Zoe shrugged. There was a lot happening everywhere. But she had some kind of business in New York. She wasn’t after fame and the victory of self-destruction like Trancas was. She wanted something else, something more like what Alice must have had after she’d gone to Wonderland and then returned to the world of gardens and schoolbooks and laundry on the line. She wanted to feel larger inside herself.
“Fine,” Momma said, and her voice took on a gratified bitterness. She loved defeat with a sour, grudging appetite, the way she loved food. “Do whatever you like.”
She went back into the house, stepping on the grass in red canvas shoes. Poppa stood over Zoe, still touching her hair with one hand and holding the flat of marigolds in the other. The smell of the flowers cascaded down, rank and sweet. Marigolds collapsed helplessly inside their own odor. They were just smell and color, no rude vegetable integrity.
“Let’s get these planted,” Poppa said tenderly. “And I’ll take you to the twelve-thirty train.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I go away so much.”
“It’s okay,” he told her, and she knew he was telling the truth. Susan’s absence punched a hole in the house, and Billy’s did, too. Susan took a piece of the future with her when she went; Billy took the mistakes of the past and made them permanent. Her own departure had a different kind of logic. It was part of her job to leave.
Sometimes Cassandra was in the bar. Sometimes he wasn’t. Zoe found that she waited all week for the nights she went out to the bar with Trancas, and when Cassandra wasn’t there Zoe felt dejected and diminished, as if a promise had not been kept. When Cassandra was there Zoe said hello to him with a swell of anxious hope, the way she’d speak to a boy she loved. Cassandra always said, ‘Hello, honey,’ and moved on. Zoe wasn’t in love with Cassandra but she wanted something from him. She couldn’t tell what it was.
Trancas started turning tricks to earn the money for a motorcycle. She told the first story as an accomplishment.
“I hung around in front of this theater on Forty-second,” she said to Zoe in a coffee shop on Waverly. “I was so scared, I was like, what if nobody wants me? What if nobody even knows what I’m doing?”
Trancas’s face was bright and homely, red with an exaltation that resembled rage. She dumped five spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She wore her gray denim jacket and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, a skeleton crowned with roses.
She said, “I told myself I’d stand there, like, fifteen minutes, and if nothing happened, I’d go home. So, like, about fourteen and a half minutes go by and suddenly this guy comes up to me, just a regular guy about fifty. He didn’t look rich but he didn’t look like a creep either, he was just all polyester, one of those guys, you know, just a guy, probably worked in an office and did something all day and then went home again. Anyway, he comes up to me and at first I thought, he’s a friend of my father’s. Then I thought, no, he’s gonna tell me something like the bus stop is down at the corner or give me some kind of Jesus pamphlet or something. But no. He walks right up to me and says, ‘Hi.’ I say hello back, and he says, ‘Can we make a deal?’ And my heart is pounding and I’m so scared but my voice comes out like I’ve done this a thousand times before, like I’m an old hand at it. I look at him a minute and then I say, ‘Maybe.’ And it was weird, Zo. It was like I knew exactly what to do and what to say and how to be. He asks, ‘What do you charge?’ and I say, ‘Depends on what you want.’ I was so cool, I don’t know where it came from.”
“What did he say?” Zoe asked. She leaned forward over the scarred, speckled surface of the table. In the kitchen of the coffee shop, a man with an accent sang, “Hang down, Sloopy, Sloopy, hang down.”
Trancas said, “He said, ‘I want to get blown, and I want a little affection.’ And you know what I said?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘A blow job costs thirty dollars, and I don’t do affection.’”