The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (27 page)

I looked up to see George balancing himself in the doorway, listening to me promise Mary cotton candy, a treat we generally didn't consent to. "Do you want me to thank you?" he said softly after Mary cheered again.

"No," I whispered.

"Good," he whispered back.

I doted on Mary the next several days, fixing her favorite egg salad for lunch and taking her for walks. I allowed her to ignore her sewing practice and started her instead on basic sums. If she didn't want to follow me as a seamstress, maybe she could become my bookkeeper. While she struggled to write a numeral 5, I stroked her hair. "Daddy says we're going to live at the ocean," she said without looking up.

"We might."

"He says I can have whatever I want in our new house." She frowned at her lopsided
5
and lengthened its tail a little. "I'm going to ask for a pony."

"That is a wonderful idea," I said. She made three more
5
s before I said, "Do you want to go out and play? I'll play with you."

"Now?"

"Yes, baby. Right now."

"You don't have to sew? That's what you usually do."

Feeling shame flush across my face, I shook my head and walked out the backdoor steps with her. When I asked what she wanted to play, she said, "Hollywood."

We played until it was time for me to make supper, when she quietly sat back at the kitchen table and picked up the pencil again. By the time I set the table—we were having salmon croquettes, a meal I could produce reliably—she had a page of
5
s to show me. "I just needed practice," she said.

I kept the page ready to show George, if he ever came home. It was not unusual for him to be late—often emergencies cropped up at one of the wells, and he had to stay until they were fixed. But I had spent all day remembering our argument, and now it struck me as suspicious that he was tardy in returning to his little girl and me. I kept the croquettes in the oven, which didn't improve them any.

At seven o'clock, he finally appeared, carrying a pig. The weight made him stagger, its juices leaking through the butcher paper and onto his good shirt. I stopped him on the doorstep, where he held the carcass out as if he thought I would take it.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Cook it," he said.

"I wouldn't even know how to start. Where did you get it?"

"The fellow selling plots in Calenga Beach came around. You should see him, up to his elbows in pigs."

"And?" The sight of my husband greasy with pig juice was revolting. Mary moaned from the kitchen. She had been hungry since five o'clock, but I wanted her to eat dinner with us, and had tried to put off her hunger with a little warm milk.

"I told him I was interested. He gave me a pig."

"Dear God. What would he give you if you signed a contract?"

"A house. Which any normal woman would be thrilled to have. I told him I would decide by next week."

"Maybe he'll send you home with a cow then."

"I could have signed today," he said. "Maybe I should have."

I had been married more than long enough to know that this pretense at waiting was false consideration, the appearance of concern that George could return to later, in arguments, to prove his own fairness. I had used the same tactic myself. Now I said, "A lot of things haven't been settled. And I don't see what we're going to do with a pig."

"Somebody has to make the decision, Nell. You're not some French dressmaker. You're a mother. You can't just go to Hollywood to work every day. I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand."

I gestured at the leaky pig, my heart pounding. "Two thousand dollars should buy us a cooked pig. Or at least a butchered one."

"You can make a feast."

"Have you ever known me to make a feast?"

"I can't imagine a better time." Moving past me into the kitchen, George let the pig crash onto the table. Then he stalked out of the room in his stained shirt.

I stared at the pig, now dotted with flies from the door George had left open. Hard at work, the infernal bookkeeper in my brain busily calculated my debt after all the years of dull, penny-by-penny growth. The money was easy. The difficult calculations involved the debt between George and me. I had been too quick to forgive my own encumbrance. It would have made no difference if I had banked a million dollars. George yearned to come home to an array of rosy-faced children, ringed around a devoted mother who taught them about Vision. Instead, we had one child, growing fast, attracting the attention of the world while teaching herself the skills she needed. My accumulated arrears were incalculable.

Tetchy and curious, Mary called my attention back to the kitchen, where the inadequately wrapped pig lolled on the table, its legs spread and its snout still spattered with blood. A better mother would have scooted her daughter out of the room with the promise of cake later, but I had no cake. I told Mary to go and talk to her father, but she lingered at the wall to watch, stunned, while I hacked at the carcass, using my biggest knife to saw off the head. Bloody to the elbows, I shoved chunks of the pig into the oven using every pan I owned, guessing at the heat and leaving the meat to cook and cook and cook. By the time George emerged from the bedroom, the kitchen was pooled in pig smoke, extra hunks were sitting uncooked in the sink, and I was sitting at the table, trembling.

"That was good food," he said.

"It's cooked," I said. "I think."

He ate it, and Mary did, too. It wasn't hard to find parts of the meat that were succulent, between the parts that were charred and some that still dripped. At the last minute, on a rare culinary inspiration, I'd thrown in carrots, too, and now the house was filled with the jarring odors of burned pork and sweet, roasted vegetables. We pushed back from the table and looked at one another, greasy and dull. George lifted his fork as if he would eat some more but simply held the implement. Mary was white. She had never seen so much food in one place.

When the knock came, I needed a minute to stand up. Whatever George and I had started wasn't finished yet, and I was not in the mood for interruption. On the porch stood two young women I'd never before seen. One thrust a bundle of daisies at me. Together they said, "Hello, Mother."

From the kitchen came the clink of a fork hitting the table.

They were rough as barn planks. Dull-eyed, thick at the ankles. Even the bouquet of drooping daisies the taller, dark-haired one thrust out looked like the grass dangling from a cow's big jaw, and my first wave of nerveless terror was shouldered aside by anger at being reminded of an animal I hadn't laid eyes on for twenty-three years. Knowing the exact number of years made me angry, too. "You have the wrong house," I said.

"Mother," the tall one said impatiently. "Nellie Plat."

"There's no one by that name here," I said.

"Nell, who's there?" George called, and I said, "No one. Somebody's asking after a gal we've never heard of." With detached interest, I noted how my hand rattled on the doorknob. I did not feel the trembling, just as I saw but did not feel my breast heaving for air. I smiled firmly at the ugly girls on my porch. "I'm sorry. You've got the wrong house. You'll have to leave."

"Nellie Plat," the tall one said again, with the annoyed patience of someone talking to the dim.

"Maybe down the street? Some new folks have moved in."

The shorter girl held up her empty hands. "We've come so far already."

"Born in Mercer County, Kansas," said the other one. "Two sisters. Our grandmother says you had the prettiest hair. Our granddad says you proved that a girl could have a temper."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not the person you're looking for." My lungs having constricted, I had to keep my sentences short. My arms shook, and also my shoulders, the muscles locked. In all the scenes from which I had awakened, blazing and terrified, I had never envisioned the girls simply appearing like bad luck on my doorstep. Now they stood on my mat, a thought I didn't want to have, disastrous. My sole, enormous desire was to make them vanish. I said, "Try Glendale. A lot of people go there."

"Nell?" George said, joining me to see the commotion. The house's air was rich with the sweet, fatty smell of pork, and behind us, Mary tunelessly sang "Casey Jones," which everybody was singing that year. I stepped forward to block the doorway. George had to lean over my shoulder.

"Good evening, ladies," he said to the pair on the porch. "Can we help you?"

The taller one nodded at him. Both girls had bobbed hair and terrible dye jobs, the tall one dull black, the other a brutal, egg-yolk yellow. They wore smears of rouge on their cheeks and uneven kohl lines around their eyes, like the swipe of a crayon. Their dresses were too short for their rough knees. It was easy not to see myself in them.

"These are for you, Mother," the tall girl said to me, shaking the flowers. "Aimée picked them out."

"Who?" I said.

"We changed our names," said the blonde. Of the two girls, she was closer to pretty, with a valentine of a face and unexpectedly tiny hands. "I'm Aimée now. With an accent. Granddad said everybody likes a name with an accent."

"Actually, he said any fool likes a name with an accent. He also told us to be sure and send his regards," the tall girl said. "Jack, too. 'Regards' wasn't actually the word he used." Behind the plastering of makeup, her expression was confident, like a client with a wallet full of money.

I leaned back against George, but when she rattled the daisies at me again, I took them. Aimée? I recited the name like one of Mary's nonsense words. Aimée-pemmay-demmay. My mind, which felt as if it had been dipped in ice, was speeding. I was a jackrabbit bolting over a crust of snow. "Well, as I live and breathe. Who could have imagined? George, imagine it! My little sisters have come out to visit."

"'Mother'?" he said.

"My old nickname." My tongue had thickened, a boot in my mouth. "I looked after my sisters when they were babies, and everybody called me Little Mother. That's what you're talking about, isn't it, girls?"

"What?" said the blond girl—
Aimée, Aimée
—her face a little pool of confusion. Her head was shapely now, bearing no sign of damage, but her eyes were as clear as a child's. My freezing brain quickly assembled the story: one commanding sister, one placid one. Traveling together, they might have had an easier time than their mother.

"I don't think they even knew I had another name," I said, shifting my gaze to the taller one, who must have been Lucille.

She looked at George. Her face would have been lightened if she smiled, but her expression was full of calculating threat. "Look at Queen Victoria," my mother-in-law used to say, watching Lucille reach for something.

"Look at Lizzie Borden," Jack would say. I hadn't remembered that in twenty years. Already I felt the stirrings of the old impatience, and the old guilt.

"We were very young when she left," Lucille said after a spiky moment. "Sister Nell, here, took the train out of town when we were babes in arms. But people told us all about her."

"What?" Aimée said.

"Do I remember you mentioning sisters?" George said to me, his tone not uncordial.

"I never imagined they would take it in their heads to come visit. Who would have thought they could find the house? They must have turned into regular Sherlock Holmeses." I shivered even though my hands, wrapped around George's arm, were damp. "They've gotten so big! I would have passed them on the street and never known who those grown-up ladies were."

"That's what happens," Lucille said. "People grow up. Sisters do."

A smile glinted between us. "George, dear, let me introduce you. This is Aimée, apparently, and this—"

My daughter Lucille looked at George and said, "My name is Lisette. Mamaw said we come from French stock. Our ancestors had farms north of Paris, where they make cider." The embellishment must have come from a schoolbook. Impossible that my mother could have known.

George hummed "Hinky-Dinky Parley Voo" and said, "You three could do the cancan together." Seeing Aimée's puzzled face, he added, "Nell changed her name, too. I guess it runs in the family."

"I didn't change it," I protested. "I rearranged it, for professional reasons."

Lisette said, "So did we. What did you pick? Marie? Hortense?"

"Annelle," I muttered.

"
Madame
Annelle," George added, though I wished he had not. There was no saying what these two strangers on our step might do with any knowledge. And indeed, this girl's face—my daughter's face—took on a new expression. I hoped no one had ever seen me look so frankly conniving.

"I wondered," she said. "I wondered if it was possible. Everyone back home knew how Nellie Plat could sew anything, and then we started hearing about Madame Annelle, seamstress to the stars."

"You're exaggerating," I said.

"I thought, 'Why not?' Why couldn't it be our dear sister? Talent like hers doesn't come up often, even in Hollywood." Looking up from under lead-black bangs, she said to George, "Why are you laughing?"

"It's rich, that's all," he said. "The Kansas Nell talks about is nothing but dray horses and pig troughs. Now I find out that you're going to the movies and looking to see who designed the costumes."

"There were no movie theaters in my day," I said.

"Oh!" said Aimée. Her face was suddenly bright. "We didn't know about you before we left! People loved to say that Nell had run away to Hollywood, but that was just talk. Where else would a girl run away to?" Her smile was like sunshine pouring into a room, and as her sister picked up the story, I hoped that this soft blond girl would continue to smile.

"Nell is the first famous person we know," the taller girl said.
Lisette.
My mind was rejecting the new names. My mind was rejecting everything, but she kept talking as if it were natural for her to be standing on my porch. As if it weren't outrageous. "Just this morning in the ice cream shop, girls were jabbering about what they would do when their ship came in." Her voice shifted a little, and I understood that she was not quite reporting what she had overheard. Probably the girls in the shop had not mentioned anything about ships, although they might have speculated about sugar daddies who could be persuaded to part with a few of their berries. "'I'd have a dress made by Madame Annelle,' one said. The other one said, 'I'd have
every
dress made by Madame Annelle.'"