The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (37 page)

Listening to the conversation that rippled past me, I contemplated words, so fundamentally unsafe. Tippy boats that regularly imperiled whoever rode on them, words shifted as soon as pressure was applied. I could not calculate the hours I had spent drilling myself on vocabulary, groping through pronunciation, and fearfully guessing at conjugations. Hundreds of hours.
Cents.
Would the French say it thus? Mrs. Hoyt could tell me if I asked her, but I couldn't ask her.
Pas possible.

A word needed so little—a dark inflection, a raised eyebrow and curled lip—before it turned on itself. What had seemed as innocent as a clear day suddenly became treacherous. I had thought that I could create a new self, new life and world with words. What an idiot.
L'idiot,
produced my perfidious brain.
Espèce d'idiot,
a phrase I had come across but never attempted with my homemade pronunciation.

The girls chattered from morning till night, all three of them. They used words gaily, scattering them around the house like bright confetti. Aimée had introduced Mary to
ducky,
and now Mary was wedging the word into every other sentence. Lisette had more words, and more insidious ones. Sitting by the window one afternoon, she drawld, "Hotsy-totsy." I came over to see, but whatever Lisette had been watching was gone. "You need some cheaters, Nell," she said, leaving me to remember when
cheaters
meant pads for an unfilled corset, not eyeglasses.

George came home every day with a new joke.

What happened when the sheik got shook?
The flapper got flustered.

Aimée and Mary laughed, and Lisette yawned extravagantly. "Better laugh," he said, "or I'll tell you another." He didn't look at me, who had not laughed and had never known him, for all his wit, to be a joke teller. He thought he was becoming something new. He would learn.

On a Saturday morning, following a night in which George muttered through his dreams, perhaps rehearsing new jokes, I crept out of the house at daybreak. Bread needed picking up, as well as groceries, and I would let him think I had gone to attend to those things. Did I remember the other time I had secretly left my house, telling no one my destination? Of course I did. I watched my shadow on the sidewalk and recognized it as the shadow of the woman who ran away.
La femme qui s'en fuit,
I practiced automatically and felt the stone in my mouth grow, though stones do not grow.

When a streetcar rattled up, I stepped on without looking to see its route, took a seat by a window, and watched the houses of South Gate give way to what the magazine writers liked to call "development opportunities." Green hummocks of cauliflower bumped across the dirt on one side, pretty stalks of scarlet carnations waved on the other, both tended by Japanese laborers wearing their stiff hats. We rode through five miles of what anyone except a Los Angeles magazine writer would call farmland before the streetcar turned north and roads widened and busied, leading up to broad, well-traveled Wilshire Boulevard. The
Times
often informed its readers that Wilshire Boulevard was the equal of anything to be found in New York City or Paris, France. I doubted it. Though the Ambassador Hotel rose grandly and Bullock's Department Store featured a mosaic entry for motorcars, we were only two blocks away from the choked neighborhoods where horses fouled the pavement and Mexican ladies cooked their flat bread and sold it right on the sidewalk. Los Angeles. Nothing was more than a block deep.

Just past eight o'clock, the day was already brilliant, sunlight coming from every direction at once. Shopkeepers pulled out awnings, and the doormen at the creamy new apartment buildings pulled down the glossy bills of their hats. I paused before a window display of T-strap shoes and purses with the new chain handles. Lisette and Aimée would love such things—
swanky, orchid.
I could hear every word they would say.

Just three doors down, another shop window showed a black crepe tunic embroidered so lavishly it probably could have stood up on its own. From the door, a salesgirl—we didn't call them shoppies anymore—smiled.

"It would suit madame," she said, accurately. The square neckline would shape my flat bosom, and the bell-shaped sleeves would give ballast to my skinny frame. "If madame would like to come in, I would be happy to show you a fitting room."

The girl's face was properly reserved, her eyes cast down in an expression both demure and haughty, but her voice was as flat as a pasture. In an unnerving instant, I knew the rooming house she lived in and her carefully kept log of expenses and savings. The latter column was not growing fast enough to suit her. "Where are you from?" I said.

"Why, madame. I live not far from here."

"You didn't grow up here."

"They say no one grows up in Los Angeles. People only come." Before I could ask further, she said, "I would be happy to show you a fitting room."

"I'm not sure," I said, exactly the kind of fiddle-mindedness that had used to infuriate me in customers when I was standing behind the counter. In those days, I vowed that when my time came, I would make decisions quickly. But I was distracted now, confronted by a girl who could have been my cousin. Just looking at her avid eyes and pinched mouth, unfamiliar with any French beyond "madame," made me want to teach her a few things. First, she should buy a phrase book.

"Or if madame would like to come in, I could show you other designs you might prefer. Should you find that you don't care for what we have in the window. Although it's the latest fashion. From France."

"Where you hope to go someday?"

"Perhaps madame can give me a tour."

Her little face tipped defiantly up at me. No matter whether she came here from Illinois or Arkansas, that tip was pure Topeka. Her shoulder, when I reached out to touch it, felt like concrete. "Yes, thank you. Show me what you have." I touched her concrete shoulder again and confided, "I have never had a shopping spree."

"Let me help madame." She had already turned away to draw back the dressing-room curtain.

While she handed me garment after garment, I tried to engage her in talk, putting to use all the conversational skills that had recently been gathering dust. I was not so far gone as to confide that I was a jayhawker—Madame Annelle had a reputation to protect—but I wanted to let this young woman know that she was not alone, much as she might have preferred to be. "Trade so early on a Saturday!" I said brightly. "Fashion is unforgiving. No one would require this of you elsewhere."

"I enjoy my work, madame."

"No doubt you are looking forward to a long evening tonight."

"Let me get madame a smaller skirt."

"The new styles become your tiny figure. You can show off your own wares."

"I am here to assist," she said, her crispness edging toward anger. Though I had meant to compliment her, I should have thought for a moment. These wares were too dear for a shop girl's wages.

But not for Madame Annelle, the sphinx of South Gate. Remembering the fury of a morning spent waiting on customers who tried on every blouse in the store and then bought nothing, I left the shop with a smart green sweaterdress for myself and a skirt and a blouse for Aimée and Lisette. Lisette would point out that it was unlike me to buy what I could so easily make. "And your garments last," she would say. No. With her uncanny ability to read my thoughts, she might pluck a word from my brain and tell me that my garments
endurés.

Madame Annelle had spent all her working days listening to women trill about their bond with their daughters, so much deeper than mere conversation. "I can say what she is thinking!" these women said, their voices woozy with ecstasy while Madame Annelle measured a hem. But I didn't remember any of them ever saying, "She can say what I am thinking!" They wouldn't have sounded ecstatic then.

My bond with Lisette pulled at me every time I moved, its strands made of guardedness and guilt and wrath, none of the proper emotions for mothers, another cause for guilt, as if guilt were new to me, as if I had not been carrying it since she was born. But there was a rough equity between us; we were gladiators in the ring. Even if it was understood that only one person would leave alive, we were fairly matched.

And therefore she could not make my heart ache as it did when I thought about Aimée. Before my second child, I was as charmed and helpless as if I were confronting a kitten—and fearful, as if the kitten were ready to chase its ball of yarn headlong into the path of a truck. Aimée turned her valentine face trustingly to the world and the world smiled back at her. She might marry a president. She might become a gangster's moll. Or she might stay with her sister Nell, Little Mother, playing cat's cradle and pat-a-cake with Mary. She would be happy thus, as my mother had been happy while she placidly sorted beans outside a Kansas shack. The idea was terrible. My mind slid away from her as a foot slides on ice—as, I thought grimly, Mama's mind had seemed to slide off everything. And Aimée's now likewise, the family traits slipping through the generations.

Only Mary made my blood regularly surge with flood tides of love and pride. Thinking of her now, my late child, miracle girl, California born and bred, made my clenched shop-girl heart enlarge with a feeling that was almost pain. Mary's existence made undeniable all that I had not given my first two girls, born to a mother little more than a frantic child herself. No one could make up the difference. Perhaps there would be a special fiery ledge for me in the afterlife, or perhaps I was suffering my punishment now. Thoughts swirled in me like a tide pool. I was doing my best to make everything up to them. The debt was unpayable. I was bringing them home new clothes. "Though not many," Lisette would say.

Had I not needed my final ten cents for streetcar fare, I would have also bought a feather from the sales girl, something pretty to attach to a headband. "Later, perhaps. If madame can sew just a little, such additions are not difficult. And so charming."

"I can do that, I think," I said, stroking the silky green feather before reluctantly giving it back. For the whole ride home, while I held my parcels in my lap, I wished I had that feather.

I returned to a still house: every room empty, and the Ford missing from its place beside the house. George was probably prowling South Gate's streets, and I was sourly gratified that he had noticed my absence. The girls were gone, too, their lipstick-rimmed coffee cups still sitting on the table. Perhaps George had wakened them. Perhaps he'd pointed out that I wasn't there. Perhaps they'd been surprised.

Automatically, I started to put the house to rights, straightening the hooked rug and stacking the scattered newspapers and
Photoplays.
If police arrived, seeking clues to a runaway wife, I would prefer they not find Lisette and Aimée's cigarettes stubbed into saucers or their cheap stockings hung in the windows to dry. I pushed chairs into place in the kitchen and set the coffee cups in the sink. In the bathroom, I put the brown carton of "sanitary napkins" Lisette had asked me to buy behind a stack of towels. The room felt disreputable, with its lingering cheap scent and a layer of soft face powder thick enough to write in. Mary had printed her name in it, struggling, as usual, with the
R.

I had not been alone in the house since Mary was born, and before that, I had filled the hush with the grind and steady thump of the sewing machine; I could hardly remember having simply stood, as I did now, feeling the feather-light California breeze find its way around windows and doorjambs. If George and the girls were this moment dying half a mile from this spot, crumpled in a car crash or engulfed in an inferno, I would be none the wiser. Or if I myself had somehow died on my absurd excursion, my body might be left stranded a block from a streetcar stop, George and the girls having no idea how to find me. I imagined the newspaper headlines, the eventual, regretful visit from a policeman, and George's visit to the morgue. Lisette would go, too, while Aimée held Mary and wrapped the child's ringlets around her finger. "That's Nell," Lisette would say, nodding at my corpse. "She doesn't look like herself," George would say. "You can tell by the mouth," Lisette would say. George and Lisette would talk and look for a long time.

I went to the bedroom and put on the green dress. Mary's box of cast-off trimmings provided a feather that I was trying to block back into shape when my family returned, Mary's collar bearing a bright pink stain. "We got ice cream, Mama!" she said.

"We decided to follow your lead," George said. "It's a beautiful morning to be out." He rubbed his hands together. "Now I could about do with a pork sandwich."

"Better make a platter of them," Lisette said.

"And some lemonade." Aimée was already heading for the kitchen. "We should be able to make a few pitchers."

"Are we expecting guests?" I said. They looked mildly startled at the sound of my voice, as if they found themselves in the presence of a talking cat.

Lisette tipped her head, also catlike. "We ran into some of my friends at the ice cream parlor. They're on their way over. Is that a new dress?"

"Yes," I said. "How many friends?"

Lisette made a vague gesture. "I didn't think you ever bought ready-made. Did you get something for me?"

"How remarkably fortunate!" I said. "I went out in order to buy you a new blouse. A perfect garment for greeting your friends."

"Good. They've seen this old thing just about enough."

"Perhaps I still have time to go out and buy you a full wardrobe." Perhaps I could offer to jump off the top of the Biltmore Hotel.

"Another time," she said. "These friends don't require a full wardrobe."

Those friends required what the magazines told us every flapper required—cigarettes, jazz, and gin. In the weeks since the girls had arrived, the friends had started to appear at the house in an amiable swarm, following Lisette home from Universal City or the Rexall where she bought cosmetics. Scented with cigarette smoke and liquor, their mouths were full of the names of movies and directors and Clara Bow, the "It" Girl. They were crazy about Clara Bow. George liked to say that he was crazy about "It."