Chapter Nine

Sunday, October 15, 4:30 p.m.

Free jerked awake as the Greyhound bus pulled into the outskirts of Portland. Reflexively, she checked to make sure Jamie’s bag was still located on the seat beside her. It was. At the sight of the cluster of tall buildings marking Portland’s downtown, the hairs along Free’s arms rose. She was really doing this. She was both frightened and excited, and not sure which emotion was stronger.

She ignored the pain from the cuts on her feet as she walked out of the terminal building. A line of homeless people – men and women, young and old, black and white – stood on the street corner opposite, waiting, she guessed, for the doors of a soup kitchen to open. For the most part, they stood without moving or talking, faces expressionless. Their body language said that they had waited in line for hours and expected to wait for hours more. The exception was a jittery mumbling man dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and a blue and white cheerleader’s skirt.

In the many times she had dreamed about living in a large city, Free certainly hadn’t pictured all these street people. In Medford, bums were mostly drunk old white men with six days of sparse white growth on their chins - not this variegated mix of people of all ages and colors, all of them looking as if they were in trouble or wanted to cause trouble. What Free wanted was to be in the section of the city where people had real jobs, not addictions. Glancing left and right, she decided to walk toward the cluster of tall buildings.

After a block or two, she knew she had chosen the right direction. There were fewer people on the sidewalk now, and they mostly looked like they worked at full time, well-paying jobs. A man in a suit held the door of a restaurant open for a woman wearing a long dark skirt decorated with sequins. Another man walking toward Free she initially pegged for a crazy, despite his expensive-looking suit, until she realized he wasn’t talking to himself but to the tiny bud of a microphone, part of a miniaturized headset he wore over one ear.

Now what? Free had never been good at being spontaneous. She made lists all the time, on paper or in her head, if she didn’t have anything to write with. She liked instructions, maps, assignments and knowing what was expected of her. That had been the good part about her job at Petorium - the white coat, the checklists, the instructional videos about dematting fur or performing CPR on dogs.

It was only when two well-dressed women made a point of detouring around her that Free realized what she must look like. With her shaved head, Birkenstocks and her four-sizes too big borrowed cardigan worn over an iridescent polyester muumuu that kept slipping off one shoulder, she didn’t look too much different from some of the homeless people she had been taking pains to avoid earlier. Evening was beginning to fall. Tonight she would check into a hotel and think about finding a place to live. Tomorrow would be time enough to think about what to do next. But first, her stomach reminded her, she needed to eat. She hadn’t had anything since breakfast. So far, all the restaurants she had passed had had white tablecloths – not the kind of places Free would feel comfortable.

A block later, she found a deli. Out of habit, Free nearly ordered the vegetarian sandwich special (sprouts, avocado and Swiss cheese on stone-ground whole wheat). Then she realized that she had always hated alfalfa sprouts. What she really wanted, Free decided, was the roast beef on white, a bag of Lay’s Kansas City Barbecue chips, and (with a guilty nudge from her conscience as she felt the bump in her belly move) a salad and a glass of milk. She took the number the clerk handed her and went to find a table.

It was the kind of restaurant decorated mostly with big signs reading, “Please bus your own table.” As instructed, the last patron had left Free’s table clean, but on the chair was a folded copy of a tabloid-sized newspaper called Willamette Week. After putting Jamie’s bag down under the table and resting her foot on it, Free picked the newspaper up and began to page through it. It was filled with listings of movies, books, plays, gallery openings and musical acts coming to town. Free had never gone to an art gallery. With the exception of the one time in junior high when they were all bused over to a dress rehearsal of Midsummer Night’s Dream at Ashland’s Shakespearen Festival, she had never seen a play. But Free could be whoever she wanted to now. Maybe she could be the kind of woman who ate at restaurants with white tablecloths, who went to the opera, who wore skirts shimmering with sequins.

The newspaper’s back pages were devoted to personal ads. In the Women Seeking Men section, women described their sense of humor and intelligence and seemed to have few requirements of a potential mate. The Men Seeking Women seemed to be seeking to fulfill their fantasies. White men sought “Asian beauties.” Half-a-dozen men were looking for women willing to be “submissive.” There was more than one man over the age of fifty who required any potential mate to be under the age of thirty-five. And a lot of the ads specified “child-free” and “slim.” Free was perilously close to fitting in neither of these last two categories.

There were also sections for Men Seeking Men, Women Seeking Women, and Other. Even these weren’t eye-opening to Free. Her parents had tried communal living when she was six. Free had shared a bedroom with three other children, and when she had a nightmare, she never knew which room to seek Diane or Bob in. Her parents almost split up over Diane’s relationship with a seventeen-year-old runaway who called himself Horse. Bob and Diane had arguments that raged for hours, while Free sat outside on the porch, playing with her stuffed dog with the torn ear, and her baby sister howled, unheeded, in the bedroom. Her mom claimed to be rejecting the establishment and its hang-ups. Her dad just cried.

And eventually, Free was never exactly sure how or why, her parents decided to leave the commune and move out. A few months later, on the dawn of the spring equinox, they exchanged vows in a service of their own making. Diane braided flowers in her hair and Bob wore an antique black silk vest, cracked with age. They had even jumped the broom. They had drawn the line at having an actual minister or even a justice of the peace. That would have been buying into a power trip.

Outside the windows of the deli, the sky was growing dark. Free’s eyelids were heavy with exhaustion. She supposed the baby and the food in her belly were taking what little energy she had available.

After busing her own table, Free approached the cashier and asked if she knew of any nearby hotels. The cashier glanced upward, thinking. Free looked at the young woman’s green hair and the two rings piercing her eyebrow. Maybe her transformation to middle class was already taking place, because she thought the girl looked a little odd. Finally, the cashier pointed down the street. “Try the Leonardo. It’s two blocks down. I hear it’s pretty quiet.” Then she looked back at Free, focusing on the bruise that had now spread far beyond the edges of the bandage. “I know it’s really none of my business, but my old boyfriend used to hit me. You need to get out of it while you still can.”

Free couldn’t think of what to answer. Finally, she settled on, “It’s really not that simple.”

The other woman surprised Free with a deep laugh. “Don’t I know it.”