The Penny (6 page)
O
n Tuesday morning, the first day I was supposed to work at Shaw Jewelers, I scrubbed up twice with castile soap and left a murky ring in our pink bathtub. I dressed in the most grown-up clothes I could find—a hand-me-down skirt of Jean’s and a white blouse with a ruffled collar. I tamed my next-to-impossible hair by winding each strand around a finger and shoved it away from my face with the teeth of a plastic bandeau.
“Here. Stand still. I got an idea,” Mama said when I stepped into her room to show her.
“What?”
“You just wait.” The next thing I knew, she brandished a lipstick tube. “I sure do think a daub of this might help.”
I stood in front of her bureau mirror with my feet planted apart and my face turned expectantly to hers. She unscrewed the tube to reveal a wand the color of cherry sherbet, which she lightly applied to the O of my mouth. After she stepped back to admire the results, she shook her head in dissatisfaction. “Something else. Just a minute.” Mama rummaged in her drawer again and pulled out her face powder. She clicked open the compact and waved the powder puff. “The most important thing about getting out in the world, especially with somebody like Miss Shaw”—she patted and blotted the welt on my chin the whole time she talked—“is that everything’s got to look right.” She stepped back again and, this time, deemed my face acceptable. She snapped the compact shut and stood surveying me like she had wrought a miracle.
Daddy gave me a look, too, the minute I walked into the den and started straightening my skirt pleats. I knew from experience what he was thinking about when he looked at me that way. It was the same expression I’d seen him use when he first laid eyes on Marianne Thompson and he looked her good up and down. He was thinking how I belonged to him. He was thinking how he was the parent and he could make me do whatever he wanted.
“What you got lipstick on for?”
Mama said things needed to look right. It was her idea.
But Mama didn’t say a word. She stood still, her eyes wide like she was the one who had gotten caught, and not me.
“You wipe that paint off your mouth right now.” He yanked out the filthy rag he kept in his back pocket to wipe the sweat off his face while he worked, and it came flying through the air toward me. “You don’t talk to nobody on your way down there to that job. Or on your way home, either, you hear me? Because I’ll know. I’ll know if you go someplace you’re not supposed to go.”
Although Mama had been lighthanded with the lipstick, I could feel the wax she’d applied to my lips now smudged on my teeth. Already, out of nerves, I’d done a fine job scraping my lips clean. I’d scraped plenty of skin off, too. I rubbed my mouth with the rag, which tasted sour and gritty. What lipstick remained didn’t leave much of a stain. I threw it back to Daddy and he tucked it where it belonged.
“Jean,” Daddy said, “you go get your sister when she’s done. I don’t want her in the street looking like a loose tramp.”
The last thing Jean wanted was to be responsible for escorting me home. She wanted to argue with him, I could tell. For a split second, I saw anger flare in her eyes and worried she was about to start up the arguments again. The last thing she needed to do was get Daddy riled up right now and, knowing my sister, that’s exactly what she’d do. I wanted her to hush up. I didn’t want him to hurt her. I never could be sure of Jean. You’d think she’d have learned by now that the only thing she’d gain by goading Daddy on would be a quick kick to her rear.
Thankfully, Daddy never gave her the chance to get him wound up. He kept his eyes on me. “The first money you get from that job goes to pay me back the money you stole, you hear me, girl?”
I told him I heard him.
“The whole time you’re in that jewelry shop, I want you to be thinking how you stole from me, you hear?”
I heard that, too.
“Don’t you go stealing anything from Shaw Jewelers. Guess we all know how your mind works, don’t we? You thought of how much you could make selling one piece of her jewelry—a bracelet or a ring? You’d make more doing that one thing than you’ll make working for her all summer. You thought about that?”
How good it felt to get away from our flat, even with Mama waving me off from the whitewashed stoop, her gaze heavy. Her eyes bore into my shoulders until I reached the corner and turned. I glanced back and saw her in her apron shading her eyes and waving good-bye.
I knew Jean would do as told, loitering around the movie posters at the Fox, perusing every name at the bottom of the bill as it became smaller and less distinct and the letters ran together, things like “song lyrics by Ira Gershwin, produced by William Perlberg, written for the screen and directed by George Seaton,” until I left the jewelry shop and she was forced to shepherd me home.
Stepping inside Miss Shaw’s shop was like stepping into a sparkling globe of gold and cut glass and gemstones. The display cases buzzed with lighting, their metal edges warm from the bulbs. I couldn’t find a thumbprint or a speck of dust anywhere and, for the moment, I felt giddy and unsteady, surrounded by treasure. In a voice just about as creamy as Mama’s potatoes, Miss Shaw said, “I’ve been planning a great many chores for you, Jenny. Are you ready to help? I’ll be sure to keep you busy while I have you.”
For years I’d been hearing the rumors about the lady who stood in front of me, and Daddy’s voice had been among the loudest of all. “That lady thinks she’s God’s gift to Grand Avenue.” “That lady holds her nose so high, she can hardly see down it at who’s below her.” “That lady thinks everybody has to work twice as hard to be half as good as she is,” he’d said, and I’d believed him. Last night he’d remarked, “Don’t know what a lady like that would want with a girl like you.”
But now I got to thinking that everything around Miss Shaw looked so fine and everything looked so perfect, people just got scared of her. And from the way she endured their whispers with her set-smile face, I guessed she liked to keep it that way.
I realized I was chewing my bottom lip sore.
She said, “You’ll be paid fifty cents an hour. Does that sound fair?”
It sounded fair, and then some. I could pay Daddy back fast.
“It can be a good thing for a young lady like you to have a job,” she noted in her practiced voice, as if she wrote the book on scales and we were starting a piano lesson. I kept thinking how she said
“a young lady like you”
and how she didn’t know what she was talking about.
You got no idea,
I wanted to tell her.
You got no idea at all what I’m like.
“I had a job like this when I was your age. I ran a cash register when I was still so short, I had to stand on a box to reach it.”
My ears perked up. This small hint of her past piqued my interest.
So Miss Shaw had a job, too?
“Are you ready to begin?”
Thinking about the whole thing, I was struck dumb with fright and self-consciousness. Even running my fingers over the penny hidden in my pocket didn’t help. “Are you sure you want me in here?” I blurted. “I’m not good with this stuff. If you wanted to find somebody to work for you, you should have put an ad in the newspaper or a sign at the window. Plenty of folks would walk by here and see a sign if you posted one.”
She held me under close scrutiny with her bright, mysterious eyes. It never occurred to me that her employing
anybody
could be as much an act of faith for her as it was for me. “Wasn’t it you who stopped the milk truck and made the baby in the basket swing and knocked Bennett’s record away?”
Of course it was me. I’d already answered that question over the telephone.
“Do you think you know better than I do how to run my shop?”
“No,” I floundered. “I’m not trying to tell you how to run anything.”
“You, Miss Jenny Blake, are the person I want.”
I clamped my mouth shut. I’d just get myself into more of a mess the more I tried to talk her out of it.
“It doesn’t make sense to interview a whole string of people I don’t know and try to discern which of them will be trustworthy.”
You don’t understand,
I wanted to shout at her.
I’m the least trustworthy person of all.
She smiled at me. “Now. Are you ready to get to work, or are we going to stand here talking about this all day?”
She’d talked me into a corner again. I didn’t dare tell her I wasn’t ready.
Miss Shaw started me off with a box of tiny price tags no bigger than Chiclets, each fastened to a length of string. She had me practice my numbers with a black fountain pen, and when she was satisfied that I could inscribe small digits without smudging zeros and eights, she had me write down prices, affix each tag to the stem of a men’s watch, and tuck each tag beneath each watchband to my liking as I arranged it inside the display case.
I thought,
No wonder she saved this job for me.
Tying string and writing eights and zeros proved easy enough for my small hands, but would have been impossible for Miss Shaw and her white gloves.
Miss Shaw made me feel guilty for even thinking I
shouldn’t
be there. For a while, I didn’t allow my mind to wander while I wrote numbers for her. But the second she placed me at the top of a ladder in the middle of the shop and instructed me to dust hundreds of dangling crystals on the chandelier overhead, my mind galloped off of its own accord again.
Here I was, standing at a dizzying height, the most untouchable and intriguing mystery in all of St. Louis counting the change in her cash register below me.
Rainbows darted across the ceiling as I took each piece of faceted glass and wiped it clean. I guess maybe I put too much stock in reading people by their hands, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those white gloves Miss Shaw always wore. To me, they represented refinement and style that I would never have. Each time I saw Miss Shaw, those white linen gloves looked as pressed and fresh as if they’d just come out of the cellophane. They never had a speck of dirt on them.
I didn’t know what she could want with me.
Each time I released a crystal on the chandelier, it tapped the others with a short, light ring.
“How often you going to want me to do this?” I asked Miss Shaw. It gave me the shivers standing up this high. It gave me the shivers thinking about Marianne Thompson’s murmured tales of Miss Shaw visiting some unmarked grave and how they might be true. “You going to expect me to do this every time I come in?”
“I dust the lights every two weeks and the chandelier once a month. Not nearly so often as some of the other things.”
“Well,” I murmured from beneath my arm. “Guess it’s nice of you to save it for me.”
Her chin lifted at my impertinence. I wondered that she didn’t tell me to climb down this minute and find my way home. When she turned toward the wall to set receipt books on a shelf, I saw the row of covered buttons go straight along her spine. I guess we were both testing each other.
“When you’re finished there, I’ll have you sweep the floors,” she said.
For the rest of the afternoon, I followed the list of chores that she laid out before me the way she might lay out crumbs for a sparrow. She coaxed me along to the next duty only after she was certain I had fully mastered the one before. I wrapped several boxes in brown paper and tied them with string before Miss Shaw left briefly to carry them to the post office. I organized the gemstone rings according to color. Every so often, as I did so, I would cast a furtive glance in her direction and think,
I’ll bet Marianne didn’t make up the story about a grave. I’ll bet she saw it. . . . I’ll bet she did.
Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the job Miss Shaw offered me. Except for making money, I suddenly didn’t want to get to know her. For all her talk about me being trustworthy, I sincerely doubted that I could trust
her.
I’d learned a long time ago that I couldn’t rely on anyone. I couldn’t keep from feeling, every time I glanced warily at her, that I’d almost caught Miss Shaw watching me covertly, too.
When I finished arranging the remainder of the gemstones, I stopped where I stood to test my theory. I wanted to know if she was studying me. Sure enough, without hesitating Miss Shaw asked, “Would you like something else to do, Jenny? Or do you want to call it a day instead?”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall, feigning indifference.
“That’s fine, if you want to go,” she said to release me. “Now, when will you return?”
Well, she sure didn’t have to ask me that. She’d been the one to assign my hours in the first place. I repeated my schedule faultlessly and she seemed pleased that I remembered. Just as I headed out, Miss Shaw called to me, “You did a fine job today, Jenny,” as if it was important to her to compliment me.
“Thank you.” My response sounded just as stiff and formal as she did.
“You’ll be paid on the first and the fifteenth of every month. Does that sound acceptable?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
Just before I turned away again, I got the impression she might want to say something more. Her gloved hand pressed flat against the glass countertop. She looked like she was trying to hold on to something that wasn’t there.
“Do you need me to do something else?” I asked.
But she must have thought better of it because she shook her head and waved me on.
“You don’t need me to stay awhile longer?” I asked.
“You’re fine,” Miss Shaw insisted. “Go on.”
All the way home in the streetcar with Jean, I couldn’t stop wondering why Miss Shaw had wanted to call me back. I kept wondering if she wanted to tell me something. Everyone said Miss Shaw had too many secrets.
All the way to Wyoming Street, I kept picturing her face, unsure of what she could want with me.
I
t took me a while to figure out why Jean would walk into the kitchen the next day and bring up one of her old birthday parties again. She knew she had a captive audience, I guess, because she caught me in the middle of cleaning the goldfish bowl. I had to listen to her while the fish swam small, desperate loop-de-loops in the jar where I’d poured half the water.
As she chased the fish with her finger and I sifted through the brightly-colored rocks on the bottom, she brought up this ancient history. It was just her luck, she told me, having a party planned two days after President Roosevelt declared war on Japan.
This part wasn’t new to me. I’d seen the photos of myself taken with Mama’s Brownie camera—me only three months old, sitting buckled in a baby carrier on the table, wearing a sleeper. In the black-and-white pictures, I’m not even as big around as Jean’s three-layer birthday cake.
“You don’t have to tell me about it.” I filled the bowl under the faucet and looked sideways at it, making sure I’d scraped all the silt off the glass. “I’ve heard all this before.”
“Maybe you have,” she hinted mysteriously. “Maybe you haven’t.”
I sloshed water on the counter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you might want to stop acting so smart, Jenny Blake. There might still be things you don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Like what Daddy did that day to Mama.”
So Jean had done it to me again. No matter how I tried to stand up against my sister, she always managed to find ways to pique my interest. “You never said a thing about that.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, smarty pants.”
As Jean related the details, I began to figure out she wanted to make sure
she
had secrets to reveal, too. She wanted to rub it in that
I
wasn’t the only one privy to secrets, even though I’d started working for Miss Shaw.
“I’ve been around much longer than you have. That means
I
know a lot more.”
“I don’t see that’s anything to brag about, do you?”
My sister recalled things in brief snapshots, the way every four-year-old remembers. Halfway through the party, the door opening. Daddy strutting in wearing a uniform with brass buttons. Jean asking him, “Who are you? You don’t look like my daddy.”
The way she described it, I could see Daddy turning in the center of the room so everyone would admire the uniform. He stood with his arms extended and his brimmed cap with brass insignia cocked to one side and the jacket wrinkling because he wore it buttoned clear to his hips.
The fight came after everyone had gone home, Jean told me as I poured the goldfish into its clean bowl and waited to see how it would adjust—after mothers of the guests had taken their daughters by hand and dragged them home. Daddy told Mama he had to join the army and leave us. He told her that if he went off to war, maybe that would make his own daddy proud.
Daddy never talked much about not being good enough to please his own father, but I’d always known, from stories like this that Jean told me, how Daddy hinted that he couldn’t measure up, that no matter what he tried to do to make his father approve of him, his father never did. When he was a boy, Daddy came down with rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart. Even though he wasn’t too weak to do handyman jobs and buy booze and support our family now, he’d once been too sickly to play football or walk far when his own daddy took him hunting or join in with the boys who chopped and hauled firewood in the fall. My grandpa, who I’d barely known before he died, had always acted slightly embarrassed about his son.
Hearing those stories made me think how hurt people are the ones who hurt people.
Daddy had let Mama grieve a good while the day of the party, Jean recounted, before he finally told her it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t joining the army after all. Mama cowered in the corner, and Jean was sure Mama was afraid he’d hit her if she admitted she wanted him to leave so he wouldn’t beat her up anymore. Daddy laughed hysterically at Mama’s bewildered reaction, saying how he’d wanted to impress everybody at the party but it was all a joke. He confessed that he’d borrowed the uniform to fool everybody. He confessed that he wanted to leave us all and go into the army more than he’d ever wanted anything else because it would prove something to his own daddy. He said he thought it was high time he lived some adventure somewhere because he sure wasn’t living it around here. He said they’d turned him away from the army when he’d tried to sign up. They wouldn’t take him to fight because, even now, years after the ridicule he’d endured from his own daddy, his heart was too weak; the army medics wouldn’t clear him to go fight.
Jean told me everything she remembered about the borrowed uniform and her birthday cake and Mama crying after everybody left. And you know how it is when you’re four years old. Jean said she never could figure out whether Mama cried because Daddy teased about leaving, or whether Mama cried because he wasn’t leaving at all.
Word had gotten around the neighborhood that I worked for Miss Shaw. Even the Pattersons below and the Smiths next door had heard and so were anxious to share theories about her. Mrs. Patterson whispered, “Oh, yes. The grave is more than a rumor, for sure.” “Since no one knows about her past, I’ll bet she’s running that business by ill-gotten means,” said Ralph Patterson. “What I heard is that she’s a lonely woman with a runaway lover,” said Miss Mona Miner, Mrs. Patterson’s best friend.
The largest amount of speculation besides the price of her car and the name of the beautician who styled her hair was over whether there truly
was
a grave in Miss Shaw’s life and who, for heaven’s sake, could be the person in it?
I heard as many notions as there were people. I could give you a list a mile long. “I heard it’s her grandmother’s, who she could never quite let go,” said Mrs. Patterson. “A sister,” said Mrs. Shipley, who accosted me one morning in front of our building. “It’s her young man who went off to war but who returned after being dishonorably discharged,” said Mrs. Smith. Add to that the list of suggestions Jean had managed to gather: a playmate, a husband no one knew about, her maiden aunt, a beloved housekeeper, a gentleman she had admired but never told.
As much as I distrusted Miss Shaw, I distrusted myself even more.
I’m not good enough to work for a person like her.
Yet, intrigue more than the fifty cents an hour she paid me kept me coming back.
The back room at Shaw Jewelers could be reached only by pushing aside a dark velvet curtain. When Miss Shaw asked, “Would you like to see where I spend most of my time?” I followed her through the opening to a shop bench lined with magnifiers and an Optivisor and scales and a gem scope. There sat tweezers and cutters and a set of screwdrivers so small, they might have belonged to an elf. A box of detached watch faces sat beneath a light with more joints in it than a praying-mantis leg.
I had at least a hundred questions about the bizarre items lined along the bench. I wouldn’t ask them, though, because I was still so nervous around Miss Shaw. I rehearsed words over and over in my head until I got brave enough to say them. The only words I managed to blurt out were simple sentences as I bustled uneasily around Miss Shaw’s shop.
“You want me to vacuum by the counter?”
“Is it okay if I move the ladder to get the boxes by the wall?”
“Is that the fly swatter you want me to use over by the shelf?”
Miss Shaw might have been formal, but she was also kind. I felt no small amount of guilt for not trusting her. Distrusting Miss Shaw seemed worse than not trusting Eleanor Roosevelt. All the same, maybe it was everybody talking, but something pushed me to ask questions every time I saw her.
Miss Shaw snapped the light on at her workbench, which made us both squint. “This is a true white, bright light that allows you to identify every flaw a stone might have. If you examine something with a regular bulb, you don’t always see its true color. But in this”— she shoved the box of watch faces aside and picked up a gemstone with a pair of tweezers— “you see every facet. You see
inside
of something. And when you do that, you find out exactly what it’s worth.”
After she let me look at the cuts inside the tourmaline, she set the tweezers aside and showed me how she went about polishing metals. She applied something creamy from a pot and flipped the switch on a felt-covered wheel. She held a tarnished ring against the moving wheel and, next thing I knew, it wasn’t dull anymore.
“When you finish arranging watches, you’ll find a cloth beside the cash register,” she said, peering at something else through her eye loupe. “I’ll expect you to polish the cut-glass bowls each time you come in.”
I knew I was being dismissed, yet I stood there a beat longer. “My sister talks about nothing but Grace Kelly,” I offered. “She thinks she’s going to turn out like a movie star, but all she’s doing is going away to secretarial school.”
Miss Shaw glanced up from the loupe. “You’re going to miss her, then?”
Well, of course I wouldn’t miss Jean. Why would I miss somebody who’d rather I disappear off the face of the earth than breathe air anywhere in her general vicinity? I’d only volunteered the information about Grace Kelly as a sort of barter. I’d offer Miss Shaw some tidbit about me and she might reciprocate, which meant I could return home with some morsel of valuable Miss-Shaw intelligence with which to antagonize my sister. Besides this job being a way to earn money, it was the perfect opportunity for a scouting mission.
Everyone on Wyoming Street would listen to me if I had something to say about Miss Shaw. I could explain the process by which she drove her Cadillac to the country and never came home with so much as a redbug on her grill. I could clear up questions about how she never wrinkled her crisp summer skirts nor nicked the heels of her shoes. I could unravel the mysteries of her birthplace, the source of her fortune, the fascinating circumstances that brought her to owning this store. And I’d have bet you my wages, all I could save of them, that her gloves would be clean as starched linen each time she came out of the workroom. Even though I’d seen the polishing rouge and tarnish rubbing off on them myself.
But except for asking if I’d miss my sister, Miss Shaw let my stories about Jean and Grace Kelly go by without offering so much as an iota of information about herself.
There are times when I think back and I can picture Mama happy. There are times I remember her moving along the clothesline in our backyard, pegging bedsheets to the wire with pins. I used to run through the sheets with my arms outspread, pretending I lived in billowy, white hallways. And Mama laughed with me.
It never occurred to me that someone else’s mother might have scolded them for doing such a thing. Only later, when I saw Marianne Thompson’s mother berating her for getting the clean laundry dirty all over again, did I realize that Mama could’ve found fault with the fun I was having. How lovely that she didn’t.
The smell in the air on one particular sunny day was the honey-sweet of the neighbors’ lopsided lilac bush and the bite of the sun and the clean of detergent. I felt free because Mama seemed happy. I came to the end of the row and stood with the hem of a sheet draped over my messy curls, and Mama shook her head at me and said, “Jenny, you remind me of a bride.” Which made me stand straighter, even though I was little, because brides were always beautiful and tall.
“Were you a bride when you married Daddy?” I asked her.
Her fingers hesitated for a brief beat before she pinched the clothespin. “Yes, of course I was. I was a beautiful bride,” she said.
“Was Daddy handsome?”
“Yes, of course. He certainly was.”
“Is that why you married him? Because he was handsome?” I wrapped the sheet tighter around my head and began to hang on and twirl. I felt Mama’s hands close over my shoulders as she began to unwind me again.
That was the day she told me she married Daddy because he drove in circles around the high school for hours, insisting she have lunch with him. That was the day she told me she married him because he threatened to beat up any other boy in the school if he so much as talked to her.
She talked to me about my daddy that day, but I believe fear held her back then, too. For many days after that, I clung to her happiness. I remember loving how the sun smelled.
The elm tree outside Jean’s window had grown so tall that it rivaled the maple we used to climb in the front yard. Most of the time Jean didn’t let me come in her room, so when she did, I felt like I’d been invited to visit one of the most elite places in St. Louis. After my first week at Shaw Jewelers, Jean decided on a whim to let me in. She was sifting through piles of her movie magazines, showing me her favorite issues, when I noticed limbs jostling outside her second-story window. The
tap tap tap
on the glass window sent my pulse speeding.
“Oh.” Jean pushed her magazines aside and rose to her feet like this happened every day of the week.
“Who is
that
?” I hopped to my feet beside her, almost knocking over her bedside lamp. I caught the shade at the last minute to keep it from crashing to the floor.
“It’s just Billy.” She unlatched her window and slid it open. The boy who jumped inside was handsome, with earnest eyes, a dreamy square jaw, and sandy hair curling at his ears no matter how he’d tried to tame it with Brylcreem. He was wearing enough hair cream to asphyxiate everyone who lived in our flat, and then some.
Jean shoved her magazines back under her bed, made sure the cuffs of her jeans were rolled up tight, and slipped furtively into her sneakers. “We’re going out now and you can’t tell anybody,” she ordered me.
“What?”
“You heard what I said.”
If you counted on one hand all the things I knew about romance, you’d have at least three fingers left over. One thing I
did
know about love was this: Jean had never done anything like this before.
“Wait a minute.” I didn’t know exactly what I wanted her to wait for. I only knew if she left through the window and Daddy found out about it before she got home, I’d pay the price right along with her.