A Girl in Three Parts

by Suzanne Daniel

  “Wait! Before you go…” Matilde’s voice stops him in the corridor. “I still haven’t been paid for my last job.”

  He swings around as though my grandmother has stolen his wallet. His Plasticine nostrils are flaring, and his brow is molding into an even angrier shape. “You’ll be paid when the boss decides your work is worth paying for and not one minute before!”

  “There is nothing wrong with my work,” says Matilde, her switched-on bátor rising up from a deep place now, reinforced and convincing. “It was done on time and the quality is good. You know that and your boss knows that.”

  “My boss is your boss, so don’t you forget that. There are many hungry outworkers far better than you who’d be happy for this work from Bolton’s.” He slams the front door behind him. And for a few minutes the women out front stop calling Matilde’s name and yell bad things at him instead.

  I’m boiling the kettle, hoping that Matilde will sit with us at the table and have at least one of her ladyfinger biscuits before Patricia polishes them all off, but instead she runs her hands up the back of her head and says, “I need to make a start on these pieces immediately.” She looks exhausted before she’s begun. “There is bean soup and cheese noodles prepared in the fridge, Allegra. You can heat that up at six o’clock.” She starts walking toward the front room. “And Patricia, there is plenty if you would like to stay for dinner. But you must call your mother and ask for her permission.”

  A small smile starts in Patricia’s eyes and spreads across her face. I’m not sure if it’s the thought of more of Matilde’s tucker or the fact that my grandmother actually asked my best-ever friend to stay without me having to beg or do anything that made her the slightest bit proud.

  Matilde slips back into the kitchen to tell us one more thing before she saddles up to her Singer: “Allegra, you are to stay out the back. Do not go to the front door, or look through the windows, and you are definitely not to go out onto the street. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Matilde.” I’d agree to anything now that Patricia is here—and staying for dinner—with me at Number 23.

  Matilde does get cracking, but the sound of her Singer is almost drowned out by the continuing noise from out the front of the house. She turns up Liszt’s Transcendental Études on her gramophone, but the angry women outside turn up their sound too, and it’s certainly coming from more than just three of them now.

  “I reckon there’s at least ten out there yelling your nana’s name,” says Patricia, using the black pick-up stick skillfully to lift two red sticks off the floor of my room.

  “It’s so weird,” I say. “She mostly just keeps to herself….I’ve never known anyone to be angry with Matilde before.” I move three sticks, trying to pull out the blue one, and then I have to admit softly, “Except maybe the people in my family.”

  “Wait here, I’m going to take a look out the front.” Patricia’s got the game pretty well stitched up and is way more interested in what’s happening out on the street than beating me again in pick-up sticks. “Matilde told you not to go to the front, Ally, but she didn’t say anything about me.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling squeezed between the instructions of my grandmother and the erupting idea of my best-ever friend. “But be careful. Go through the kitchen door and then you can sneak along Joy’s fence line…you know, on the other side to where Matilde is working. I’ll wait here and make noises like we’re still playing pick-up sticks.”

  Patricia moves pretty quickly and is back in my room before eighty-apple-pie.

  “There’s nine of them out there…I counted…and now they’re holding up signs,” she says, slightly puffed.

  “What do the signs say?” I’m really hoping Patricia’s reading has improved.

  “I looked real quick, so I only saw two of them straight on. One I couldn’t make out, but the other one says Scab.”

  “Scab?…Why would they say scab? That’s just really weird.” I’m wondering if those women think my grandmother Matilde is a Riffraff.

  Rick doesn’t say anything about the angry women when he arrives home, but I know that he’s seen them because soon after, he comes to the kitchen door and suggests that before dinner we go for a paddle. I think he wants to get us away from Number 23 and let the waves wash over us and do their work.

  “Go grab your togs, girls. And Al, leave a note for Matilde on the hall table to say I’m taking you out for a while,” he says. “Actually, write down straight up, Al…My father is taking me to the beach!”

  I don’t want to make Matilde livid with all that’s going on, so I write instead: We’re going for a drive with Rick.

  I explain to Patricia what a paddle involves and tell her that it will be really cool because we can take it in turns with Rick on the board and then he can also teach her how to ride the waves.

  But she doesn’t seem all that excited. “I’ll just watch you from the beach, Ally. I don’t have a swimsuit.”

  “I’ve got an old one you can wear. I’ve grown out of it, but it’ll still fit you.”

  “Nah, it’ll be more fun just to watch.”

  I’m sure Patricia will change her mind when she sees how cool it is to ride the waves, so I bring the extra suit anyway. We join Rick at his van out the back. I slide in along the bench seat beside Rick, and Patricia tucks in snugly next to me. Rick sits forward, revs the engine and takes off down the side drive, turning sharply into the street. A startled woman jumps out of the way, her fist waving and her sign bending toward us. The sign reads in big black letters: STRIKEBREAKER.

  “What’s a strikebreaker, Rick?” I ask, looking back to make sure I’ve read the words right.

  “And what’s a scab?” adds Patricia, also looking over her shoulder.

  “Those women are just a bit hot under the collar and taking it out on Matilde. They’ll be gone soon enough.” Rick is flipping over the Beach Boys cassette with one hand and steering with the other.

  “Will Matilde be safe there all on her own?” I say, suddenly thinking we should go back. “I don’t think we should be leaving her.”

  “They’re not going to hurt her, Al Pal.”

  “But what’s happening, Rick? Why are they so angry? I don’t understand…can you please tell us what’s going on?”

  “Really it’s nothing to worry about,” he says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music.

  I turn down “Good Vibrations.” “You’re fobbing me off, Rick. What’s happening?”

  Rick stops tapping and glances at me sideways. “Okay, Al…look…those women are on strike. Do you know what that is?”

  “Kind of,” I say at the same time as Patricia says, “No.”

  “Well, they want better pay, so they’ve all stopped work at the factory. They’re trying to negotiate with Bolton’s to give them more money. But if Matilde and the other outworkers keep up their sewing at home, that means Bolton’s can still get the work done and their orders filled and then they don’t need the women at the factory after all. The strike is broken.”

  “Is it bad to be a strikebreaker?”

  “That depends on your perspective, Al.”

  “But Matilde is just doing what she’s always done—her piecework from home—and if she doesn’t work, then she doesn’t get paid, not a red cent.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”

  “And if she doesn’t get paid, she can’t pay for everything we need.”

  “Well, she doesn’t pay for everything we need, Al. I work too.”

  “I know…but you’ve got that sickness.”

  “What sickness?”

  “The Játszik sickness…”

  “The what sickness?”

  Rick and Patricia both turn toward me so that I feel flanked, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t taken the conversation from strikebreakin
g to the Játszik sickness. I lean forward and turn up “Good Vibrations.” “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What are you talking about, Al? Come on, don’t you fob me off now.” Rick turns the music down again.

  He’s not going to let me off the hook, I can tell, so I explain reluctantly, “I heard Matilde telling that Polish lady, the one who came around for tea, that you had a sickness and she called it the Játszik sickness. She said it’s why you can’t contribute much money.”

  “Jeeeez,” Rick mutters under his breath, and turns up “Good Vibrations” louder than before. He doesn’t tap his fingers on the steering wheel this time; he just stares straight ahead.

  “She wasn’t really mad about it, Rick, she was just explaining why she needs the money from the piecework. But…well…maybe…maybe I didn’t hear her properly.” I don’t think Rick is hearing me now.

  We don’t speak again until we pull up in the car park at the beach. Rick gets his board out of the back and hovers there for a while before he sticks his head in the side window of the van.

  “I’m going to catch a few waves. You two can wait here or down on the sand.” Rick’s obviously changed his mind about taking us for a paddle and wants the waves to wash his stuff away all on his own.

  “And Al…by the way…sometimes your grandmother can be a bitter old woman. I don’t have that sickness, not like her husband had. I just like to place a bet every now and again. It gives me something to be hopeful about.”

  I’m relieved about that, in a worried-guilty sort of way.

  “Looks like we didn’t need our swimmers after all,” I say to Patricia.

  “That’s okay, Ally. I can’t actually swim,” she says, watching Rick walking toward the water. “Well, at least your dad hasn’t got that sickness.”

  “Yeah, but now he’s mad at Matilde all because of me,” I say, and I start to feel a sickness of my own rise up in that part of my heart that gets congested when my dad and grandmothers press hard and cold against each other.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Patricia and I arrive home from the beach bone dry. Coming up the back porch, I hear Matilde on the phone at the end of the hall. She doesn’t normally speak much on the phone, especially in the middle of a rush job.

  “Of course I understand. I need the work just like you do, Nora, but this could be our only opportunity to change things for good, to make things better for all of us, the pieceworkers. We are the ones treated worst of all.” She sees us come in, turns to the wall and lowers her voice. Only it’s a Matilde-style lowered voice and still just loud enough for me to hear every word.

  “With this strike at the factory, Bolton’s needs us now more than ever, and so we have this small window of power. We should seize this opportunity to be paid fairly and to be paid on time. It could be our only chance.”

  Matilde goes quiet. She is listening. She is nodding. She is pleased: “Good. This is good, Nora. Can you speak with your sister also? I will call Katia and Irena.”

  She hangs up and walks back to the front room, looking like something important has been settled. I follow her in, hoping it’s a good moment to ask if Patricia can stay for a sleepover. “Yes, yes, she can stay,” says Matilde, sitting back down at her machine. “Your friend Patricia is a good no-nonsense girl. She is welcome here.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Patricia is fascinated that Lucinda Lister is preggers. I told her when we were chatting in bed last night. And now after breakfast she wants to talk about it again, this time fishing for more details: “Do you know who the father is?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I say, and the truth is I hadn’t even thought to wonder about that.

  “We should visit her, Ally—we could take her some Twisties. I’d like to meet her.”

  “Matilde would be livid if I went anywhere near the place. She told me to keep well away from there, and from Lucinda.”

  “It’s not like the mumps, Ally. You can’t catch preggers.”

  “I know that…but I don’t want to make Matilde mad, especially in the middle of this rush job with all the other stuff that’s going on.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” says Patricia, but then she comes up with an idea. “Tell you what, why don’t you write Lucinda a note and I can drop it off at her place. That way you won’t be going there—you’ll be staying away like Matilde told you to, but you can still send her your sympathies. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”

  Lucinda isn’t the sort of girl anyone normally feels sorry for. She’s always been the girl across the road that has everything: a blond ponytail, a pool, a dragster, cool parents, a mixed party with eighteen friends, and Alpine Lights. But now that I think about it, there’s no one hanging around in the garage anymore, her pool has gone murky, and it seems like her dad and his station wagon aren’t coming back. I’m not sure where a baby fits in…whether that counts as more of everything or if it is actually something to feel sorry about.

  Patricia seems pretty sure it’s something to feel sorry about, and she’s usually spot-on, so I write Lucinda a note on my old Holly Hobbie stationery:

  Sorry you’re preggers. I hope these Twisties make you feel better.

  From,

  Ally

  Patricia slips out the back door and down Joy’s side path to deliver it across the road to the Lucky house. I play both hands of Go Fish by myself on my bedroom floor, using two different voices out loud so Matilde is none the wiser.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  For three days now Matilde has pedaled hard, despite the angry women holding up their signs—and calling out her name—and the growing crowd of neighbors staring at what’s become quite a sight outside Number 23. The man with the gray Plasticine face has arrived at the same time each night, branded with dripping egg yolk and bringing more bags of fabric and a fresh round of barked instructions for Matilde.

  And now some of the women are shouting Áruló…Áruló…Áruló.

  I’m thinking that word must be Hungarian, so I sneak a look in the dictionary Matilde keeps on the bookshelf. And there it is: áruló in Hungarian means traitor in English. My birthmark warms up and starts to pulsate.

  I take a tray of tea and honey toast in to Matilde. I make the tea extra warm, sweet and milky and spread the honey extra thick. Once I’ve set the tray down on the table next to the Singer, my arms surprise me by moving forward and wrapping themselves around Matilde’s bony shoulders. My face nuzzles into the back of her head. She smells brave. She smells able. She smells really tired. Matilde actually stops sewing. She exhales and reaches her left hand up to my forearm, which I turn upward…slowly…deliberately…so that my special mark lines up with the numbers written on her wrist.

  And suddenly there is Kimberly Linton’s father, standing large and looking menacing in the doorway of Matilde’s front room.

  “Sorry to disturb such a tender scene, but I have come to let you know that it’s you who is dragging the chain, and now that I’m here, I can see all too clearly why.”

  Mr. Linton moves forward and stands over Matilde at her machine. It’s easy to trace the origin of every festering feature of Kimberly Linton. He has that same cruel expression Kimberly gets when she’s about to lash out.

  So this time I decide to strike first.

  “My grandmother is not dragging any chain,” I say, picturing Mr. Linton as a scrunched-up essay in my pocket. “She’s hardly had any breaks in more than three days.”

  “Is that right, little miss,” he says without looking at me. Then, stepping in closer to Matilde, he sprays: “Well, how is it, then, that your work is so slow and the quality is so poor? And as if that’s not bad enough, I hear you’re stirring up trouble with my other outworkers. If you want to be paid anything—anything at all—for this job or any other, you’d better pic
k up the pace and keep your mouth firmly shut!” Mr. Linton’s spittle is going straight into Matilde’s face.

  A memory vapor of Kimberly’s burning words is whirling around the room:

  I have an alive mother to buy for, not a dead mother, not a dead mother, not a dead mother like you.

  And now it’s mixing with the threatening words of her father: Pick up the pace…the quality is poor…keep your mouth firmly shut.

  My solar plexus is pushing up something that surfaces with a burst of bátor: “You leave my grandmother alone! You’re a bully just like your horrible mean daughter!” I fly at him and pull at his arm with all my might.

  Matilde flinches like something is coming her way, but Mr. Linton turns and pokes his thumb—hard—into the middle of my spine. His breath smells of meat and vinegar, and he pushes me down toward the door with his other hand at the base of my neck: “Now settle down, little miss—you have quite a temper there.”

  He must have hit a nerve. I can’t help but let out an echoing shriek as I land—thump—on my knees in the corridor. And now he’s above me, looking down, but I don’t care if he hurts me. I will not let this bully from Bolton’s Fashion House see me cry.

  Matilde jumps up and is breathing hard by my side. “You…you disgusting pig. Do not ever touch my granddaughter. Do you hear me? Ever! How did you even get into my home? My front door is locked,” she demands loudly from the floor next to me.

  “What…you want me to come to the front door with those mad women bellowing out there? Knock on your front door like a visitor!” Mr. Linton is snarling. “You work for me, remember, and I’ll use any entrance I like.” He looks like he thinks he owns everyone and everything in the world.

  Matilde, satisfied that I’m not injured, stands up and takes him in—head on—but suddenly she seems paralyzed.

  Joy is here.