The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (7 page)

"Roof needs to be freshened," she said in response to her husband. She studied the brown stain forming above a picture of a leg-of-mutton sleeve on a lace-trimmed shirtwaist, $1.05. I knew how much lawn cost, and lace. I could charge less and still make a profit.

"Can't put up sod in the rain. You'd best go see Myrtle, in case she's needing anything," my father-in-law said. Jack's mother fetched her bonnet, showily checking it for damp before she tied the ribbons.

I dawdled until her wagon had disappeared down the road to the Marsh place. Then I hurried into the parlor, although water needed hauling for dinner and the skinny chickens, angry in the rain, needed tending. Before she left, my mother-in-law reminded me of the piece of salt pork in the locker, but it would not be harmed by staying there. With Lucille on my hip, I gazed at the parlor and felt naughty and gleeful. A person would have thought I was setting out to make mischief, not pin together flimsy pattern pieces.

"We have a lot to do," I told Lucille, who gazed philosophically at the darting shadows on the wall. The room was so dark on that rainy afternoon that I had to light the lamp. Its chimney wanted cleaning—another task for later. Over Jack's mother's precious rug I spread five and a half yards of dun muslin that I would cut and baste to make a sample dress. Next week I would go back into town and try it on Mrs. Cooper, adjusting darts, waist, sleeves, and back before I started to cut the chintz. I had never made a sample dress before, never made a dress with a peplum draped over the hips. My hands shook. Lucille, who had lately come to understand crawling, wriggled across the bodice, crumpling the fabric as she pulled herself along. Catching her just before she reached the pinned shoulder seam, I set her in front of me. "We are starting something new. You don't want to ruin things yet." She responded better to adult conversation than baby talk; for the moment, she stopped struggling to get away and turned her face toward me.

"You don't know how anything will turn out until you try it. People will act like they already know; they'll look at whatever you're doing and tell you how wrong it is. Don't believe anybody." Quieting most fussy babies is a lucky thing; quieting Lucille was a miracle. I didn't care what came out of my mouth, so long as she sat still. "Your pa would tell you that there's only two ways to do things: the right way and the wrong way. He tells me that when he's showing me how I picked the wrong way. But your pa, God bless him, has a limited view."

Who knows what a baby thinks is funny? Lucille threw back her head and crowed. While she was still grinning, I set her on the edge of the rug, then looked back to study Mrs. Cooper's pattern. I nearly missed the moment Lucille put a straight pin into her mouth. After that, I kept her in my lap and worked around her, straightening the flyaway fabric and pinning the pattern pieces as smoothly as I could manage. Lucille waited, hiccupped, then lurched sideways and spit up on the collar.

"Was that necessary?" I asked her. With a baby's toppling speed, she went after another glittering straight pin. I smacked her hand and said, "If you wait, you'll get your prettiest dress yet. I'll buy some lace for the collar." She started to put on a scowl, but when I added, "Button-up sleeves," she quieted enough for me to take her to the bedroom, change her soiled diaper, and return to the parlor to cut out the dress's back panel. I had never played games of make-believe, but now I chatted with my daughter as if she were old enough to have tea with Mrs. McKinley. It was our joke.

I was not the only mother in Mercer County to carry on elaborate, lopsided conversations with a child too young to say her first word. Walterine Potter said she made a new baby every time the latest one learned how to talk back to her. Walterine would understand a mother's voice in a dark house, talking to hear talk. And if Walterine had heard me talk about a traveling suit or train fare, she would understand that a mother will say anything to keep a baby entertained.

By the time my mother-in-law returned, I had the front and back of the sample dress finished, needing only to be basted up the sides. The pork, uncut, waited on the table with unsliced bread and pickles. Lucille was not crying, and Jack, his parents, and I ate in silence that might have been called peaceful.

Things were easy then. Mrs. Cooper's dress was a small extra chore, simple to hide, and my desire to ride with Jack into town the next weekend excited no surprise. In her warm house, Mrs. Cooper tried on the new sample dress, its paper-thin muslin making her feel light, she said, as a moth. She kept whirling away from me as I tried to adjust the shoulders. "Mrs. Cooper!
Please
hold still!" I could not keep the laughter from my voice.

"You sound like a schoolmistress," she said.

"I'm worse than that. I'm your seamstress."

"Will you stick me with a pin?"

"If I have to," I said. No grown women I knew talked this way, which was a pity. Mrs. Cooper stood obediently still, but the smile still curved her mouth and cheeks. I could feel the matching smile on my own mouth. When Mrs. Cooper asked if her new dress would be ready for next week's church, I protested. She didn't understand the amount of fine work involved. But she wheedled and twisted, shedding pins as she moved. Now that I had planted the idea in her, she assured me that she could not wait. Finally I made the promise, if only to keep her from loosening any more pins from the gathers at the shoulders. Riding back home on the wagon, I hid her dress by sitting on it and later sneaked it into the house under my apron. I had not expected to be good at subterfuge. As it turned out, I was expert.

After dinner, while Jack and his parents were awake, I worked through the mending pile as usual: socks, work shirts, kerchiefs, overalls. After Jack retired, Lucille and I stayed up another two hours with Mrs. Cooper's dress. The next night, the same. Lucille watched me with marble eyes as I basted and then made French seams on the sumptuous fabrics. Sometimes she whimpered, but I chattered quietly to her, and she held her peace. I could not escape the thought that she and I had entered a pact and, thinking this, I handed her a scrap of chintz. "The finest babies in New York and Paris are sucking on chintz this season," I told her. When she raised her fat hand to reach for the wool, I praised her good taste but held it out of reach. "Wait," I told her. "You'll have nicer fabrics than this."

The whispered conversations were a still, silken time between my baby and me. Sometimes we talked until near dawn; after those nights, Lucille consented to nap during the day, and the dark house felt gracious with silence. My mother-in-law looked at me sharply about my late hours, but she was no more eager to break the stillness than I. Instead, after the third night that Lucille and I saw in the dawn, both of us so lightheaded we might have been drinking, my mother-in-law left a stack of feed sacks on my sewing pile. "The hands could use new shirts," she said. "And a cloth for the table would be nice." The expression on her face was bland as milk. "Now that you're burning up a month's worth of kerosene every night, I intend that we get our money's worth."

Heat burst across my face, and I dropped my eyes. The kitchen reservoir, my responsibility to keep filled, was dry, and the kindling pile down to a few sticks of chokecherry. Beside the empty kindling box, though, Lucille slept rosily. "Sewing quiets Lucille. She likes to watch the needle. When she's older, she'll be a help to me."

"Who knows what a baby will be?" my mother-in-law said, picking up the water bucket beside the door. "At least she's sleeping now."

I did not know whether my mother-in-law told Jack about the kerosene. Now that the baby was here and the house had become thickly female, Jack spent even more time outdoors. Storming in at mealtimes, he contented himself with a glance to ensure all Lucille's limbs were in place; then he looked to see whether food was on the table. Understanding the baby's wants and moods was my job, not his, as was right. Still, I was also right to warn him, the evening he took the sock I was darning out of my hand and told me to hoe the garden, that the baby would object to my being out of her sight, without a needle in my hand.

"The garden looks like we're growing thistles as a cash crop," he said.

"I'm not disputing that. I'm just telling you."

"The household is not going to be run around what you imagine a baby is thinking. Good night, Nell! Next you'll tell me what she dreamed."

"I'm just telling you," I said again. Who knows if he heard the starch in my voice. Lucille stirred irritably.

"There's still some daylight left," he said.

I didn't get two steps out the door before Lucille commenced to wail. I could hear her from the lean-to where I fetched the hoe, and during the walk out to the garden, and from the garden itself, where I chopped only the first rows of thistles—Jack was right, they were taller than my knee—before my mother-in-law carried Lucille out to me, her fat baby legs churning, her sobs clogged in her throat. I held her for half an hour before she quieted and I could return to the house. Dark-faced, Jack waited in our bedroom.

"You eat from the garden, but you don't work it. You take from this household, but you don't give anything," he said.

"I am contributing peace," I said, unbuttoning my dress to feed Lucille, who still hiccupped.

"Everyone else pitches in, but Queen Nell picks and chooses."

"I haven't noticed anybody kneeling before me." I turned Lucille to face her father. "Here's your princess."

"The princess of Kansas," he said, and smoothed a curl behind her pink ear while she squirmed away from him.

"She'll learn about work," I said. "She already knows. She doesn't care for it."

Jack stood and watched Lucille, his face unreadable behind his dark beard, which was lately starting to foam up in patches. Now would be an opportune moment for him to recognize the vein-traces in my teats or the little bulge at my waist. I hoisted Lucille to my breast, but she made a hoarse sound and turned away, her face crunched into a frown.

"She's in a temper," I said.

"Your side of the family coming out."

"That's not what your mother says." I moved a little, showing myself to him more plainly.

"Anyway, what could she have a temper about? She's got everything she wants."

"She doesn't want to share," I said.

The pause that followed was satisfying. Eventually he said, "Aren't you quick."

"You had something to do with this, too."

"I didn't expect you to get every year like a brood sow." Sitting still with his eyes closed, Jack looked defeated, and I felt a rare moment of union with him. "I thought maybe we'd get one night of sleep before we got started on the next one."

"If we waited for our plans to take place, we'd never get out of the house," I said, forgetting until the words were out of my mouth where I'd heard them.

Jack opened his eyes. "I've been thinking. If Pa and I add Lindstroms' piece of land, I might buy a gasoline tractor. It's an expense, but if we expand, we need to invest. I'm thinking about cattle, too. Herefords. I got a pamphlet that says Herefords are changing the face of the prairie."

"Mighty ambitious," I said, and Jack nodded.

"I aim to pull us ahead. But I hadn't counted on another mouth to feed so soon."

"Who says you're feeding them?" I touched my rock-hard breast, unable to tell whether we were fighting or joking. "This is the best cooking I do."

"At this rate, we'll wind up with twenty kids, like the Mormons."

"You planning on taking on some other wives?" I said.

"Maybe. I'd like a sweet one."

"You don't know how good you've got it in me," I said.

"Maybe that's true. But, Nell, nobody could blame me for wanting a wife who does something more than ... sew."

"I do more," I said. From my lap, Lucille let out a shriek. He looked at her, then left the room. When I pulled Lucille to my teat again, she bit me.

In the morning, Jack's mother greeted me from the stove, where she was making gravy, by saying, "You can name the new one after my mother or father." Her mother was Amelia, her father Rupert. Lucille was named after no one, a name picked because I found it pretty.

"My pa might want a say."

"He can have the next one. The rate you're going, he won't have to wait long." Her words were calm, her stirring ferocious.

"I thought maybe we'd slow down now. Stop working so hard."

"With the new one already coming, you're fixing to work harder than ever. Or at least straight through the night. Guess you don't need to sleep."

"I'll sleep soon," I told her.

"It would have been good for you to tell me you were setting up business." Jack must have told her about the new baby. I didn't know who told her about Mrs. Cooper.

I said, "The reverend's wife asked me to make her a dress. I'm not exactly Sears, Roebuck."

"But you're not just doing a kindness, are you?"

"I'll contribute to the household," I said.

She was stirring so hard that the gravy was frothing in the pan. "It doesn't look good when a woman doesn't know what's going on in her own family."

"I like to sew," I said, as if that answered anything.

"My God, you are too old to act like a child!" Either from too much heat or her lashing, the gravy bubbled over onto the searing cooktop, and the kitchen filled with smoke and the halfsweet smell of scorched lard. My mother-in-law yanked the pan off the stove and dropped it into the dry sink, then pulled off her apron and turned her back on me. "It's your mess," she said on her way out the door. "Clean it."

I wiped the stove, made fresh gravy as best I could, then hung out and beat the bedding before she returned, wordless. She was genuinely angry, which saddened me. We had been, if not friends, then comrades. Now her mistrust dragged after me like a train. When we were together in the house, she walked into rooms I had just exited and lifted plates I had just set down; when I came back from the garden she met me at the door. If I was going to deceive her now I would have to be twice as artless, as transparent as water. When I offered to make her cuffs for her day dress, she accepted without comment.