plainclothes pig; a narc. A crazy junkie with a knife. Or a pimp. Or just a man, like her brothers.