The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (6 page)

By now we were well away from the house, Lucille's breath on my neck damp and sweet. Dust hung in a brown cloud at our ankles, and the hem of my dress was filthy. He said, "Orris built himself a nice farm, but he still has this sad old soil."

"He's doing all right. He and Jack went out to look at the Lindstrom place. They're thinking to buy a parcel."

"Guess you're moving up in the world," Pa said.

"We'll keep the same house. Eighty acres of Harold Lindstrom's bad wheat doesn't much boost me, tell you the truth." I wet my lips. "Pa—"

"It's good to have more land," he said. "That's where your future is."

"I don't know as I care for my future. I—"

"You've got that child in your arms. You're carrying your future, so you better care."

He set his face ahead as if there were something out there worth looking at. I could see what he was doing. "Pa, listen to me."

"No," he said. "You just stop. Do not tell me anything you're going to be sorry later you said."

"All right," I said, hitching up heavy Lucille. "I won't burden you."

"Good."

The wind had returned, carrying grit and tiny sticks. We were walking straight into it, but neither one of us made a turn to go back to the house. "You're looking well," he said. "Your mama thinks you're carrying again. I told her it was too soon."

"She's not seen me twice in the last month," I said.

"She knows what she knows."

"Hark at you. Maybe the fairies tell her."

He gave me a glance, but let it go. "Don't undervalue her. She's more right than not. When is the next one coming?"

I stared at his exhausted boots, the rusty leather lined with fine dust in every crease. "Once I was out fetching plums with her. I couldn't have been more than six years old. The day was still as could be, but suddenly she pulled me up and told me to hurry. We barely got back inside before the rain started. It was the storm that flooded the barn. For a while after that, I thought she was a witch."

"She's no witch," Pa said.

"Still."

I looked at the ground while we walked. My arms were starting to throb with Lucille's weight. Finally Pa said, "When we were first married, I used to bring home a newspaper for her when I went into town. I thought some article or picture might catch her attention, and I could learn from what she looked at."

"You were studying her," I said.

"I thought I could. But she didn't care to be studied. One time I brought home a newspaper and tossed it on top of the stove. She cooked around the news for a full week, until some bacon flared the paper up."

"She has her ways," I said.

"She's so mild, she seems like she'll go along with anything. It took me a while to see that wasn't so."

"What did you do then?" If he heard the sharpness in my voice, I could always point to the mass of clouds moving in. We should have turned around, but I wasn't willing to turn first.

"What do you think? Made peace. Where else was I going to go, Nell?"

"An orange grove, I guess."

"You make your call, you stay with it. That's what honor means." His face was strangely solemn. In a different mood, I would have made fun.

"I don't believe I've heard you use that word before," I said.

"Then it's time. What else did you expect me to say?"

His voice was ragged, and it occurred to me to step out of reach. But I had one child in my arms and another in my belly, and he would not hit me again. He would hit something, though. "I didn't expect you to say a thing different."

He squinted at the bank of clouds. "We're not going to beat that rain." By the time we got back, we were soaked through and the mud was all over our shoes. Wringing wet, Lucille slept unperturbed. "A little angel," Mama said. Then she and Pa left.

Farms were built on the dry prairie soil, and the prairie tolerated farms, but no one could say that we belonged to the land. A few chickens scrabbled, the cows sometimes groaned, the plow squealed and shuddered, and none of it was more than a scratch against the constant low howl of the wind—and what is wind? Nothing, in motion. Sometimes, walking, I heard the cotton-wood leaves shivering. I did not think of how the sound was like fingernails scratching on a door. At home, mending my way through the hill of torn overalls and socks that mounted every day, I did not think about the grit that settled onto food and between sheets, until every move felt roughened. Once a bad wind pushed a piece of straw right through the sod wall and into my eye, and for a day I was blinded. When sight started to come back, Jack said, "You don't want to go looking in a mirror just yet."

"Am I a fright?"

"Still looks bad, you want to know the truth." He was stretching, trying to imagine what a woman might want to hear. But he was not flexible, and even his best efforts produced little bend. I did consult the mirror, repeatedly: two weeks passed before all the blood cleared, and another week before the last bit of straw fell from my eye like an eyelash.

The wind, the grit—there was no point thinking about them. Nothing was going to change. Trying not to have thoughts, I sewed. Though I had always believed myself a clear thinker, I did not have the courage to think what was in my mind now. In the end, I stitched my thoughts into place, one seam after another, eight stitches to the inch.

On Saturdays, when Jack took the wagon into Grant Station, twelve miles south, toward limestone country, I insisted on going with him, even though bouncing against the hard bench set my lower back on fire. At the general store, I looked over every piece of cloth, the same pieces I'd looked over the week before. Using flimsy bills doled grudgingly by my mother-in-law, I bought denim and gingham for the household, wool when I could get it. Cheaper fabrics I bought on the bolt. Twice I cajoled Jack until he gave me money to buy scraps of silk that could be folded into radiant pleats for our daughter. She had a respect for clothes, and when I dressed her in pretty silk or dimity, she did not spit up. Once I understood this, I tried to save portions of each afternoon to put new outfits on her, one after the other, while she sat on the floor with the fabric puddled around her and gurgled. "You know how to wear clothes," I said. "Not everyone does. You have a natural sense of style."

She held up her arms, her grin so irresistible that I carefully put the newest dress on her, even though it was still pinned at the bottom. The rose-colored trim brought out the roses in her cheeks, and I carried her into the parlor to show her off to her grandmother, who fingered the baby's curls. "You are raising a clothes horse," she said.

"Do you want to hold her for a little?" I said.

"There's dinner to get." We exchanged a glance. Sure enough, as soon as I took the unfinished dress away from my daughter, she commenced the afternoon's howl.

I learned to keep a tiny bib handy to placate her when visitors came by, and brought her to town only in clothes she had not worn before. In January, I had nearly run out of heavy thread and needles for patching. Getting up early, I dressed Lucille in a dark blue felt coat, gathered at the throat with a ruff. By ten o'clock, I was scrutinizing thread in Mr. Cates's general store when Reverend Cooper's wife came in. She smiled first at Lucille, who cooed on the floor, then at me. I'd pushed aside a dozen spools on the wooden counter and held two.

"Are they different?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am. You don't want your thread falling apart halfway down a seam."

"But how can you tell?" She looked at me with worried perplexity, as if a minister's wife from Baltimore or Philadelphia
—I never could remember—might be called on to do a little sewing.

"Weight, I guess. Shine. The look of it. You get to know how it should be, and most of it doesn't match that."

"Like earth and heaven, my husband would tell you," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. Although I wouldn't call even the best thread heavenly."

"My husband would tell you that every created thing longs to reflect the glory of its creator. Of course, my husband does not sew."

I was not slow to catch her joke, only cautious about it. I waited until she smiled before I smiled back at her. She said, "You're a fine seamstress."

"You must have been talking to my mama. Or my mother-in-law."

She smiled again. She had smiled more in five minutes than anybody else I knew did in a day. "Also several neighbors. I hear that your new daughter has a wardrobe fit for a princess."

"People need something else to talk about."

"Do they? Joseph Stallings is worried about screwworm flies on his herd. He told me about them, a pestilence. Once the screwworms start, the only thing to do is put down the whole herd. Everything you own consumed by a fly smaller than your little fingernail." She tapped her gloved finger on one of my spools. "I'd rather hear people talk about Lucille's wardrobe. You're doing the county a service."

"Not one I'd planned on."

"Plans! If we waited for our plans to take shape, would we ever leave the house?" For a moment her face hardened, and I thought about Reverend Farley. How often now did Mrs. Cooper remember the night her husband came home to announce exultantly that he had heard a Call, and the voice was calling from Kansas?

She leaned toward me and whispered, "Mr. Cooper makes notes before he preaches and carries them into the pulpit. Sometimes I imagine replacing his notes with something of mine, a laundry list or a letter to my sister, just to think about the expression on his face."

"I would like to hear some preaching about laundry," I whispered back. Mrs. Cooper had come to town some years before; even if she had married as a teen, she would be older than I. But as she cut her eyes and grinned, she seemed as protected as a child.

"Lo! For cleanliness is good," she said.

"It is a gospel worth hearing," I said.

She pressed her gloved hand to her mouth as if to stifle her giggle, though it erupted anyway, a charming sound. "Someone will scold us if they hear us carrying on."

"We'll tell them that we're discussing laundry," I said. "Bluing is old-fashioned. Use bleach."

"And please! Use it more than once a year. Sometimes the church benches need scrubbing after service," she said. I had not guessed that a reverend's wife might be so peppery, although her merry face made her words seem harmless. Leaning toward me again, she said, "Would you—I don't mean to presume—would you consider making me a dress?"

"Goodness," I said. "It would be a pleasure."

"I would pay you for your time," she said.

Well, I knew that. The surprise was how I felt a dream that had been hovering in my mind, so gauzy I had nearly looked through it, brighten. I put the vision aside, but not quite out of reach.

Together the minister's wife and I pulled out the bolts of cloth—harsh red cotton, a blue-and-yellow gingham, several bolts of denim. While she mooned over a flowered cotton of poor quality, I pressed her toward a light gray wool. Good, heavy fabric, it would hold up and look dignified. "I'll make it pretty," I promised her. "I'll make it your favorite thing to wear." No matter what I said, she gazed at the unpatterned wool and looked disappointed, then reached after cheap cotton in ugly purples and yellows that would glare in the least light. Finally, after all my talking, she poutily accepted the wool but insisted on adding four yards of blue chintz with a lopsided pattern—what were supposed to be tiny flowers looked like smudgy snowballs. "It isn't the finest fabric," I said.

"It will make a beautiful dress."

"If you like it, will you let me choose the fabric next time?" Who knows where I got my brass.

"'Next time,'" she said. "You are giving me something to look forward to. This is another service you provide." She smiled again, and I joined her. I could see right away that smiling was a skill I would need.

Mrs. Cooper and I left nearly everything undiscussed, I realized later. I didn't tell her when I would have the dresses finished, and she didn't tell me how much she would pay. After choosing her fabric, she and I sheered away from the subject as if we were skirting a sinkhole. I understood that she would not be bringing Mr. Cooper's attention to any new dresses that might arrive in their house.

Upon returning home, I chose not to tell Jack or his mother that I had taken on employment. Instead, I pondered the cost of a one-way fare to Los Angeles: $90 for immigrants, $110 for second class. The railway station stood at the end of Grant Station's single street and posted fares right out front. Anyone walking by could read them. Chicago was $47, Des Moines $62. Rates dropped ten percent for passengers paying in gold, though I didn't suppose anyone in Grant Station had ever come to the ticket window with a pocketful of bullion.

I couldn't remember having paid attention to this information as I wore out the wooden sidewalk on my weekly trip to town, but now I discovered myself to be a regular almanac of schedules and fares. San Francisco, Omaha, Memphis, Des Plaines. Departure times, connection points, fares: all of America was at Grant Station's door! Anyone in town would have laughed, but there was no one I could tell this joke to.

I made no firm plans and permitted myself no bright daydreams of a life rich with colors and pretty fabrics, where no baby cried and no wind blew. To imagine such a scene invited other scenes to present themselves, scenarios that included babies left alone, scoured by wind—unendurable thoughts. Instead, not thinking, I hauled with me from place to place the knowledge that Los Angeles would cost $110 in greenbacks, just as I was hauling the new baby, the one Jack still didn't know about. In a town where there were no secrets, I now had two. This must be how it felt to be rich, I thought. It was permissible to think that.

A week passed, and my father-in-law brought home the news that Myrtle Marsh was laid up with a boggy womb after delivering her fourth girl. He stood in the kitchen in his stocking feet, having slogged from the barn and collected, my mother-in-law said, half their property on his boots. Rain had finally come, shifting everyone's fear from drought to washed-out crops. Water seeped through the house's sod walls, and muddy patches bloomed on the fresh pictures from the Sears catalogue that my mother-in-law and I had put up after taking a hard brush to the roof and floors—spring cleaning in Mercer County.