The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (19 page)

From Sally's bed came a dreamy sound, and then she was still again. I waited another minute, then got up and went back to work.

Following Mrs. Carlton's reference, I fitted the commissioner's wife for a gown to wear to the Mason Opera House, said to be splendid, for Mr. E. H. Sothern's recital. She deemed it necessary to impart that information; after that, she fell silent. The commissioner's wife was scarcely a woman who found it appropriate to converse with a seamstress. After ten minutes, she told me so.

"Excellent, madame." My hands, engaged in pinning a pleat, did not slow.

"Here in California, many people believe that class distinctions no longer apply. I do not agree."

"No, madame."

"Here, building a new outpost of society, such distinctions are more important than ever if we hope to impart civilization."

"
Oui, madame.
Please turn."

At first her smile was uncertain. Then it widened.

The gown was green silk, and I found ninety-eight green glass buttons to edge the daringly low back. A week after the concert, I received a note from a Mrs. Corning in Bel-Air. I arrived at her home after my shift at Bloom's, and Mrs. Corning, whose husband owned Corning Pipe and Fittings, asked whether my husband didn't accompany me on calls.

"If you would like a gown, I will need three weeks. A traveling suit, two. Of course, we must discuss fabrics," I said.

She frowned. "I like to know who is coming to my house. I have children."

I rose. "I am not in the habit of discussing my personal life."

Her eyes sparkled. I could have pleased her more only if I had managed to say it in French. She said, "In
Vogue
there is a drawing of an evening gown draped at the front."

I nodded. "The neckline is pulled high. This would be very flattering for you. Perhaps a lilac silk?"

Though it was late, she called for tea to be brought. I was not foolish enough to imagine that she thought me her equal or, impossibly, her friend. I was something better. When I prepared to leave, the flavor of the weak tea already gone from my mouth, she said, "I'm very pleased. I have sought a seamstress."

"A
modiste
" I told her, and her eyes sparkled again.

I had found the word in the same issue of
Vogue
she had seen. But she had looked only at the drawings. Now, gaining confidence, I taught myself more French vocabulary from a schoolbook that I bought for twenty cents at a stall. After four months, I could conjugate certain verbs, and I attempted simple sentences, avoiding words that had frightening combinations of vowels. "
Mais c'est chic!
" was simple and always impressed.

Mrs. Corning was a warm-hearted woman and more given to talk than the commissioner's wife. From her came three more references, one of them the new Mrs. Aloysius Butler, a young woman who had created a scandal by marrying a water commissioner very soon after he divorced his formidable first wife. Now she was preparing for a trip to the Continent and desired an entire wardrobe, from chemises to cloaks. Originally she and Mr. Butler had planned only a short trip, but then it was decided that his son, a jam-faced child with long curls that stuck to his face, would accompany them and make, at age seven, his Grand Tour. "He will need a number of sailor suits. I don't suppose you sew for children?"

"I regret," I murmured. The sentence was useful for suggesting an accent without actually requiring one. I had already decided that I would take on no sewing aside from ladies' fashions. In this way, I would preserve my exclusivity. Also, I preferred not to work with children.
Les enfants.

"It's good work. I hope you're not letting your pride get ahead of you. A girl in your position needs to be careful."

I let quite a long pause go by as I surveyed the fit across Mrs. Butler's shoulders. Her neck started to turn a dull red, the color of a bruised apple. "Would madame like the back drawn up just a bit more? The silhouette will be lengthened."

She let a pause of her own go by before saying, "Girls who take chances live to regret them."

"No doubt, madame." I made sure I sounded serene. Already I had taken new lodgings, a room to myself in a proper house. And yesterday, armed with orders that would carry me three months ahead, I had handed in my resignation at Bloom's, where the floor manager assured me I would never work as a shop girl again. "I intend to have no regrets."

"Goodness! That will be quite a life."

"
Oui,
madame," I said. The cordiality of my tone momentarily blanketed us, and in that moment I noted the softness already beginning under Mrs. Butler's firm chin. I felt a rush of sympathy for her. It was not her fault that she did not know my life had already begun.

The first mornings of my new life as a self-employed businesslady—the phrase more awkward in my mouth than the French I hazarded—I woke disoriented and unhappy. For twenty years, my every breathing moment had been shaped by tasks: cows to be milked, coffee beans roasted, a streetcar caught while I was still pinning my hair. Now loose time drooped around me, threatening to fall away and leave me stranded in no time, no place, with no others. No eyes were turned toward me, no floor manager keeping one eye on the shop floor and the other on his pocket watch; I could stay in bed all day, like the girls with hookahs in the flickers. Anyone could tell you: first would come indolence, then addiction. I would be crawling the streets of Los Angeles, my hair matted and my dark eyes unseeing. I laughed at my fancies, a little.

Paying an extra four dollars a week, I retained a single room. With no one to see, I could eat garlic for breakfast like the immigrants. I could rise without washing and remain in my nightdress all day, a slattern. Nothing except my own backbone held me to habits of decency, and my backbone had proved itself sometimes to be loose. Terrified that ten extra minutes in bed would turn into an hour dozing there, and then days, until I was swept onto the street with the garbage, I jumped out of bed before dawn, though more than once I dozed off over whatever garment I was sewing. Eventually I accustomed myself to rising at daybreak, but I watched myself closely for any looseness.

I inched into my new life as I might tiptoe into a forest, if I had ever seen a forest, assessing the new plants and the calls of faraway animals, testing each step to make sure the ground would hold my weight. Every day I moved in more deeply, taking up residence, I thought, in my new life. The single morning that I teased myself by trying to stay in bed, to loll as my first roommate, Josephine, and I had always vowed we would do when our ships came in, I thrashed and listened for the chimes from the church tower. At seven o'clock, I threw back the blanket and jumped to work like something let out of a cage.

In our daydreams, Josephine and I had not considered that bed might hold no particular attractions. More pleasure could be garnered by sitting in the morning sun and ruching jersey than by twisting on the lumpy, cotton-batting mattress. No one joined me there. I would not make that mistake again.

Down the hall dwelled other girls, and though we did not romp into one another's lives with the heedless gaiety I had felt in my first house, we were friendly enough and sometimes went to the kitchen together to pop corn over the gas flame with the long-handled popper. We kept regular hours, took weekend outings, enjoyed homemaking projects, and developed opinions about the new canal in Panama, whose map was published in the
Times.
I worried about the terrible earthquake in San Francisco and worried in a different way about the Mann Act. When I saw articles about President Roosevelt's speech in Osawatomie, I closed my eyes, purely unable to imagine a president going to Kansas. I also could not remember where Osawatomie was, a fact that cheered me. I thought of my existence now as an adult's life, and surely that idea was correct, if limited. In this way, working steadily, I saw years pass while I created an ever-more-elaborate plan of the shimmering new life I meant to attain.

I was not unusual. Girls who came to Los Angeles understood—or learned—that they had made a bargain with rough fate. By running away from towns where the only building with glass in its windows was the bank and where mail arrived, grubby and fingered, once every two weeks, girls who came to California knew that they were embracing nothing but hope, nothing but ambition, nothing but the clear, empty air. All of us had traded certainty for possibility, which was the same thing as something for nothing, a distinction I was foolish enough to make with some of the girls in my house one evening. "That is not so!" a girl primly upbraided me. "We have begun a new adventure!"

"That's what California is—adventure," said another girl, reminding me fleetingly of Mabel.

"We are writing whole new stories in our lives!" said the first girl, given to oratorical flourishes. I sometimes wondered whether customers had to interrupt her as she speechified from behind the stocking counter. About our lives she was right, of course. We had begun new stories, and we would not know the endings until we arrived at them. It would have been churlish that evening to remind anyone that not every story ended happily. We knew.

Every day we looked around and saw the aging shop girls, the ones who would die in rooming houses with other girls gathered around them, if anyone happened to be home. I had met shoppies wearing their gray hair in sad ringlets, working now at dime-store counters where their trembling, dry hands set out trinkets for customers half their age to scorn. Sometimes I deliberately stopped by the dime store, just to remind myself. Then I went home and sewed with extra care and speed.

It was a life. I strolled in the evening now and again with a fellow, though not one of them wore a suit that was pressed. They were timid, respectful men, and I could not pretend I wasn't relieved to see them depart at evening's end. If they were the only husbands on offer, I would do without.

Still, like the other girls, I kept myself up. One just don't know, does one, I thought—my little joke with myself. It would not do to shut any doors. On the weekends a dozen of us clustered in the kitchen, melting down paraffin to soften our hands and throats. "You never seem to age at all," one girl said to me, and I smiled, accepting the words as a compliment.

It was useful for Madame Annelle not to age, or at least to be ageless. One client, a bank teller's wife, assured me that Madame Annelle was renowned. I put on a frown, and the client quickly amended that Madame Annelle was renowned only in the right circles, among people of discrimination. "Even to know your name indicates that someone is the right kind of person!" she said shrilly.

"Please turn," I said.

"With so many people pouring into our city, to know the right people is more important than ever. We must be careful of our associates."

"
Tournez.
"

"Might you make me another dress, for the afternoon?"

"
Oui,
" I said, as if carelessly.

Privately I was delighted at every report of my fame, though
fame
seemed a comical word for a skinny little gal overlooked on the streetcar. I believed it unlikely that anyone famous would ride a streetcar. Even the actresses in the new moving pictures stepped, everyone knew, out of shining Model Ts. I enjoyed reading in the
Examiner
about the actresses and the Model Ts at exactly the same time I imagined Madame Annelle's shrug. I could slip into Madame Annelle's expressions and comportment as if I were pulling on a sweater, and I wondered whether those actresses in their motorcars likewise slipped on their characters, so reliably imperiled by landlords or white slavers. I tickled myself with the idea that I too was an actress. Everyone in Los Angeles was acting. Just because the idea was amusing didn't mean that it was wrong.

Folks back in Kansas would have thought me soft in the head, playing pretend like a child. But Kansas's sharp voices were muted now. The dreams came rarely these days, and the seemingly mild passage of day upon day upon day eroded even the keenest memories. I had to struggle to remember how a curl of Lucille's hair had wrapped around my finger like a tendril. I could not say the last time I had glimpsed a little girl's tendril. Only sometimes did the sight of a child's uncertain footsteps make my heart constrict, or did my head whip around at the sound of a voice made husky after years of calling balky animals and drinking coarse liquor. Of course I was aware of the old life carrying on without me, Lucille having learned her letters by now, Mae and Vi surely married. I was aware of these thoughts but not clearly aware of them, pushing them to the back of my mind while I busied myself with my bright California life.

Still, the memory of sounds had the capacity to undo me. No matter how much time passed, sometimes the memory of a voice would arc across my mind with demonic clarity. Having on a few occasions found myself so shaken by overheard conversations that I had to lean against a building to compose myself, leaving onlookers to believe I had been drinking, I tried to blanket my mind. Better to hum bits of music or recall amusing stories than to leave myself unprotected against a husband's angry complaint, a baby's angry cry.

Then, once I had put away every voice, older sounds came to me, the sounds planted before I had memory. Wind. The soft lowing of a cow, making noise simply to fill the night. Wind. The winch of a well handle, the crackle of a stalk-fed fire. Wind. Though the sound of voices could be tamped if I hummed or muttered, I did not know how to crowd out the other sounds, bodiless, that made room for themselves. The old wind slid around any words I murmured, as the cow softly moaned on and on.

The wind, the cow—the sounds would die out eventually, I told myself. Los Angeles, rowdy with horns and banging and shouts, surely made enough noise on a single corner to obliterate a soughing prairie wind. Miserably pressing my hands to my face, I hummed and tapped my feet and thought about the four yards of blue and gold brocade before me, stiff as wood and so thick it could nearly stand up by itself. I had already broken two needles. I thought about darts and gathers; I thought with all my might. I thought until there was nothing in my mind. That helped.