The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (17 page)

"Up, now," I said. "Quit lollygagging."

"Aren't you on fire," he said.

"I am trying to be. Though you're mighty wet tinder."

He didn't like that and was surly in rising, while my impatience grew brighter and hotter. I pinned my hair, washed my face in the basin, and dressed. He took ten minutes to attach his excuse for a collar. The dog on the corner would have been embarrassed by it.

I walked half a step in front of him to the streetcar stop, crossing over to the south line. It was all I could do not to run. "Might I presume that you have a destination in mind?" he said.

"Yes."

"Does the Sphinx intend to reveal it?"

"No."

I was afraid that he would refuse. A refusal would not be the end of the world, but considerably more than a week had passed since he had given me anything. Anything
nice.
So we got on the trolley with folded lips and stiff shoulders. A girl with two fluffy dogs on pink leads kept her pets out of our way.

Although I hadn't had a Sunday outing in months, I knew every route. A person remembers what she cares about. I led us flawlessly, riding to the terminal and then switching to the southern section of the Red Line, which dropped to the harbor at Long Beach. Pete and I didn't exchange a word until we saw the first glint of ocean as we came down from the rise planted with lettuce and ringed with flame orange poppies, which grew wild here. The field ran right down to the water, and I remembered Pa laughing at the idea of crops that might grow in salty air. Not one hundred feet from the poppies, ships were anchored.

"Are you going to run away to sea?" Pete said. "I'll wave my handkerchief from the shore."

"This is a place people go on a Sunday, for an outing."

"And what do those people do, once they get here?"

"Stroll. Take the sea air." I couldn't keep the excitement out of my voice; we could smell the ocean, with its tang and snap. Too much time had passed since I had come to the shore. Too much time had passed since I had gone anywhere. Since I had met Pete, weekends were spent on my lodging-room floor. Normally that fact didn't trouble me, but today it seemed a dreadful thing. Why had Pete come to Los Angeles if he never cared to see the Pacific Ocean in all its majesty? Or at least
think
about it. A different man, one who had simple, ordinary curiosity, would come here every week. Or would think about it.

Pete said, "You could have suggested an outing without making it such a mystery."

"I thought a mystery would make the outing more enjoyable," I said.

"You surprise me. Wouldn't you rather be stitching a seam, or self-improving? Are you sure you have time enough to take the air?"

I took an extra-deep breath, clowning for him. There was no telling how much time had passed since we had laughed together; now we spilled happily from the streetcar onto the thoroughfare in Long Beach, the brown ocean water lapping at the rocks only a few feet from the wooden sidewalk. The ocean here did not have the long glamour of the Santa Monica prospect. Littered with scraps of seaweed and crumpled paper cones, the sand smelled like fish. Shrill gulls called from farther down the beach, where they clustered around something glistening and dead. A small island—a big rock, really—thrust up from the surf not far from us, and that was all, except for the smooth sheet of water shading from green to blue, with lazy white curls breaking here and there, and the weak sun glittering all the way to the horizon. The tart, fishy air was tonic, and looking at the infinite reach of water made a pressure around my chest spring loose. Before me, the sea extended without a single wall or limit, a thrilling sight. Had I been alone, I might have run straight into the water, though I could not swim.

"Here's as far as we go. Here's where civilization ends. No-Hope Point," Pete said.

"An unfortunate way to look at it," I said, startled that his perception was so close to mine, his understanding so different.

"How else is there to look?" He pushed a small rock with his shoe until the rock dropped off the sidewalk into the shallow water. "This is the point where man stops and nature takes over."

"It's the point that man has driven
to.
It's the goal."

Pete gazed at the water, his hand over his hat brim to shade his eyes. "Seeing the land end like this makes me feel hemmed in. There might as well be a sign: here's as far as you are going, fellow."

"Goodness, Pete. Just look at that expanse! It's like a vast promise."

"That much is certainly true. A promise that you will not be going any further."

I was dismayed to feel the morning's annoyance sliding over me again so easily. "A promise of what is possible. A promise that you will never be caught. A promise that you can do more than you are doing right now."

"Nelly, are you trying to say something to me? Talk to me directly."

"I just wish that you could enjoy the ocean."

The wind off the water was whipping color into Pete's cheeks at the same time that the salty air made his silly mustache droop. I had never let myself think of it as silly before. He said, "And what would we do then, with all of our enjoyment?"

"I don't know."

"This isn't the fullest plan, is it?" His voice was gentle, and we strolled to the end of the sidewalk, where the gray boards dropped off to sand and rocks—mostly rocks. He kept his hand just under my elbow, not even touching, a gentlemanly distance, and we looked into the shallow brown water frothing over sharp stones. Had I taken us to Santa Monica, we would have seen adults and children playing on the broad stretch of tawny sand. Here, though, the land ended in rocks that dropped straight into the brown water, and ships sent out skiffs to unload their cargo. Long Beach was a place of commerce and ambition. I should have chosen a different destination.

"Is it time to go back?" he said.

"I'm afraid so."

"Why afraid?"

I looked out again over the brilliant ocean, the light painfully bright. "I think we had best not see each other again."

"Why is that, Nell?" His voice was soft. He did not draw his hand away.

"I—we aren't suited."

"You think not? Well then, it must be so."

"Though I'm very fond of you." Pete didn't speak, and fright seized me. "There is no one else. Please understand. Nor will there be."

"Don't be silly."

"I wouldn't have you think—"

"You cannot control what I think," he said. When I looked at him through wet eyelashes, I saw his perfectly familiar face, more familiar to me now than any other. His eyes were wet, too, his face its normal sallow color under the flush from the sea air. "I trust you will let me see you home?"

"That would be a kindness," I murmured.

"Yes," he said.

At the streetcar stop and during the long ride back, I sought for words that were not foolish or grand and could find none. I would not ever see his small, private smile again, a thought that I could not bear to hold. Instead, I thought about his mousy hairs, sticky with Pinaud's brilliantine, that I regularly cleaned from my pillow and floor.

All the way to the door of my lodging house, his courtesy was impeccable. Standing on the pavement before the battered, patched door, he said, "I would recommend that you find other accommodations now. A woman alone in the world cannot afford too much tarnish on her name."

"Thank you for the sound advice." He had not called me a lady, or a girl. I turned "woman" around in my head as I closed the door and entered the dark hallway. Nothing would be gained by watching him walk away.

Attaining new lodgings was not easy; a girl could get a room in a decent house only if she had a gentleman's commendation. In the end, I had to go back to Mr. Riching, a difficult thing. He claimed not to remember my name. But Josephine, who had advanced in his affections, murmured something on my behalf, and in the end I found proper lodgings in Glendale with other girls—older ones, who owned more than a single outfit. I shared a room again, but even with two beds and two washstands, the space was commodious. My last chore at the Sixth Street house was pulling the dollar bills out of the bed frame with a button hook. It took me all night, working carefully so that I didn't rip them. Even flattened, the bills filled my handbag.

The new house boasted hallways with lamps and had a nine o'clock curfew. The other girls complained, but they were coddled things, hand raised, and they did not understand what they were being protected from. They had not awakened to moans night after night from a dye-haired woman two flimsy rooms away. In the old house, I had slept with a jagged piece of iron next to my bed. I left it for the next tenant, along with the odor of cheap rose perfume and the bedbugs.

This new house was clean and smelled of stew. When the girls around me tried to seem worldly—two of them smoked—I kept my face smooth and excused myself. They thought I was a prude, wearing my blouse collars high and my skirts long and full. I carefully asked each of them whether she minded having my sewing machine, covered during the daytime, stand in a corner of the front room, the room where we received guests. The girls—sixteen or seventeen years old to my nineteen—looked at me with confusion. "I thought you were a shoppie," one said, but she gave up trying to categorize me when I made her a new evening wrap. I sewed through most nights and every weekend, shunning the rackets.
Clean,
I was
clean
now—upstanding, enterprising, a girl with prospects. I was indisputably a girl with one hundred forty-eight dollars in savings. One hundred sixty-one. One hundred sixty-four.

I took on every sewing job I could find, even small ones that I didn't care for, such as re-seaming stockings, with the intention of distracting myself from thoughts about Pete. But Pete was already gone; he was nothing. My perfidious mind hardly even paused over him. Instead, dreams stormed across my sleep as if they had been waiting for just this moment. In the dreams, I was trapped, again and again, sometimes inside locked cellars, sometimes standing unguarded while jeering crowds advanced. The people did not actually hold weapons, but they had fists, didn't they? And their faces twisted when they saw me.

I didn't need to consult a dream interpreter to understand that these dreams were Kansas coming back to me, Kansas clearing its throat, Kansas letting me know that it had not forgotten me, despite my upright new habits and cleanliness. The vengeful dreams shocked me out of sleep, when I found the bedding hot with sweat and the table beside me sometimes overturned, and my hammering heart would not permit me to sleep again. At those times, memories of Mercer County, which I had thought safely banished, overtook me.

With a vividness that felt vengeful, the precise flowered pattern of my mother-in-law's parlor rug returned to me, its crude blue and acid yellow. I recalled the cramped, smoky kitchen, which anyone in California would have thought a closet. Without desiring to do so, I conjured the smell of potatoes boiling on a stove fed with crackling corn stalks and with the cow chips my mother-in-law and I gathered at the end of summer. I remembered Jack's boots, and his feet.

I bit my lip and tried to corral my thoughts, but Lucille's wail was already caught in every stitch of the sewing machine, and I remembered more clearly than I thought possible the faint dusting of hair on Amelia's misshapen head. Feeling the phantom weight of my babies, my arms started to tremble—I had to stop pumping the machine before I ruined a long tuck at the waist. The emotion that tore through me was something abject and nameless, unless there is a word for the emotion that feels like drowning. I had not understood, in the time that Pete and I were keeping company, that he was a storm wall. Now the memories rushed over me until I could hardly breathe. Had Pete known I would be grief-struck in his absence, he would have been gratified.

Lucille was two by now. She was old enough for a nice dress with a pinafore, and I wondered if my mother-in-law had made her one. Perhaps Jack had remarried by now—surely abandonment was grounds enough to free him. Perhaps Lucille's new mother was making her dresses. She would be making them for Amelia, too, if Amelia was capable of walking. If she had ever gotten her gaze to fix on a ball or a spoon. If she was still alive. I took a shuddering breath. Surely I would know if she had died. I had heard the stories of mothers who knew when their sons, all the way in the Cuban war, had been brushed by a bullet. Mothers knew. But mothers did not leave their children, and so perhaps I had no right to call myself a mother. I had exchanged that name for my new one, Madame Annelle, a seamstress who had no
enfants.

I could not keep from wretchedly pondering Amelia, and then Mama, whom Amelia resembled. Then Pa. Longing for his impatient face tore through me, and I rocked on my hard chair, biting my wrist to make sure no one could hear me. Nevertheless, my roommate, a girl named Sally, got out of bed and came to me, her stringy brown hair tangled over her shoulders. She had spots on her chin and nose, but she would find a nice boy because of her sheer sweetness. Like, as Jack had loved to tell me, called to like.

"Shh. Are you homesick? There, there." The words fell like a blanket around me, ready-made but not insincere.

I shook my head, my teeth still clamped onto my wrist. The sobs clawed at my chest, and I bit harder. I was the kind of woman who left her children. I would not be the kind of girl who awakened the whole house.

"We all get overcome sometimes. Just the other night I woke up crying. Who knows why?" In the low light, Sally's greasy face shone. She took my free hand and rubbed it. "Leaving home—it's hard. None of us knew how hard. Some things will never come back." Her hand tightened on mine. "You aren't in the family way, are you?"

I shook my head, and she returned to stroking my hand, and then moved to my back. She wouldn't let me pull away. "This is what it means, to start again. There's a cost. Maybe if we had known, we wouldn't have left. Maybe it's good that we didn't know. I think about this a lot, when I miss home. What would I be doing there? Hauling water? Making biscuits?"