The High Cost of Living (2 page)

A girl wearing a long bottle green velvet dress was sitting on a hassock, her back toward them, kicking off her uncomfortable shoes. She balanced a wineglass on the palm of one hand, running the other through fine wavy light brown hair that shimmered over her shoulders and halfway down her back, smooth and controlled as satin. “All right, it can be amusing! But to pretend you're fulfilling some grand role in society, that's silly!”

The voice was familiar: low pitched, husky, but knife-edge precise in its diction. Yes, it had been Cecily's voice in the play. Honor Rogers. “Is that your sister?” she asked Cam.

Cam nodded heavily, as if her neck were too weak to support her head. “My baby sister.” She nodded again. “Paul's letching for my very own little sister.”

“Paul?”

“Our director.
Him
.”

The owner of the ashtray, the apartment, the party. He was in his middle or late forties and chunkily built with a face carved in broad lines and dark angles, crumbling only a little. Leslie asked Cam, “Are you worried? Or do you just think you ought to be?” She had never had a sister; the idea intrigued her. Younger sister, vulnerable, looking up to you.

“It's all my fault. I brought her down to try out. I never thought she'd get the part, I just wanted her to get a kick out of it.… I had to do some fast talking to persuade Mama too.”

Paul squatted, saying something into Honor's ear. When he stopped she flung back her long swan throat and laughed till her body shook. Paul grinned, with his teeth showing, his forehead wrinkled. Her dad's age. That annoyed her. Her boyish father would look at his wife and three sons and a daughter and two dogs and seem to wonder who the hell they were. How had he come to wake up with these noisy carping strangers on his back? The way he would look at them coldly, blankly, especially when he'd been drinking. This man was more self-important, more aggressive. She found his lust ugly, butt grinding out on the ceramic belly. Now he was taking Honor's arm, leaning close again, and the girl swung around to face them, freeing herself with a shrug.

“Did you have fun playing Cecily?” Leslie asked.

Somehow it was the right question. “Yes, but not as much as I'd expected. It's work, actually. Stupid rote work.”

“Our Cecily doesn't approve of work. She wants to swallow a part like a birth control pill,” Paul said wryly.

“The costumes are fun, anyhow.” Honor ignored him, looking at them out of enormous eyes that seemed above the bottle green velvet such a pale brown as almost to be golden, like a cat's eyes. Her forehead and cheekbones were high, her nose long, her skin pale and rosily translucent. Her mouth and chin were delicate. “I wanted to come to the party tonight in mine—all frills and ribbons and a dear ridiculous parasol. But Paul wouldn't let me. He was petrified I might spill something. They rent their costumes, you know.” Her eyes shone gold with mischief.

Leslie sat up straighter against the wall. Nineteen? Even though Honor was, odds on, talking to her to annoy Paul, turning her back on him as part of the same game as flirting outrageously five minutes earlier, she enjoyed the moment. “I'm Leslie McGivers. I work with your sister.”

“Oh, Cam's talked about you.” Honor raised her thin arrogant eyebrows. “She says you're brilliant. That George”—Honor drawled the name, looking under her lashes to see if Leslie noticed she used his first name. Ah, she was young—“brought you with him from Grand Rapids. That you have a black belt in kung fu and George treats you like his daughter and you eat rapists for breakfast.”

“A brown belt in karate.” But look at me with your golden eyes. Nobody has looked at me anything like that way for months. Christmas. Val with the snow in her shining black hair.

“Cam admires you, so I think you must be special. She hardly ever admires another woman.” Honor beamed at her sister.

What else had Cam said? That she was a dyke? Paul glanced at her quickly then through her. She did not register on him. He had risen to his feet and he stood now at Honor's shoulder peering down into her green dress, at her breasts. But Leslie did not think Cam had guessed. No, Honor flirted with everyone; probably she flirted with the mirror when she brushed her teeth.

Another woman who had just come in slipped her arm through Paul's. “Come and dance. It's time for our ingenue to go home to her mama.… You know, Cam, I have a little sister too, but I keep her where she belongs. At home in the closet.”

Honor rose. She was tall, perhaps five eight and a good two inches taller than Leslie, who instinctively stood with her. “It
is
time for me to be in bed, even if I don't sleep in a closet like Cinderella.”

Groggily Cam stumbled to her feet and began pawing at the coats on the bed. Leslie took hers as it heaved up. As they went past the crowded livingroom she saw that Hennessy had pinned another woman against the wall, hunched over her with his extended arm blocking her escape. “… and when I opened my eyes, there she was climbing into bed with me …” Together they picked their way out and went down the broad stairs. Cam tripped on her big clumsy shoes and Leslie caught her under the elbow, set her back on her feet.

“You'd better drive,” Leslie said to Honor.

“But I hate machines. I don't know how!”

“I'll drive, I'll drive,” Cam muttered, fumbling for her keys.

It was an old dust-colored VW with one fender bright blue. “Why not take a taxi?” Leslie suggested. “I'll go up and call one for you.”

“Mama would be upset.”

“Yes, we do not upset Mama!” Cam declaimed. “It costs too much.”

“How would she know? Get the car in the morning.”

“She'd know.” Cam giggled. “She's sitting up waiting. She always waits. She has to check us in and check us over.”

“Camille!” Honor sounded icy. “She worries. We don't live in a neighborhood where you stroll around at night.” She put her hand on Leslie's sleeve. “Could you drive us? Please.”

“I'm not drunk.” Cam leaned on the fender, still going through her purse. “The keys're here somewhere. I can drive perfectly.”

She saw Paul at the second-floor window looking out at them, probably trying to decide if it was worth his while to come down. He turned then, as if deciding. “All right,” Leslie heard herself say. “But I hardly know the city.” Now how the hell would she get back home from wherever?

Thus she found herself patiently driving the battered VW whose gears slipped, whose brakes were mushy, whose choke did not appear to be connected with anything, while Honor gave her directions. “You turn at those lights, or maybe it's the street after, I'm not sure. Let me see. Not that one. Oh, that was it! We've gone past it!”

“The virginity of a younger sister,” Cam was saying from the back seat in a loud flat voice about three inches from Leslie's ear. Cam's chin came to rest on the back of the driver's seat. “It's confusing. The virginity of most people is like they haven't got around to it. Except most people aren't virgins. But Honor—it's a positive thing. Like a Samoan princess.”

“Be quiet, Cam. Or help me give directions!”

Finally Leslie parked in a bus stop and looked at a city map from the glove compartment. Honor and Cam lived on the near northwest side about six blocks off Grand River, and she plotted a reasonable route via the John C. Lodge Freeway and then south on Wyoming. “You're delightfully practical, Leslie,” Honor said. “I'm always so tangled up in my own fantasies that I never notice the obvious, such as where I'm being driven. Also, it's so dull-signs that tell you not to do things. The only street names I ever remember are the pretty ones, the old French names like Beaubien and Saint Antoine, even if everybody pronounces them wrong. But they're all slums or factories. Or rubble fields. I can't imagine why you'd choose to move here.”

“This is a metropolis compared to Grand Rapids, and Grand Rapids was wildly cosmopolitan after Ludington.”

“Is that where you come from? Ludington? That's where the ferries cross, isn't it?”

“The Chesapeake and Ohio Car and Auto Ferry. Have you taken it?”

“Never,” Honor said tragically. “We only noticed it on the map, Mama and I. One of those things you imagine doing. I dare say it'd be disillusioning—a second rate imitation of a real voyage on a real sea.”

“With a bit of wind you wouldn't think so.”

“Really? Does it get stormy?”

“A tanker broke up out on Lake Michigan the year I left home. Broke in half in a storm. Nobody got off.” Defending her home now, as if she'd ever go back. But Honor had annoyed her. Really, she might be beautiful but she was ridiculously affected. Probably gone to some fancy private schools where they all tried to sound British.

“I've never been anyplace. Except in my head. But being a tourist sounds tacky. I'd like to travel, but for some compelling, some inherent reason.”

Leslie laughed. “Like being a fugitive?”

“Don't laugh at me, Leslie. I hate to be laughed at. I always find a way to punish Paul when he does that.”

“When Daddy was going to take us all to Niagara Falls, you wouldn't go,” Cam said suddenly, chin on the seat back.

“Well, imagine going to Niagara Falls with Daddy and you and Mignon!”

Mignon must be another sister, whom she imagined as older than Honor, just as beautiful and already interested in women. And throw in a legacy from a rich aunt. “Does she live at home too?” Please not.

“No, she's in Columbus with her family,” Cam said. “Poor Mignon.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don't know.” Cam yawned warmly in her ear. “We always say that. Why do we always say that?”

“Because she has three children at twenty-four, she's sweet and darling, her husband only married her for her looks, and she's losing them already.” Honor shook her head and her long hair slithered back and forth. “Stop, Leslie, right now!”

“We're nowhere near your house yet.”

“That dismal-looking diner. We need to make Cam presentable.”

“Come on, Honor. Cam's an adult. Surely she can come in a little soused.”

“Not wih
her,”
Cam said. “But I'll keep my mouth shut.”

“Camille! You can't walk without shuffling!” Honor screwed around in her seat.

“Yes I can. Right past Mother dear. Nighty-night.”

“Besides, she'll be brimming with questions. You know.”

“Why didn't she come to the play if she wanted to keep an eye on you?” Leslie parked and they walked back half a block. The all-night diner stood across from the gates of a Kelvinator plant and served the night shift. There were eight or nine men in the place, including two cops at the counter. Walking past them all to the booth, Leslie felt peppered with stares. She always felt conspicuous, but here were Cam in her purple satin jumpsuit and Honor in a long velvet gown.

“Been out on the town, girls?”

“Partying,” Cam started to say when Leslie nudged her into a booth at the end. Edgily she pulled off her gloves and her left hand rubbed the callused edge of her right palm. She noticed she was sweating. But she was not really
with
Cam or Honor; neither of them, that is, was her lover, with whom she walked always warily, always in fear of being attacked. Her jaw gave a twinge and she discovered she was gritting her teeth. Neither Cam nor Honor seemed nervous. Cam was drunk past caring and Honor seemed flattered by the comments, the stir. She had taken several minutes shrugging off her coat before sitting in the booth.

“Leslie, you look quite grumpy. Are we keeping you from something? Or someone?” Honor raised her little eyebrows, undecided whether to flirt or be annoyed.

“Only a room with the heat turned off. Don't worry.” If only she could stop herself from worrying. It was a sickness to be balanced always on the blade of anxiety, twanging alertness. Yet the first time she had been attacked, she had been purely thoughtlessly happy, overflowing with a clear liquid ample joy as she walked with Val out of a Howard Johnson's and across the parking lot. Two men blocked their way. At first she had not understood. Val and she had been walking intertwined, that was all. She could still see that man's face bloated with righteous anger then a fist coming. She had not known how to fight. She had never hit anyone except for paddling her dog Satan when he had been naughty on the floor, or once in a while whacking her youngest brother. All she had done was scratch the man's cheek before he had left her in the parking lot with a broken jaw.

She had played that scene fifty thousand times. “A male atmosphere like this one makes me edgy.”

“It's pretty … greasy.” Honor giggled. “Our entrance was the event of the night. Here comes our waitress.”

Leslie relaxed. She was ridiculous sometimes. Maybe it was the four months of working on the rape hot line right after she had come to Detroit. Black women, white women, old ladies, kids, all bleeding. Never again, she could not take it. She could not live with that knowledge of pain. Just to mind her own business and survive, somehow intact. “Three black coffees—”

“I don't wish coffee, and I don't take it black,” Honor interrupted, bridling. “I would like tea.”

“Not for you. For Cam. And a glass of milk for me.” It was the only thing she could find to consume. She was too wired to drink coffee and she would not eat bad food.

“Oh, that's a good idea. I'll have milk too, instead. And pie—What kind of pie do you have? Blueberry with strawberry ice cream.” When the waitress had left, Honor leaned forward. “I'm sorry I jumped at you. I thought you were being officious. You're so practical!”

“So practical. I spend my days sorting hundred-year-old rent receipts. Or I feed a balky computer information on capital formation trends and capital accumulation in selected northern industrial centers during the post-bellum period. At least with the Simpson papers I dig up ancient scandals, like finding fossil condoms in a bed of sandstone.” She wasn't doing anything wrong, just showing off a little.