The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (3 page)

"Is that what you like—the clear days? I'll order up some more for you."

"Law. Guess you're pretty important."

"Guess I am," he said. "You'd like, I'll come to see you later and we can look over my work."

"I'd like," I said. Suddenly shy around a boy I'd known since I was no bigger than a bug, I could hardly bring myself to look at him. I think he was smiling.

Inside the church, Mama herded me to sit with the grownup women instead of the children. Annalee Barkis, twenty-four years old and in the habit of saying she had a beau up in South Dakota, though none of us had ever seen him, folded my hand in hers and kept holding on right through the preaching. She was trying to get some of my good luck, and to my shame, I felt proud of that.

On the way home, in the back of the noisy wagon, Mama said, "You'll be wanting a new dress."

"I can make that next week."

"A new dress. A new life."

Mama gazed at me, as hard to read as a cloud. When I grew uncomfortable under her cloudy gaze, I said, "I've known Jack since I was in the cradle."

"Not that long ago," she said.

"He's old enough to go courting."

She nodded, and the very mildness of her response nettled me. "How old were you when Pa came around?" I said. Normally I didn't ask her questions. Mostly she didn't know answers.

"Fifteen," she said.

"Like me."

"Like you. And I'd known him since I could remember."

"Like me." I looked off toward Earl Meister's place with a face meant to be indifferent.

"Like you. I thought I knew everything I had to know." She waited while I studied Earl's well. Eventually I glanced back; the wind had teased most of her hair from its knot. "People will surprise you," she said.

"Not Jack. He's a glass of plain water."

"I'm not talking about secrets," she said. "Just—things you hadn't expected."

"He'll wait till after the wedding and lo and behold! He'll show me he has a wooden leg."

"No," Mama said.

I rested my shoulder against hers and picked up her hand, stroking the surprisingly soft skin. "I know him as well as anybody can. And that's a lot."

Mama said nothing for a spell, maybe thinking about how well people can know each other, maybe thinking about Earl's wife's sorry-looking pillowcases lolling dingily on the line. Mama would never let linens so gray be set out where people could see. "There's enough cloth for a dress?" she said.

"I think so," I said.

Jack came to call three days later, wearing the suit again. Viola giggled. "Hush," Mama said. "That's respect." She was right, but his respectful suit could have used a good brushing.

While Mama sat on one end of the porch, dreamily sorting beans from stones, Jack and I sat on the other, looking at the wheat fields bleed to nothing in the distance. His fingers crawled restlessly over the slats of the bench. Only when he told me that my shiny hair caught the sunlight did I let one hand fall into the space between us. He brushed it but did not clasp it, which was more respect. When he asked if he could come to see me again, I said yes.

That night over my crunchy mashed potatoes, Pa broke the silence between us. "So. Jack Plat?"

"Maybe."

"He's got a temper."

"I'm used to that. He's adding eighty acres."

Pa snorted. "Count on ten."

"He's got gumption," I said. Everyone in Mercer County knew that Jack had waited for me in his suit. It was as good as reading banns.

Pa said, "Don't know that cattle much care for gumption. Hard to digest."

"I should have known you wouldn't hold with getting ahead," I said. "Now, if he came to you asking about whiskey, you'd be able to tell him a thing or two."

"You don't mean that," Mama broke in, her frightened voice watery. "You're just talking."

I smiled at Pa, and he smiled back. Twenty years married to the man, Mama still hadn't figured out that he never drank two days running, and he never raised his hand if he hadn't been drinking. After Jack called three more times, I waited until a day Pa woke up thick-headed and penitent, then left the two of them indoors. When they called me off the porch, Pa's face was cheerful enough. He put our hands together and said, "I always knew my girl would find a man with gumption." Jack smiled.

The reverend joined us four weeks later, which gave me time to make two new dresses—navy blue wool for the wedding and every nice occasion thereafter, and a quick brown calico to start my wifely life. The cotton was cheap, and I made skirts for Mama and Mae and Viola, too, and a shirt for Pa. With all its seams, it took longer than the dresses put together. He wore it to the ceremony and the gathering at the Plats' afterward. Nussine brought a layer cake, made in the new oven Ernold had ordered for her. It had nickel, she told me, on all the handles. Jack had two pieces of her cake while Pa stepped out onto the porch. I followed him, and we had a short conversation about nickel plating. I suggested he try it on his plow, and he said he planned to tell Ernold to nickel-plate the bed, the kind of joke he could now make with me, a married gal. I stayed on the porch and waved while he and Mama left. So far as I ever saw, Pa didn't wear the shirt again.

From the start, I liked being Nell Plat instead of Nell Presser. Even with its window, my new house was dark, the soddie Mr. Plat's granddad had dug out when he came to Kansas for his hundred-sixty acres, but it was bigger than the house I grew up in. Jack and I had our own room, whose importance settled over me the first time he pulled down the curtain at the doorway. Neither of us could bear to look at the other, but in the gloom I helped him fumble with the ties on my petticoat, and he guided my hand to the buttons on his trousers. "Adam and Eve never had to bother with this," he grumbled, and the line tickled me so that I was helpless, snorting and hiccupping into his shoulder. "Well, they didn't," he said, clearly pleased to have amused his bride. He lifted me onto the hard bed. Laughter, we found, helped.

In the morning, shyly full of ourselves, we emerged to his mother. After eating my first meal, she told me to use my time tending the garden and the barns; in the evenings I could do the mending. Just one night spent in the slanted lantern light taught me that I'd need the daylight to pin seams, and that I missed my mama's sewing machine. I didn't mind doing handwork when it was called for, but I hated poking along a straight seam, taking a half-hour to stitch what a machine could finish in a minute.

Trying to be sweet, I twined around Jack after dinner. "If you bring me home a Singer, I'll do wonderful things with it," I told him. "You'll be glad you spent the money."

"You don't need you a machine to do wonderful things," he said, a joke that made me blush. Still, I wanted that Singer.

"You'll see. I'll get better."

"I don't know how much better you can get, girlie."

"Find out," I said, then ran away before he could grab me.

The next time he went to town, he brought me home a thimble, calling it a pledge, the way schoolboys gave each other pledges as promises on debts. That night Jack came to bed and found me fully dressed under the quilt. I took his hand, held it before his eyes, and told him to greet his pledge. His face went dark, and for a moment I was afraid. Then he turned over. In the morning, he slipped out of bed before me, and I was both disappointed and not.

Daytimes, his mother and I squared off. "Maybe in some places folks like streaky laundry," she remarked as I struggled with the washboard.

"Maybe in some places folks pitch in and help."

"I've already got all the cooking to do and another mouth to feed. Some families benefit when their sons get married."

"Jack already knew about my cooking. Putting me in the kitchen is a waste of my talents."

"It's a waste of good food, that's sure. What are your talents?"

"You have a long, pretty waist," I told her. "A dress with gathers would show that off."

She didn't let much of a pause go by. "Who do you figure I want to be showing off for?"

"It's a pleasure to look good. And no sin. I'll take in your dress."

"Not exactly a chore that needs doing," she said.

"No sin," I said. Looking up from the heavy overalls I was scrubbing, I felt something sparkling make an appearance in me, like a quick fish darting from behind a rock.

She walked back into the house with a sway and later suggested that I make a fence for the garden, since I was eating so much of the food that it produced. I remarked that most people fenced their gardens before putting down a carpet in the parlor. She said that the carpet needed sweeping as soon as I was finished with the fence—if I knew how to sweep a carpet, coming from a house without any. "Why don't you just show me a few dozen times," I told her. "I'll learn from watching you."

After I finished her dress, squares of cambric appeared in my sewing pile. The preacher's wife carried cambric handkerchiefs with finely stitched hems. I pulled a clean rag from my pocket, showily dabbed at my face, and asked, "Would you like me to embroider your initials, while I'm at it?"

"Yes," she said. This wasn't war. It was something like friendship.

The war, or at least skirmishes, were occurring with my husband. The haze of our bodies didn't last long, and he revealed himself to be a touchy man, quick to note a slight and maddeningly long to forget it. One day when his mother absent-mindedly called him Jacky, his face turned to murder. He didn't say a word to her, though. Instead he hauled me up by the elbow, marched me to the barn, and stood silently until I mucked out Rufus's stall. I should have done it earlier, I knew. But I hadn't been the one to call him by his baby name.

Another evening, I sat in the kitchen with the darning while he complained about lumpy socks and ungrateful females until I said, "Whatever happened to those kittens you saved?"

"What kittens?"

"The ones you pulled from under the outhouse."

"Are you joking, Nell? Think about what's under an outhouse."

"You brought them home, washed them, and gave them to your mother."

The laugh he produced was all the more ugly because he really was amused. "Who told you that? And when do you imagine I'd take it in my head to wash a cat?"

"The whole county knows this story."

"Never happened," he said, the grin a slash through his struggling beard. At least telling him the story was enough to make him stop picking at me. And the kitten rescue had happened, too. I wouldn't have married him without it. He just didn't want to be reminded.

By then I was learning the signs. We had our happy times, generally in bed when no one was talking, but black moods rolled over him, often after he came back from town, where anyone might have made a comment about his patchy beard, his lanky bride, the time he spent eight dollars on ryegrass seed, thinking it was wheat—no one forgot. After those occasions, he found the need to tell me about my shortcomings, from my stubbornness to my inedible cakes to my big feet. When the bad spirit settled, he'd come in from the fields early, lips moving as he totted up my flaws. Willfulness. Sharp toenails. I learned to walk out to the garden while he was still talking.

Looking over the uneven posts of my fence, reminding myself that I had improved my life with this marriage, I saw a barn and two wells, the second dug by Jack's father just a year before. Like everybody in Mercer County, he was farming now as well as ranching—putting his eggs, he liked to say, in two baskets. The subject was one of the few that could loosen his tongue. On the day that I walked away from Jack's detailed complaint regarding my bad handwriting, his father met me at the garden fence and spent half an hour telling me about Turkey red winter wheat, first introduced by the Mennonites. Looking politely past him, I squinted at the horizon line. I thought I could make out a gentle slope, the first tiny hill that would lead to the Rockies, and beyond them, the ocean, all invisible. We took them on faith, like we took Jesus.

"My father resisted it," Mr. Plat said. "He didn't hold with planting a crop in the fall, even though the Menno farms were growing it and shipping all over the country. My mother told him, 'There's more than one way to do things,' but he didn't want to hear."

"How did you convince him?"

"Planted it anyway. He was too tight to plow a crop under once it started to green." My father-in-law cracked a smile, a rare thing. "There's room for a lot of different thinking under one roof."

"Gets to feel crowded, though."

"You can always come outside." He nodded at the open fields before us, those uninterrupted planes of light brown and washed-out blue. One day I would make a quilt that looked like Kansas. It would need only one seam.

I knew that my father-in-law was trying to console me, but his explanation left parts out. Folks who stayed out in all that light and grass grew strangely flat, pressed between sky and ground. They lost the sense of things. My father-in-law talked at auctions—not just to the animals, which was normal enough, but to whips and spades and fat sacks of seed. "You? Is it you?" he'd murmur while looking at a slumped burlap measure of Red Label seed. If a person didn't want to become peculiar, he had to come back indoors, where the arguments were still waiting.

"A little discord isn't a bad thing," Jack's father said. "It reminds you you're alive."

"I'll remember that," I told him.

"A lot of voices is the sound of life. It's how we're meant to be."

"I'll remember that, too."

"It'll help you when the hard times come," he said, nodding at my belly as if hard times were stored up there. Only two months after Jack and I exchanged vows, I was already pregnant, pretty well a Mercer County record. I would have liked to keep my condition to myself, but my breasts got huge immediately, and women at church made jokes about top-heavy structures. I stopped going to church, but there was no holding back the news. At night Jack tugged at my teats through my nightdress. "Moo," he said.

"Go gentle on the udders," I said.

He tugged again. "This is what they're made for."