The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (11 page)

He said, "You can't even meet me a little, can you?"

"How can I meet you? Unless you want me to be like you, going into town and seeing things that aren't there." It was a purely idiot thing to say, selfish and mean. Between the two of us, it wasn't Jack who saw things that weren't there. But my meanness held back the tears. He took me then, rougher than he ever had, and I couldn't blame him. After he finished, he eventually said, "You don't know the first thing about giving. You're a selfish wife and a selfish mother. It's a sad thing to see."

"Don't look," I said.

"I don't see the point in pleasing a woman who won't be pleased. Tomorrow you start helping Mama in the kitchen again."

"I have orders to fill." The fear welled through my voice. I could tell from their sudden stillness that the girls heard it.

"It's time for you to remember that you're part of a family." He pulled on his boots and went back to the barn. To my surprise, he came back an hour later, said nothing, and passed out on top of the quilt.

We rose together at four o'clock, he to tend to the cows, I to decorate the edge of a cape for Mrs. Horne with two yards of braid. He came back in for breakfast, and I went to the kitchen to chop salt pork. When I picked up the cape again after Jack left the house, my hands were soft from pork fat and the sand I'd used to scrub them clean.

Jack said nothing more, but I could feel his eyes on me, and I felt as if I were racing to cross a field before it collapsed beneath me. I made myself sew faster, losing some precision but turning out a dozen skirts a day. Mrs. Cooper told me I was a djinni, which I liked when she defined it for me. "Would Mr. Cooper approve of you knowing about heathen spirits?" I asked.

"Does Mr. Plat approve of your knowledge of thread?"

"The subject has not presented itself."

"Just so with the djinn," she said. "Would you like cake?" She smiled, and I smiled. I always lingered with Mrs. Cooper.

I now made the round of houses in Grant Station in a single morning and had learned not to accept any tea, or my bladder, still loose from Amelia, would make me miserable before it was time to go home. I took orders and measurements, then went to see Mr. Cates and examined the new fabric that had arrived. Ten weeks after Amelia was born, the reverend's wife wanted a suit, a complicated project. Mr. Cates found me brown velvet as soft as a pelt, and I picked out black buttons for the trim.

Even working with my djinn-like speed, I needed two weeks to make the suit, as I taught myself the new, slimmer lines from Mrs. Cooper's sister's
Harper's Bazaar.
It seemed strange to be working without any kind of bustle at all, the corseted waist riding right over the exposed hips. I wasn't sure the immodest fashion was one a reverend's wife should be wearing, but Mrs. Cooper had not asked my opinion, and the lines would certainly become her.

In the kitchen, my mother-in-law praised Lucille for swallowing one spoonful of oatmeal until the proud girl swallowed a second. In a week, Lucille would turn one year old. Even after I gave my mother-in-law a portion of my earnings, the pocket in my underskirt was stuffed with dollar bills. Eighty-two. Ninety-six. The night after I attained one hundred and thirteen dollars I lay awake, listening to Amelia's slightly clotted breathing and the smooth rush of Lucille's baby snores. Jack had come into the house after dinner and noted me bent over the sewing machine while his mother scrubbed the supper pots. Without a word, he pushed me back—gently, it must be admitted—and carried the Singer out the door. The cast-iron machine could not have been easy to lift, but he didn't make a sound, then or later, when he loaded it onto the wagon and drove away. By the next day, I heard about Lorene Silver, thrilled when her daddy told her she would be getting Nell Plat's sewing machine. I heard about it from Myrtle Marsh, who heard from Mrs. Horne, who heard from Mr. Cates, who was telling everybody.

That night I lay alone, noting how my blood hastened across my temples and over my wrists. It raced as if looking for an exit, I thought, and smiled grimly at my fancy. Outside the wind was light. Coyotes must have been skulking near the barn; one of the cows complained. Even at the stillest hour, a person could go deaf from the noise.

In the morning, nervy as a grass snake, I put on my underskirt, brushed Lucille's curls, straightened Amelia's cap, and set their cradles in the kitchen. "You're dressed early," my mother-in-law said.

"Ba, ba, ba," said Lucille.

"Ba, ba, ba," I echoed.

"And in bright spirits, too," my mother-in-law said.

"BA, BA, BA!" Lucille shrieked happily.

"She'll be talking any day now. Jack's first word was 'milk,' but we didn't know that for a while. He pronounced it 'mokey.'" My mother-in-law's long, rough face had softened, and I noted how the line of her cheek fell exactly as Jack's had in our courting days, when we sat on the bench of Pa's house and he looked hopeful and confident. When a person stands on the edge of change, everything she sees feels like a portent.

"What was your first word?" Jack's mother said.

"I don't know."

"You should ask your mother."

"Mama recalls different things. The day a crow landed on her wash line, she found out later that her cousin had passed on. I'll bet I heard fifty times how the day the wagon axle broke exactly when Pa was hearing the new tax assessment. She reckons that the world sends her signals."

"My husband should have consulted with her before buying the Lindstroms' land."

"Mama's not much on land values," I said. Jack's mother and I smiled at each other, and then I looked away, my eyes stinging. "Ba, ba?" I said to Lucille.

"BA!" she yelled. Her noise chased Jack's mother—Eveline, her name was Eveline—from the room.

After Lucille finished eating, I put her in the cradle. Mercifully, the heat made her dozy. I paused only long enough to touch her hair, though she scowled at me. I lingered a moment more over Amelia, who gazed at me with her dark blue infant eyes, her expression placid now that she'd eaten. The forceps marks had gone away by now, and her hairless little head let me see her pink ears, hardly bigger than my thumbnail. She cooed when I fanned her.

In the bedroom, I made a package with Mrs. Cooper's suit, then slipped out of the house and began the walk to town. I moved quickly, still wearing my gingham dress—anyone would think I was going to tend chickens. I got as far as the turn at Emil's farm before Mr. Cates's boy came along in his wagon and took me the rest of the way, three silent hours. I had him let me out in front of the Feed & Seed, and I dawdled under the statue of Lincoln until the boy's sulky wagon had rounded the corner. Only then did I walk to the train station. In the ladies' lounge, I put on Mrs. Cooper's suit, a little loose at the waist. Probably I'd be glad about that after twelve hours on a train. I gathered the money from my underskirt pocket, adding a dollar to my purse in case I needed a lemonade or sandwich. Then I sat for a long time on the bench; the train would arrive at 1535, as I knew in my sleep. Sitting without even piecework to busy my hands felt strange, and I kept looking for things to distract me. Twice, when my thoughts veered toward Lucille, I gazed at the lamps overhead, grimy and cloaked in cobwebs.

For three hours I sat and did not see a soul except the railroad boys and the ticket collector. No one left Grant Station. This had been my safety all along. Years later, I could recall the lamps in detail. When the train came, a porter lifted me up, since my new skirt was too fashionably tight at the ankles to permit such a high step.

The train lurched all the way north to Chicago before it rambled southwest along a jagged line, tracing buttes the color of raw skin. I studied the blank reddish soil outside my window, pretending to a scholarly interest in order to avoid the gaze of passengers around me. I didn't want to attract the notice of men because I had some sense, or of the ladies because I had some propriety, or of the children because to look at them made my heart freeze. Instead, I pondered clumps of bunchgrass, and wondered whether children in Colorado or Utah pretended to play the flute on the hollow stems. Mae and I had spent hours tootling on the needle-and-thread that erupted wherever the cows didn't crop it. Thinking of children brought tears up, so I stared at the wooden slats under my shoes and made myself think about Los Angeles. I had very little to go on: notions about generous orange trees, stories people told about consumptives and the touched who went to the ocean for cures, Mrs. Cooper's laughing insistence that Paradise would be filled with people who arose late, drank fragrant tea, and dined elegantly. "Even the porters?" I asked her. "Even the scrubwomen?"

"Especially the scrubwomen," she said.

Closing my eyes against the uneven ride, I imagined electricity, no more than a rumor in Grant Station, illuminating every room and street. Colors would be brighter in California, cloth would fall more softly, and wind would be a sweet breeze. Men ruddy with good health would play golf while women strolled through brilliant rooms and streets. The women would wear lustrous dresses, and their single need would be for more lustrous dresses. I thought about them until I could hear the sweep of their hems over deep rugs, a world filled by people of a sort I had never met. Those ladies would not feel the desire, as I measured a waist, to inform me that their husbands had just acquired a new thresher. Those ladies might not speak at all, so full would be the air with bird song and the distant ocean's murmur.

I managed to fill the journey with these thoughts, concentrating harder when a baby not far from me raised an outraged howl. Pressing my thumbs to my temples and my fingers to my wet eyes, I thought desperately about pelisses, such an elegant way to show off a fine lining. I thought about them for a day on the spur up to Chicago and two and a half more days on the big California Limited, which had slippery leather seats. I saw the sun set and rise twice, and after the second sunrise, when I felt scoured by the thoughts I would not let myself think, we arrived.

Arcade Station was a hectic and noisy cave, with Negro porters importantly calling, "Out-of-the-way-please" as if the phrase were a single long word. Loud birds swooped from the high, ribbed ceiling. Advertisements for ant treatment and Papinta the Flame Dancer flapped off the dirty walls, and under my feet cinders crunched and popped. After five steps, the hem of my skirt was nearly black. The plans I had made over the last ten months were arranged in my mind in a rigid list. First, I had to get away from the station.

Half a dozen trains were nosed up to the platform. I couldn't keep myself from thinking of cows in a barn, exactly the kind of hayseeder thought I did not want to have. The air was full of dirty steam, sticky with fuel and machine oil. From their booths, men in dark blue Southern Pacific caps called out arrivals and departures, their voices barely audible above the whistles and hissing of the trains, and the warnings of mothers to their children, and the whoops from packs of jangling, roaring girls.

I had never seen anything like them. Arms linked, swaggering three and four abreast through the crowded station, they scattered children before them and pushed even gentlemen with top hats out of their way. Their skirts were striped in broad rows of yellow and green and red, and were embellished by a dozen rows of trim and buttons so loosely sewed that they rang like bells. In the center of their cheeks they wore circles of rouge, and their hair blazed in tones of red and yellow that I knew came from dye, though I had never seen dyed hair before. One girl grinned when she saw me, flashing a gold tooth. I frowned lightly and looked away, as if searching for a family member momentarily delayed in meeting my train. If this was what Los Angeles had to offer, I thought, then I would keep traveling. I did not let myself consider how little money I had left, or that there was nowhere else to go: now that I had come to California, nothing more than water lay before me. One of the girls said something, and I could tell the kind of joke it was by the way the others screeched. I continued to scan the station for my invisible family members. The heat rose and clung to my sweat-soaked chest and I would not let myself think how far was this raucous scene from an ocean or an orange grove.

A man approached and asked if I was new here, and if I might need his help. "No, thank you," I said. A few steps later, another fellow in a green plaid suit offered to carry my package wherever I might be going. "No, thank you," I said. A girl rested her hand on mine. She was dressed quietly, or I would have turned away from her, too. "Was that your train?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a place to go?"

"Yes."

She grinned. "No, you don't. But you're smart to lie."

"Is it always this noisy?" I said.

"Oh my. You came from the country, didn't you?"

"Ranch land," I said.

She smiled again, and I blushed. "I'm Josephine." She gestured to a girl in a deep hat and travel-stained gloves standing behind her. "This is Mabel, my sister. She just came in from Boston."

"Boston!" I said. "Why did you come all this way?" To this horrible, loud place, I meant, full of frightening girls and the smell of heat. I was tired, or I wouldn't have said something so stupid.

"Oh,
Bos
-ton," Mabel drawled, pushing her fuzzy hair vaguely back toward her chignon, as if she were suggesting that it tidy itself. "I've been cold for long enough. Haven't you?"

"A little breeze would feel good right now."

"Well, then," Mabel said, as if we'd settled something.

"I can take you to a rooming house, if you'd like," Josephine said. "Mabel and I need one more girl to share our room. It's a respectable house. Working girls live there, shop girls. We were looking for one more." The two of them were dressed all but identically, in navy serge skirts and plain waists. My suit—Mrs. Cooper's suit—looked peculiar to them, I could tell.

"You don't know the first thing about me," I said.

"Girls come to Los Angeles every day. We have to hold together."