The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (12 page)

Girls ringed and swirled around us. The band of hoydens had clumped across the platform to a sweets stand, but their place had been taken by proper girls descending from the trains, their hair tidy and their shoes brushed, many of them wearing the same dark skirts and white shirtwaists as Josephine and Mabel. I'd imagined I was the only one running away to California. It was disturbing to see that I was merely the latest conscript in an army.

Josephine was waiting on me, her frank face bright. "Thank you," I said.

"And I can get you work. If you need it."

I can't—

She made a sweeping motion and looked at my bedraggled package. "One day you'll look out for someone else. And you'll need money to pay the rent. Is that box all you have? That can't hold more than a hairbrush."

"It's more than a hairbrush," I said, stung. The box held a change of clothes and night things.

"I sent a trunk ahead," Mabel said.

Josephine put her gloved hand on my wrist. "You got on that train in a hurry, didn't you? You're nothing but a child. What's your name?"

"Nell Presser," I said, pleased at the presence of mind that prompted me not to give Jack's name.

"Just 'Nell' will do," Josephine said, clasping my hand and leading me through the crowd. When we got to the rooming house, she told the other girls there about finding me, "lost as a kitten," and I understood enough to let her tell the story her way.

The other girls had different stories. Some of them arrived at midnight and had to pick their way out of the neighborhood of tilting houses, little more than shanties, that abutted the station. One loud girl swore she ran from white slavers—that was why she arrived at the rooming house with only a pocketbook. She was a hefty thing, and I thought she would have given any slaver a good fight, but I held my tongue. My intention now was to listen, pay attention, remember. After only two days, the girls christened me "Sphinx," which would have made Jack laugh. I did not let myself think about Jack. There were many things I did not let myself think about.

The crowded rooming house helped me. In the morning, Mabel and Josephine and I picked our way through the tiny space left between the creaky iron bed we shared and the single pine wardrobe. Mabel's trunk, when it arrived, was stowed in the parlor over an unvarnished patch of floor, with the extra luggage from the other girls who were planning a grander life. The uneven floorboards of the house creaked at night with the footsteps of girls taking turns at the lavatory and visiting one another's rooms. This was not like the clench of Mercer County life, where a breath taken by one person was exhaled by five others. We girls were strangers to each other. Often I didn't know my neighbor's family name, but we tumbled into one another's lives like puppies. We moved from one bedroom to another, looking at photographs and eating the occasional cake sent by a fond mother. Mabel made proclamations about the motorcar she would one day own, and the girls called her "Mabel the Motorcar Girl," a nickname that she both was and was not fond of.

Those evenings were our pleasures. Our days were spent at work. Josephine was as good as her word, presenting me in Mrs. Cooper's brown suit to the floor manager at Levisky's Ladies Wear on Spring Street. I was not worldly enough to understand what the store's name connoted—I had hardly heard of Jews, much less met any—and I bobbed a little curtsy at the floor manager, who said, "How long ago did you arrive?"

"She's clean and respectable," Josephine said.

"Do you know your letters?" He didn't look as if he meant to insult me. I didn't need the warning glance from Josephine.

"I can write a legible hand," I said.

"There won't be any call for that, so long as you can read. Most of your type can't." His look was appraising, but anyone raised in a farm community had suffered worse. I would start the next day, which gave me enough time to buy a skirt and waist, like the clothes the other shop girls wore.

Ready-made clothes! Many Mercer County afternoons, I had beguiled myself with dreams of stepping into garments created without the least effort, just as I had imagined sitting at a restaurant table, waiting for food that would simply appear. I hadn't envisioned careless workmanship—scarcely any seam allowance and a visible hem—and a poor fit. Even with the smallest-sized skirt, I could run my thumbs under the waistband. "It's close enough," said Josephine. Her own skirt fell with a pull over her hips.

"I'll take it in tonight," I said, looking unhappily at the shoddy cloth. Every stitch would have to be careful. Handled too much, the skirt might come apart. "It will take some work, though."

"Are you handy with a needle?" Josephine said.

"I can copy designs." I had prepared this answer on the train—words not quite boastful but created to catch a girl's interest. Josephine, I could see, was caught.

She smoothed a pucker at the seam. "If you're quick, your skills will be in demand. I don't know a girl who likes how her clothes fit."

"We did not come all this way for sagging skirts," I said, and Josephine laughed as if I had made a joke.

The dark Henrietta skirt from Levisky's cost four dollars, the shirtwaist to go with it two dollars more. The room I shared with Josephine and Mabel cost each of us two dollars a week. My new job paid me three dollars a week. I said to Josephine, "If you like, I can smarten up your skirt after I finish with mine. If I let out the waist a bit and restitch the seams, it will last you longer."

"I can't pay you."

"Goodness," I said. "After all your kindness." When I was finished, the skirt would be both more comfortable and more becoming. Other girls would notice.

Every morning, packs of us crowded onto the streetcar in our work uniforms, car after car filled jam up with girls. Men rode the streetcar, too, of course, but we girls sat in one another's laps, swayed on our feet, cheerfully bumped shoulders and elbows. Some of the girls were making eyes at the men, but I was content to hide inside the company of my sisters-in-arms. Already two of them had complimented me on Josephine's skirt and asked if I might care to take on another.

I bore this in mind as I scampered up and down the ladder that rolled the breadth of Levisky's back wall. The building was dark at the back and bright near the windows, where the light fell through a curtain of dust and lint. Anyone who came near heard us sneezing. The glass counters stood in two big squares in the center of the room, and the shop girls who worked behind the counters did their best not to snuffle. My job was to fetch customers' requests from boxes stacked fifteen feet high, boxes labeled in hands that were often hasty. The floor manager, Mr. Lewes, stood below to watch and chided me for the time I took in fetching a corset cover. He seemed to find nothing exceptional in discussing a corset cover with a single girl and jabbed his finger at the label on the box, which appeared to read "caribou." I promised to do better, but he had already turned away.

There are many ways a job can be difficult. At Levisky's, I didn't have to stand outdoors in punishing weather, didn't have to coax huge, balky animals or heave slopping buckets of water twelve times a day. Wearing my new, bad clothing, the skirt so narrow I could hardly walk, I had only to fetch flawed lengths of cloth, shoddy stockings, hats whose veils were already working loose at the brim. Up and down the ladder a hundred times an hour; by noon on the first day, the blood in my legs was pounding. Dizzy, I missed a step on the ladder and would have fallen to the wood floor had Mr. Lewes not been waiting to catch me. "This happens with the new girls," he said, his arms tight around my shoulders and bosom. "They all think they know how to work. But if we don't watch, they come crashing down."

"I didn't mean to disaccommodate you," I said. Should a nice girl have scrambled out of his embrace? I did not, though I did not smile at him, either.

"I was expecting as much," he said.

None of this exchange did I discuss with the other girls. It was my job to keep my job, even if by four o'clock the throbbing in my legs and knees—we weren't allowed to sit at any time, including lunch—was matched by the frantic pressure in my bladder. Girls were not paid for personal time. Before a week had passed, I knew of two girls who, afraid to drink even a sip of water, fainted behind their counters.

We tried to hide the fainters from Mr. Lewes and his successor, Mr. Riching, who was harder to distract. He watched me dart from hat trimmings to bootlaces across the back wall, bending and stretching from the ladder like an acrobat. On the morning that Josephine was urgently waving vinegar under the nose of a girl called Sary—she had dropped like a stone behind the handkerchief counter—I reached across two stacks so that my shirtwaist stretched tight against my chest. When he looked as if he might go back out to the floor, I stretched farther, and he lingered. "You're good at your job," he said. His gaze was not entirely unpleasant, and there was Sary to think of. Mr. Riching was a slim man with a greasy mustache, vain about his hands. All of us girls had seen him dab them with lavender water. Several girls clambered onto the streetcar at night smelling of lavender.

I smiled at him. "I have good balance and am not afraid of heights."

"I can't decide whether your talents are wasted in the back of the store, or whether this is exactly where you should be."

Shop girls made six dollars a week rather than my three, a point so obvious it seemed to float in the air between us. "I am a very good worker, sir." I scrambled back down the ladder so that I would not be looking down at my employer. He contented himself with running a finger over the seam of my waist. A man acquainted with his merchandise, he knew just where to find the ribbon on my corset. Jack would not have been able to locate it at gunpoint.

"Do you promise that you will not collapse if I put you behind a counter?" Mr. Riching said.

"I am very sturdy," I said.

"We have a new opening."

I learned how to stand immobile behind the glass-topped counter, my face impassive as customers demanded fashionable wares, no matter that they were ugly or catchpenny or vulgar—and the ladies with fat hands
would
insist on lace-trimmed mitts that made their hands look like dumplings. "Very nice, miss," I would say, though I could have advised them better. I smiled when the regrettable items had been brought to my counter from the boxes in the back, smiled when the customer frowned and pulled on the gloves, sometimes half tearing them apart, and smiled once the sale was completed. Mr. Riching's eyes were on me, as they were on all the girls.

He noticed, for instance, that his shop girls were looking more neatly turned out, their shirtwaists tidier, their skirts better fitted. I had not yet charged anyone, but I watched them watch their reflections when they hurried past a glass. "They are not more fashionable," he said. "No one, for instance, is wearing the new dropped waist. Still, the overall effect is smart." He was leaning over my counter, and any girl on the floor was able to hear Nell having a conversation with the floor manager, just as cool as you please. Later, Mabel would have opinions.

"Surely that is beneficial for Levisky's Ladies Wear," I said. "The shop girls are representatives of the establishment."

"And you are certain that it benefits the establishment to have its shop girls looking smart?"

"Ladies like to look at what is becoming, even more at what is current. They see the fashion on another figure and judge it for themselves," I said. When he did not remark, I added, "It will take longer to make dropped waists, should you care to see them."

Mr. Riching knew this. He told me so that afternoon, in the dark stockroom, as he pulled out the ribbon from my corset that later I would have to spend half an hour rethreading. "There is very little about the female form that I do not know," he said. Resting his hands on me, fingering the little blades of my hipbones, he said, "You could wear the dropped waist nicely."

"Shall I make one and model it for you?"

"Saucy," he said, his voice both approving and disapproving. I would not have been standing in the back room with him if he were not my employer, but I must admit I felt a spark, and another when he put his lavender hands on my breasts. "Why do they call you Sphinx?" he said.

"I have no idea."

"You are a liar."

I smiled and didn't say anymore while he peeled the corset down my skinny chest and said, when he removed my petticoat, that I was no bigger than a bird. The only time Jack had ever commented on my size, he told me that everybody knew skinny girls were mean. Now Mr. Riching ran his finger over the channels of my ribcage and softly whistled
too-wheet too-wheet.
My pleasure in this moment was hardly shadowed by my knowledge that he had told another girl she was as tawny as a lioness. The world was large, and my new life had plenty of room to store secrets.

Josephine was fond of saying we were a family, but as far as I was concerned, we girls were better than a family—less angry, less mean. Our memories of one another could only stretch to the moment we each arrived in Los Angeles, and I had no intention of allowing myself to remember further. When my thoughts began to veer, caught by the cry of an angry baby or a woman's low voice singing, I hurried to make myself think about Levisky's, streetcars, the girls I rose with every morning. There was plenty enough to fill a person's head. "Sometimes," Mabel whispered one night, "I look around and think, there might be murderers here! We don't know. We could all be murdered in our beds!"

"And the other girls here might be thinking that about you," said Josephine, which shut her sister down.

We took up collections for girls who couldn't meet the week's rent. We sheltered the girls who found themselves in the family way, a group that included Sary, doomed to meet bad fortune. The other girls knew enough to use pessaries or to douche, which Josephine attempted to explain to me. "If you miss a monthly—" she began.

I won't.

"You'll lose your job," she said.

"No, I won't." She thought I was being mule-headed, and I was content to let her think that. Even to kind Josephine I could not describe a deformed child, my womb exploded by the clapping metal wings of Dr. Johnson's forceps. Words led to more words. If I told her about Amelia I would have to tell her also about Lucille, and Jack, and Mama, and Pa. All of Kansas would unravel onto the floor between us, Sphinx undone and Nell, angry and plain and old before her time, revealed in her place. It was the tight wrapping of my secrets that held me upright, so I kept them wrapped.