I did.
“I’m Aseel, and this is Sophronia.”
“Everybody calls me Soph.”
“I’m Tess. You guys dancers?”
“I’m a dancer. My stage name is Lady Asenath. But I’m also a translator. And pretty much everything else, including manager for the fellow who brought this troupe over from Africa.” Aseel made a grand gesture, like she was showing off a palace full of treasures.
Soph handed me a tightly rolled cigarette. “I’m a journalist,” she said. “Did you know this is the first time these traditional dances have been seen in America? It’s incredible. I’m working on a story about it.”
I took a drag and tried not to choke. Nineteenth-century tobacco is intense. “What else do you write about?”
“Mostly I write pamphlets about how I’m fucking an angel.”
I’ve heard a lot of weird things in my twenty-five years of travel, so it was easy to keep my tone conversational. “What kind of angel?”
“I don’t mean a real angel. The goddess wouldn’t take physical form like that. But I teach women about family health and the marriage bed, and it helps if they can tell their husbands that they’re reading spiritualist tracts.”
Aseel broke in. “I ordered one of her newsletters when I was having woman problems back in Arizona. When I came to Chicago, the first thing I did was call on her.” The two women looked at each other and giggled.
“You look like a New Woman.” Soph raised her eyebrows. “What do you do?”
“Actually, I’m looking for work.”
“But you don’t dance?” Aseel was dubious. “Can you do mending? We are desperate for a seamstress.”
“Sure I can.”
Soph did a little pirouette. “Wonderful! Delightful! It’s as if the goddess herself brought you to us!”
I grinned and nodded. This was an incredible stroke of luck. I’d landed a job in the exact place where Comstock would try to crush women’s rights in a few months.
* * *
Aseel reminded me of every female boss I’ve ever had, no matter where I traveled. She wasn’t technically in charge—that honor went to Sol Bloom, a young event promoter from San Francisco who managed the entire Midway Plaisance. But everyone knew Aseel was the person with all the answers. Though she had no job title, she did everything at the Algerian Theater, from accounting and hiring to project management and choreography. And of course, she was paid less than the guys following her directions on how to build the stage.
Also like every female boss I’ve ever had, this situation annoyed the shit out of her. My second day on the job, I arrived to find Aseel chewing out the cast and crew. “What are you oafs doing? We open on May 1! The sets aren’t finished, the roof is leaking, and you’re all dancing like donkeys!” Then she yelled at everybody in Arabic for a while before whirling on me. “And how about the costumes? Salina’s jacket is in tatters!” I hung my head along with the rest of the team. We couldn’t all be as competent as the great Lady Asenath, the star of our show and scourge of lazy proto-carnies.
Still, I passed the afternoon pleasantly enough, adding modest chemises to the traditional, midriff-baring vests that some of the dancers wore with their skirts and tassels. These additions had to be transparent enough to show the women’s stomach muscles, but opaque enough to prevent nice midwestern white people from freaking out. Next there were endless tiny beads and sparkly coins to replace on jackets, pantaloons, scarves, and shoes. As I licked another piece of thread and poked it through the needle’s eye, Aseel sat down next to me and groaned.
“Long day. And we have a performance in a couple of hours.”
I was surprised. “I thought the show started in May.”
“Why do you think the costumes are already so ripped up and broken? I’ve been putting on a preview show for the past few weeks. Two bits a head. We’ve made plenty of dough and the Midway isn’t even open yet.” There was a note of pride in her voice.
I started attaching coins to a bodice, carefully placing them so they overlapped like kissing buttons. “How long have you been dancing with this troupe?”
She sorted through the dish of coins and handed me a few of the right size. “Oh, I didn’t come over with them. I joined up last year, when Sol put a notice in the paper for a manager who spoke Arabic.”
“He hired you as the manager?”
“Well, technically he hired me as a dancer. But then he figured out that I can speak English and Arabic, and that I know how to run a show. My parents are from Egypt, and they owned a saloon back in Arizona. I learned African dances to entertain the guests, but my dad taught me how to run the business too.” She looked down, suddenly sad. “He was a good man. Always treated the girls as well as the boys.”
“Why did you come to Chicago?”
“After he died, my mother remarried and … well, perhaps you can guess. Not all men are equally good.”
“No, they aren’t.” I carefully placed another coin and thought about my past, waiting like an unpopped blister in the future. “Leaving is probably better than the alternative.”
“The alternative … I considered that.” Aseel gave me an appraising look, and I wondered if we were both talking about murder. Then she winked and smiled. “But now I’m here, with my own show.”
Sol poked his head into the dressing room, a fat cigar in his mouth. “I think you mean my show. It’s almost preview time, Aseel.”
She stood, face smoothed into professionalism again. “We’re ready.”
He clapped her on the shoulder with a grin. “Of course you are. Of course.” Then he slipped her an extra two dollars. That was, as I learned, a typical Sol move—he took credit for the show, but he also made sure we knew that he appreciated the real force behind its success. His small gestures made a big difference. Nobody in the show ever questioned that Aseel was their boss.
I was making $1.50 per day, which was actually pretty good for a seamstress in this period. The political gains from suffrage were helping a new generation of ladies move out of their fathers’ houses and into a few limited areas of work: garment-making, nursing, teaching, landscaping, and the arts. Newly founded colleges like UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago opened their doors to a fully coed student body.
Like many other unmarried women of the day, I rented a room in a boardinghouse—a three-story brick building on Dearborn Street that Soph recommended. Her consulting parlors were right down the hall, and that meant a steady trickle of visitors came past my door seeking spiritual guidance.
That night, I lay back on the hard cot in my room, read the Tribune, and eavesdropped on two well-dressed ladies gossiping about how Soph could cure anyone’s broken heart with a prayer. An hour later, three women arrived from jobs in the garment district, their faces drawn and fingers raw. One was crying. “God have mercy on me, but I cannot have this child,” she whispered, voice quavering. “He is not a good man. After what he did to me—” Her sobs came again, a seizure of melancholy. Another shushed her. “Soph can help. We will pray. She knows the secrets of angels.” The third snorted. “You mean she knows a certain midwife.”
As the afternoons blurred together, each one warmer than the last, I witnessed a nearly forgotten facet of feminine culture in the Gilded Age. These were Spiritualists, devotees of a mystical blend of paganism, occult beliefs, and Christianity that was embraced mostly by American women. Soph was one of Chicago’s best-known practitioners.
Watching women demur to men in public and suffer the consequences of their abuse in private, it was hard to believe we were at a transition point in history when women’s growing power could unsettle a long-established social order. But change is never linear or obvious. Often progress only becomes detectable when it inspires a desperate backlash. Which is why I was almost certain to find the Comstockers here and now, laying the groundwork for their malicious edit.
SIX
BETH
Balboa, Alta California … Irvine, Alta Cali
fornia (1992 C.E.)
Lizzy had the biggest car, so she always drove when we did things as a group. Which was good, because it turned out Heather had invited her cousin Hamid, and Soojin had brought that poseur Mark. As we drove to the movies, I wondered whether Mark still had scars from his unimpressive experiments with chest carving. And then I remembered with a nauseated jolt that we’d left Mark’s best friend floating in Woodbridge Lake a couple months ago. Maybe I’d try to be nice to the guy for once.
The double bill at the Balboa Theater that night included Total Recall. As we piled into the stained pseudo-velvet seats in the balcony, I wound up between Lizzy and Hamid. I was a little annoyed at first, but it turned out that Hamid had seen RoboCop on video, and could actually string together a few sentences about it.
“I really liked how RoboCop had those advertisements and news propaganda bits.” He turned to me and offered some of his popcorn. Hamid and Heather hung out sometimes, so we’d met before, but all I knew was that he was a senior who had gotten into UCLA.
“Yeah. I love movies that are violent and funny at the same time. The ads made it seem like Total Recall will be that way too. Plus it’s the same director.”
“Exactly! Paul Verhoeven is rad.”
I’d rarely met anyone who cared that movies had directors, let alone that those directors might have something to do with the tone of the film. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but Hamid was pretty cute. It wasn’t his looks, which were perfectly fine but not particularly noteworthy—he had short black hair and one of those perfect golden-brown California tans that all of us wanted. The main thing was that I liked talking to him. We discussed our favorite directors until the lights went down, at which point I was definitely developing a crush.
We started holding hands around the point where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyeballs pop out in the thin Martian atmosphere. It was one of those surreptitious moments in the dark, eyes carefully averted, that I’d experienced half a dozen times with other boys. Usually all that came of it was extra popcorn butter on my fingers and a few awkward glances once we’d returned to the light.
Not this time. During our post-movie excursion to the donut shop, Hamid managed to jam a folded napkin into my hand. Much later in the evening, alone in my room with headphones blasting Million Eyes, I peeked. There was a phone number. Below it, he’d written: “Get your ass to Mars. Or call me. Or both.” Of course I called.
* * *
The following weekend, Hamid picked me up in a beat-up old sedan that was clearly a family hand-me-down. School was finally out for the summer and I’d spent the day listening to my mom on the phone signing me up for SAT prep classes. It was a relief to sit on the cracked seats with someone who had opinions about things other than my academic future.
“Air conditioning’s broken. Sorry about that.”
I didn’t mind. Hot air blew in the open windows and the horizon was smeared with a dirty orange sunset. He’d installed a decent stereo, so I fiddled with the cassette player. A tape popped out with no label.
“What’s this?”
“A mixtape Heather made for me. You’d probably like it.”
He was right. Trouble for Nora filled the car with sound and we drove toward the beach.
“So what are you going to major in at UCLA?” I asked.
“I have no idea, honestly. I’m undeclared and I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible.”
I was taken aback. Lizzy and I both planned to study geoscience, and spent a lot of time talking about how we’d organize our careers. Everything started with escaping from Irvine, of course, but usually ended in some remote Arctic region where we’d discover the secret of how life evolved.
“Isn’t there something that you want to study? You could major in film.”
He laughed bitterly. “My parents are paying for college. I’m not allowed to major in film.”
“What do they want you to major in?”
“Pretty much either pre-med or business.”
“That sucks.”
He turned to me briefly with a lopsided smile, and for a moment he was so gorgeous that I lost the thread of my dark premonition that one day he’d be a depressed middle manager posting about cult movies on Usenet.
“What do you want to major in?”
“I’m going to be a geoscientist.”
“Oh yeah? You going to travel through time?”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s cultural geology. They only call it that because the Machines are found in rocks. I’m going to study actual geology. You know, like how the Earth was formed.”
He laughed and sped off the freeway toward Balboa Beach. “I like you, Beth Cohen. I think you might be the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”
Everything we did that evening was an excuse to have a long conversation. We talked about the artificiality of high school as we ate pizza; we talked about the movie Wings of Desire as we took off our shoes to feel the sand where it met water. Around us were the amplified noises of the Fun Zone—a mix of videogame zoinks, music from half a dozen speakers, and kids getting off on sugar and booze—but all of it was muffled by the retaining wall of our voices. Eventually we were silent again, holding hands in the dark and soaking up what remained of the day’s heat as it radiated from the sand.
“Sometimes I think going to college is kind of like dying. You’re this one kind of person, with all different interests, but then you have to cut those off and become somebody totally different.” Hamid looked down as he spoke, digging a hole in the sand. I felt joined to him by mournfulness, plus the tragedy of how we were only now getting to know each other. He was about to disappear into a future neither of us could imagine.
Impulsively I ran my fingers through his hair, and it felt soft but also sad and profound and terrifying. And then, suddenly, it was scalding hot and urgent. Hamid turned to me and we were kissing, and also touching each other in a way that made my muscles tighten involuntarily. I was filled with an ache I’d only seen described in cheesy erotica they stocked in the “sexuality” section at Brentano’s bookstore.
We paused and I whispered in his ear. “You are so beautiful.” I had always wanted to say that to someone and mean it.
He looked into my eyes, his face serious. “So are you.”
We stood up, arms wrapped around each other, bodies pressed together as closely as possible.
“We should probably go home.”
“Yeah, we should.”
As we kissed again, I wondered if what was happening between us meant anything. Maybe we would never do this again, or maybe we’d have some kind of John Hughes–style summer romance. Maybe we’d fall in love. We trudged back to the parking lot, which was mostly empty. Then we spent a while listening to music in the car and saying we should leave but instead figuring out how to configure the seats so that we could lie next to each other.
I wanted to kiss every part of him that I’d read was a good place to kiss: his neck, his eyelids, his chest, his stomach. Everything. Each time he returned my kisses, place by place, and I could feel the softness of his lips even in the parts of my body he wasn’t touching. At a certain point it seemed like the most obvious thing to do was cover ourselves in a musty blanket from the back and take off all our clothes. I had never been naked with anyone like this before, for the sole purpose of exploration. It was like science.
As we fumbled toward what I’d been told would give us pleasure, I kept wondering what my body was supposed to be feeling. Intermittently I went numb. Images popped into my head whose origins I didn’t want to remember. Angry hands between my legs. A voice that turned my name into a curse. Concentrating intensely, I reoriented to the sound of Hamid sighing and ran my hands down the shallow ravine of his spine. But I’d lost the thread of what we were doing. It was like watching a movie where you didn’t get a bunch of the key references. Good—maybe very good—but also confusing.
Afterward we held each other, shaky and sweating and engrossed
by conversation again.
“I guess I thought that would hurt more.” I spoke into the curve of his neck, and could feel the cords of his muscles move before he shifted onto his elbow to look at me.
“Wait, why?”
“Well, because … you know, it usually hurts the first time for girls.”
Hamid was startled. “You were a virgin? I thought … well, you don’t act like one.”
“What does a virgin act like?”
“I mean, you’re one of Heather’s punk friends. I thought you guys were all worldly.” He laughed, and managed to look both adorable and embarrassed. “I guess that sounds stupid.”
“I mean, I think I’m flattered?”
“I was a virgin too.” He looked uncomfortable, then put on a mock pedagogical expression. “So, I guess that’s welcome to adulthood, kids. I hope you’re ready for the important responsibilities.”
“I’m ready.” I hugged him hard.
For the next several weeks, I divided my time between the crucial hours spent with Hamid and the irrelevant ones devoted to everything else.
* * *
Hamid and I became regulars at a restaurant in Woodbridge Mall called Knowlwood. It was elaborately decorated like an idealized 1950s house, complete with white picket fences, World War II paraphernalia, and flowery wallpaper. There were antique portraits of a white family on the walls, their cheeks and lips airbrushed into various shades of rosy pink. Every time we visited, I wondered who those people were.
I watched Hamid eat a pile of fries covered in melted cheese and bacon bits, debating whether to ask him what he was doing tomorrow. Would that seem weird? He hadn’t called for a couple of days and I didn’t want to seem needy. But then, before I could ask, he told me everything I wanted to know.
“So my entire family is going to Florida for a month.” Hamid sighed and shook his head. “They are obsessed with Disney World. There’s some new thing called Pleasure Island that my aunts and uncles say is the greatest resort ever built.”
The Future of Another Timeline Page 6