The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (35 page)

"When you have a spread as big as we did, you can hire in labor," Lisette said. "We were raised to belong to the land." Her face was calm, a point I had to admire. Even a person who knew the profundity of her lie—fifteen hundred acres!—could envision the girl Lisette was describing, that fearless rancher's daughter, hair tumbling from beneath her cowboy hat, out riding the range, undeterred by the fear of tornadoes or Indians.

"In that case, your skills are wasted here in the seamstress's shop," Mrs. Hoyt said.

Lisette smiled. "Is there a call at Universal City for girls to saddle up and oversee land? I once rescued a steer that had foundered." She paused, letting us appreciate the moment: a girl outlined against a prairie sky. The cotton bodice strains against the swell of flesh beneath. The huge animal, the long horizon made beautiful by lighting, the girl like a goddess. Even Aimée looked startled.

"There is nothing like that for you here," Mrs. Hoyt said.

"Please let us try again," Lisette said. "We understand now what we need to do."

"
We,
" said Mrs. Hoyt. There was no sign that Lisette's machine had bucked and fought her as Aimée's had, and Aimée now looked timidly at Mrs. Hoyt. "I'm sorry about the cloth," she murmured. "It is so thrilling to be here."

A long beat passed before Mrs. Hoyt smiled. "We have very little time to make these costumes. You understand that?" Aimée nodded. "The picture depends on everything being ready when it is needed. It depends on you."

Aimée tipped her face back up and her smile glistened. "That is thrilling, too," she said.

"You need to get out of here for a little." Mrs. Hoyt looked down the table at the girls who were frozen and listening fiercely. "Hilda! Take Aimée for a tour."

"May I go, too?" Lisette said.

"Yes. But don't be long. This is a job, not sightseeing."

"And Mary?" I said, gesturing at my little girl who had raised her sleepy head to look at us, her face creased from the cotton she had rested on.

Mrs. Hoyt nodded tightly, then told me to collect the skirts that were finished so that we could go over them in the costumer's shop. By the time Mrs. Hoyt and I returned there, costumes for two different films had arrived, and we dropped back into the merciful preoccupation of measuring and stitching over the basted lines.

Later, a boy arrived with a flask of lukewarm coffee and sandwiches, and later still, Franklin Coston came back and spoke with Mrs. Hoyt about boots. He did not speak with me. By then, neither of us had energy for racy jokes; my hair hung in hanks, and Mrs. Hoyt's chalk lines were blurry. For all of George's and my squabbling about this position, neither of us had considered that I might have become too old for a career. I seized a moment, while Mrs. Hoyt and Franklin were occupied, to sit on my cramped fingers.

By five o'clock, when Mrs. Hoyt started stacking drawings and pushing the dressmaker's forms back to the wall, I had given up guessing at time, as if we had moved into some endless, fiery existence that time could not affect. "Let's see how those sisters of yours are doing," Mrs. Hoyt said, and I needed a blank moment to catch up to her meaning. I hadn't seen my sisters, I nearly said, in over twenty years.

Mrs. Hoyt and I walked silently to the seamstress shop; at the step an imperious woman, perhaps Gertrude the willow, called to Mrs. Hoyt, so I entered the room ahead of her, which was just as well. One glance at Aimée's miserable face told it all, even before I noted the wad of blue jersey in front of her. "Once it starts to bunch, it doesn't smooth out," she said.

"Give it to me," I said. Aimée started to tug the fabric out of the machine, and I reached around her to pull the lever and lift the needle's foot. The girl didn't have the smallest notion. Nodding at Mary, who said that she had not seen anybody famous even though she had looked and looked, I tucked Aimée's ruined length of cloth under the flounce on her chair, pulled the last piece from the shelf, and stashed it in my big workbag. Aimée's face was tragic. "Hush," I said. "Put on a smile. This will be all right."

"I told you," Lisette said just as Mrs. Hoyt came into the room, her shoes like hammers on the wood floor. Her examination of the finished garments was blessedly cursory, as was her glance at Aimée's sewing machine. "You've caught on?" she said, and "Good," when Aimée nodded. Later, I supposed, I would worry or feel guilt. Now I was simply tired. Damn tired, as Lisette would say when we were back outside the gate.

The girls and I were silent on the clackety ride home, Mary slumped damply against my shoulder. Smoothing hair back from her cheek, I looked with a bleak heart at the night ahead. George would be in no mood to put up with my piecework; I would have to find half an hour while he was preoccupied to make a replacement skirt for Aimée. In the morning, I would smuggle the finished garment back to the studio. Perhaps Lisette had another story about her cowgirl past that she could use to distract Mrs. Hoyt. If my employer counted pieces of cloth, I could implicate the other seamstresses. Any girl might have a use for a length of good blue jersey.

In the splintery seat in front of me, Lisette was whispering something to her sister. I could not hear her words, but I saw her emphatic nod as she agreed with herself—probably reassuring Aimée over the ruined skirts. Lisette had seen her sister's struggles, along with my quick theft. More ammunition for her. What a store I had given her! And it was clear that her stockpiling was not likely to stop. Her stockpiling had only begun.

She was not interested in talking to me on the walk from the streetcar, but once we entered the house, where George waited for us, she became a regular chatterbox. She talked about the streetcar, the weather, fashion in Los Angeles and at the studio. She talked about the streets at the studio, and the boys there, and the food she had smelled but never located. "It's a city inside the city. It has its own rules and its own fashion, too. Skirts are very short."

"Are they," George said.

"Slow down," I told Lisette. "Not everything needs to be said at once." There was no point in contradicting her, although I didn't remember seeing an especially short skirt. As long as she was talking about Universal City, she was not talking about Kansas or bad mothers there.

"Boys and girls were necking right on the street," she said.

"Do tell," George said.

She did tell, while Aimée washed Mary's hands, and did tell more while I set the table. Lisette's Universal City was an extraordinary place, with lovestruck boys trailing girls in full costume. On one corner stood a juggler, on another, a horse. Her details were perfect, and I listened in a half-trance. If I jumped in to correct Lisette now, I would sound like the wet blanket and the liar.

"Everybody at Universal knows Nell," she confided over a dish of pickles and leftover pork. "You should have seen her greeting and waving as we walked down the street. She's a celebrity."

"What's a celebrity?" Mary asked.

"Your auntie is joking," I said.

"People were rushing over. If the folks back home could just see!" Lisette said. "It was 'Madame Annelle' this and 'Madame Annelle' that. Once we were inside the gate, we girls couldn't get anywhere near her. Next thing you know, she'll be signing autographs."

"I don't doubt it," George said.

"We wanted to work alongside her, but she's much too important for that," Lisette said.

"Now you're being silly," I said, and Lisette said, "Mrs. Hoyt wouldn't let us work with her, would she, Aimée?"

"It's very confusing there," said Aimée, inviting us to smile with her, the picture of dim prettiness.

"Not to Nell!" Lisette bit into a pickle. "She could have been to the manner born. Honestly, it was quite a thing."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," I said.

"She
was
very confident," Aimée allowed.

"And striking! She just walked through the studio gate and already seemed taller."

"Like Gloria Swanson," Aimée said. "You know, Gloria's not even five feet tall. But on camera, she looks so big!"

"And then there's Nell," George said, "towering over the little people."

"Silly." Lisette swatted at his arm.

He didn't look at me, whom he had used to call his slip of a wife. "Mighty Nell strides forth, wielding her tape measure and her shears. Somebody should make a picture about her," he said.

"Hardly," I said, at the same time that Lisette said, "I was thinking the same thing myself."

"Nell comes to the big city," George said.

"She scampers up the ladder of success. In no time, she has a chauffeur and a maid. Little Nell, who used to wait on others, now has people waiting on her!" Lisette said. Her voice sparkled as if she were just this moment uncovering a new story, like Howard Carter in Egypt. And George was sparkling beside her, bright as fire.

"I don't think anybody wants to see a picture about a seamstress," I said.

"She has become a
modiste
," George corrected me. "But does she forget her humble beginnings?" he said.

"Yes!" Lisette said. "Her child awakens at night crying for her, but she is dancing the Charleston in a nightclub."

"Don't you worry," I said to Mary, who smiled uncertainly. "I won't leave you to dance the Charleston."

"The sewing ladies said it's harder than it looks. They say it's better to do the Black Bottom," Mary said.

"I won't do that, either," I said, earning a snort from George.

"It was hot," she said. "I don't want to go back there."

"It will get better, sweetheart. You'll see." I did not look at my husband, hearing his daughter complain about her mother's workplace.

"The ladies can teach you to dance!" said Aimée to Mary. "Wouldn't that be fun?"

"And then Mary can teach Nell," said George.

"There's not much call for the Charleston in my life," I said.

"What if you want to go back to the Casbah?" Lisette smiled. "I hear it's quite a place."

"George must have been telling you stories. We did not dance. Did we, dear?"

"No indeed," he said, and I remembered our quarrel there, and the gin, and the sickness the next day.

Lisette said, "Here's where the movie comes in. Nell is at every nightclub, courted by every man. Her own telephone is answered by her own secretary. But is she happy?"

"Oh, for goodness sake." I stood up and started collecting plates from the table. "If I had a chauffeur and a maid, I'd have someone to help me clear the table. And if I'm supposed to dance the Charleston, somebody's going to have to teach me. And George."

I waited for his snappy comeback, but he paused a moment. His chair pushed back from the table, he might have looked like a paterfamilias. His belly swelled a little under his brown vest, and his collar was unhooked. He might have looked like a paterfamilias, but he did not. He looked like a customer making a transaction he hadn't planned on, and Lisette wore the attentive face of a girl making a sale.

"I wouldn't mind having somebody teach me the Charleston," he said. "Then I could go to a dancehall and show the girls what a real floorflusher looks like."

Lisette made a brushing motion. "Every dancehall in America is filled with two-bit Rudys. Only silly girls are taken in by that. A real fellow, though, someone who makes an impression..." She dropped her eyes, and in her silence I might have believed she was blushing. Impossible to know for sure under her makeup, though her expression was fixed and strange. Suddenly Lisette seemed like a delicate thing. I thought about Franklin Coston, the sparking pleasure of his talk. But he was at the studio, under the bright sun, and I was not sharing a house with Franklin.

"Why, it's getting late," I said. "I'll wash up. You girls—would you take a walk? Would you take a walk with Mary?"

"A stroll," Lisette said. "How nice. Just what we used to do with Pa." Jack going out for a stroll! Nobody changed that much.

"I'll go with you," George said.

"Don't you want to read the newspaper?" I said, too brightly.

"The newspaper will still be here when we return. But ladies in the city do not stroll alone after dark."

I noisily ran and heated a panful of water while the girls brushed Mary's hair and gathered wraps. Then I dropped the whole stack of plates into the water, splashing my apron. I remembered Mrs. Donlavey standing in her chemise, freckled arms quivering as she derided girls who smoked and danced. George let the door bang shut when they went out, and I stood like a post, my hands floating just above the scalding water.

In the dizzy rush of my day, I had lost track of the fact that George had gone through a day of his own, in which he had plenty of time to think about his home, crowded with flappers and cigarettes and girls who liked to talk. Foolish, foolish me. George! Who loved to come home with surprises—a Saturday trip to the beach, a mahjong set. A house. A pig. Tonight, he'd come home with a plan, although I wasn't sure he knew that. And waiting for him was Lisette, who had plans of her own.

The scene played out like a cued reel: the animated, happy talk, the saunter. George making a great show of attending to his daughter, pretending not to notice that the two sets of shoulders are growing closer. The first time those shoulders bump, the man and girl pull back and grin apologetically. Not the second time, though. The tap on the arm that lingers. The smiles slowly dropping, the shy glances flicking away and then back as if magnetized. The girl's lips are slightly parted, the man's head drops toward hers. All of this conducted above Mary's head, made more thrilling by the child's dawdling steps. The group could be as far as State Street by now. They had passed plenty of doorways dark enough to shelter a kiss.

By the time they returned, no one visibly disheveled, I had broken two plates and washed and dried the rest. "Did you have a good walk?" I said.

George rubbed his hands together. "Where's that newspaper? Got to catch up with the world." It was what he always said. The difference was in his eyes, glossy as marbles.

The girls were already in the bathroom, Aimée industriously scrubbing her stockings and Lisette stroking cold cream over her cheeks. I left them to bathe Mary. Aimée offered to pour bath salts into the water, and under Mary's imploring eyes I agreed, although she would emerge smelling like a floozy.