Eppie sat alone at the small kitchen table in the apartment which she now called home. It was a modest dwelling, not a thousand square feet in total, which occupied the second floor of a two-story duplex. Two bedrooms, one bath, a living room and kitchen, and a small porch which led to the outside staircase. Hardly enough space for three people to share, but Eppie did not complain. Personal space was a concept unknown to her, walls and doors having served as scant protection in the past. She slept on the fold-out sofa bed in the living room, using an end table as her nightstand and Rachel’s old sleeping bag as her blanket, and she slept soundly there in comfort and in peace.
This morning, two weeks after she had moved in, Eppie sat and poked tentatively at her bowl of oatmeal with her spoon. She would have to leave for school in a few minutes and wanted to eat something before she left, but her stomach was not cooperating. The bouts of nausea which she had first felt a month earlier were now becoming more frequent. She did not normally eat a great deal at any one sitting, but she usually had at least some appetite at meal times. Lately, however, her appetite had become highly sporadic. At times she was quite hungry and would eagerly consume whatever kind of food happened to be available. At other times she was repulsed by the sight or the smell of food, often to the point where even the thought of eating anything would send pangs of nausea through her stomach. At present she was listing precipitously toward the latter of these two extremes. She considered emptying her bowl into the kitchen sink and washing it down the drain, but she did not want to run the garbage disposal. Rachel's roommate Allison would surely hear the noise and come out of her room to see what was going on. Eppie did not feel like explaining to Allison that she was not very hungry.
Allison made Eppie feel uncomfortable. She was in some ways the complete opposite of Eppie's parents. Whereas her parents had been largely unconcerned with her daily comings and goings, and had taken little interest in her activities outside of those household chores that she was ordered to perform, Allison seemed extraordinarily interested in everything she did. She wanted to know what Eppie ate at each meal, what programs she watched on television, and what articles she read in newspapers or magazines. She seemed especially interested in learning about Eppie's friends. Eppie found that she could not use the telephone without Allison inquiring as to whom she had spoken with. Whenever Eppie left the apartment, Allison asked her where she was going and whom she was planning to meet before she left, and asked again after she returned.
Although her tone of voice was never accusatory, Eppie nonetheless began to feel that Allison was subtly interrogating her, perhaps trying to catch her in a lie or an inconsistency of some kind. Except for one disconcerting fact which she had not yet found the courage to reveal to anyone, Eppie did not feel that she had anything to hide from either Allison or Rachel, and so, at first, she answered all of her new roommate's questions without reservation. But Allison's persistence pricked at Eppie's sense of privacy and she began to avoid doing anything out of the ordinary whenever Allison was around. She would not use the telephone when Allison was in the apartment. She waited until Allison went to work before leaving the apartment for any reason other than to go to school, and she tried to be back before Allison came home.
Since Allison and Rachel maintained very different work schedules, Eppie rarely had the apartment to herself. Rachel normally left for work at seven o'clock each morning and returned by five, while Allison worked nights. Allison would leave for work around ten o'clock and return at dawn, just as Eppie was getting ready for school. Except for those brief periods when Rachel was at work and Allison had some unexpected errand to run, Eppie never found herself alone in the apartment.
After she had lived with the women for a few days, Eppie had asked about the possibility of having her own key so that she could let herself in when nobody else was home. Rachel had seemed receptive to the idea, but Allison had dismissed it as unnecessary. With their alternating work schedules there would always be somebody around to let her in, Allison had said. Eppie had assumed at the time that Allison was simply not yet ready to trust her with free access to enter or leave the apartment on her own at any hour of the day or night. It was a feeling that Eppie could understand, given that it was entirely Rachel's idea to bring a little-known transient teenager into their home, and so she did not press the matter. She felt confident that in time Allison would come to trust her because she had taken steps to demonstrate that she was indeed trustworthy. She had offered to pay for her share of the groceries, even though her ability to pay was quite small. She had withdrawn all of her savings, accumulated a few dollars at a time during the summer from a part-time job, from a bank account registered in both her name and her mother's. The balance would have covered perhaps two months worth of groceries had the women accepted her offer to pay, after which Eppie would have had to find another part-time job to keep up with her share. Rachel and Allison, however, refused to take any money from her for any expense.
In return for her roommates' generosity, Eppie insisted on performing most of the housework. Vacuuming carpets and cleaning bathrooms were tasks that came easily to her, since she had been doing them in her parents' house for years, and doing this work voluntarily now, she found, turned a former task of drudgery into an act of independence. Cleaning the dishes was not a difficult job either, since the apartment had a dishwasher, but Eppie made it a point to clear the dishes and silverware from the table after each shared meal, rinse them in the kitchen sink and stack them neatly in the dishwasher.
The apartment did not have a clothes washer or dryer, so Eppie gathered up the laundry each Saturday and walked it the three blocks to the laundromat. Rachel and Allison's clothes received the complete service. They were sorted, washed and dried, and then neatly folded. Each Saturday afternoon the women would find several stacks of clean clothes arranged in rows waiting for them on their beds. Eppie separated her own clothes from her roommates' while removing them from the washing machines and would not place them in the dryers. She had learned from her mother several years earlier that clothes suffered more wear and tear in tumble dryers than they did while worn, and that clothes which were routinely machine-dried lasted less than half as long as those that were air-dried. Eppie had therefore gotten into the habit of hang-drying all of her clothes, and she continued that practice with even greater resolve now. She did not have the money to spend on new clothes, and she felt it wasteful to spend what little money she did have on commercial dryers. Instead she bought a collapsible wooden drying rack at a thrift store for a dollar and she hung her laundry on it each week. Her clothes came off the rack a bit stiffer and more wrinkled than those run through the automatic dryers, but she took pride in knowing that she was saving herself an unnecessary expense. It made her sad to think, though, that there were so few such practical little things she had ever learned from her mother.
Eppie often found the beginning of a new school year difficult, and the current year was no exception. She did not have many friends, and her self-consciousness about this fact alone made her reluctant to reveal much personal information about them to Allison. Throughout her years in elementary school and junior high, Eppie found that she had to develop new friendships with different people every year or two. A pattern seemed to develop in which she would make a new friend during the school year, but then lose touch with her over the course of the summer, only to return at the beginning of the following year to find that her friend had changed. She would have a new hair style or would have begun wearing different clothes. Perhaps she would be wearing make-up or jewelry which she had not worn the year before. She might also have started behaving much differently from the way Eppie had known her to be just a few months earlier. And, perhaps most significantly, she would have new friends—friends who were quite different from Eppie and to whom Eppie could not relate very well. These new friends were always louder and more outgoing than Eppie was, and they seemed, at least in Eppie's eyes, to be more fun to be with. Eppie would always feel intimidated by these newcomers and would never attempt to follow her old friends into their wider circles. Quietly secure in her own identity, she was not one to be swept up into the tight cliques of girls who bonded together at school like pre-college sorority sisters.
She would be lonely and friendless for a while as her old friends drifted away. In a short time, however, she would begin to develop a new friendship or two, although it might take several months until she felt that the friendship was solid. Her history of friends come and gone made her defensive in her relationships, and such was the case now. The school year was only a month old and Allison's persistent questioning prodded uncomfortably at that protective shield that Eppie was trying to maintain around her ever-regenerating social life.
Eppie had grown up under circumstances which placed her beyond the limited range of experience known by most other girls her age, and she was painfully aware of the distinction. She had matured at an unhappily accelerated pace along a tortuous and uncharitable path. She considered herself to be neither ahead of nor behind her classmates in terms of maturity, but she felt that her maturity was of a tougher and stronger breed than theirs, forged upon a reality far harder and unforgiving. Their lives were more protected and pampered than hers, and they took more for granted than she did, because they did not know what she knew. They exuded a charm and a confidence around others that she lacked, and they found excitement in things that seemed unimportant to her. With each passing year, Eppie felt further removed from the center of her age group. She was not afflicted with self-pity, however, for her classmates' behavior did not inspire in her the least bit of envy. With the single exception of the abuse which she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, she would not have wished to trade her life for any of theirs. Yet she was conscious of the changes that time and circumstance were imposing upon her and her classmates, and she began to think that life might make it impossible for her to remain friends with anybody for very long.
Those few girls that she felt comfortable with were very much like herself—soft-spoken, polite girls who rejected the burgeoning interests in boys and parties and general adolescent hijinks that affected so many other girls upon entering high school. She favored instead things sweeter and more tender. She enjoyed English class more than any other, for she had an enduring love of poetry and verse—words in whose gentle rhythms she found ready comfort in her darkest times. On many a late evening, after her parents had both gone off to bed, she would sit up alone in her room, too shaken to sleep, and pour out her pain in rhyme on the blank pages of her school notebook.
I feel as empty as the air
On which we both depend
There are such things that we must share
But wish that there 'twould end
If I were strong I'd strike you down
And have you taste the dirt
Not cause you'd learn to love the ground
But just to know my hurt
After committing her words to paper, she would repeat them to herself over and over again as she lay her head on her pillow and pulled the covers up tight to her chin. It was a way she had of calming herself on those awful nights before sleep came to console her.
Not all of her poetry was of such despair, however. She wrote of happy times and pleasant things as well. At fourteen, notwithstanding the pain of her family life, she still retained much of her girlish innocence. She absolutely adored any picture or painting or small sculpture that depicted cats or bunny rabbits or other cuddly creatures. When she was a small child a neighbor's cat had had a litter of kittens and she fell in love with them the moment she first saw them. She gave each kitten a name and visited them every day, watching in fascination as the mother cat would groom and nurse her brood.
Playful Tabitha with your tail so high
Pretty Penny with eyes so bright
Two girls do make the litter fair
And your mother's work so light
Hungry Oliver wants to be fed again
Patient Sherlock waits his turn
The boys are quite a pair themselves
Your sisters and I have learned
Eppie had begged her mother to adopt them all, because she could not bear the idea that they would soon be taken away from their mother and from each other and given away to separate owners. Her mother had been raising her alone at the time and they could not have afforded to take even one kitten, but Eppie did not recall her mother explaining to her the fact that kittens cost money and they had none to spare. Instead, she only remembered being told that she could not have a kitten and that was that. She had locked herself in her room and cried for hours that day, and each day for several weeks afterward she would visit her neighbors and ask to see the kittens again, only to return to her room in sorrow each time she discovered that another kitten had been given away. Even to the present day she would occasionally think about those kittens and wonder what had become of each of them, and the memory could still bring tears to her eyes.
Eppie tried again to force down a spoonful of oatmeal, but it was not possible. She feared that if she tried too hard she would be overcome by the nausea, as she had been the previous day, and that would surely bring out the inquisitor in Allison. Yesterday's episode had luckily occurred while Allison was at work and Rachel was asleep, and Eppie had thus far managed to keep her bouts of sickness from their knowledge.
Unable to finish her breakfast, Eppie decided to risk running the disposal for a few seconds. She emptied what remained of her oatmeal into the kitchen sink, washed the entire contents into the drain and flipped the switch for the disposal. The motor was an oversized model which was many years old. It spun aggressively, making a loud whirring noise that reverberated through the stainless steel sink and along the countertop to the walls. The toaster oven and the blender which sat on the counter buzzed with the vibration. The metal spurs inside the spinning chamber clanked and rattled sharply as they mashed Eppie's cold oatmeal into a fine paste before it was carried down the drain.
Eppie turned the disposal off after a few seconds and quickly rinsed the bowl and spoon under the tap. She opened the dishwasher and placed the items inside. As she closed the dishwasher door, she looked up to see Allison standing at the entrance to the kitchen.
"Was your breakfast okay this morning?" Allison asked.
"Yeah," Eppie replied defensively. "It was fine. I'm just cleaning up."
"Did you have oatmeal again today?"
"Yeah."
Allison walked over to the sink and leaned against the counter with one hip. Her eyes glanced into the sink quickly and then turned to focus on Eppie.
"I would think you might like something else for breakfast once in a while," she said casually. "We usually have eggs and bacon or sausage in the refrigerator. You can help yourself to that whenever you like."
"That's okay," Eppie said. "I don't really like to cook much for breakfast. Oatmeal is fine with me. There's less to clean up."
"Well, we have English muffins in the pantry. And there's always bread if you just want toast and jelly."
Eppie nodded her head. "Okay," she said, trying to be agreeable. "That sounds good. Maybe I'll have that tomorrow."
"And if everything else is gone there's always cereal around. You must like that. I don't know a single teenager who doesn't like cereal."
"Yeah, cereal's good too," Eppie said. "I'll keep that in mind. I have to go now or I'll be late for school." She gathered her jacket and a backpack from the table and headed for the door.
"Eppie," Allison said, stopping her in mid-stride as she was about to open the door. "Rachel and I are going to have some people over here tonight for a meeting. We'll be ordering pizza or something like that, so you don't have to worry about cooking anything tonight. I'm sure there will be plenty left over for you if you get home in time. We'll probably get started around seven."
"All right," Eppie replied. "That sounds great. I'll see you later."
Eppie opened the door and stepped outside, then quickly closed the door behind her. She pattered down the stairs to the ground level and walked briskly along the sidewalk until she was out of sight of the apartment, at which point she slowed down to a more moderate pace. Her stomach continued to bother her. She reached into a pocket of her jacket and withdrew a roll of antacid tablets, then popped one into her mouth. As she chewed it she looked at her watch and calculated that, if necessary, she would arrive at school early enough to visit the lavatory for a few minutes before her first class.
* * *
Rachel and Allison seemed to Eppie a rather unusual pair as friends and roommates tended to be. Having had no siblings and no real father for much of her life, Eppie was unaccustomed to a living arrangement in which two individuals of equal authority shared a home. She had been too young to remember how things had been between her mother and her father, and there had been no such arrangement when her mother had remarried, for her stepfather had immediately made it clear that his authority overruled her mother's by a wide margin and that Eppie had no authority whatsoever.
Although Rachel and Allison both had full-time jobs, there was still much time, especially on weekends, when the two roommates would both be home at the same time. Eppie had wondered initially how things would be done at those times. How would decisions be made? She was not so much interested in the large, one-time decisions, such as which roommate would occupy which bedroom or who was to supply each particular piece of furniture. Those decisions had been made well before Eppie arrived. Rather, she was interested in seeing how the small and mundane decisions of everyday living were handled. Who would shop for the groceries each week and what would be bought? Did each roommate have her own food or was all the food shared between them? What programs would they watch on the apartment's single television set when both were home? At what level would the thermostat be set? As far as Eppie could tell, neither roommate was in charge of making such decisions, and yet the decisions nevertheless seemed to be made effortlessly and without contention. Either roommate could adjust the level of the thermostat or flip the television to another channel, but this was done only after asking the other roommate if she minded. Such simple courtesies were not completely foreign to Eppie, as she had learned and practiced them at school and elsewhere outside her home, yet within the confines of home as she had ever known it they were utterly new to her. She had been taken completely by surprise when, sitting in the living room one weekend afternoon watching television with the two women, Rachel reached for the remote control and, before changing the channel, asked Eppie if she minded if they were to watch something else. With no single point of authority within the apartment, Eppie was continuously surprised, and pleasantly so, by the easy cooperation that the two woman had formed between themselves, and which they were now offering to her as well. It seemed a much freer environment in which to live than the one in which she had been raised.
And yet, for all of the outward expressions of equality between the two roommates, over time Eppie noticed that Allison's will seemed to be the stronger of the two. Unimportant decisions could be made by either woman without a second thought, but decisions of consequence were handled differently. In such situations, the two women would discuss the issue at hand and a decision would be offered by one of them. If the other was in agreement, then the issue was settled. However, if the two had differing opinions, then the discussion would continue. Neither woman would come right out and tell the other that she was wrong. Instead, there tended to be a debate in which each would offer her most persuasive argument. Rachel would be very forthright in expressing her position and would directly state her reasons for preferring one option over another. Allison, on the other hand, was more subtle. Before offering her opinion directly, she would first repeat her understanding of Rachel's opinion back to her, pointing out along the way places where unsatisfactory consequences might result. She would then express her own opinion under the guise of starting with Rachel's viewpoint and improving upon it here and there. By the time she was finished, Rachel would usually be convinced that Allison's opinion was not so far removed from her own and, in the spirit of compromise that the two women shared, she would invariably end up acceding to the option which Allison had preferred from the start.
Eppie concluded that Rachel was the more earnest of the two and that she was the least afraid to express her opinions to others, but that she was also the more likely to compromise her position when confronted with another point of view. Rachel was clearly an intelligent woman, someone who cared deeply about a great many things and was willing to invest much time and effort in those special causes which she felt were important. She had described to Eppie the relationship that she had had with her father while she was growing up, and Eppie had listened with fascination as Rachel wavered between anger and disgust as she recounted the many battles that she and her father had waged. Eppie felt closer to Rachel when she heard these stories, for they told her that Rachel too had lost at a young age the tender and loving relationship that every little girl, even one as willful and precocious as Rachel had been, wanted to have with her father. And, lacking that relationship herself, Eppie wished that she had possessed even a small portion of the fire of resistance that burned so brightly in Rachel's spirit when she spoke of her father. If she had, Eppie thought, she might have had the courage to break away from her stepfather sooner than she did.
Eppie also saw within Rachel's retelling of these episodes, as she had seen in Rachel's discussions with Allison, that Rachel was highly reactive to the actions of others. She could be manipulated by another person, either consciously or not, by the methods by which the other person dealt with her. She would meet anger with anger, compromise with compromise, obstinance with obstinance, compassion with compassion. Rachel did not seem to recognize this trait in herself, however. In her own mind, she would simply handle every situation with whatever type of action was warranted. To respond to anger with compassion made no sense to her, and a one-sided compromise was really no compromise at all. So she would show back to everyone, friend and foe alike, a mirror-perfect image of the feelings—anger or friendship, respect or disdain—that were accorded to her. She could fight any battle, and could do so on whatever terms were required. The issue of right versus wrong was paramount to her, and the right would ultimately prevail, regardless of the manner in which the battle was waged. In this way, Rachel was not the true leader in any contest. Others would decide the tactics and plan the strategy for every engagement. Rachel was the loyal foot soldier, ever ready to fight bravely for the causes in which she believed, and not seriously inclined to question the methods of the fight.
* * *
Eppie walked back to the apartment that evening well after the last good light had been lost for the day. Dusk came noticeably earlier now with each passing week, and the days had grown cooler. She shivered against a stiff, steady wind which gained strength as the sun went down. Her light jacket would soon be insufficient for the two-mile walk to school, and she wondered if Rachel or Allison might have a spare winter coat that she could borrow. If not, she thought, she would try to find an affordable second-hand coat at the thrift store that weekend. She shuffled her feet through a small pile of leaves which had accumulated at the foot of the outdoor stairs and made her way up to the porch on the second floor.
Eppie paused outside the apartment door. Several voices could be heard coming from inside. The window to the right of the door looked directly into the dining area at one end of the kitchen. Eppie stepped back from the door and moved slowly to the right to get a better view through the window. The lights in the kitchen were on, and in the darkness outside she could see fairly clearly through the thin curtains which were drawn closed. She observed the scene for only a few moments, as she did not want to be spotted by any of the group inside. She counted six people sitting around the table: Rachel, Allison and four others—two men and two women whom she did not recognize. One of the women was large and burly, with dark, unkempt hair that looked like it had never been brushed. The large woman talked loudly and with conviction, her hands gesticulating up and down, as the others leaned forward in their chairs and listened with evident attention. One or two of the others spoke up now and then to interject their thoughts into the conversation, but it was apparent that the large woman was the center of the discussion at the moment.
Eppie moved back to the door and entered the apartment as quietly as she could, hoping that she could slip inconspicuously into the living room without disturbing the group. As soon as she closed the door behind her, however, the discussion at the table stopped.
"Hi, Eppie," said Rachel from one end of the table. "You're home kind of late tonight."
"Yeah, I know," Eppie replied apologetically. "I went to the library after school to work on a paper for English class. I guess I lost track of the time." She smiled at the group. Now that their discussion had been interrupted by her entrance, she knew that it would be impolite to simply walk off to the living room.
Rachel handled the introductions. "Eppie, I'd like you to meet Judy and Carl," she said, nodding to her right toward the large woman and the man sitting next to her, both of whom sat with their backs toward the door. They looked over their shoulders and offered short, perfunctory greetings to Eppie. The woman was even more imposing up close than she had seemed through the window. Eppie guessed that she was about thirty years old and that she weighed at least three hundred pounds. She wore a heavy brown sweatshirt that was spotted with dried paint and faded blue jeans that strained tightly about her hips and thighs. The man was thinner and older than the woman. He appeared to be in his fifties and quite fit for his age. His clothes, although equally utilitarian, were neater and cleaner than the woman's. He wore new jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the cuffs. His receding gray hair and round wire-rimmed eyeglasses gave him a professorial appearance. Eppie assumed that the two were not related to each other.
"And this is Jennifer, and that's Billy," Rachel continued, indicating the woman and the man sitting to her left. The woman appeared to be about the same age as Rachel and Allison. She was very smartly dressed in a white turtleneck shirt and an expensive-looking red sweater. She had thoroughly blonde hair that was professionally styled and wore makeup and jewelry which complemented her outfit, giving her a chic appearance which contrasted sharply with the young man sitting next to her. He appeared to be the youngest member of the group, perhaps twenty years of age at the most. His face was partially obscured by long strands of dirty blonde hair that hung down over the corners of his eyes. He wore an old T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up nearly to the points of his shoulders and his face appeared to have been unshaven for several days. He held a half-empty bottle of beer in his left hand, while another bottle sat empty to his right.
Eppie exchanged helloes with the woman and was about to do the same with the man when he suddenly stood up with formality and leaned across the table from the opposite corner. "Very nice to meet you, Eppie," the young man said with elegant courtesy, extending his hand and looking directly into her eyes. The smell of beer came across the table.
"Nice to meet you too," she said, shaking his hand and smiling, more surprised than any of the others at Billy's overt politeness.
"There's some pizza left on the counter if you're hungry," said Allison.
"Maybe later," Eppie replied. "I'm not real hungry right now. I don't want to interrupt your meeting any longer. I'll just work on my homework in the living room."
Eppie retreated into the living room and settled down on the sofa, which was no more than fifteen feet from the kitchen table. She took some books and papers from her backpack and laid them on the coffee table. She tried to concentrate on her school work, but she could not withdraw her attention from the discussion at the table.
"How certain are you about what you heard?" asked Rachel.
"As certain as anybody can be," said Judy. "I got it straight from my sister-in-law. She's been workin' at that place since the day it opened and she was right there at the board meetin' when they discussed the whole thing."
"Are you sure she wasn't exaggerating?" asked Jennifer. "Maybe the situation isn't as bad as she made it seem."
"Listen, my sister-in-law don't exaggerate about things like this," Judy answered firmly. "She said that new doctor over there—what's her name, Wheelan I think she said, yeah Wheelan—she raised a big fuss about it in the meetin' the other week. She was dead-set against the whole idea, but nobody in the meetin' would back her up. Lizzy said the board ain't gonna do nothin' about it cause it would be too damn expensive to fight it."
"Why hasn't there been anything in the papers about it?" asked Carl. "I would think that something like this would have been reported on by now if the clinic has known about it for this long. Has Wheelan talked to any reporters about it?"
"How the hell should I know?" Judy replied testily. "Maybe Rachel's Daddy has the newspapers wrapped around his little finger, too. I don't know all the particulars, I'm just tellin' you what Lizzy said, and she ought to know what's goin' on."
A silence fell over the group as they considered the situation which Judy had described. Eyes met eyes in rapid succession as the plausibility of Judy's story began to take hold. Doubt gave way to certainty, and shock to indignation. Eppie sat motionless in the living room, her attention feigned on the textbook in her lap, and she did not make a sound.
"We can't let him get away with this," said Rachel with stone-faced resolve. "I will not allow him to get away with this."
"We need a plan, guys," said Allison. "We need to come up with a strategy for blocking him on this. Anybody have any ideas?"
"He's trying to do this behind everybody's back," said Carl, as if answering his own earlier question. "He doesn't want any publicity. That's why it hasn't been in the papers."
"We can fix that," said Jennifer. "We can have flyers and signs printed up in a couple of days. You know, something like 'Now He Wants Your Appendix Too!' Something that will grab some headlines."
"I can prob'ly get a copy of the damn letter itself from Lizzy," said Judy. "We could just make copies of that and hand it out to people. Then they'd know we wasn't makin' it up."
Rachel looked at Allison, who wore a look of concern on her face. "What's the matter, Allie?" she asked. "You look worried."
"I'm just wondering whether we might be playing into his hands," replied Allison.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean maybe your Dad wants us to make a big deal out of this. Maybe he doesn't really have any plans for those tissues at all. Maybe he's doing this just to get us to react. He may only be trying to gin up an issue to use in the governor's race."
"What are you talkin' 'bout?" asked Judy. "How's he gonna make himself look good by havin' us uncover his plot? He's gonna look like a fool when we get through with him."
"I'm not so sure about that, Judy," said Allison. "Let's think about the situation like a politician for a minute. If you're a politician, you live for votes. Everything you do and everything you say is focused on getting people to vote for you. Now sometimes you can get votes by trying to be all things to all people, but sometimes you don't try to do that because that's what your opponent is doing and you want to show everyone that you are more principled than that. So you pick a fight with some unpopular group of people—people like us, for example—on an issue that voters feel strongly about, and then you milk it for all it's worth. You hold press conferences where you talk about how you will never be pushed around by a bunch of radicals. Then you go to fundraisers and you collect gobs of money from fat cats who agree with your position. Before you know it they all want to have their pictures taken with you. They tell you what a great campaign you're running and that you're a credit to the party and that they are ready to volunteer to help you—all that crap. It's a great way to energize your base of support. Sure, you offend the people on the other side of the issue, but you weren't going to get their votes anyway. And you sure as hell can get your name into the papers that way. A slick candidate can turn this type of confrontation into the best political advertising campaign you ever saw."
The others pondered Allison's thoughts.
"I have to admit, Allison has a good point," said Carl. "I hadn't thought of it that way, but she may be right. Fighting back too aggressively may backfire on us."
"So what do you suggest we do?" asked Judy, looking at both Allison and Carl. "We sure as hell can't just sit on our hands and do nothin'."
"Maybe we could just wait for a little while to see what his next move will be," said Jennifer. "If we don't react to his threat immediately he may decide that he miscalculated and drop the whole idea."
"Yes, but I think we should have the signs and flyers printed up anyway," Rachel said, "just in case he doesn't drop the idea. Then we'd have them to use right away if we need them. Do you think we can afford that, Carl?"
Carl thought for a moment and then shook his head slowly. "I don't think so, Rachel. Our funds are not exactly plentiful right now. If we were certain that we would use the signs then I would say that the expense would be justified. But to spend money on materials like that and then never use them would be a waste. I don't think we can justify that."
"How about just making the flyers then?" suggested Allison. "They're pretty cheap, right? We could print up a couple of hundred handouts for twenty bucks. Isn't that within our budget?"
"Okay," said Carl. "I suppose we could afford to do that much."
Billy suddenly raised his beer bottle a foot off the table and slammed it down with a force so hard that the others jumped in their seats. "No way, man!" he said emphatically, startling the others as he burst out of the silence that he had maintained throughout the discussion. "No fuckin' way do we just sit back and let him get away with this. If you guys want to play footsy with this bastard and let him have his way, that's up to you, but you can count me out." He raised the beer bottle in his right hand again and used it as a pointer, aiming it at each of the others around the table as he spoke. "Any rat like him takes a shit in my yard and I'm gonna shove it right back up his ass with a candle on it!"
"All right, Billy, calm down," Allison said. "I didn't say we shouldn't do anything. I just said that we may need to come up with a better strategy than just fighting back blindly. He's raised the ante on us here. I think we need to find out what he's holding in his hand, that's all. We need to figure out whether or not he's bluffing. I don't think we should fold our cards, but I don't think we should raise the stakes either."
"Fuck the stakes!" Billy yelled. "Fuck all this namby-pamby raise-the-ante bullshit! You guys are just playing games. I say we hit back at him and we make it hurt."
Allison sat back in her chair and sighed impatiently. "Okay, Billy," she said, exasperated by his attitude. "If you have a suggestion about how we should respond, then go ahead and let us hear it. Tell us what you have in mind, and then we'll discuss it and we'll decide if we all agree with your approach."
"I'll tell you what I have in mind, all right," said Billy truculently, "but whether you agree with me or not doesn't make any difference to me. You can do whatever you want—sit around and wait until doomsday for all I care. But I'll tell you what I'm gonna do, and you can decide for yourselves whether you're with me or not."
The others sat silently and looked at Billy. In the next room, Eppie felt the hair on the back of her neck start to tingle, and her stomach was struck with a sudden discomfort. She swallowed hard and held one hand over her midsection, trying to hold the nausea in check. She wished that she had gotten a soda from the kitchen when she had the chance, carbonated water being the best thing she had yet found for calming her stomach.
"I'm gonna find out when the first of that son-of-a-bitch's flunkies is gonna show up at that clinic to pick up his first batch of tissues," Billy declared. "And when he does I'm gonna be right there waiting for him. And that motherfucker better have a couple of armed guards with him, because that's the only way he's gonna get past me."
"Billy," said Allison, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, "whoever he is, he's going to have cops escorting him in and out. Haven't you learned anything from walking the line the past couple of months? Anytime anything controversial happens at the clinic, the cops are always there. You think this time it's going to be any different? You try to hassle the guy in the doorway of the clinic and the cops will arrest you on the spot. You won't accomplish anything."
"Oh, I'll accomplish something," said Billy. "I'll accomplish a public ass-whipping of that guy before the cops can lay a hand on me. Sure, I may get arrested for my trouble, but so what? I'll be out of jail in a few days. I've done it before. Small price to pay for showing the whole world that we won't be pushed around like a bunch of patsies."
Again the others sat in silence. Billy scanned their faces, looking for a challenge.
"And don't worry about the expense, Mister Treasurer," he said sarcastically to Carl. "My plan won't cost us a dime. You can still get arrested in this town for free."
"Billy, you're playing right into his hands," said Allison. "That's exactly the kind of thing he wants to have happen. I can see the headlines now: 'Local Abortion Rights Hoodlum Arrested. Mayor Vows To Uphold The Law.' You might as well hand him the keys to the governor's mansion yourself."
Billy drained the last of his beer with a hearty swallow and set the bottle down in the middle of the table. "You worry too much, Allie Cat," he said with a swagger in his voice as he stood up to leave. "There's only two options here. Either we take the fight to him, or he takes it to us. Everything else is just bullshit. You people can sit around here and debate the situation all you want, but I don't have time for it. Anybody here decides they want to help me out, you know where you can find me. Otherwise, you do whatever you want. I can handle myself. I'll see you later."
Billy walked around the table and headed for the door as the others followed him with their eyes. As he opened the door, he turned toward Eppie. "It was very nice meeting you, Eppie," he said politely. "You take care now."
Eppie looked across the room at Billy with a blank stare and struggled to find words to acknowledge his departure. She managed to come up with only one. "Bye," she said weakly, as Billy closed the door behind him.
Eppie used the break in the discussion caused by Billy's exit as an opportunity to move from the sofa without drawing undue attention to herself. She got up and walked delicately down the short hallway and slipped into the bathroom.
Allison, obviously annoyed at Billy's behavior, seemed not to notice Eppie's movement. "God, that guy frustrates me," she said. "He's going to ruin everything. He does more harm than good for this organization."
"We should kick him out," said Jennifer, her face twisted with disgust. "I wouldn't mind a bit if I never saw him at these meetings again. It gives me the willies just being in the same room with him. For that matter, I wouldn't mind if he never showed up on the line either."
"He acts like such a child all the time," said Carl. "You can't reason with him. He only wants to do things his way, and if you suggest any other alternative he gets belligerent."
"Can we all agree then that we won't invite him to any more of our meetings?" asked Jennifer to the others. Allison, Carl and Rachel all nodded their heads in unison, but Judy did not.
"Wait a minute," Judy said, holding up her hands in a manner that indicated her disagreement with the others. "I gotta say somethin’ here. Now I'm not gonna defend everything Billy does, 'cause sometimes I don't agree with him neither, but sometimes I gotta say that the guy makes some sense. I know he's a hothead, and a lotta times he gets himself in trouble for no good reason, but I got the same complaint as he does on this here issue. I think he's right, we're bein' too passive here. Rachel's Daddy ain't bluffin' if you ask me. He's dead serious about what he's doin' and I think we need to be just as serious as him. I wasn't gonna go against what everybody else thought if I was the only one to think that way. But now that Billy's kinda laid it out there, I think I might as well speak up an' tell you that I agree with him. Not about how he's gonna fight the fella who shows up to collect the tissues. I don't approve of violence like that for no reason. That's not what I'm sayin'. What I'm sayin' is that we shouldn't just sit around and let the Mayor lead us around by the nose. I'd feel helpless if that's all we was gonna do. I'm not sure I have any better ideas right at the moment, but I think maybe we should all sleep on it for a day or two an' try to come up with some better ideas. I'd feel better if we was doin' somethin' rather than not doin' anythin'."
Allison was about to respond to Judy when she was interrupted by the labored sounds of gasping and coughing coming from the other end of the hallway. Rachel and Allison looked at each other and quickly excused themselves. They walked down the hallway and stopped at the bathroom door. Silently they stood outside the door for a few seconds, waiting for the sound of another wave of peristalsis to confirm their suspicions. They heard the sound of vomiting a second time, and Rachel rapped her knuckles firmly on the door.
"Eppie?" she called.
"Yeah," Eppie's voice came back in despair.
"Are you all right?"
No reply came for several seconds. Then they heard more coughing and deep, gasping breaths.
"Open the door, Eppie," said Allison.
A few seconds later they heard the lock on the door handle being released from inside the bathroom. Rachel turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Eppie was kneeling in front of the toilet, her elbows resting on either side of the bowl and her hands holding her hair away from her face. Her body stiffened forcefully as she knelt there, and she retched again. Then she relaxed and took several deep breaths. Exhaustedly she sat back against the opposite wall and started to cry. She wrapped one arm around her midsection and used her other hand to wipe her eyes.
Rachel crouched beside her and pushed some hair away from her face. She reached out and tore off a handful of toilet paper, which she used to clean around the edges of Eppie's mouth and chin. "Eppie, what's wrong?" she asked.
"I think I'm in trouble," Eppie said.