Follow Me (33 page)

The personnel director hired them both on the spot. Elena was assigned to the dress department, Sally to household goods on
the fourth floor. They were to start the following Monday.

So Sally Bliss would make her living in the city of her dreams as a salesgirl in a department store, fifty-five dollars per
week, benefits included. It was the best outcome she could have hoped for.

All that was left was to find a place to live. It was too late in the day to look, she was exhausted, and Penelope had lost
patience and was beginning to whine with hunger. Sally said good-bye to Elena and took her daughter back to the diner for
an early supper before returning to the Cadillac Hotel.

From then on, their arrangements fell into place more easily than Sally could have hoped. She thought it must have had something
to do with giving up her unreasonable ambitions; she was ready to accept what the world thought she deserved, to expect no
more than her fair share.

They moved into their own apartment at the end of the week. Advertised as
comfortable accommodations on a bus line
, at eighty dollars a month, the apartment Sally liked best was located over a shoe repair shop, diagonally across from the
municipal post office. The landlord, Mr. Botelia, the shop owner, was a potbellied, grizzled man. When he met them at the
side door of the building, he was wearing an apron stained with shades of polish, he smelled of leather cream, and as he greeted
Penelope, he held out a sharp-clawed bear’s paw in place of a hand.

He growled, and Penelope burst into tears.

No, no, that’s not what he was after. It had been Halloween the day before, hadn’t it, he’d wanted to have a little fun, but
he didn’t want to frighten the girl. He pleaded with her to stop crying, and with a swift movement he removed the bear’s paw
from his long sleeve and pulled from his tool belt another appendage, a mechanical contraption ending in a pair of shears,
which he sliced, clack-clack, in the air. Was that better? he asked Penelope, but she hid her face in the folds of her mother’s
skirt and kept bawling. No? Then how about this? He exchanged the shears for a plastic arm ending in a slender-fingered hand,
probably a woman’s hand, he admitted as he tucked it up his sleeve, though didn’t they agree that it was hard to tell for
sure? He’d gotten it for free, taken it off a store mannequin that he’d found in the garbage.

In fact, he had two hands of his own. But he couldn’t resist a good joke.

The apartment he showed them was more spacious than Sally expected, with a bay window and a reading nook facing the street,
though the furnishings were meager — a single table, twin beds, a tattered sofa. And it was so dusty that their feet left
prints across the floor. But when Mr. Botelia said he’d let Sally determine the rent she thought was fair, she replied with
some awkwardness that she thought fifty dollars a month was all she could afford. Mr. Botelia offered better than that and
set the rent at forty dollars a month, half the amount listed in the ad and less than the rent she’d proposed because, as
he reminded her apologetically, utilities were extra.

They would get used to the mail trucks rumbling down the road every morning at four. They would get used to the smell of polish
and leather, which permeated the whole building. They would get so used to the apartment above Botelia’s Shoe Repair that
they’d settle in and stay for many years.

They soon discovered that their newest home wasn’t far from the river, less than a mile. The first Sunday, Sally took Penelope
to explore the neighborhood, and they ended up on the Ford Street Bridge, where they leaned against the rail, trying to catch
sight of one of the strange fairy creatures they’d seen in the state park. But this stretch of the river was the color of
a rusty pipe, and the stone embankment was coated with a noxious black slime. The reality of it made the memory of their experience
in the park seem impossibly distant to Sally, as if it had happened in another life.

Later in the week they followed a path leading from a warehouse to the water, and they were able to walk right up to the riverbank.
But there was a strong sulfur stench coming from the mud, and the shore had served as a dumping ground for trash. Sally gave
up hope of ever seeing anything alive come out of the water. Nothing could survive, she decided, not in that poisonous stew.
Over time, when she bothered to look at the Tuskee at all, she saw a surface as impenetrable as the macadam of the city streets.

When Sally described this period in her life, she’d warn that there wasn’t much of interest to say. Who cared that over several
months she transformed that dusty wreck of an apartment on Magellan Street into a cozy home? Who cared that Penelope Bliss
got used to her name, even came to like the sound of it? And who cared that by the age of twenty-nine, Sally was so proficient
in her sales job at Sibley’s that she’d been promoted to an assistant manager of the floor? All the mundane stuff, work, work,
work, day in, day out — it might have filled the bulk of the hours of her life, but it hardly figured when she added up the
years. Still, it was something when a customer came in to buy a smoking stand and she talked him into buying a brass magazine
rack along with it. And there was that woman in search of a casserole warmer who left the store with a new dinnerware service
for eight. And what about that day she sold seventeen Mary Proctor ironing boards in three hours!

Oh, she did work hard, and she was shrewd at gauging what a customer might be willing to add to his purchases. But she was
just your average Jane, just another single mother trying to keep ahead of the game, two teeth missing after the loose one
fell out and a faint pink wriggling scar poking up from her right eyebrow. It didn’t matter in the larger scheme that having
set herself the challenge of saving as much of her hard-earned salary as she could, she’d take a twenty-minute bus ride to
the IGA instead of walking to the nearby A&P. If she was lucky, Mr. Botelia’s wife, who was as plump and filthy as her husband,
would drive Sally to the grocery store in their car, a battered wood-paneled station wagon that bounced her out of the seat
when it hit a pothole.

And all those receipts she saved — what was the point of them other than to prove that Sally Bliss knew a bargain when she
saw it? Not until 1960 did she pay more than fifty-five cents for a package of franks. She would buy frozen mixed vegetables
on sale, two for one, and save ten cents. She’d buy the cheapest margarine. Blue Bonnet was her favorite, and at the IGA it
usually came on sale at the first of the month.

She became fond of Dinty Moore beef stew. A twenty-four-ounce can was only forty-five cents. Penelope liked American cheese,
Sally preferred pimento, and once she found them on sale together. She bought chuck roast instead of round steak. She bought
canned chicken, though she would have preferred the fancy pink salmon. She invited her Polish friend, Elena, for New Year’s
dinner and bought a smoked ham on sale, along with an angel food cake, which she covered in an instant lemon sauce from a
packet. For her daughter’s fifth birthday, in March of 1958, she invited over a group of little girls from the neighborhood.
She borrowed cake tins from Mrs. Botelia, bought a mix and made a cake that was a big hit. She had snapshots of the girls
with their mouths rimmed with chocolate. And Sally gave Penelope a real Lionel train set, which she’d bought at seventy percent
off the original price because the caboose had been damaged in shipment.

They bought a used console television, which filled all their extra time. Most nights they would turn to Channel 4 and watch
Frank Sinatra. Sally loved Frank Sinatra, even if he did collect girls as if they were souvenirs. He could come along and
collect her any day! And that heartthrob Senator John Kennedy… Once Sally had a dream in which the senator appeared on the
fourth floor of Sibley’s, said flattering things to her, and they made love on the red velvet sectional. And when in real
life he ran for president, she wore a JFK button pinned to her lapel.

There I am,
she’d say, holding up the old newspaper she’d saved with its front-page photograph of the Memorial Day Parade in 1960. She
was the girl standing in back of the blurred group of faces, the one in an oversized white sailor’s cap she’d bought at the
five-and-dime. If she hadn’t been wearing that white cap, it would have been impossible to distinguish her in the crowd.

What was there to say to distinguish Sally Bliss from thousands of others like her in America in the late 1950s? She was pert-looking,
with full cheeks and rosy skin. She’d trained herself to keep her mouth closed when she smiled to hide the hole of her missing
teeth. She’d put on a few extra pounds around her thighs, but wasn’t that what happened to a woman once she hit thirty? She
sang when she did housework but never out in public. She bought wool suits, half slips, and Dacron blouses from the sales
rack. She found a fine calfskin bag on the clearance shelf for $7.99.

Correspondence with her friends in Tuskee kept her posted on the news there. None of them expressed any disapproval of her
sudden departure; though they didn’t admit it, Sally guessed that they knew why she’d left. She wished she hadn’t had to leave.
Their letters reminded her of how pleasant life had been in Tuskee. Buddy Potter wrote to say that he was thinking about retiring
and selling the store. He kept on thinking about it for the next twelve years. On July 4, 1959, Penny Campbell married Arthur
Steerforth from the Dockery. They had the wedding in Penny’s hometown, in the backyard of her parents’ house, and it poured
buckets all afternoon, though at the end of the day a double rainbow appeared. And wouldn’t you know, within the year Penny
was pregnant with twins!

Implicit in Penny’s letters was the understanding that their music, as fun as it had been, was something they’d outgrown.
They both had children to raise and a home to keep up.

Sally usually ate her lunch in the store’s fifth-floor restaurant. Once in a while she’d meet a friendly man, a customer or
another employee. But she wasn’t about to risk getting to know him better, not after all she’d been through. She felt much
older than other women her age, more worldly and shrewd, and she was convinced that romance was a notion exploited for commercial
appeal. If she ever got married, it would be for pragmatic reasons. She wouldn’t have minded having help paying the bills.
But he’d have to be high-class for Sally Bliss to be interested, a real gentleman. And that wasn’t the kind of man who would
go for a career girl with broken teeth.

What Penelope would remember from those first years in Rondo was the train set she got for her birthday, with the caboose
that always fell off the track at the top of the figure eight.
Chugachugachug
.

She was five.

When she was six she played a mouse in the class play.
Squeak, squeak,
she said, and the audience clapped. She had a very nice teacher named Mrs. Doherty, who didn’t give just stars to students
when they got a perfect score on a spelling test. She gave blue ribbons. Penelope tacked her ribbons alongside her closet
door, and by the end of the year there were blue ribbons going up one side of the doorway and down the other.

She was good at spelling. She was good at imitating Donald Duck. She knew she was pretty — she could tell because everyone
wanted to be friends with her, even the girls who lived in houses with swing sets in their yards. And once a boy named Gregor
gave her a present. It was a glass heart almost as big as a regular peach, and on it was written: Kathy and Billy, 1-1-42.
She didn’t have a chance to ask Gregor who Kathy and Billy were because the next day he moved to Florida, and she never saw
him again. But she vowed to keep the heart forever.

The time when she hadn’t known how to read seemed like a dream. It felt like something she’d always been doing. She liked
reading, and Mrs. Doherty often called on her to read aloud because she was good at it. The only things she wasn’t good at
were singing and dancing. They were chores, like wiping the dishes dry with a towel. She even sang in the junior choir at
church every week, week after week, but she never improved and she never came to like it.

Not counting singing and dancing, she was good at everything. She would never say this to anyone, but it was all right to
think it, as long as the thought didn’t make her vain. It was all right to be proud, but not vain. She pretended for a long
time to know the difference between the two, and eventually she did know, even if she couldn’t explain it.

When she grew up she wanted to be a nurse. Then she changed her mind and decided that she wanted to be a teacher. Then she
changed her mind again because she had a friend named Lucy who wanted to drive a bus, so Penelope wanted to drive a bus, too.
After she played the mouse in the school play, her mother predicted that Penelope Bliss would be a star of stage and screen.
But sometimes her mother was wrong.

She was seven and learned to roller-skate at the rink in the park. When she was eight she borrowed a bike from the Botelias
and taught herself to ride no-handed. And then everything changed all at once, between yesterday and tomorrow.

Everything changed because the lawyer representing Bennett Patterson finally succeeded in locating Sally on the fourth floor
of Sibley’s. It hadn’t been easy to find her. Initially, Benny had hired a private eye from Buffalo, but the man turned out
to be a fraud and conned Benny out of a bundle of money without providing him with any useful information. The firm of Atwell
and Stevenson based in Fenton proved more helpful. They obtained records of Sally’s financial transactions from the Tuskee
Bank and were able to track her travels north. This was after confirming with hospital records the most relevant fact: Sally’s
daughter had been born on March 17, 1953, exactly nine months after Sally and Benny had had their fling in Helena.

If Benny had only had a job or a steady girlfriend, or if he’d just been interested in any aspect of the world around him,
he would have long since forgotten about the tart of a girl he’d met at the Barge. After giving her a good wallop for deserting
him, that should have been that. But while Benny was at the hotel nursing a headache the day after finding Sally in Tuskee,
his pal went through the items in the purse Sally had left behind and found the photo of her child.