The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (15 page)

The room, a big wooden shell with only a rough platform for the ragtime orchestra but an enormous dance floor jammed with jiggling dancers, was ripe with the smell of damp, eager bodies. Mabel was sitting on the lap of a fellow whose name we were never told, and a girl named Mathilda kept getting up and sitting down, getting up and sitting down. She banged into the small table and beer was slopping everywhere, but no one complained. It was Saturday night, and I was drinking beer, too. When a fellow with a wide mustache came over and asked me where I lived, I said, "Pasadena."

"No, you don't." He grinned.

"I do, though. Go there and look for me."

"I'm looking at you now. And I don't want to stop looking."

Then the other girls hooted, all right. "There's your TwoDollar Bill," Mabel said. What right had she, sprawled on her fellow's lap? Anybody could see how she was hoping that night would end. She was bound to be disappointed again; already the fellow was looking for a way to dislodge her. To my boy with the mustache, I said, "Prove to me you're a gentleman."

"Can't do 'er. Sorry."

"Then prove to me why I shouldn't call the cops on you."

"Here?" He gestured at the unpainted wood walls, the shirtsleeve orchestra at the far end, the dance floor jammed with tipsy, roaring couples. Like everything else in my life now, the racket—you couldn't call it a dance—was loud and hot. "In this place, I'm the king of England."

"In this place, I'm the queen," I said.

"Then we're meant to go together." He had mousy hair and mossy teeth, but his smile was genuine.

"Hold on, girls!" Mabel screeched. "Sphinx has caught a smooth one!"

"Sphinx?" he said.

"Just a game," I said.

"Ask her! Ask her anything!" Mabel's voice was like a fire bell. "Try to get her to tell you the least thing about herself! Just ask!"

He considered me, and I took in his clean but soft collar, his tired shoes. His hands were well kept, and though it might have been cheap of me, I tickled myself with the thought of them on my shoulders. "Would you dance with me?" he said. Mabel screeched when he took my hand.

His name was Pete, he ran an accounting machine for the Conservative Life Insurance Company, and his mustache drooped with moisture before he had danced me across the hall. The throng was so rough it made Mercer County barn dances look genteel; we banged into other couples on the way, and some of the girls howled. If they were anything like Mabel, in the morning they would point out their bruises and pretend to complain. Pete did his best to shield me, and his hand on my back was steady. I liked that hand, the first I had felt in months. I liked Pete, a young man with a job at an insurance company. I liked the recklessness that was seeping across me, even though I knew it probably sprang from nothing more mysterious than beer. I thought about Pete's hands sliding down past my shoulders. If Mabel knew what I was thinking at that moment, she would have shrieked until they heard her in Nevada. Pete said, "Is this your first time to come down here?"

"No."

"I haven't seen you before."

"Well."

"Gee, Nell. Why in the world do your friends call you Sphinx?" he said. "It must be your exotic Egyptian looks." I started to giggle, and he tightened his hold. My waist was growing damp under his hand, and I pressed into that new moisture.

"I'm from Kansas," I said.

"A fact! Stop the presses."

"Egypt, Kansas."

"I know it well. It's just down the road from China, Nebraska."

"I have cousins there. The Sphinx-Lees. How do you know about Nebraska geography?"

"I was very good in school. They told me all about you."

I loved this fizzy talk, just as I suddenly loved the shrill, out-of-tune orchestra, the girl in the pink satin dress who rammed into us, the cupped boards under our feet. Why not racket with this mustachioed boy? Who was going to stop me? The sense of freedom was so fierce, it felt like rage. "What else do you know?" I said.

"You're not like the other girls here."

"I am, though. I'm exactly like them."

"You're not silly. You have both feet on the ground," he said.

"You think so?" Pulling back, I made enough room to spring toward him, hitting him chest to chest. He stumbled but awkwardly caught me. Somebody nearby called, "We're cutting you off, sister."

"Good thing you're not hefty," Pete said, keeping his arms wrapped around me so that my feet dangled.

"Now do you think I'm like the other girls?" Not far from us, a girl in brown tried to jump into her partner's arms, and both of them staggered.

"No," he said. Before I could wriggle out of his clasp, he murmured, "That's why I crossed the floor to get to you, Sphinx."

"I keep my secrets," I said.

"We'll see about that."

Only the scraps that were left of my propriety made me go home that night with Mabel and Josephine, to their proper house. They sneaked me into their room through the window and let me sleep on a pallet of cloaks. I might as well have lain on the plain floor; wakefulness sizzled through me. In the morning, when Mabel said, "Just
look
at the bruises," I looked at my own arms. It hadn't occurred to me she might be talking about herself.

My blood roaring, I felt tippy. I felt electrified. I felt jumpy as a flea, and the world had become a ponderous, broad-backed farm horse. I waited five minutes for the streetcar home on Sunday morning, and when it didn't come, I trotted down Broadway while men in their shirtsleeves called after me. What was the hurry? If they had gotten a good look at my face—I could feel the blush—they would not have asked.

The soonest I could see Pete again would be the following Saturday, at the next racket; he didn't know how to find me otherwise. "Pasadena," I had idiotically told him. Perhaps he was this moment riding his bicycle up and down Millionaire's Row, looking for a brown-haired girl, skinny as a fish.

I had nearly reached my own house before I came up with a plan, turned around, and trotted back to Josephine. "You're a dervish," she said, taking in my limp hair and noisy breaths. Herself, she had not moved from the bed, where she lolled with heavy pleasure.

"I have a request."

"Oh-ho," said Mabel, crimping her hair by the window. "At last."

I kept my gaze on Josephine, remembering her big eyes for Mr. Riching. Back in the rooming house, among us girls, she called him Rrrrich. "Can you keep him away from the glove counter tomorrow?" I said. "I will be back in place before ten o'clock."

"Don't hurry on my account," she drawled. "I can show off some fashionable undergarments."

"For this, I'll make you a new undergarment, with fresh ribbons. I'll put elastic insets at the sides and you'll be more comfortable," I said.

"Ask for two," Mabel said to her sister. "It's no small favor."

"We'll miss you at Levisky's," Josephine said to me. "We won't be half so smart once you're gone."

"Where are you going?" Mabel said. "You can't go anywhere without us." Her fingers drummed unhappily on her bruised arm. She had hardly danced at the racket, although Pete had taken her out on the floor once and returned with a carefully neutral face. I made fun of that face later, when his hot hands pressed into my back again.

I said, "I haven't gone anywhere." But I had spent months at Levisky's, and even though I was sewing now for dozens of girls, I lived like a charwoman, not a young lady with prospects. At home I had three yards of better-quality serge, and I knew how to make myself look like a lady of fashion. The better clientele wanted a good eye from its shop girls, experience. As Mabel kept pointing out, I wasn't growing younger. By Saturday, I meant to improve my state, a fact that I would permit Pete to pry out of me.

And I did, too, though my new shop did not sport the Colorado Boulevard address I had hoped for. A shop girl did not vault from Spring Street, its air heavy with motor oil and cooking fat, straight to the wide, leafy thoroughfares of Pasadena. A shop girl could scarcely find the streetcar fare to go so far. Instead, I took a position in Glendale at Carter's Department Store, three stories tall with counters on every floor and electrical lights bracketed to the walls, not just bulbs dangling from the ceiling. Shoppers came to admire the lights and the chandelier in the foyer, which so pleasingly illuminated Carter's superior merchandise. The floorwalker examined me under that light, assessing whether he could believe me when I assured him that I was not Irish or Italian. Only the finest girls were permitted to stand under the chandelier at Carter's. Carter's clients wished to associate with their own kind. I nodded, fully prepared to be Carter's kind. In addition, the floorwalker explained to me, Carter's stood only two blocks from the E. D. Goode home. I smiled, kept my gaze on the floor, and nodded as if I were well familiar with the E. D. Goode home.

After the interview, I walked the nearby streets until I found a house sitting on a modest rise, every inch of it ornamented with shingles and fancy bricks and paint—a plain woman inside yards of furbelows. Like that plain woman, the house intended to tell me it was rich, with windows two stories tall and sticklike pillars supporting second-story porches. E. D. Goode, I could see, had not been born to wealth. Those accustomed to their money built houses that spilled out as well as up, confidently assuming stretches of land. They did not build narrow, worried houses that strained to reach so high. I stared until I could make out the painted-glass lamp behind the beaded curtains and the shadow of the potted plant. Finally a maid came onto the fenced porch to glare at me.

Starting with my first day at Carter's, I made a point of passing the house every evening, although it was out of my way and my legs ached from the extra half-hour that Carter's shop girls were happy, I was assured, to spend in their positions. I committed to memory the E. D. Goode home's turrets and porches and layers of fancy woodwork. I considered the color of the trim, which would be better suited by a deep maroon. I imagined walking past the house with Pete. I imagined walking into the house with him. What good would it do me to build a prosperous clientele clamoring for designs by Madame Annelle if I had to walk into my home alone each night? I was embarrassed to have taken so long to understand this fact, so basic that even Mabel grasped it. Besides, it was a nervy pleasure to think about Pete, who made my breath catch every time I remembered his hand against mine, which I remembered quite often.

By Saturday, the day of the next racket, I was a tangle of nerves. Mabel had reminded me twice that a girl never knew about fellows. He could have another girl already, or two. He could be trailing a string of broken hearts as long as the tail on a kite. Thoughts like this drove me into a Mabel-like flurry, and I spent the afternoon trying on and discarding every combination of clothing I owned. I looked at my reflection in the cracked window glass with despair, considering ways I could baste up a quick collar, rob lace from an underskirt for a jabot. Then I imagined myself sitting alone at a table wearing a lace tie from an underskirt while laughing Pete kept himself occupied elsewhere, and panic washed through me.

The shadow of panic lingered until we girls waltzed, arms linked, into the dance hall, where he was waiting inside the door—soft hat, mustache, an athletic, boyish nervousness. He had lingered there so obviously that I felt a flash of scorn, squelched by relief.

"Sphinx! If it isn't the girl of my dreams."

"Fresh," Mabel said, darting in front of Pete and pretending to smack his face.

"But I'm all the rage with the girls," he said, and winked at me. That really was fresh, and the glittering excitement that had been banked in me all week surged up again. For a moment, I could not speak.

"See?" Mabel cried. "I told you he was not to be trusted."

"Well, good night," Pete said. "Who told you I could be trusted?" He winked again, over the head of Mabel desperately twining between us. "I would never trust a fellow like me."

"No?" I said, slightly out of breath.

"Never," he said, reaching around Mabel to lead me onto the dance floor.

He was wearing the same suit he had worn the week before, but his collar was cleaner. I could see the marks from the brush, and when he pressed me against him, I could smell bleach and bay rum and sweat. Trembling overtook me, and he said, "You cannot be cold." He almost had to shout, the crowd was so noisy.

"I am not cold," I said. He grinned, and I grinned back, and if he was a cad, I was content to uncover that fact later.

He was thoughtful, anyway, or at least experienced. He danced me away from Mabel and the other girls, pushing us to the far side of the hall. The orchestra played two numbers before we found a door at the side of the room and ran away, clutching hands and trying to muffle our laughter. Dismissing Jack from my mind was easy. He and I had busied ourselves being make-believe adults, taking actions we barely understood under the eyes of relatives and neighbors who noted and judged our every move. Now Pete and I ran giggling through the dark, a couple of children. And the hot wave of desire that crashed through me was nothing I had ever felt in Kansas. Kansas wouldn't allow such a thing, I thought, and laughed out loud. Pete put his hand over my mouth, and I laughed more.

He had a place in mind, a sheltered cove in a tiny park. Trees of some kind, and ivy underfoot. At the same time I tried to hang onto details, they were swept out of my mind in a bubbling rush. Pete buried his face in the dip between my shoulder and throat, then nuzzled up to my face. "You're beautiful," he muttered. No one had ever said that to me, and I liked hearing it, though I didn't believe him.

"You don't say," I said.

"I thought of you all week."

"Did you."

"Pasadena has many shops, and you are not in them."

"Yet."

"Did you think of me?" Hoisting my skirt, he groped to find the tie to my drawers.

"Wait," I said, my heart chattering while he rubbed me through the thin cotton lawn. The heat between us was so great, you'd think the cotton would have caught fire.