The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (13 page)

The other girls were happy enough not to hear about my old life; my silence gave them more time to talk. I heard about the families left behind, the beaus, the ponies. When October came and our rooming house was hotter than ever in a scorching east wind, a girl named Agnes sat in her open window and moaned. "It's supposed to be chilly now! The frost is on the pumpkin!"

"It's apples now at home. And cider," said another girl.

"Maple leaves," said another.

"Ice!"

"Here it's just going to get hotter and hotter, and never stop," said Mabel, fanning herself on the floor. "We've come to hell."

"By February, your friends back in Boston will envy you," I said. I meant the words to be mild, but they came out like a slap. I couldn't help myself: Mabel
preened
so when she complained. All the girls looked at me, surprised and largely approving.

"Sphinx speaks!" Mabel squealed. "Call the newspapers!"

"For pity's sake," I said.

"What do you miss?" Agnes said to me. "What is your family doing right now?"

"Don't bother asking," Mabel said. "Sphinx won't tell you anything. I'll bet we don't even know her real name."

"It's Nell, all right." Had it occurred to me when I had the chance, I would have chosen something else—Daisy or Myrtle. A pretty name, from a flower. The girls were all looking at me, and I said, "The air is so sharp and hard that every sound goes off like a shotgun. You can hear the school bell a mile away. Boys wrap mittens around the handles on their lunch pails, because their mothers pack fresh biscuits and the pails get hot to carry." The part about the mittens was true.

"I should have known Sphinx would miss school. Come all the way to California, and she thinks about her old school-house," Mabel said.

"I think about lots of things," I said.

"I know you," she said. "Next thing, you're going to be holding classes for us shoppies, to make us more cultured."

"We've got all the culture we can bear." I hadn't gone to school past third grade, a fact I would not share.

Later that night, when my irritation with Mabel settled down, I pondered the girl Mabel saw when she looked at me—some stranger, with airs and education. In my determination to block out any glimpse of the torn fabric of my Kansas life, I had not perceived the opportunity right before me: I could tell the girls anything, and they would believe me. As I believed them—which is to say, as fully as seemed prudent.

No one, from shoppie to water commissioner, had come to Los Angeles to keep on with his same old life. Angelenos were bent on starting again, doing the job right this time. A former showgirl became president of the Ladies' Association, a one-time blacksmith the new mayor. Lives changed overnight! The promise pulled us out of bed every morning.

No one understood this better than customers at Levisky's. Daily they deplored the lack of refinement in Los Angeles, how a nice-seeming lady at the club might turn out to have been a house girl just a year before. "One just don't know, does one?" said a customer, leaving a pair of gloves on the counter after she had mangled them.

"Indeed no, madam," I said, though Josephine later told me I should have said, "No, one don't." Josephine said she had gone to high school, a claim that might be true.

The next morning, while we hurried to the streetcar, I told Agnes that my brother had always liked girls with dark hair like hers.

"What's his name?" she said.

"Louis."

"Your family has pretty names. Louis and Nell."

"Actually, Nell is short for Annelle.' My family came from France." I had practiced the words, and they were not hard to say. More were at the ready, backed up in my mouth like flood-water.

"No wonder you can create the latest fashions," Agnes said. "It's in your blood."

"That's what folks at home used to say. Mama would come to church with a scarf over her hat and call it chic."

"Chic," Agnes agreed. Both of us pronounced it "chick," as did the other girls to whom Agnes excitedly told about my ancestry. "Why, you're tonier than the girls we wait on!" said another girl called Prissy, with spots on her face and greasy hair.

"Heavens. Who can tell about toniness?"

"We can," she said emphatically. "We spend all day at those counters, and we know a thing or two. When a promotion comes at Levisky's, you'll get it."

"Oh, now," I said. "Pshaw."

"Mark my words." Prissy nodded vigorously, agreeing with herself, eager to encourage the meek French girl I had become. I kept my eyes downcast as I overheard Prissy talking to other girls about certain kinds of distinctions that came to nobly modest girls. Promotions, she said, would come for a girl who knew what was chic.

But Levisky's featured no promotions; there was no position to be promoted to except to be married and gone, and every girl I worked with aimed for that. Often the girls sat up eating oranges and talking about the men they hoped to marry, the number of children they would have, the exact placement of the windows in the houses they would own. Accustomed to my silence, they chattered around me, their words lapping like water. When the talk turned to home décor, I joined in. All of us yearned for lace curtains we would wash every month. We were ravenous to be respectable.

Unlike the hoydens who served meals or worked at typewriting machines, we shoppies were careful of ourselves, avoiding fresh men on streetcars, greasy fellows who claimed to know policemen, and Socialist agitators who harangued us on our way home. Excitable and sometimes unwashed, the Socialists bristled with pamphlets and talked about revolution. We did our best to steer clear of them, especially after one clasped Josephine's hand and told her that she would be a queen in the reign of the proletariat; we ringed around her and escorted her home, then heated water so she could wash her hands.

"Queen! La," said Mabel, handing Josephine the cake of soap.

"Queen of the workers," Josephine said, making a face so we laughed. "Queen of the shoppies."

"Queen of the streetcar," I said.

"Queen of seven o'clock," said Josephine, who hated rising early. When we talked about the lives we would someday live, she could hold forth for fifteen minutes at a time about sleeping until noon, something none of us had ever done. No doubt the agitators, periodically dragged away by the police, would not approve of sleeping late, as they did not approve of our hunger for curtains. We were not troubled. Our shoppie life was a way station to the happiness we had come to California to claim.

As long as we were all at the station together, there was no reason not to enjoy ourselves, and by and large, our spirits stayed high. We got up birthday parties and newsletters. Sometimes we played mild pranks—on a fairy day at work, set aside for practical jokes, the daring fairy girl pinned to the back of Mr. Riching's jacket a note that decreed
LORD AND MASTER.
One girl, Laney, confided in me that even at six dollars a week, with feet so swollen at night that she had to pry her shoes off, she had never been happier. I squeezed her hand and kept my own counsel. Whether I had ever been happier was not a thought I let myself dwell on, and that did not figure. I was on the way to being happier, and every day the path to happiness revealed itself more plainly.

Laney gave me my first paid sewing job in California. Like most of the girls, she owned only one shirtwaist. She washed it on Sundays and prayed it would not tear. And it did not, but there was no way for her to prevent it from being spattered when a clump of grinning little boys hit her with a mud ball on a rainy day. I found her outside the store, scrubbing at the cotton, working the black grit farther into the weave. "Stop," I said.

"I have no other," she cried, like the heroine of a melodrama.

"I'll make you a new one."

"I have no money!" she wailed, but let me take her measurements—bust, sleeve, back. All the shoppies carried tape measures for the customers' convenience. "Truly—all I have is fifty cents."

"Pay me twenty-five, and if you like what I do, tell anyone who needs a dress made."

She looked at me with such gratitude that I was ashamed for having charged her a quarter. For weeks, I had been stitching up and taking in shoppies' clothes for nothing, building to this point. Now I drove myself to finish Laney's brand-new waist in two feverish nights and used the tiniest buttons I could find—mother-of-pearl, ten cents for twenty—to trim the long sleeves. Shop girls' hands were on display all day, and a nice sleeve was an asset.

Laney started to cry again when I brought her the shirtwaist, but she recovered quickly enough, and all day she flitted from one counter to the next, showing off the cuff and the perfect tucks at the shoulder. By the time the store closed, I had five more clients. When Josephine asked when I could possibly do the extra work, I said, "Tonight."

Josephine was kind and Mabel mostly so. They turned their faces to the wall while I sewed faster than I ever had, even in my final days in Kansas. After the third night, I was scarcely fit company, although the waists were pretty, and I was experimenting with a quicker way to pin the darts. "You're not enjoying yourself," Mabel said. The night before she had told me for the love of God to put out the light and stop working. Now she said, "Why did you bother to leave home? You could have worked yourself to the bone there."

"I like to sew," I said.

"'I like to sew,'" Mabel mimicked, making a long face. I didn't believe I had sounded so gloomy. She peered at me and said, "Is this what you think is fun?"

"Yes," I said crossly.

Mabel's tiny-featured face was screwed into a pout. The fellow with whom she had been keeping company had not met her for three nights, and she was cross herself. "How old are you?" she demanded.

"Seventeen."

"You'll regret losing your girlhood," she said. "What are you giving it to? The shoppies of Levisky's? You'll wake up one day and want a man of your own," she said, then, "Are all the Kansas girls as slow as you?"

"All of them," I said. "Too much time with the cows. Moo." That at least made her giggle and look for another girl to complain to while I finished hemming a skirt, a quick job. I had other orders waiting.

Just as in Grant Station, orders led to orders. Instead of Mrs. Trimbull and her six trousseaus, I had Mary at the handbag counter, whose skirt was seen by Ethel across the aisle, who wanted a skirt of her own, as did Louise and Rosalie, behind Ethel. The girls at Levisky's approached me at the end of the day, when we clustered at the glass door and waited for Mr. Rich-ing to come with the big key and let us out. Girls from May's Store, down the street, tugged my elbow at the streetcar stop. "Certainly," I told them, and "seventy-five cents," and "Annelle." To the girls from Barton's Emporium, a half-mile away, I said, "Madame Annelle," which sounded more costly, more knowledgeable, more like the labels on the better-line skirts sold at Levisky's. To the Barton's girls, I said, "One dollar."

I gave good value, curving the seams at the hips so that the serge skirts had a bell-like swing and adjusting the lines at the shoulders. The girls wearing my clothes looked indefinably pretty. Stylish.
Chic.
I found a French grammar on top of a dustbin, taught myself a few phrases, and lingered on the pronunciation guide. No one asked, when I began to salt my fittings with
Oui
and
C'est ça,
how it happened that a girl from Paris had washed up in Los Angeles. The one occasion I attempted a kind of plausible history—a seamstress mother, years spent practicing stitches on bits of muslin—the girl twisted away from me. She regained interest only when I shrugged in what I thought might be a French manner and brightened further when I produced a small, private smile at her request for a green blouse. "I like green. It's pretty on me," she said.

"Yes, well. Green," I said, wishing I knew how to say the word in French.

"Perhaps also one in blue?" she said, and looked happy, as if she had passed an examination, when I nodded.

"
Oui,
" I said. When I learned to say
exactement,
girls started to order two shirtwaists at a time, and sometimes added a shift. Everyone yearned for something special and pretty, and Madame Annelle was happy—
contente,
or the more forbidding
heureuse
—to assure that.

The money came in, quarter by quarter and dime by dime, but I was far from giving notice at Levisky's. Still, I could not ask Josephine and Mabel to continue sleeping through my nights of pinning and stitching. Already they looked shadowed, though Josephine loyally claimed that my sewing didn't trouble them a bit, kind words for which I made her and Mabel extra nightgowns before I left. On advice from Mr. Riching, who had known other girls who needed to vacate their addresses, I found a new room in what he called a respectable house on an unsavory street.

This was not even remotely true. The building, a gas-lit, four-story firetrap on an alley off of Sixth Street, which slumped at the roofline and gaped at the windows, fairly shouted its lack of respectability. A person needed only to glance at it to know that doors in that house banged all night long. Looking at the dingy chemise hanging in plain view at one of the windows, I felt affronted, an emotion I was in no position to entertain.

After the occasions Mr. Riching and I had had in the stock room, he had every reason to think I would fit in with residents of this slatternly establishment. Girls like me, girls who came to the city without the decent protection of a man: such girls could not be surprised when fellows made assumptions. Girls who hoped one day to marry protected their honor, and when they finally relinquished it, took pains to assure every man he was the first, the only. They did not steady themselves against a dusty wall and smile as their employer unlaced their corset. Sometimes late on a Saturday, if we had had beer, we girls had scandalous conversations in our room, imitating ourselves imitating innocence. "Oh!" we gasped. "Oh,
sir!
"

I laughed as hard as anyone but did not mount an imitation myself. None of the sweet girls I worked with could imagine how far was my distance from innocence, and though I tried every night and every day to forget that distance, it was printed on me, easy to see if a person knew how to look. The one time Josephine found me crying—a man had walked past gently helping his baby daughter learn to balance on her dimpled legs, a procedure not aided by her frequent peals of laughter—she presumed me nothing more than homesick. She sat beside me and patted my hand until I stopped crying, furious with myself. Did I think babies were going to disappear from the world, that I would never have to hear a child's laugh again?