19 Purchase Street (6 page)

The stove and refrigerator were in a closet that had no door. Vicky italicized the word borrowed when she said she'd
borrowed
tea and cups from where she worked. Substantial cups that clanged against one another when she handled them. “I have to be at work at four,” she said.

Norma didn't have to ask if they could stay.

Vicky didn't have to ask if they wanted to. She made up the sofa with one of the sheets and two of the pillows from her bed. In tune with Norma's thoughts, she volunteered that the fellow who had been there was no one special. In other words, don't worry, he wouldn't be back that night.

Norma and Gainer went to bed earlier than usual. With their heads at opposite ends, the sofa was roomy enough and its high back reinforced their sense of security. Norma lay there with tomorrow in mind. No matter what she tried to put into tomorrow it seemed empty. Gainer propped his pillow against the sofa's fat arm and thumbed through magazines, recent issues of
Harper's Bazaar
and an August 1933
National Geographic
. When the light was turned off he scrunched down and hugged Norma's feet.

The following day Vicky had more vitality, more to offer, as though she'd been regenerated. She gave advice like an old-timer who'd been through it. She told Norma: “The worst problem is age. You can't be sixteen.”

“But that's what I am.”

“Everyone thinks a sixteen-year-old out on her own is an easy hustle. Can't have experience, can't be reliable. You got to be eighteen at least, not just say you're eighteen but
look
it.”

The transformation took three days.

Norma, at Vicky's suggestion, went down to Thirty-fourth Street to a school for hairdressers. The students needed practice. Norma managed to get with the swishiest one there, a young man who at once became a confidante and conspirator. Norma didn't understand all that he chattered on about and none of the jargon, but she made it seem that she did. He snipped her plain long hair away a little at a time, using a style in
Harper's Bazaar
for reference. He also insisted on doing Norma's make-up and when he was through he appreciated his work so much he was carried further, shoved all sorts of cosmetic devices into her handbag.

That same night she went blond.

Did it herself with Gainer looking on. She read the Clairol directions, closed her eyes and applied. Didn't face the mirror until she was done and then wasn't sure she looked all that much older.

“Do you think I look older?” she asked Gainer.

“Yeah.”

“You're not just saying that?”

He winked his best wicked wink at her.

Then there were the mother's things.

Vicky went with Norma to get them. The Puerto Rican superintendent at the West End Avenue apartment building didn't recognize Norma immediately, nor did he believe anything had been left in storage. Norma insisted. The superintendent muttered idiomatic Spanish obscenities that he was sure they didn't understand as he opened the storage area and found two footlockers. Norma recalled there having been four. The superintendent turned resentful, as though he was being deprived. He left Norma and Vicky to cope with the heavy footlockers. They dragged and shoved more than carried them out to the sidewalk.

Four available taxis wanted nothing to do with them. Vicky walked down a block and got one. The driver was an older Irishman with a whiskey complexion. Not a word of complaint from him about the footlockers and he even helped carry them in and up to Vicky's place. He was redder in the face and puffing hard by the time he was done. Norma wished she could afford to give him more than a dollar tip but he looked into her eyes and saw that, and as though he had God's ear, he told Him aloud to bless her.

Norma hurried to have the footlockers open. But seeing their contents made her pause. Things she'd never realized occupied any corner of her memory now seemed so familiar, and evocative. What could be more inconsequential than a brown tweed skirt or a white ribbed sweater? Except that they had been
hers
, the mother's, and although Norma couldn't recall any particular instance when they had been worn by the mother, she still saw her in them.

She handled all the mother's things with great care at first, certainly with much more than they'd been packed with. As Norma removed layer after layer, the effect lessened.

She tried some things on. They were only a bit large and long, could be made to fit. Vicky tried on a Bergdorf dress she loved but it was small for her, especially across the bust and hips, would never do.

One of the footlockers contained shoes, boots and handbags. The shoes were also small for Vicky, however Norma fitted them perfectly.

Norma stayed up late altering a dress, a beige, light wool challis. She had to seam and hem it by hand, difficult because the fabric had such give to it. Gainer helped. When she had to do over a side seam, he pinned it as she told him to. He got down and squinted at the hemline to make sure it was straight. He also threaded the needles, licked the thread and was able to get it through the eye first time every try. While Norma stitched, they sang Rodgers and Hart songs, practically the entire score of
The Boy Friend
. Gainer didn't miss many lyrics.

Next day he went job hunting with Norma. He told her she looked beautiful at the perfectly timed moment, just before she entered the first employment agency. He waited down in the lobby.

On the first application Norma only lied about her age and made up a social security number. She printed neatly that she had two years of high school, no special skills, no previous employment and that she desired a clerical position or whatever was available. The only space she left blank was where references were asked for.

The employment agency lady behind a heaped desk assessed the application in an instant. She gave the favor of her appraisal to Norma from thigh to forehead and dismissed her with an automatic promise.

Norma went to two other agencies and got similar reactions. What had started out as a hopeful attitude had been turned into a feeling that she was a bother to people.

By then it was midafternoon. She and Gainer sat at a counter at Chock full o' Nuts for grilled cheese sandwiches that weren't grilled enough and milk shakes that were mostly milk. She tried to hide her disappointment but Gainer sensed it, so instead of asking if she was getting a job, he told her: “While I was waiting in the lobby of that last building this man came up to the newsstand. He was dressed better than the President. He slipped two cigars into his jacket and only paid for a newspaper.”

“Probably it wasn't like that,” Norma said for his sake.

“If I had the money I'd take us to a movie,” Gainer said, and when she didn't pick up on it he brightened and said, “Why don't we go to a music store and play some Cole Porter or someone?”

At that moment Norma was thinking of the father, wondering how he'd treated job applicants, those without all the qualifications trying for their first niche. Had he ever knowingly let one slip through? She wanted to believe he had, more than one.

One more employment agency.

At 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Norma smoothed the legs of her stockings and went in, chin up, with a faint smile. She asked for an application as though she were asking to pass the salt at her own dinner party, hesitating before adding a please. She didn't print, she scribbled, gave her age as twenty-one. She was a Bachelor of Arts graduate of Bennington, had majored in both Visual Communication and English Literature. She had worked two summers, one at BBD&O, the other at Doubleday. She would accept an editorial position in publishing or, second choice, a programming assistant's job at one of the major television networks. For references she gave two names she had memorized from the copy of
Fortune
magazine she'd purposely glanced through at the newsstand on the way up.

The employment agency woman considered the application and smiled. She offered Norma a chair, a cigarette, a cup of coffee, another smile. Did Norma have time to go on an interview that day? Not today, Norma told her, or tomorrow either for that matter, because she had so many interviews. She used the glass that framed a Mondrian print to approve her hair and went out before the woman could ask another word.

If nothing else, it put some altitude into Norma's spirit. It was just good to know she could pull it off. In a way, she'd helped herself to a compliment, she thought, but from another side of it, didn't she wish it hadn't been an impersonation?

She found Gainer outside on Fifth Avenue talking to a man about Saint Patrick's Cathedral across the way, the possibility of its spires falling and killing a lot of shoppers on their way to Saks. Those high old stones appeared loose and when last had anyone climbed up to inspect them? The man did a straight face and said he'd take it up with the cardinal. He was a vendor of big pretzels and Norma felt obliged to buy one. She and Gainer shared it on the walk home. Up Park Avenue, past all the money, brass water hydrants polished for the better dogs, doormen wearing white gloves as though they might contaminate.

Going crosstown between Third and Second avenues Norma's nose led her eyes to a neighborhood bakery that had a penciled sign taped to its window.

Help wanted.

Norma went in and the baker-owner, a Mr. Larkin, said nicely that he doubted she'd want the job. It wasn't just selling cookies, the hours were bad and the pay wasn't even union scale.

No matter to Norma.

Almost as clearly as she'd seen the
help wanted
in his window, Larkin read the
help needed
in her eyes. He told her to wear white.

She would have to wait until her first pay to get the required white outfit. However, next day when she showed up to work, Larkin let her wear one of his white shirts and a pair of trousers from a linen supply company.

The trousers were overstarched, ironed with such pressure the fabric stuck to itself. Norma had to force her feet down into the legs of them and, of course, they were too large in every way. She cuffed them up four inches three times, used several turns of twine for a belt.

Larkin also provided a white cotton hat with a puffy crown to contain her hair. She had to safety pin a large tuck in the band of it. Her shoes were from the mother's trunk. The only comfortable enough pair. Medium high stacked heels in a navy suede from Bendel's. The first smudge of flour that got on them Larkin made her take them off.

The problem with going barefoot was that the floor around the sink was somewhat wet and by stepping there and around Norma's under-feet picked up flour. It was like walking on paste. More and more of it accumulated, hardened and became a sort of sole.

Larkin was a good, practical baker. Eclairs and Boston cream pies were about as fancy as he went. No flaky pastries, not even a strudel. He did everything in a hurry.

Norma felt that she had to match him. Part of her job was to keep all the utensils clean and all the mixing vats, baking pans and trays. As fast as she scrubbed them, Larkin put them back to use. The air there always held motes of flour and fragrances. Loaves baking. Whenever Larkin removed them from the oven and turned them out of their tins, Norma stood close, all the more to enjoy breathing. Then there was the wonderful sweeter smell of layers for cakes cooking and sugar cookies getting their bottoms browned.

Norma's work hours were from four to midnight. Two-fifty an hour. That came to eighty a week after taxes and everything. On the W-2 forms she claimed one dependent.

The first work night she walked home barefoot because she couldn't get her shoes on.

Gainer had been waiting for the sound of her on the stairs. He was standing in the open doorway. She climbed the six flights up to him. He had his best smile for her and tried not to look sleepy. He hugged her around the hips. She patted the back of his head, which was like kissing with her hand.

Larkin had given her a couple of eclair mistakes and a lopsided loaf of rye to take home.

Gainer exaggerated his delight and she loved him for that.

She ran some water in the bathtub, sat on the edge and put her feet in to soak. The flour and water and now street dirt were like a hardened plaster. She could hardly flex her toes.

When she told Gainer what it was, they laughed. He took off his clothes and kneeled in the water in the tub. She tried to stop him but he wouldn't. He scraped and rubbed with his fingers until the flour became doughy and broke away and her feet were clean.

“What did you do while I was at work?”

“Read mostly. The television was too snowy.”

“Just read?”

“For a while I sat in the window and watched. Saw a woman kick a man and then kiss him. Before that I saw a girl in a bathroom pull something out of herself.”

“You promised to stay in. Did you?”

The fib was in his mouth but he didn't tell it. “I went around the block a couple of times. I talked with a guy who said he was a policeman. I don't think he was because he had on a dirty T-shirt and an old leather vest. Another guy lying in a doorway asked me for a cigarette.”

Norma couldn't reprimand him. Not doing so, she realized, was permission. Serious, eyes to eyes, she made a rule for whenever he was out on the street and anyone got mean, started acting crazy or tried to touch him.

“What should
you
do?” she asked, testing.

“Run!”

That first job of Norma's as flunky to a kind baker helped them get the first place of their own. Like Vicky's it was the highest to walk up to, situated at the rear of an older building. One long everything room that Norma and Gainer scrubbed down and rolled yellow paint onto. Yellow because it seemed the happiest of all the little sample chips, but when painted it was too much yellow and they couldn't get used to it.

They bought what they needed to cook and eat with. And a pair of twin size mattresses. Whatever else went into the apartment came from the streets, from the unwanted furniture and other things people put out at the curb on a specified night every month for the city sanitation department trucks to take away.