Sisters of the Road by Barbara Wilson Page B

explained. “I made it up myself. I’m doing a purge. That’s what I like about life,” she added. “You can always start over.”
    I wasn’t sure if she was referring to women with handcuffs or her digestive system, but didn’t want to ask.
    “You should have some. June said you went home sick.”
    “I’m not sick,” I said. “But I do have a problem. You know that girl Trish who was at the shop the day before yesterday?”
    I told her about Rosalie and the night at the strip, about Trish vanishing and my search for her.
    “I don’t know the slightest bit about the world she lives in, that’s the trouble,” I ended. “Not only am I not a teenager, but I don’t know anything about prostitution.”
    Carole finished her drink, leaving a moustache of pale green above her lips. She licked it off thoughtfully. “I used to have fantasies about being a prostitute,” she said. “I even turned a trick once.”
    “You?” I said, not sure if I’d heard her right. Carole was a little kooky, but it was hard to believe she’d gone to bed with a man for money.
    She fixed me with her beatific, slightly vacant blue eyes. “Oh, it was no big deal—kind of strange, but not really upsetting. Funny, actually… See, I was taking an art class, well, really modeling for the art class in exchange for lessons. I was kind of into being naked—I mean, I was twenty or something and I had a good body and knew it. I really got into sitting up there, turning all different directions and stuff. I let myself fantasize, just in this general way. I wasn’t a lesbian then, I guess I was bisexual, sort of pansexual, you know. I’d think about the women looking at me and at the men looking and it just felt good, it felt erotic.”
    She smiled warmly and almost playfully at me, and I realized I was trying to imagine what Carole looked like naked. She did have a nice body, especially wearing sweat clothes: lithe and energetic with just the right amount of curve at her thighs and breasts. If I were to admit it, at the moment she looked a little like one of those women in Playboy— guileless, a good sport, no hang-ups. I shook the image out of my head; it was too easy.
    “So one day I’m leaving class and this guy comes up and asks if I want to go out afterwards and have a cup of coffee or something. He was just an ordinary guy, I can’t even remember what he looked like. A little older than some of the rest maybe. ‘Sure, why not,’ I said, and we went to a coffee shop. Turned out he was married and had a couple of young kids. It wasn’t like he was some sex fiend or anything. He didn’t come on to me like that, just friendly and polite and asking me what I want to do for a living and how do I like the class and stuff. Then afterwards, when we’re leaving the coffee shop, he all of a sudden asks, ‘Your place or a motel?’
    “I don’t think so,’ I say, ‘I mean, like you’re married and everything,’ I say, not to hurt his feelings. ‘I mean, I like you and all, but…’
    “You don’t understand,’ he says. ‘I want to pay you. It’s just business. I’ll pay you’—he says fifty dollars or something. It seemed like a fortune.”
    Carole seemed bemused at the memory. “Nowadays I’d tell him to get lost, nowadays something like that wouldn’t even happen. But then… well, of course I needed the money, so some of it was that. But mainly I remember thinking, Wow, he thinks I’m a prostitute. Model equals prostitute, right? That was so—erotic! It gave me this great feeling, I don’t know, like of being in control. Yeah, that’s it,” Carole repeated, twirling the blond lock of hair that fell out of her short hair like a question mark. “I felt powerful. And sexy, and sort of low and nasty .”
    I was speechless for a moment. “You liked that?”
    “Umm-hmm,” said Carole, smiling. “I did. It was sort of an extension of sitting up there on the platform, with my legs spread a little and thinking