Anybody Can Do Anything (12 page)

I was doing the mouth when I heard the studio door open and close and then voices. The appointment said, “I vant yust the head. Not the body. Yust the head.” Marilee said, “Four dollars, payable in advance, entitles you to four poses and one five-by-seven without the folder. A tinted photo is two dollars extra. Now do you want to fix up any before I take you?”

“No,” said the appointment. “Yust the head. My modder vants to see how I look before she die.”

“Okay, honey,” said Marilee. “Now sit right here. Look over here. Look over here. Look right at me. Now look up here at my hand. Now you’re all done. You can git your proofs Wednesday.” The door closed and from my work-table I watched Yust the Head’s black torso go toiling up the steep hill.

My next picture was also a brunette but with brown eyes, it said in the corner. I gave her olive skin, orangy red lips and golden highlights in her dark brown hair.

Marilee’s next customer was a fat girl with scarlet cheeks, who shyly asked if she could be posed to look thinner. “The camera don’t lie,” said Marilee heartlessly. “Four dollars in advance, do you wish it tinted and what type folder?”

I peeked around the screen. The fat girl was crouched on the piano bench on which Marilee posed her subjects, looking terrified as if she were about to have a tonsillectomy without anaesthetic. Marilee came out from under her black cloth and squinted at the girl. “Come on, honey,” she said winking, “let’s have a nice big smile, look at the birdie, now. Tweet, tweet.”

She adjusted her light so that its several hundred watts illuminated the fat girl’s miserable face harshly without any shadows, reduced her eyes to squinting pinpoints and changed her from a nice shiny apple to a doughy pudding. Still not satisfied Marilee clicked over on her shiny black slippers, gripped the girl by the chin and the back of her head and forced her head to the side and back into a most unnatural tortured position.

“That’ll give you a neck,” she said. “Now let’s have a great big smile.”

The girl tried again. Marilee said, “Oh, golly, honey, that was a dream and would it look good tinted. Our tinting’s only two dollars for a great big five-by-seven. Now look right
at me. Think of that boy-friend. Now to the left. O.K. All done. You can git your proofs Wednesday. With your coloring you should really have one tinted.” The girl mumbled something and Marilee said, “That’ll be two dollars. All tinting’s paid for in advance.” I checked my colors to be sure I had a full tube of red for those enormous cheeks.

At noon Marilee came into examine my work. I had all my finished pictures on the rack and was frankly proud of them. Marilee squinted her eyes, clicked her tongue with her teeth and said, “God, honey, you’re not gettin’ the idea at all. Not enough color. When people pay for tinting they want color. Now here watch me.”

She grabbed one of my best pictures, a redhead with copper-colored hair, amber eyes and coral lips, and went to work. She changed the hair to bright unrelieved orange, the eyes to turquoise blue with large white dots in the pupils, scrubbed plenty of magenta on the cheeks and lips and then carefully, with a toothpick dipped in paint, put red jabs in the corners of the eyes and outlined the nostrils in bright red. The girl, except for the color of her hair, now looked exactly like Marilee and exactly like all the other pictures. Marilee said, “That’s better, eh? Now fix up the rest of
‘em.”

At first I was resentful, then I thought, “How ridiculous—it’s Marilee’s studio and if she wants purple lips and flaming red nostrils it’s her privilege.” So I tinted the photographs the way she wanted them and the work went much faster.

By Saturday noon I had caught up with all the orders and Marilee and I were “real girl chums.” I knew all about Mama, who was a Rosicrucian, a diabetic and raised lovebirds. I knew all about sister Alma who was married to a sailor and followed him to “Frisco, Dago, L.A. and Long Beach.” I knew about Marilee’s boy-friend, Ernie, who was a chiropractor and would love to give me a treatment any night after work.

She said, “Honest to God, some nights Mama is all tied up in knots and Ernie works her over and you can hear her bones crack a block away—it’s just like pistol shots. Mama says she don’t think she could carry on if it wasn’t for Ernie.”

I didn’t want any bones cracking like pistol shots and I didn’t relish being worked over by Ernie but I didn’t want to hurt Marilee’s feelings so I said I’d call her and set a date.

She said, “Gosh, honey, it’s been like a shot in the arm havin’ you here. I’m real sorry the work’s all caught up but I’ll call you the minute I pile up some more orders.”

Marilee gave me $28.45 in crumpled bills and a little package. “Open it,” she said, winking and smiling. “It’s a surprise. Go wan.” I did and there in a little leather frame was a tinted photograph of me. I could tell it was me because the hair was orange. “Oh, it’s beautiful! Thank you, Marilee,” I squealed, looking with horror at the turquoise-blue, hard, sexy eyes, flaring red-lined nostrils and purple lips.

Marilee said, “You remember that day I asked you to pose for me so I could adjust the camera?” I remembered. “I tinted it last night,” she said.

I kissed her good-bye and promised to have her out to dinner but I never did, because when I went to look for her, after working for a rabbit grower, a lawyer, a credit bureau, a purse seiner, a florist, a public stenographer, a dentist, a laboratory of clinical medicine and a gangster, I found her little shop closed, the bespectacled brides and sailors and girls gone from her show window.

I asked the shoe repair man next door if he knew what had happened to Marilee but he said, “I dona know. People coma and goa inna depresh.” The printer, however, told me that Marilee’s mother had died (I wondered if those treatments of Ernie’s with her poor old bones cracking like pistol shots had anything to do with her sudden demise) and she and Ernie had gone to California to be with her sis. I
thought that Ernie and Marilee could work out a dual business. After she had twisted and bent a customer into one of her poses, Ernie could give him a treatment to get him back in shape.

Mr. Webber, the rabbit grower, who was tall and thin and had a high-domed forehead like pictures of the Disciples, was raising Chinchilla rabbits and trying to organize the other growers. For two weeks he laboriously wrote out reports and letters in longhand and I copied them. In the afternoons he made tea over an alcohol stove and as we drank it he told me how much he admired Mary. He said that she was a flame in this burned-out world.

Mr. Webber was as gentle and soft as his rabbits and never ever pointed out my mistakes but secretly, behind his arms, wrote over them in ink. At the end of the two weeks he gave me a check for seventy-five dollars, which was twenty-five dollars more than I expected. The extra money, I knew, was a tribute to Mary rather than an appreciation of my efficiency.

After Mr. Webber, I was out of work for three days but I wasn’t as sad as I might have been because of that extra money, so I painted the kitchen, using a very remarkable yellow paint which never dried. It looked very nice but it grew more and more irritating as weeks and weeks went by and we still had to pry dishes off the drainboards and peel the children out of the breakfast nook.

On Wednesday night Mary told me she had found me a job with a darling old lawyer. I protested that I didn’t know anything about legal forms but Mary said they were easy. All you had to do was go through the files and copy. She also explained that the old lawyer used a dictaphone and gave me a demonstration on the coffee table of how to use one, which wasn’t too helpful as I’d never even seen one.

However, the next morning I reported for work at Mr. O’Reilly’s law office, which was in an old but very respectable building in the financial district. Mr. O’Reilly had thick gray hair, an oily manner and a most disconcerting habit of appearing behind me suddenly and soundlessly.

By the trial and error method I got the dictaphone to work, learned about legal forms and phraseology, but I needn’t have bothered. Mr. O’Reilly had very little work and the little he did have he didn’t attend to. All he really wanted me there for was to talk about sex. He edged into it gracefully and gradually and by constantly referring to cases tried to make it seem as if he were merely discussing business. When I left he promised to mail me my salary but he never did.

Mary finally admitted that she had never seen Mr. O’Reilly but had been told about the job by an elevator starter in another building.

Then I went to work in a credit bureau typing very dull reports implying that everybody in Seattle but the President of the First National Bank had rotten credit. One day when my boss was out of his office I sneaked over and looked up our family’s credit. We took up almost a whole drawer and from what I read it sounded as if the credit bureau not only wouldn’t recommend us for credit, they wouldn’t even let us pay cash. This, however, didn’t make me feel too badly because I knew they didn’t like anybody.

The next job Mary got for me was taking dictation on a dock for a purse seiner, who was trying to settle an estate involving hundreds of relatives all named Escvotrizwitz and Trckvotisztz and Krje and living in places called Brk, Pec, Plav and Klujk. My shorthand, feeble enough in English, collapsed completely under Mr. Ljubovija’s barrage of Serbo-Croat mixed with a few By Gollies and Okays, which he fondly thought was English. Finally, I told him that if he’d give me a general idea of what he wanted to say and would spell out all the names, I would write the letters.

I could not understand why he wanted the letters in English when there was a good chance that, as none of the family including him, spoke it, not one would be able to read it, but he was insistent. To him, writing in English was synonymous with success. He was a very nice man and I loved sitting in the sun on the dock listening to the raspy-throated gulls, smelling the nice boaty smells of creosote and tar and watching the purse seiners work on their nets.

I ate my sandwiches on the dock and then walked up to a little restaurant for coffee. The restaurant, run by two enormously fat blond women who dressed in stiff white uniforms like nurses and always had beads of sweat on their upper lips, catered to the fishermen and specialized in Swedish Meat Balls, Veal Sylta, Potatis Pankaka, Ugnspannkaka, Mandel Skorpor, Kringlor, Hungarian Goulash and terrible little fruit salads filled with nuts and marshmallows and canned grapes, which they served with every order and seemed to believe gave the place an air of refinement.

My next job was working for a public stenographer, a large woman who wore wide patent leather belts around her big waist and had a most disconcerting habit of sniffing her armpits, reaching in her bottom drawer for her deodorant and applying it via the neck of her dress, when she was talking to clients.

The first time I saw Mrs. Pundril go through this little routine was when she was talking to a lumberman from Minnesota. He was in the midst of explaining a report, when suddenly she sniffed her right armpit, grabbed out her Mum, took off the lid, gouged some out with her right forefinger and with a great deal of maneuvering managed to apply it even though her blouse had a very high neck. As he watched, the lumberman’s face turned a dull red. I laughed so hard I had to stuff my handkerchief in my mouth and Mrs. Pundril was as unconcerned as though she were filling her pen.

After one week, Mrs. Pundril fired me. She said I wasn’t
fast enough for public stenography and I made too many errors. She pronounced them “eeroars.” I didn’t blame her for firing me, but it didn’t do my self-confidence any good. Then for a few weeks I typed bills for a florist, a dentist and a laboratory and then Mary got me the job with the gangster.

His name was Murray Adams, he had an office in a funny old building that housed beaded-bag menders, dream interpreters, corn removers and such, and I still don’t know what he intended to do. He was big and dark and handsome and wore an oyster-white fedora and a tan camel’s-hair overcoat even in the office, which was hot.

Mary met him in some oil promoter’s office and he asked her if she knew of a girl to sit in his office and answer his phone. Mary naturally said of course she did, her sister Betty, and so there I was.

Murray, he told me to call him that, told me that he’d been a member of a mob in Chicago and a rum runner on the Atlantic Coast and had “a bucket of ice in hock in Washington, D.C.” He was very sweet to me and used to take me out for coffee and tell me about different “dirty deals” he had gotten from different “babes,” but he used to make me nervous when he sat by the office window, which was on the second floor, pretending that he was holding a Tommy gun and mowing down the people in the street.

“Look at that bunch of slobs,” he’d say. “Not one of ‘em got anything on the ball. Jeeze I’d like to have a machine gun and ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, [he’d make motions of moving a machine gun back and forth] I’d let them all have it. Especially the dames.”

I don’t know why Murray had me and I certainly don’t know why he had a telephone because whenever he left the office he told me to tell whoever called that he wasn’t in and whenever he was in the office he said to tell whoever called that he was out. I had a typewriter but nothing to
type so I wrote letters to everyone I had ever known. Murray paid me in crisp new bills, twenty dollars a week, for three weeks and then left town owing his rent, telephone bill, and for his furniture. I never heard of him again.

“This is the best job I’ve ever gotten you,” Mary said. “You get twenty-five dollars a week for being Mr. Wilson’s private secretary and you have a chance to make thousands more on the dime cards.”

So I went to work for Mr. Wilson and his dime card scheme, which was the depression version of the present-day Pyramid Clubs.

Mr. Wilson, an advertising man, thought up the dime card scheme and if Seattle hadn’t been such a stuffy city he might have made a million dollars and I might have made about ten thousand.

The idea, as I remember it, was that you bought a printed share in Prosperity for two dollars—you turned your share and a dollar more into the Prosperity office, where I worked, and got an envelope containing a dime card (cards with round slots for ten dimes each and ten places for signatures)—and two more printed shares in prosperity. You sold your two shares for two dollars each, kept three of the four dollars to pay yourself back for the two dollars you spent on your original share, plus the one dollar turned into the office, had the other dollar changed into dimes, inserted them in the dime card and passed it to the person you bought your share from. That person took one dime from the card, signed his name and passed it back to the person he bought from. That person did the same, etc., etc., etc.