Beyond the Pale: A Novel (32 page)

“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” I whined.

“How can I understand what you’re saying if you don’t say anything? Help me undo this corset, will you?”

I felt awkward, even though I’d done it a hundred times, and she noticed.

“What is it, Chava?”

“That man who was with Gutke—.”

“The one you met at the train station?”

“Yes. You don’t remember?”

“Why should I?”

“Because he wasn’t a man.” I cleared my throat.

“What do you mean, he wasn’t a man? What should he be, a dog?”

“Everything has to be a joke to you.”

“Look who’s talking. All right, I’m listening. So you met a man who wasn’t a man—you have to admit it sounds like the beginning of a riddle.”

“Hmm—I think it is a riddle.” Her easiness made it easier for me. I pried my boots off.

“I give up already, so what was he?”

“A woman. He was a woman dressed to look like a man.”

“Really? You know for sure?” She rose and put all her clothes in the bureau carefully, smoothing them out before she closed the drawer.

“I think so. I remember when we first got to the station, Gutke called him ‘Dovida,’ but ‘Dovid’ in front of you. And then Gutke winked at me. Yes, I’m sure. I’m sure it was a woman.” I stared at a stain on the wall just to the right of Rose’s shoulder. I figured I should have been undressing too but I couldn’t seem to move off the edge of the bed.

“What a scandal! I never heard of such a thing.”

“No, me either. That’s why no one notices, I guess. They can’t imagine it.”

“Why would a woman do that?” Rose asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe if she wanted to travel alone safely or if she wanted to be a bricklayer—.”

“A bricklayer? What girl wants to be a bricklayer? If she’s going to dress like a man, she could want to be something better, a rabbi at least.”

“Rabbis have to have full beards,” I said. The words were a hot coal burning my mouth but I didn’t want Rose to notice. “Maybe she wanted to be a student at the university.”

“But wasn’t he—she—old?”

“All right, maybe a university teacher or a grain trader. Men can go anywhere they please to do business.”

“Would you dress up like a man to do business?” Rose was studying me, her hands on her hips. For some reason I noticed that where her shoulder met her body, there was a little bulge of fat, just enough to curl a hand around.

“I don’t know. I never thought of it, before then. I thought maybe in Odessa all kinds of strange things could be ordinary. But I never saw anyone else like that while we were there. At least that I could tell.”

“I never heard about such a thing even here in New York.” Rose put her foot on the bottom drawer and rolled her stocking down slowly, as if she were studying each hair on her leg.

“Maybe it’s something they don’t tell us about, because they think we’re still children.”

“Mama and Papa talk about everything with us, they think they’re very modern. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our mind or our bodies, they say. I don’t think it’s something they ever thought of either.” She switched legs and rolled the other stocking off quickly.

“Well, maybe if no one can think of it, it would make it easy for them to stay invisible, keep out of the way.”

“Oh, you’re worried for them.” Rose sat back beside me, putting her arm through mine.

“Aren’t you worried for the girls you knew in Odessa?”

“Of course.” Rose frowned, puzzled. “I know I should be more upset but Odessa seems so far away now, and the girls I knew—.” She moved her head from side to side. “I can only pray that God has been merciful to them. To them and to all the family we left behind.” She paused, staring into the air, then she looked back at me. “Aren’t you getting undressed tonight?”

“Yes, yes,” I started to undo my shirtwaist. “Gutke’s probably fine.”

“Yes, probably.” Rose started to say something else, stopped, started again. “Do you like being a girl, Chava?”

“Girl? I don’t feel like a girl.”

“I know, I know, you’re all grown up and serious, studying so you can get out of tobacco. What I mean is, would you rather have been a boy?”

I looked at my hands, the way the yellow stain spread like an old map into the creases. “How can I know that? I could earn more money. The boys at my factory earn fifty cents a day more for doing the exact same thing I do.”

“You think that’s something? In garments, only the men can be cutters, and some of them make $25 a week. You think that’s hard to do? They should do what I do. But they get $10 more than the most experienced woman.”

“They have families, though.”

“And what? We have no obligations? We get to spend all our money on fancy waists with ribbons?”

“So maybe you’re the one who’d like to be a boy?” Finally I got my shirtwaist off and stood to step out of my skirt.

Rose laughed. “No. Boys—I’ve had enough of them in my own house. You see how Mama spoils Harry, even when she knows he’s taking advantage? And Aaron, so full of himself. Who wants to be like that?” She made a sour face for a second. “There’s only one thing boys can do I wish I could.”

“Oh,” I smiled at her, turning the gas jets down after putting my clothes away. “What’s that?”

“Kiss you.” I froze, my back to her, for what seemed forever. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said. “I was just teasing.”

I turned around. Even in the shadows I could see her face was pink with blushing, her blue eyes glittering as though wet.

“Chava? I’m sorry, all right?”

“Don’t be sorry. Just tell me the truth. Did you mean it?”

“Yes.” Rose took a deep breath.

I took one too, sitting down beside her. “I also want to kiss you.” I had the sensation of being on the sea again, pitch and roll, moving inside a different element, not attached to the earth anymore.

Rose leaned towards me, put her hand on my cheek to turn my face so we could see each other in the light that came from the street. I was worried, looking at her, at the olive of her face, but Rose appeared happy. “So if you want to and I want to, who starts?”

I pulled the tenement air down to the bottom of my lungs. This was harder than going out on strike. I moved my lips onto Rose’s. Together. We had been lying in bed together for more than two years. Careful. Cousins. Left side, right side, I’m worn out, me too, goodnight.

No, I changed my mind as the kiss engulfed our faces and my hands found the soft flesh of her shoulders and pressed her close. This was easier than going on strike. This was easier than anything.

We didn’t sleep. How could we? The borders of our bed were transformed, ran together. We had been separate countries with a careful truce. Now I understood what internationalism really meant. I was still Chava and Rose was Rose but we traveled through each other, inside and out, without having to show identification. We opened—maybe Rose was always open and I hadn’t known. Now this happened to us together. We opened and were recognized. In recognition there was a tenderness for which I was not prepared. Of course I’d heard the love songs of young girls, though mostly they were about waiting for a beloved who was unfaithful or some shlemil who went off to war. I ran my fingertip in the crease between Rose’s lower lip and her chin. I wanted to ask and tell her so much, with my hands as well as with words, but we had to be silent, make all our noises sound like the ordinary sighs and moans of sleeping. Eventually, we must have slept for an hour or two before dawn.

I walked Rose to her new job at Schlessinger’s Waist and Dress Company. Harry had wanted her to work for him after she quit Fine’s, but even Aunt Bina agreed it would be better to keep his business separate. He laughed and said, “Well, at least if she doesn’t work for me I can keep out the radical element!” I tried not to let Harry get to me. We used to have a rooster like him in Kishinev, all show of feathers, who’d run off at the first sign of trouble, leaving the hens to take care of themselves. At breakfast I got up to pour him coffee. He raised his eyebrows but I just smiled. Then he spilled the coffee down his shirt. Was it that easy to make all guilty men nervous?

On the street Rose and I didn’t know how to act. It was as if the morning brought us into another world, almost exactly like the one we were in yesterday, full of stenches and exploitation. Yet this one also had soft-eyed chestnut horses pulling ice carts, the sweet taste of an apple in our mouths, clouds streaming by in the sky over the buildings, the sensation of her hand caressing my skin.

A hand! When Rose gave my hand a careful squeeze before she joined the crowd of girls going up to work, I stared at the long stains on my fingers. I didn’t go to Polstein’s. Instead I walked to First Street. The League door was locked and I turned to go, then a key scraped from the inside and a woman leaned out. She looked me over.

“Nu?”

“Do you expect Lena Reznikoff today?”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“We came together on the boat. She helped me after the strike at Samuels’ box factory.”

“Oh,” the woman said, “you’re the hero of the Children’s Strike, I remember. Come, come inside. I’m Rose Schneiderman and you’re Chava, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, Chava Meyer.” I was surprised and pleased that she knew about me, calling me “hero.” Another Rose. That I took for a sign, a good omen. At that moment everything was a good omen.

“Have you eaten? Can I get you some coffee, a roll?”

“Just some coffee, thank you.” I felt very tall. Actually, I was taller than both Roses—Rose Schneiderman was very short—but it wasn’t height, exactly. It was tall as if I had suddenly finished growing, was a person who had known both sorrow and a kiss, both of the big sides of life. And I was sleepy too, I realized, swallowing the strong coffee.

“Did you come down to join the League?”

“Really I came because Lena said she might be able to get me a job in a bindery. What does it mean, to join the League?”

This Rose gave one of those smiles that goes straight across the lips, without turning up. She had bright red hair, a long nose and a small, almost dainty mouth. She was much older than me, maybe older than my sister Esther, even, but she was welcoming.

“It’s not always clear, even to me,” she said. “Where do you work?”

“By Polstein’s, stripping tobacco. A little more than a year now.”

“There are good unions in tobacco, even for the girls. You have a union there?”

I showed her my local card. “But really, all we do is pay dues, nothing else.”

“The union is there if you need it. You’ve got good conditions?”

“In tobacco I don’t think there can be good conditions, because it stains you,” I held up my hands to show, “and gets in your lungs. That’s why I want to leave. But we usually only work ten hours, with forty-five minutes for lunch, not awful. Hard work, tedious—but where not?”

“And overtime?”

“We’re supposed to get extra for overtime but usually the stewards pretend it doesn’t happen.” Rose made a little note. “Anyway, I would rather do something else.”

“You think a bindery would be different?”

“It would be a change, and I want very much to work with books.”

“Why not printing?”

I had a quick memory of the slogans on the ruined print shop wall in Kishinev. “Printing would be all right if you know of something.”

“I don’t. I was just asking. Myself, I used to line caps.”

“You don’t work in a factory anymore?”

“One of the women from the League—a friend of Lillian Wald’s, who started the Henry Street Settlement House—you know it?”

I nodded. Someone in my shop said they gave girls lessons in arranging flowers, which seemed very frivolous. But maybe Rose would enjoy that, to go to a settlement house and have ladies show us how to put flowers in a vase. They must have other lessons there too. Maybe she’d like an excursion to Henry Street.

“Working girls need unions first,” Rose continued, “but sometimes settlement houses can help. This woman gave me a scholarship, she called it, so I could stop factory work, go to the Rand School and organize for the League.”

A woman supported a working girl to go to school instead of a working boy? The whole world seemed turned inside out. I tried to imagine Aaron working so Rose and I could get an education. “What is this Rand School?”

“Socialist. I was supposed to take day courses, but it’s easier to go at night. There’s so much work to do among working girls during the day.”

I felt a thrum in my body, a light-headed confusion. I looked at Rose Schneiderman and sighed, forgetting why I came. “If a working girl like me joined the League, what would she be expected to do?”

“Talk to the other girls where you work about the League and unions. If you’re interested, we have lectures, English classes and committees.”

“I’m not sure. It sounds like a good idea but I just really came to talk to Lena.”

“Oh, Lena, of course. I’m sorry. Lena’s in Chicago, at the national meeting of the League, with Pauline and Leonora. That’s why I’m alone today. And you were looking for bindery work, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.” I sighed again, thinking of Lena taking a train to Chicago. How far was that? What did America look like outside of the tenement? It wasn’t possible that everywhere was as crowded as New York. They had a map of the United States hanging in the high school. I imagined America was a palace, but they kept all of us immigrants standing outside, on the front steps, saying, “This is as far as you can go—isn’t New York a wonder?”

Rose was writing something down again. “We have a girl on the executive committee from the bookbinders’ Local 43. Already they have an eight-hour day, not a bad choice if there’s work. Give me your address, and Lena or I will get in touch with you when we can find something out, all right?”

I was still trying to grasp what it would be like to work only eight hours, six days a week. What would I do with all the time? I looked at Rose Schneiderman. Lectures, she said, committees, organizing. “Yes, thank you, and maybe I will join your League.”

“Our League,” she said, shaking my hand.

I was an hour and a half late to Polstein’s. They said if it happened again I’d be fired; today they’d dock my wages through lunch. The forelady looked confused when I nodded pleasantly. I felt as if I was covered with fur and Rose’s face kept floating beside me. Maybe I could get her something on the way home, a fancy orange wrapped in paper or a pastry from the Italian bakery. Would she like that or call me extravagant?