The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (9 page)

"How would Zeke know what to ask?" Jack said. "When something comes along you never foresaw, how can you know to ask about it?"

"You don't." Running along the chalk line, my infinitesimal stitches would follow the rise of a bust, allowing just enough room for a caught breath. "You trust your spouse. I would expect you to tell me anything I needed to know."

"You didn't tell me any too soon about the new baby."

"It's bad luck to talk too soon about a baby."

"Luck," he said.

"What else can you call it?" I said.

"Plenty." He cleared his throat. "No one asked you to start seamstressing."

"Mrs. Cooper did. And then Mrs. Trimbull."

"No one in this house," he said. The air in the room was tightening like a gear, notch by notch. "How do you think it looks, Nell? I come in for dinner, and my mother is hauling water, feeding the stove, dishing up the same meal she just cooked. Where is Nell? Nell is sewing."

"Nell is giving your mother money, every week."

"It isn't enough."

"It's more than anybody else gets," I said. If Jack would just leave an opening in the conversation, I would be happy to remind him: Mabel Ornett, who never got out of bed. Tillie Hansen, who heard voices. Rose Pruitt! After the first child was born, she gave their cow to a tinker. After the second, her husband, Virgil, came home to find the wagon gone. There had been no more children, and people joked that Virgil was afeard of what she would give away next. It would be my pleasure to remind Jack of this.

He said, "It must be nice to have your life. Everything just the way you want it."

"Not everything." The look that passed between us could have corroded metal, but he did not say "You may not" or "I forbid." Extra household money was not harming his progress toward a gasoline tractor. He did not lift his hand, but when he left the room I realized I had been crushing the edge of the bodice in my fist. I had to flatiron it in the morning.

That Saturday, when we came wordlessly home from town, I gave his mother ten dollars, half of what I had brought home. I could not keep myself from staring at her hands as she took the bills, smoothed them, and tucked them into her pocket. Handing her the money was the hardest thing I had done all day. "Business is picking up," she said.

"Thank Paris. Your fashionable lady of today is looking toward the new, larger sleeves."

"Mutton sleeves."

"Leg of mutton," I corrected her, though I knew I would do better to hold my tongue. "The style would suit you."

"Mutton dressed as lamb," she said, not quite contradicting me. My first sewing task for the week would be an opulent blouse for my mother-in-law, who would not pay me for it.

The extra work didn't trouble me. My hands trembled now whenever they didn't hold fabric, and I could not stop calculating the difference between the money in my pocket and $110. Behind that amount lay ideas I could not bear to examine too closely, filled with color and bright light and the sweet taste of oranges. The ideas hovered like ghosts in a doorway, and if I did not raise my eyes, I did not have to acknowledge them. Still, I could feel the ideas pulsing when Jack called me out to the barn to sweep, which I'd promised to do three days before. While I was there, he told me to pick the horses' hooves, too, a task I hated.

My mind fled to lustrous cloth and gleaming thread, exacting dresses that grew more difficult as I grew more skilled. I was seeing lines I had never seen before; for one dress I sewed buckshot into the back of the hem to make it hang the way I wanted. I had opinions now about the placement of a button, the spacing between two rows of trim. Even when I held no cloth between my hands, I thought about the problems posed by a line and a measurement, and I could lose myself for an hour thinking about ways to gather a waistline. I was worse than Mama, whose dreamy nature was nothing more than a vague mind. My mind wasn't vague at all: it locked onto the problem of a drooping armhole and wouldn't let go. Even when I found a solution, I kept wondering, kept turning the problem around—what if I raised the shoulder higher just there? Wouldn't that be even better? Sometimes Lucille's cry felt as if it reached me across miles, and when it did, I was angry to be called back. The ideas that held my attention had no room for anyone other than myself. That thought, above all, I did not think.

Eight stitches to the inch. For a skirt: one hundred vertical pleats, twenty-four waist darts, nine curved hip darts and four bottom hem pleats. Five blouses to a spool of thread. Three papers of needles for eleven cents. Likewise eleven cents for a dozen thimbles. A housedress for Mrs. Cooper. A trousseau for Mrs. Horne's oldest girl, though she did not yet have a beau. Things happened so quickly, Mrs. Horne observed. It paid to be prepared, she said. So true, I told her, my eyes demurely downcast. Another skirt for Minnie Closter, paid for in nickels.

Having heard about my skills, Mrs. Trimbull's sister in Topeka sent a package with her measurements and eight yards of black silk. Mr. Cates was finding room in his store for fabrics we had never seen, peau de soie, which we could admire but not pronounce, cloth that glittered over the hand. He smiled whenever I entered the store—or, as he noted once the spring days began to stretch out, when the new baby and I entered the store. "That one's coming in the door ahead of you," he said.

"This one's in a hurry," I said. True and not true. The baby gained weight alarmingly; my belly felt as if it held a cannon-ball. But unlike Lucille, who had twisted in me like a trout, the new baby moved sluggishly. I should be pleased that this one was not so energetic, I thought, avoiding the words
not right,
avoiding
problem
and
wrong.
I had earned a calm baby. I thought of still water, windless days, the fallow places where nothing grew. Not a family in Mercer County didn't have a child who was simple; Mama called them God's children. Pa called them mouths—they would always eat but never work. I didn't know what Jack called them and saw no point in asking. The baby moved heavily, an old lady turning over in bed. I would find out Jack's opinion as soon as I had to.

He had avoided me since finding out about the new child, staying away from the womenfolk, like his father. It was my mother-in-law who noted that I was not eating as I had done with Lucille and who stood with her hands on her hips until I drained the glass of buttermilk she gave me, though it tasted like rust and came back up more often than not. Alert as a wolf, she watched me with increasing concern, an emotion that she mostly offered through her annoyed expression, and when she found me yawning over the churn she curtly suggested that I try going to bed before dawn. I didn't want any further discord in the house and retired that night after finishing the day's mending. Jack, up with a tetchy calf, was more than an hour behind me. When he drew back the curtain to our room and saw me already in bed, my belly making a tent of the bedclothes, he straightened the quilt over me and went back out to sleep in the barn. Since I'd told him about the new baby, we'd probably not spent ten hours together in bed, though Lord knows there was nothing to be afraid of now.

I slept roughly, hot and troubled. In the daytime I wore patched gingham dresses; it would not do to swan around now, when the ladies of town were themselves just learning how to preen. There was no need for them to know about the finished seams I gave myself, or the single, secret, covered button, or the cream-colored shift with embroidery so fine it seemed part of the delicate cotton lawn I stitched it to. Certainly there was no need for them to know about the money pocket, as long as an envelope, that I attached to my underskirt. Fifty-eight dollars. Sixty-four. Seventy. Seventy-one.

Later I would tell Jack that I sewed right up to the moment I felt my first pain, but this was not true. I sewed well beyond the first pains, setting in the huge sleeves on six shirtwaists for Mrs. Horne, who had said that having me take her measurements made her feel just like she was in Paris, France. I wanted her to keep thinking that. The sleeves were so big that she would have to enter rooms sideways. By the time I finished, contractions had doubled me over.

"It came on sudden," I told my mother-in-law. I lay on the floor while she pinned a cotton-batting pad to Jack's and my cornhusk mattress and fed armloads of stalks into the stove. Spasms ripped through me and I felt the floor buck. "This isn't going into town the easy way," I said, feeling strangely conversational. "This is the bumpy way."

"You're not going anywhere," my mother-in-law snapped.

"Bump, bump, bump," I said. She didn't say anything after that. Later I would remember her braced against the wall, levering me up from the floor while I tipped helplessly from side to side, hardly able to feel my legs. In the end, she had to grab me at the waist and heave me onto the bed, where I lay calmly convinced that my spine was on fire. I don't know where Lucille was. Every time I opened my eyes, my mother-in-law was beside me. "Jack is in the field," she told me. "I'll get him if there's a need."

"Not yet," I said.

I closed my eyes and opened them, closed them and opened them. The baby seemed to be tearing its way out, ripping things inside of me that I didn't imagine could be made whole again. I heard voices—Mama's, Reverend Cooper's—but when I opened my eyes the only person in the room was my mother-in-law, her face gleaming with sweat. "A cradle is a pine box," I told her.

"Hush," she said.

By the time the doctor came, a night had passed, and I understood that Jack must have ridden to town. I saw Dr. Johnson and said, "Go away."

"Don't be afraid," Jack said.

"She's not afraid," his mother said, entirely correctly.

The baby clung to me like murder, and for every spasm that pushed her down, I could feel her clambering back up. The doctor cut and cut, giving her all the room she needed, but she didn't want room. Finally he had to clasp the forceps—"big paddles," my mother-in-law told me later, with a shudder—around her head and pull her out. I heard all about it later. "Yanked that baby out like she was a baked potato," my mother-in-law said.

It was good that Jack had already decided on a name. "Amelia," he said, and I nodded. Left to myself, I might have named her Beelzebub. Seventeen years old, I felt seventy. When my mother-in-law came into the room and lifted the baby from my arms, I pretended to be asleep. There was no reason to protest her taking the baby. Mrs. Cooper had given me a rule. A person needed one year before she could love her child.

I slept, then woke asking for ice—ice! Twelve miles out of town!—then slept again before the word was fully out of my mouth. Not until the next day was I clear-headed enough to see my new daughter, and every word fled. Her head looked like a gourd, squashed at the temples, the mark of the forceps still so clear I could make out over her ears the dents from the metal ridges. I traced them while she rooted at me. Perhaps Lucille had claimed all the available crying. This baby hardly made a sound.

Neither did Jack or my mother-in-law or even Lucille. The house was coated in sludgy silence. Jack entered the room, sat beside me for a time, then left again. It was honest conversation. Amelia lay beside me, and I watched her not return my gaze. No newborn can focus her eyes, I reminded myself, but still I watched my little girl aimlessly turn her squashed head and felt my heart twist. My mother-in-law, no seamstress, spent Amelia's first days making a cap that hung down to the baby's tiny jaw. She looked like a Pilgrim, but the cloth disguised the dents.

The rain stopped when the baby arrived, and the heat came as if it had been away on holiday. Inside the black house with one window and one door, we might as well have been inside the cookstove. My mother-in-law and I waited until the men were out of the house, then walked around in our shifts. Lucille got the hiccups and couldn't stop, and both girls sweated through their diapers. It was too hot to talk, too hot to sleep. All anybody wanted was water, which my mother-in-law fetched because I couldn't carry buckets yet. She watched every drop we drank.

Lucille fretfully squirmed away from any touch, but Amelia consented to anything, objecting neither when I carried her nor when I let her lie and then discovered that she'd been lying in wet for an hour. It didn't seem possible that a child so new could be tolerant; a newborn is nothing but sensations. Gazing at Amelia's uncomplaining face made a chill race through my heart, although my mother-in-law insisted that the baby was fine, just made from different cloth from her sister. Mama had not yet come, though Jack had made a point of riding over to tell her she was a grandmama again. No telling what she might see or say. I closed my eyes against Amelia's hot belly and took a moment's sad comfort there, both of us slick with heat.

On the fifth straight merciless day, Jack's father harnessed Rufus and took us all to the creek. My mother-in-law clapped her hands like a girl when she caught the first glimpse of river reeds. Myself, all I saw was slack brown water curled around a cotton-wood stump, as blank as dirt. Anything might rest under that dark surface—snakes, snags, a rusty hatchet or two. A body could hide under water so dark. In weather straight from hell, a person could be forgiven for thinking such thoughts. Amelia gazed around her with mild eyes. "Who's a
baby
?" my mother-in-law cooed to her. I didn't recall her ever cooing to Lucille.

Taking Amelia into her arms, my mother-in-law waded into the lazy water. The baby seemed to like it—she put on a dim smile and moved her head. She and her grandmama were well beyond the bank, out where the water made an occasional crest, before my mother-in-law lost her footing in the thick water, and she and the baby slipped out of sight.

When frightening things happen, the mind fixes on stupid details: a jagged bit of branch was caught on a rock farther downstream. By the time I dragged my eyes back to the spot, the men were in the water up to their waists, my mother-in-law already on her feet again, holding Amelia over her head and laughing. "You've gone swimming!" she said to the baby, whose face was untroubled.