A Tyranny of Petticoats (37 page)

“A mink coat,” she said with a swoon, “just like Marlene Dietrich.”

“A house of our own,” I said.

Frankie rolled her eyes, though she was smiling — that smile was like a hook where I always hung my coat. “A night at the Brown Derby.”

That was Frankie — she was the comet blazing through the sky, and I wanted to be the tail. But it was dangerous to think anything was a guarantee with a girl like her. Every moment with her slipped too quickly from my grasp.

A commotion at the factory; gasps and squeals threading through the raucous din of the machines.
Frankie! Frankie!
They called her name like the legions of fans she dreamed of outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Frankie pushed her goggles up into her kerchief-wrapped hair and shut down her equipment.

A hardness formed in my gut, clenching like when I’d written my letter to James, like when his father had sat me down to tell me of his death.

A swarm of girls pressed around the corner, ushering a young man on crutches with them. “Francesca,” he said, like she was the sweetest honey. And she was.

But I also knew, then, that she was no longer mine.

He’d been rescued with a dozen other army privates from a camp and spent weeks recovering in a hospital bed in England. He was feverish, too ill to write to her, but as soon as he was mended he received a medal and an honorable discharge and came straight for her. I overheard all this with the dozens of other girls crowded around, swooning and clutching their hands to their hearts. They’d been dazzled by Frankie and her lies and exaggerations and her starlight.

She never returned to the factory after that day. Soon more servicemen trickled in, claiming their girls or, more often, claiming our jobs. The shift mother called me to her office and asked me if I wouldn’t mind stepping aside for another GI who’d come home and, she said delicately, needed the work more than I did. He’d served his country, after all. When I started to mind, though, I realized she wasn’t really asking.

We declared victory in Europe, though the battles in the Pacific raged on, over the same stretch of sea where James had lost his life believing I was waiting for him back on shore. I wandered Los Angeles and all the places Frankie and I had been. The drugstore where we got milk shakes, now packed with soldiers and their gals. The place she shared with her roommate — twice I tried to find the nerve to knock, to call, but the third time, as I paced the sidewalk, I saw a young family leaving the apartment, crossing the parking lot under the hot white gleam of California summer.

“You’ll find work again,” Mrs. M said, as I chewed on the night’s meal (pork chop, no longer rationed) and stared out the window as the late-evening sun splashed across the new cars whizzing by on the avenue. “Maybe once I cash in my war bonds, I can hire you to do some cleaning for me. Or I can check with the other ladies in my bridge club. . . .” She stirred her Ovaltine. “What about Francesca? Did she finally land a role? Maybe she could get you work as an assistant at the studio. . . .”

“Francesca’s not coming around anymore.” I dropped my fork. “Listen, Mrs. M, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s none of your business, but if I don’t tell someone, it’s going to eat me up.”

Her lips quavered. “Evie, dear, if you’re in any sort of trouble —”

“I was in love with someone, but it didn’t work out.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Another girl.”

Mrs. M didn’t say anything for a long time. Slowly, I opened my eyes to find her staring at me expectantly. “Well?” she asked. “Is that it?”

“You’re not going to — to kick me out?” I asked.

“Is it going to keep you from paying rent?” She took a sip of Ovaltine, leaving a chocolate mustache on her upper lip. “Dear, we all came to California in search of ourselves. Herbert and I wanted better weather for his illness, though it turned out it didn’t do him much good. You came here ’cause you have a story to tell. Might as well tell it.”

I ended up having to cash out most of my war bonds when a new job never materialized — no need to hire a dark-skinned girl like me when hundreds of vets needed work. I went to the movies — and walked right back out when one of the shorts in front of a Bogart show starred Francesca Miller in a Daniel Fiorelli production. I didn’t need to see those eyes watching me, that smile scrawled across the screen.

More important, I had time to write, and the first thing I tackled was a new draft of
City of Angels,
this time as a one-act play. I’d sit in a corner booth at the Shrinking Violet and sip on soda water while I reworked the story. I’d chat with Luisa and Madge when they had breaks, and while I never felt the same spark with them that had flared in me with Frankie, it was nice to have a few friends in this world who didn’t make me feel like I had to hide.

Plus, it was good to have their support for what I was about to do.

I climbed the stairs to Violet’s office with legs like gelatin, hugging my brown folio tight to my chest. Violet’s guard, the only man I’d seen in the whole club, ushered me inside. Violet lounged behind her desk, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, her creamy satin gown crisp against her dark skin. “Evelyn,” she said, my name streaming from her mouth in a puff of smoke. “The girls tell me you have a play for me. Something a little more serious to be part of our revue here at the club.”

“It’s called
City of Angels
.” I hesitated, then held the folio out to her. “In a city of women, all the men called off to war, a gun moll named Kitty Cohen decides to seize control of her old squeeze’s gang for herself. But she’s pursued by a clever young detective on the force, Mary O’Shea. Sparks and bullets both fly as they outwit each other, and fall for each other —”

“I get the idea.” She tapped away the ash from her cigarette as she flipped through the script. “Ha. ‘Looks like we’ll have to share this town.’ That’s cute, I like that.” She glanced up at me. “You got studios interested in this?”

“No, I didn’t think —”

“What’re you asking, a thousand? Two? I can give you two, but I can’t go any higher. I gotta pay my girls. Six months exclusive, you can revise it, then you can take it to the studios —”

Two thousand dollars! I could live another year off of that. Enough time to write another script. Maybe two — one for the studios and another for the Shrinking Violet. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

1.

I’D ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD GIRL. ALWAYS followed the rules. Kept my nose clean, as Granny liked to say.

Our farm was a whopping twenty-seven acres, and I had the run of the place. The garden, the orchard, the barn, the fields. When a hot breeze blew, I would follow it. Hike up my skirt, run off the porch and down our long grassy drive to the dirt lane that led to the rest of the world. Most times I could run straight out into the road and just stand there. Let the wind swirl around me as it tunneled between the fields on either side. Two cars a day passed by, maybe, headed to or from other farms down the lane. You could tell when they’d gone past, because those tires stirred up dirt and left a silt-brown cloud hanging above the avocado trees lining the drive. You could tell when they were coming too. The dust would rise, a long way off, and billow closer.

I’d never wondered much about life past the end of the lane.

We had a television set, out in the barn. Daddy liked to keep up with the news, but Granny wouldn’t allow such newfangled contraptions into her house.
It took me my whole adult life to get used to having that radio in the living room,
she always said.
Then they go on and invent something new. No call for it.
She had this scratchy-throat voice, from years of breathing in Granddad’s tobacco smoke. ’Course, he went on into the sky a few years before I came along into the world.

Daddy might have been the man of the house, but Granny sure enough ran the place. So the TV went into the barn. Daddy always did things how Granny wanted. “Get that girl some books,” she’d say. And sure enough, Daddy’d come home with some for me. I had quite a collection by that summer. Twenty-two books in all. That was more than anyone I knew, including the girls who still went to school. They had books, but they had to give them back at the end of the year. I’d gone to school over in town up until eighth grade, and then Daddy pulled me out. Needed help around the farm, he said, with Granny getting on in years.

“Let her learn,” Granny said. “I can manage.” But she couldn’t. Her back didn’t want to bend low enough to weed anymore. Her fingers shook trying to grip the handle of a broom or a rake. Sometimes she didn’t even see all the eggs that our hens laid, right in plain view in their nests.

We had a television set, out in the barn, I was saying. And I had all these books too. So I knew about the world. Daddy had a rocking chair out there that he’d pulled off the porch. Come evening, after supper, he’d go sit out there. Watching. Rocking. Muttering from time to time about the state of things. I watched with him, most nights. He only brought in the one chair, so I sat on the floor by his knee, far enough away not to get rocked on, sifting scraps of straw through my fingers.

The world came into our barn every night. And most nights, I was glad enough to be safe in that barn, and not out there in the rest of it. It sounded bad out there. On television some nights they pulled numbers out of a machine, and if your birthday matched, you had to go and fight in the war in Vietnam. If you were a boy, that is, and over eighteen.

Black people didn’t need to go all the way to Vietnam to find a war, Daddy said once while we were watching the draft. Sometimes the newspaper showed pictures of civil rights demonstrations. People protesting a system that said black people should live separate; black people should stay in their place, and that place should always be small. If you were black and you lived in the South, you had to fight. If you were black and you lived in a city, you had to fight. Didn’t have to go anywhere, even. That fight came right to you.

Nothing like that ever came close to our farm. I could walk through the field and get to town. There was a general store there, and a post office, and a restaurant, and a bar I couldn’t go into. Everyone knew me. Everyone was black.

The worst thing I’d ever had to fight was a jackrabbit, dead set on digging up my string bean plants. I was a good girl. The edge of my world was the end of that lane.

2.

I wandered through my garden picking rhubarb and blackberries. The berries along the fence were plentiful this time of year. They were full and ripe, and you had to pluck them just so or you’d have nothing but berry mash and stained fingertips for your effort.