She tried to see herself in a hustle-bustle place, comforted by the idea there would be a ladder to climb. She liked a ladder.
Sweetie waved to the guys on a horse-drawn Sunset Scavenger wagon, stomping garbage.
“Buongiorno!” A mustached guy at the top of the pile waved at Sweetie.
“Abyssinia, Mr. Cirelli!” she answered, without slowing.
The gaunt guys in his crew stared as the girls passed.
“You’ll get a kick out of this. So, I’m in charge of our costume bible. I record everything used to costume a production. The amount of fabric, how much it cost, where we got it, how we dyed it.” Sweetie swung her arms, taking up all the air around her on the sidewalk. “And, of course, every singer’s measurements.” She paused dramatically, drawing out “measurements”—this was important.
A hobo bumped her with his stick as he passed, and Sweetie hollered, “Hey!” Then she returned to her story. “So the singers are mostly all divas, but we’ve got this one diva’s diva—she won’t go onstage without a guy spraying a flit gun of Chanel Number Five on the curtains first.”
Jane tripped on a crack. Heels were trouble.
“So anyway, she looks to be on a serious path of weight gain. And this is a problem, right? Her costume’s ready, made just so, with all the right beading and trim, in exactly the size she was when we officially measured her. But now the designer suspects—heck, we all do—the diva’s gained weight. So? In this circumstance, I’m the girth detective. You know, sneaking around, measuring the back sides of chairs she sits on?”
She heard movie patter in Sweetie’s speech and was tempted to listen just to her sound without considering her content.
Against a red light and in front of a honking jitney, Sweetie ran across the street, Jane trying to keep up without turning a heel.
“So last night? I follow the diva and the rest of them to the Streets of Paris nightclub. On Mason?”
She’d seen signs for it on a wall a block back—LOUSIEST SHOW IN TOWN! COCKTAILS FIVE CENTS!
Jane nodded, distracted by columns and stone and flags ahead.
“When the diva sits on this stool, her belly pushing up against the bar, I drop my sweater on the ground so I can bend over to mark the floor with chalk at the edge of the stool’s back leg, so I can calculate the distance between the stool back and the bar edge?”
She hurried, fearful of losing Sweetie in the throngs hustling toward a squealing bus.
“This drunk kicks me when I’m down there, and I tip over on this sticky floor. Ripping a seam at my waist? But I went back to work late last night? And got all the numbers entered into the bible! So, this morning, my sleuthing complete, all the numbers calculated—she’s two sizes bigger!—we’re letting out the seams so she can hit the big notes. Woo-hoo! But shush it. Nobody, most especially the diva, can know we know she’s made it to a new category of fat.”
Sweetie looked at her like she expected a response.
“Phyl Coe on the radio.”
Sweetie laughed at the girl detective reference. “Sneak the measurements, record the numbers, do the math. That’s the kind of artist I am right now, but not forever.”
She saw Sweetie was good at her job.
By the time they entered the War Memorial building, she really wanted to work with Sweetie, who was so magnetic, so encouraging, the way she bubbled with support and possibility, such a cheerleader. It didn’t matter if the work wasn’t near as interesting as Sweetie made it sound. And there wouldn’t be telephone or greeting work.
They entered the stone building, making their way to an interior stairwell. Up and back and behind they went, Sweetie leading her through a mass of bodies.
“How long you been working here?”
“Started right after I met Rivka. After she fixed me up.”
Let Sweetie be my Rivka. Let her fix me up, Jane thought.
Sweetie opened a door into chaos and began pointing, naming drapers, sewers, cutters, painters, dyers, accessorizers, milliners, tailors, stitchers, and shoppers. Rows of ladies hunched over sewing machines while men in shirtsleeves hollered at them. Other ladies cut fabric on room-long tables. Up and down the walls and on every flat surface were fur, lace, feathers, brocade, beads, and velvet. On dress forms to the left were a maid, a gladiator, a queen, and a dirty monk. And the white wigs and ship hats and fire swords from the pictures on the wall of their flat! Jane wondered if Sweetie had designed those, or if she had just drawn them after they were made.
In the middle of the room was a huge yelling woman with marble-colored skin, tall as Jane but wider, with a white shiny suit and matching fabric wrapped around her head.
“Diva?”
“Designer, my boss.”
The big lady screamed in another language, cigarette in one hand, coffee cup and saucer in the other, a statue come to life, people shifting around her so that she looked like the center of everything, instructions flowing from her fingertips, conducting every movement in the room. Something about that, her control of these people, disarmed Jane, who believed in the possibility of a woman’s success, but mostly her own. She tasted resentment.
Why did she feel a rising instinct to diminish this woman? Was it so she herself would feel bigger? Was it the momma in her? The daddy?
Whatever it was, instinctively, she found the quickest, most insignificant path to minimizing the woman’s obvious importance. She turned her back to the designer and said to Sweetie, “Don’t stand behind her in the potluck line,” throwing her arms to the sides to signify the size of the woman’s hips.
This wasn’t the sort of thing Jane did. She wanted this job.
But when she did it, Sweetie’s eyes bulged so you could see the whites all the way around. Jane’s right hand hit something soft, and then it was hot and wet.
“Aaaaarrrr!”
The designer was right up behind her. Jane had smacked her coffee cup, spilling hot liquid down the front of the shiny, white clothes.
“Tu es virée!” the designer yelled, the veins at her temples pulsing, blue.
“She says you’re fired.”
“I haven’t had an interview.”
The designer seemed to understand English.
“Eh bien, tu es embauchée. Maintenant, tu es virée!” Spit bubbles popped at the corners of her red, red lips.
“You’ve just been hired, and fired,” Sweetie said, her face frozen in an expression more of fear than sympathy.
Jane looked around the room and saw that Sweetie was now at its center, all eyes on her, not the designer, not Jane. Sweetie was the one who’d be punished. She’d brought the idiot into the workroom.
STRIPPED of her interview costume, back in the hand-me-down bathrobe, Jane sat on the flat’s parlor rug, up against the sofa, cracking her toes.
“Disgusting!” Sweetie said, in her after-the-opera-interview mood.
“I maybe stood a chance at the costume shop, but the receptionist one had dozens of girls in line, and that was just for one morning’s interviews. Those were the only two.”
Jane rested her cheek against a bony knee. She hated to fail and hated more that she was to blame.
“I recommended you to Madame DuBois, put my name behind you!” Sweetie said, standing above her in the bay window. “When Rivka recommended me, I took it seriously, I did Rivka honor. What you’ve done to me there . . . I’ll never . . .” She swallowed something and turned to Rivka. “And that all bounces back on you. I’m so sorry about that, dear.”
Sweetie’s lashes clumped, wet, into star sprays. She frowned at Rivka, who sat riffling through newspapers around her on the sofa and didn’t look up.
“I’m so sorry I put you in this position, saying we should help Jane. You were right.”
Sweetie’d turned on her.
Before Jane could interrupt, even before she could think what to offer in self-defense, Rivka said, “Jane is right. It is ugly, unfair world for unskilled women.” She lit a cigarette in a ser
ies of tiny gestures. “There is more for unskilled men, of course.”
“Why can’t a girl do those jobs?” Jane asked, thinking of her picking work. She’d never been the only girl in the field. When Okies were hungry, everybody worked, even little kids, dragging burlap bags behind them in the dirt like tails.
You can do men’s work, said the radio voice in her head.
“Those jobs require strength? Man stuff?” Sweetie sank onto the sofa and rolled her eyes. She’d shifted so easily from supportive to contemptuous, acting like she’d been truly injured in the opera mess, then jerking back, pretending she was most offended by the harm Jane had done Rivka—a harm Jane couldn’t see—as if Rivka were Sweetie’s main concern.
“Not all male jobs require male strength,” Rivka said.
“What are you talking about?”
Sweetie looked like she had no memory of women doing backbreaking field work. Had Uno shielded her so well?
“There is one at Prospect.” Rivka circled something in pencil.
“The Prospect?” Sweetie sat upright.
“But testicles,” Rivka said.
“Testicles?” Jane asked.
“Man job.” Rivka read aloud: “Copy boys wanted for expanding staff of ambitious regional newspaper. Need smart, hardworking hustlers. Contact Jorge Cruz at MIssion 7-2073.”
“See? Copy boys,” Sweetie said. “She’s ruined her chance. The chance I gave her!”
You can be a boy, said the voice in her head.
“Maybe she can persuade them,” Rivka said.
“Why would they give it to a girl?”
“Boys,” Jane said. “Copy boys.”
“So?”
“It says boys, not men.”
“So?”
“I could be a boy.” Her head buzzed with unfamiliar joy as she said it.
The girls were silent.
It was obviously true. It was easier to move and be in the world in overalls than the hose and heels a city girl required. In pants there was no limit to your gait.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m six foot. My voice is husky. I’ve got no bosoms.”
“She is right there,” Rivka agreed.
“Listen to Laurel and Hardy,” Sweetie said.
“No,” Rivka said. “She is right. She is not idiot, we think. She is willing to work hard, we think. She is tall and deep-voiced enough to pass as eighteen-year-old boy, immature one . . .”
“She doesn’t look like a boy!”
Jane thought of everybody at home who said she looked like Daddy. “Cut off my hair.”
“I’m not!”
“She could get this,” Rivka insisted.
Jane’s skin warmed.
“You want me to cut that gorgeous hair?” Sweetie asked.
Gorgeous? That’s a hoot.
“I know Prospect people.” Rivka’s voice underlined know. “I will cut her hair. I will make her boy,” Rivka said. “I can teach her. I taught you.”
“Taught me how to be a girl?” Sweetie shrieked.
“How to be city girl.”
Sweetie got up and walked back to the window, facing away from the other two.
“We will see if she can be boy. We will have party. See if she can get job.”
“You’re inviting Mac?” Sweetie asked, her tone a dare, a tone Jane’d not seen her take with Rivka. There was something behind that.
“I can do this,” Rivka answered. “I can make her copy boy. You think I cannot do this?”
Jane heard her say the word I three times and wondered if this was a moment of purchase.
“If I shave my head, you can get me a job?”
Rivka looked almost surprised to be reminded of Jane’s presence. Then her eyes went up to the ceiling, looking for the answer.
“It is more than shaving head. It is becoming something you are not. Something higher. Something better. Can you learn to do this?”
“You think being a boy is better than being a girl?”
“I did not say that. You did not listen. You apparently cannot listen.”
Grab hold. You’re in a hole. Stop digging.
“I can do it. I can. I can be a boy. I can be better,” she said.
Being a girl had always been a hard thing, so many layers of subtlety on top of the obvious difficulty of just getting a job done.
“You think manhood’s just some thing you put on?” Sweetie asked. Her cheeks were inflamed, making the whites of her eyes look too bright, almost fake, angry, maybe because she was no longer the one doing the helping, nor being helped.
“Precisely,” Rivka said. “Manhood is some thing you put on.”
CHAPTER THREE
DRIVE
That’s more like it.
She patted her hair, an inch long and gummed up with pomade, admiring her reflection, a great pleasure welling up from deep within. She’d never been so interested in her whole nude self, never lived in a place with a mirror bigger enough than her head to make a real study of her appearance in the world. Now, running her hands over her shoulders, arms, hips, legs, she understood why Rivka had mocked her when she’d stepped from the bath that first night, a girl weirdly tall, with bone-shaped limbs, a concave chest. But now she liked what she saw in this new light.
This was how he would have looked, his newborn self stretched, divided, multiplied into a flesh-covered skeleton, like her. If he were here, breathing, talking, laughing at her side, they’d be a matched pair. Cutting her hair felt like letting that happen.
But still, he wasn’t standing here with her.
She’d pushed out live and he had died.
Same with Daddy.
Both had gone into the ditch. Only she had come out.
She thought, Not my fault.
She straightened up taller, less dangly. same brand she saw in library magazine advertisements, with pictures of baseball players swinging a bat in their skivvies. These were nothing like her droopy, homemade panties. Nothing like the hose and garters attached to a girdle from her interview, making her feel sucked in, breathless, jury-rigged, as if the snaps might break, giving her scarcely any inclination to think what she thought, so aware was she of the rayon pattern scratching into the skin of her legs.
From this first new layer, she was comfortable.
She pulled on wool pants, her bare skin slipping into baggy, slippery-lined legs. They were too big, but she thought she’d grow into them and would step freely down the street, going where she cared to go, as fast as she wanted. She put on the crisp, ironed shirt, thick socks, wingtips, adding layers of protection, and finally left the bathroom for the parlor, where Rivka nodded, shook her head, nodded again.
“Let me teach you how to tie tie.”
Sweetie cut through the room. “You look like your daddy.”
Jane shuddered.
Rivka stuffed her pockets: a beat-up wallet with a dollar in change, a key to the flat, a handkerchief, a pack of Lucky Strikes, a pencil, and a pocket notebook—a moleskin.
“Ballast,” Rivka said. “Man needs weight.”
Daddy used to load his pockets with nuts, bolts, his pocketknife, when he didn’t have money to carry.
Jane put on a gray wool cap, which warmed the top of her head, though she thought it made her look like the hopeful sucker in a comic book.
In spite of that, and in spite of Sweetie mentioning Daddy in this moment on the brink of the party, she felt good. Hands in her pockets, knees wide, she felt the freedom of spreading out. She’d worked hard for so long to hunch over, to hide the bigness that made her the butt of jokes, so that her very self was what stopped her from getting the things she wanted.
And now for that fact, her height, to make her more believable in this new role, with all its possibilities, was an amazement.
“About your voice,” Rivka said. “Drop it to lower register, just little lower.”
That wouldn’t be hard with her damaged throat.
She ha
d been thirteen when she’d breathed in valley fever’s dust-borne spore and it had swum to the bottom of her lungs, circling up, filling itself with a hundred babies before rupturing, releasing them to repeat the pattern, traveling through her blood, spreading the fungus, turning her voice to a growl.
One morning that year she had woken in the car’s back seat, where she’d slept so as not to keep her parents awake with her coughing. She’d trapped a fiddleback spider in a jelly jar and set it on the dashboard, where the sun shone into and out of its quilted glass surface, shooting little fragmented rainbows through the dusty sky. She could see the air where she lived had a graininess, and could understand why it was so hard for her to breathe there.
Seeing it so clearly had set her off coughing.
Momma had opened the car door in her nightgown—“Quiet! You’ll ruin your throat. Sound enough like a boy already!”
Now that fever-ruined voice was a lucky thing, everything gone opposite.
“Stand up straight!” Rivka lectured. “Throw your shoulders back! Stick your chest out.”
Jane did, taking up more space.
Rivka continued, “No one will believe in copy boy who does not smoke.”
She taught Jane how to light a cigarette like a boy, how to let it dangle out the side of her lips, how to grip it with her thumb and two fingers, flicking ashes, rude, as if no one needed to sweep up after her, or as if she didn’t care they did.
“All is fine now with body, voice. But I am as worried about ain’t as the rest of it.”
“And fixin’ and figurin’,” Sweetie said, her eyebrows raised, so superior to Jane, having banished the chopped-off g from her own speech.
“That is color. Ain’t is error. There is difference.”
“I ain’t gonna say ain’t no more.”
Rivka looked at her sharply.
“Sounds like there is someone in there.”
Jane smiled.
“Muzzle her.”
JANE lit another Lucky Strike, sitting on the top step. Her cough had mostly calmed since she’d left the dust for fog, but she expected the cigarette to take her right back to hacking. She loosened the tie that had been choking her all afternoon, making her feel like a cow on a ramp, and took a long drag, feeling her throat itch. But the cough didn’t come, so she settled, studying her neighborhood from the flat’s front steps.
Copy Boy Page 5