The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (14 page)

So far as I knew, Josephine told no one about the incident, which in her eyes had been nothing more than touching. She imagined me very pure. Putting aside the afternoons with Mr. Riching that no shoppie would find scandalous, I had not so much as stepped out with a boy since I came to Los Angeles, and Mabel called me Schoolmarm when she tired of Sphinx. I did not suppose it was a name I would be called in my new lodging house, though it might fit me better there, where I might be the only resident who could read.

My new landlord grinned when I gave him Mr. Riching's name as reference. I didn't hurry to withdraw my hand from his clasp, and he gave me a room with a window—an advantage despite the crack in the pane that slashed from corner to corner and made the window shiver when the trains passed. Dim, filthy, the panels of wallpaper unfurling like tongues off the walls, the lodging house was a horror, but I could have my own key as long as I paid rent promptly and the police didn't come. I threw open the cracked window and slept in a haze of creosote and cooking grease. On bad nights, I dreamed about dirt and hay, and of dark houses where I groped from room to room, trying to find the wailing baby. The mornings after those dreams, I dunked my head in the washbasin until I heard nothing but water.

The room cost four dollars a week, and no one complained about my sewing late into the night. I did not often spy my neighbors, some of whom had rooms that opened directly onto the street, but when I did see them I nodded and took note, in case someone might want a new peignoir. I had been in the new house only four weeks before I made enough money to buy a battered Singer, which sped up my production considerably. At the same time, I took more care with my clothes, making sure every day that my collar was clean and every seam drawn tight. I was with the women from my house, but not of them.

On Sunday afternoons, I would walk all the way to Fourth and Grand to catch the trolley, though I could have caught a car at a closer stop. I used the walk to brush the rooming house out of the folds in my clothes, the air in my lungs. The first Sunday I rode the Red Car all the way to Santa Monica, my blood humming as I craned for a glimpse of the long blue horizon. I had needed weeks to gather the confidence, and the trolley fare.

The salt in the air surprised me. All that time back in Kansas imagining, and I still hadn't imagined well enough to conjure the stickiness coating my skin or the sharp breeze that teased hair into my mouth. Gentlemen and ladies strolled the promenade, the sand crunching under their feet, and the little brim of my hat was insufficient; I shaded my eyes like a field hand as I stared at the ocean, sunlight glittering across its greenish back. Languorous as an immense cat, the brilliant water smashed over the bright sand in low, rolling waves. Behind it stretched the expanse I had dreamed of, green fading to blue, flatter than farmland. All the sacrifice, all the sorrow, the nights without sleep and the furious days, in order to see this: a long line to the horizon. Not much different from Kansas. Except, of course, it was beautiful.

I could not help myself; I thought of Pa standing at our fence line, gazing ravenously across the blank land. How he would have laughed to see me now. There's your blue line, Nell, he would say. There's what you've been after. Get going.

I had never been a crier and wasn't going to start now. The gulls that screamed and angled through the air were snowy from a distance, but when two of them landed not far from me to squabble over a bit of rope, I could see their dingy wings and ungainly feet. Then they swept back into the sky, where they were bright as stars again and difficult to look at.

Pa would have laughed, but he would have kept looking, same as me. Jack was the one who would have gotten bored with the sweep of light and water. "What's a man got to do with that?" he would ask, which was the right question. He was just on the wrong side of it. A few girls in black bathing costumes waded carefully into the shallow water; beyond them was nothing human, no boat or buoy. The unpeopled expanse was either a promise or a warning, like much of what life offered. I gazed until my eyes ached. Then I walked back to the trolley stop and did not look again, although the next trolley was long in coming.

After that, I stayed inland, riding the Red Car to Pasadena and Beverly Hills, to the university with its disappointing three buildings, up the new Angel's Flight incline and all the way to little Burbank with its brick block buildings. I found neighborhoods that had real pavement sidewalks, not just wooden planks like any frontier town: Glendale, Downey, Highland Park. I rode for an hour and a half to reach San Bernardino, where I admired a number of two-story brick houses.

In all of these places, I was aware of the ocean just beyond the rise, or at my back, or at the bottom of the hill. The Pacific pressed on my mind the same way that Kansas did, squeezing me between landscape and seascape. Unlike the pioneers, who had tumbled into land that opened before them like a dream, every hill giving way to another hill and every bit of prairie to more of itself, I had slammed myself against the end of territory. The old restlessness, which could look over a fence line and yearn to walk on land that no one had yet seen, was replaced with a new feeling. My back to the shore, here I was forced to stand up, to
be
something. I did not try to explain to myself what that meant. All of my new Los Angeles compatriots would understand.

Everyone who set out for this place, every single shop girl and enterprising clerk, was being squeezed into a new conformation. It was why we had come. Impossible not to feel ourselves standing on the hand of fate, its fingers curling around us. The old Kansas Nell would have worried about being crushed inside that giant hand. But the new Nell felt herself lifted up, scooped from the common ground and brought to higher, better ground. In the new place something was being called forth from me, and I moved forward to answer.

Bold, I started to go downtown, walking beside buildings eight stories high and covering entire city blocks. Unlike in Grant Station, where biddies would note and report on a girl walking down a street, in Los Angeles there was nothing to stop me. Strangers' eyes slid past; at the end of a block they would not recall they had seen me. As I, after some practice, could not recall them. This was another kind of freedom that I had not anticipated. No one here would ever say that he had seen me all over downtown, which was a promise and a warning, both.

At Third Street and Broadway, I discovered the Bradbury Building, completed fifteen years earlier and still the subject of disapproving conversation. One of the shoppies had dismissed it as a big birdcage, but once I saw it, I wondered how she could have misunderstood so totally. The building was like a cathedral, though I had never been in a cathedral. Yard after yard of metal scrollwork inside the tall lobby seemed to spring from the tiled floor, and the open elevators on each side skimmed up and down, whirring like birds. Every pulley and lever was exposed. Machinery was another thing—like pavements, like bright windows, like the long blue line of the ocean—that I had not understood could be beautiful.

All around me, signs of change and progress announced the new Los Angeles—new buildings with Egyptian motifs built right into their façades, new clubs founded for the health of their members, new religions with strange pink temples and, it was reported, peculiar practices. I left the religions alone, admired the new buildings, and studied the idea of tennis and cycling clubs. Girls of clean habit, even single girls, were not prohibited. Not held hidebound by outmoded traditions, Los Angeles was characterized by youth and vigor. Pamphlets advertising vanishing cream and real estate development were full of the new confidence. All a person had to do was read.

The customers of Levisky's did not read. "We must protect ourselves against vulgarity," said a young matron examining grubby pillowslips. Standing back from the counter and watching her deeply shadowed eyes, I could envision her life: the tiny house, the four children, the husband whose single collar needed cleaning nightly. The channel separating us was no more than a brook, easily stepped across, though she wanted with all her being to think otherwise.

Her voice, like the voices of all the customers, rang through my head when I came back to my dirty room. "I do like a bit of lace," a horse-faced customer had simpered from inside a blouse whose rows of ruffles crowded her chin like a beard. "My husband, Mr. Everett, says that the modern fashions make ladies look like men. Mr. Everett is comical." She would not proceed with her transaction until I agreed, which was easy enough to do. Mr. Everett was certainly comical.

Even the most complacent and foolish Levisky's customer had enough dollar bills in her tiny pocketbook to buy the store's shoddy merchandise, which I did not. It was not the married state that separated us, but money, though neither the Levisky's customers in their hauteur nor I in my deference would ever mouth the word. Instead, I simply stayed up an extra hour to finish a pair of gloves that I was improvising out of a scrap of kid and some chocolate-colored silk for a girl at Barton's. She paid me two dollars.

If I was careful, I could eat for sixty cents a day, making breakfast out of oranges donated by my grateful shoppie clients. At first, it was thrilling to keep a bowl of fresh oranges in my room, but after two weeks I developed stinging sores on the sides of my mouth, and I was afraid people would think I had a disease. By then, I realized that the oranges were simply overflow from the trees whose branches drooped over walls, and I stopped thanking the girls. "
Merci,
but I would rather have money," I said. I was getting as coarse as the dye-haired women in their wrappers down the hall. When one of them asked me why I was living there, I said, "I am a seamstress." I had not said so aloud to anyone before this, and I liked the word so much as it came out of my mouth that I found a way to say it again. "I make fine clothes for customers. A fashion seamstress."

"Fancy," the woman drawled, but I saw her eyes drop to my cuff, set off with two rows of piping.

"I can make anything," I told her.

"Do tell," she said, turning back toward her room, but her tone was more interested than she had meant it to be. I watched her adjust her wrapper so that it swung more gracefully with her step.

Calling myself a fashion seamstress was another lie, a whopper. I made any piece of clothing that a customer would pay me for, even men's overalls, even union suits. Once a Chinese woman brought me a piece of leather and the outline of her child's feet on a piece of butcher paper, and I found a way to make shoes, though God knows they were ugly when I was finished, and I wouldn't want to bet on them in a rainstorm.

Four dollars a week for the room. Six dollars a week at work. My brain clicked like an abacus. Sometimes, if I was doing something easy, a pintucked bib that needed no special care, I let my mind wander to the house I would one day live in, nicer than the one owned by the lisping customer who had been rude to me that day. I imagined a long porch, red flowers in stone planters. Though it was a big house, I did not imagine anyone but myself in it—no husband. No children. I did not hope for a future as solitary as my present. Quite the contrary. But to imagine a child, brightly laughing and holding plump, rosy arms up to me, the child's powdery smell of soap and milk, the warm, moist weight in the arms that was unlike any other: there was only so much I could ask of myself.

I was sleeping three hours a night. I could make two dresses a week at ten dollars each, or a batch of shirtwaists (one dollar unless the girl wanted a double row of buttons, which was a dollar more), or, once, a gown for thirteen dollars. I hid some of my money inside the hollow iron legs of the bed, some of it inside a deep flounce I attached to the lampshade. At the lodging house, everybody watched everybody else, and I didn't trust the latch on my door, or the door.

Stitching dress after dress, I thought of ways to attract different customers. If I depended on the custom of shoppies, I would never get out of this greasy lodging house. Bearing down on the treadle, I thought about customers who desired complex clothing—not just well-constructed day dresses, but bicycle suits, bathing costumes, tennis outfits. I had not yet met anyone who played tennis, but I admired the long knife pleats and jaunty stripes.

I would have to find other employment, far away from Spring Street. The customers who populated my imagination did not come to a dark downtown street where the garbage and horse droppings were simply swept to the curb each week, as if they might disappear there. The ladies certainly did not care to bring their custom to a store with a Levantine name. The ladies shopped where they lived: in Pasadena.

I had discovered Pasadena in one of my journeys on the Red Car, and once I found it, I went back as often as I could. Not a bit spunky or raw or promising, Pasadena was the Paradise Mrs. Cooper and I had envisioned in her parlor in Grant Station, the Eden without dark or dirt, where prosperity shone from the shiny motorcars at the curbs and the glossy horses that stepped past them. Streets in Pasadena were not the dirty, crowded steam tunnels we shop girls negotiated every day, but boulevards forty feet across. On either side, mansions spread out behind trellises and fountains with statues in them. Rarely did we see the occupants of those mansions, but we had all seen their gardeners and nannies and housekeepers, and had imagined what it would be like to oversee them. "It is so important to get references," we said to each other. "My housemaid would wear a black uniform with a white apron. It looks crisp." Our hungry conversations swirled fastest on the weekends, when we drank beer and were apt to say things. "Pasadena is filled with money," Josephine said, as if the point required plain statement. "That's where money goes to live."

We were sitting at a dance hall, half shouting over the noise and our beers. No well-raised girl would dream of coming to dance halls—Madame Annelle, for instance, would
ne jamais
be found in one—but they provided a way for shop girls to meet up-and-coming fellows, ambitious young men eager to take their place on California's stage. Girls here were, heaven knew, safe from exposure: any floorwalker or store manager who came to a dance hall would have trouble, in the crush, finding anyone.