by Laura Ruby
I could have talked about the angel, about the churning furnace of this world. I could have talked about the will of God and all His mystery. I could have said that there was no use in getting angry.
Instead I said, Tell me another story.
What kind of story?
About the redhead in his photograph. The one who looks as harmless as milk.
The Jezebel
ONCE THERE WAS A BEAUTIFUL girl, the youngest daughter of a preacher man. Her eyes were like cornflowers, her hair was like fire, her skin—
Like cream? I asked.
Peaches and cream, said Marguerite. And she was desperately in love with the son of a scholar, a fine young man, tall and fair as a god in a painting. It seemed as if the match was made in heaven.
But then she came along.
She? I asked.
A temptress, dark and alluring. The scholar’s son was smitten. Ensorceled. He told the preacher’s daughter that he could not marry her, for he was in love with someone else. He said that the preacher’s daughter deserved better than a man with designs on another.
The preacher’s daughter could not believe the scholar’s son could have been distracted so easily, could defy the wishes of his parents, of his people. She feared for his soul, feared that a devil had taken it. A filthy Jezebel. She was determined to save him. She enlisted her father, the preacher. They implored him to think of his family, to think of his community. Equality for all was a lofty goal, but this was too much to ask. This would tear the town apart. He had to leave the Jezebel. He had to. And finally, worn down by the entreaties of the preacher, he did.
But when he left the temptress, he also left his heart with her. And no matter how much the preacher’s daughter tried, she couldn’t make him love her instead. So she asked that the temptress come to their church after Sunday service. Just to talk, just to understand. Woman to woman.
The Jezebel dared to come, and the preacher’s daughter was not afraid. She invited the woman into the meeting room for tea. It was a special sort of tea. The kind that made a person sleepy if you drank enough.
The women talked. The preacher’s daughter begged the temptress to leave the scholar’s son alone. You will ruin him, she said. It’s an abomination, you’re a churchgoing woman, surely you’ve read scripture. But the Jezebel claimed that the scholar’s son was in love with her and she with him, that she never meant to hurt anyone. Here was the truth of it, the Jezebel said: they would be married one day, she was sure of it. Love was God’s own creation. And so was she.
The preacher’s daughter flew into a rage at such blasphemy, but she didn’t show it. She waited until the Jezebel had finished her tea, waited until the cup slipped from her hand and smashed to the floor, waited until she was slumped in her chair. Then she took a pillow from the settee, placed it over the Jezebel’s face, and held it. She was surprised at how easy it was to vanquish evil.
The preacher found her there, standing over the Jezebel. Together, they put the pillow into the hearth, where it burned, but they left the smashed teacup on the floor. They called for help. They claimed the Jezebel had collapsed, they didn’t know why. One of God’s mysteries. They would pray for her and her family.
The scholar’s son was devastated, but the preacher’s daughter comforted him. And even if the scholar’s son wondered how the temptress had come to be in the church that Sunday, how a healthy young woman collapsed while drinking tea—even if he had poked at the remnants of a pillow burned in the hearth, even if he stayed up at night, not sleeping, looking down at the peaceful peaches-and-cream face of his lovely new wife, wondering who he had married—he said nothing.
He said nothing.
He said nothing.
Why does the world demand girls be beautiful, but when they are, punish them for it? Why does it punish girls either way? Why does the world want girls to be sorry, some even more than others? Sorry, sorrier, sorriest.
On the day of her job interview, Frankie woke up and brushed her hair in the mirror. It was long now, longer than it had been before Sister George had sheared it, longer even than she would have been allowed to keep it if she’d still been in the orphanage.
Pretty hair. Jezebel’s hair. She wished that Sam were there to comb his hands through it and never stop.
She dressed in her best dress and gloves. Toni helped her draw a line up the back of her legs with a pen so that it looked as if she were wearing stockings. And then Toni perched the hat that Aunt Marion had given her so long ago on Frankie’s freshly rolled curls.
“There,” said Toni. “It’s like you’re a lady or something.”
“Or something,” said Dewey, Ada’s youngest son, still a year from his enlistment date. He had eyes like sandpaper and stiff, white-blond hair that sprouted doll-like from his head. Dewey scoured Frankie and Toni both raw with his mustardy-brown eyes, his lopsided smirk, the way he had of eating with his mouth open, of spraying food half chewed. They stayed as far away from him as they could. Which wasn’t far enough.
When Frankie went into the kitchen, only Ada and her father were there, looking like they’d been fighting and she’d just walked right into the middle of it. Her father told her that he’d be taking Frankie to catch the streetcar and got up to get his coat. Ada didn’t offer any breakfast, which was just as well; Frankie was too nervous to eat. Ada stared at the hat on Frankie’s head, frowning.
“Things will be okay, yes?” said Frankie’s father. “You will be fine.” Her father pulled some change from his pocket and counted out the fare. “You give this to driver and tell him Berman’s. Lots of girls work there, so they always stop.”
“They always stop,” Frankie said. “Sure.”
She’d chased down streetcars before, of course, but this was different. If she got the job, she’d have to catch the streetcar every day and go to work, all by herself. With all those chores she’d had to do at the orphanage, she’d never had to do any of them all on her own, except as a punishment. What if she got lost? What if she couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to do? What if the other typists hated her? The streets never looked so wide, and the streetcar never looked as big as when it pulled up in front of her.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t get the job?”
He looked her up and down, nodded in approval. “I made you nice shoes. You will get the job,” he said.
She felt as if she would be sick all over her tidy outfit. “But what if I don’t get it? I mean, there’ll be other jobs, right?”
“Your mother make this happen,” her father said, frowning. “You have to get the job, yes?”
Frankie couldn’t understand what he was talking about until she realized he meant Ada. He was saying that Ada was her mother.
Ada was not her mother. Ada would never be. And what kind of man was her father that he would say such a thing?
Her rage burned out quickly. Her bones felt like pudding as she said goodbye to her father and staggered up the stairs to the driver. She put the change in his palm and said, “Berman’s.”
“What?” he said. “Speak up, girlie!”
“Berman’s,” she said, a little louder.
“I can’t hear you,” he said, leaning his face in.
“Berman’s!” she shouted.
He scowled. “Well, Berman’s. You didn’t have to shout.”
She found a seat right up front and watched out the window. Her stomach was now hard as a cinder block. If Superman punched her there, she thought, he would break his hand.
The ride was only twenty-five minutes, but it felt like hours. Her eyes were hot and dry as she stepped off the streetcar and walked the one block to Berman’s. At the front desk, a woman sat filing her long red nails. Frankie cleared her throat, hoping that she would notice Frankie standing there, but she didn’t. She cleared it again, and still she didn’t look up.
“Excuse me,” Frankie said.
“Yeah?” she said, still filing
.
“I have an appointment to see Mr. Gilhooly.”
She put the file down. “You that new girl?”
“What?”
“You that new girl for the typing pool?”
“Yeah. I mean yes, I guess I am. I’m Frankie. Francesca. Mazza.”
She scooped up a phone and called someone. “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “New girl’s here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” She put the phone down. “Wanda will be right out. She runs the typing pool.”
“Okay,” Frankie said. “Thank you.” She sat in one of the chairs. She realized she was sitting with her legs far apart, so she crossed them like a lady. Then she crossed them the other way. She worried that crossing her legs would smear the lines Toni had drawn for her and uncrossed them again. She put her purse down in the seat next to her and then put it on her lap. She fixed her borrowed hat, pulling on the felt.
“You all right?” said the receptionist.
“Oh, yes. Fine.”
“That’s a swell dress.”
Frankie clutched at her collar and glared but saw that the woman was smiling in a nice way. Maybe she really liked the dress. “Thank you,” Frankie said.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
Frankie didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. She’d talked plenty in the orphanage. She didn’t know how to talk out here in the world.
A door behind the big reception desk opened, and another woman stood there. “Francesca Mazza?”
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
Frankie followed her into the back offices. The smell of smoke wafted in the air as the men inside the offices chomped on cigars and cigarettes while they yelled at people on the phone. “Salesmen,” Wanda said, and twirled a finger around her ear. One of her eyes had a freckle right in her iris. Frankie wasn’t sure where to look. It was as if she had a hole in her eye that Frankie could fall into and disappear.
She led Frankie to a typewriter and told her to roll up a piece of paper. Frankie started to take off her gloves, but Wanda stopped her. “Keep ’em on,” she said. “I’m not hiring you until I know you can type. Last girl said she could type and her forms came back like a cat had jumped across the keys. Just type what I say. Ready? Dear Mr. Gilhooly, G-I-L-H-O-O-L-Y, I would like to order a set of screwdrivers and a set of nuts and some bolts. Please send me these items as soon as you can. . . .”
Wanda talked very fast, and Frankie had to concentrate to make sure her gloved fingers didn’t slip off the keys. After a minute or two, Wanda stopped talking and whipped the page out of the typewriter to look at it. Frankie crossed her fingers under the desk.
“Hmmm . . . ,” Wanda said, flipping the paper over. “All right. Gimme some shorthand. ‘The rain in Spain falls slowly on the plain.’ Wait, don’t write that part. Write, ‘The applicant was a good typist, but we don’t know about her shorthand. If we hire her, we’re going to need another typewriter, a desk, a chair, and more pens and pencils. Also, six reams of paper.’”
Frankie picked up the paper and showed her the shorthand. Wanda smiled at her and winked her freckled eye. “All righty. I think you’ve got yourself a job. Pays seventy-five cents an hour, not including lunch. Come back at nine a.m. sharp tomorrow.”
Frankie walked out of the building in a daze. She got the job, which meant she would be making more than twenty-five dollars a week. What could she do with all that money? How many dresses could she buy? How many sacks of flour or pounds of rice? How many sketchbooks? Paints? For one blissful moment, she forgot all her misery and confusion. She almost did a dance in the street.
A woman passing by smiled at her. “You look happy!”
Almost immediately, Frankie’s blissful feelings faded. How dare she be happy when her brother was fighting a war? How dare she be happy when Sam was gone? Her eyes welled with tears.
The woman touched her arm. “You’re allowed to be glad for a moment.”
“You don’t understand,” Frankie began.
“I don’t need to,” the woman said. “We only get scraps in this lousy life. Take what you can get, do you hear me?”
“But—”
The woman drew Frankie into a brief but ferocious hug. “Take what you can get.”
When I visited the blue house in the sea of red brick, Marguerite came too. We watched the berry-lipped girl and her boxer man, though we chose what to witness. I liked having Marguerite with me, liked having Wolf at our feet. We were like some strange little family. If you didn’t think about it too long. If you forgot that we were dead.
Afterward, we would stretch out on a roof downtown, on the deck of a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, counting the stars, little doorways.
Marguerite said, You never told me her name. The baby’s.
She’s called something else now, I said. But when she was born, I called her Mercy.
The Churning Furnace
THE WAR IN EUROPE RAGED on, but Frankie’s war had just begun.
Ada’s eyes followed her everywhere. Every step she took, every bite of food she ate, every sip of water. The nicer Frankie tried to be, the smaller the portions of spaghetti and meatballs, the drier the toast, the more Ada watched. And the more Ada watched, the more Ada got from Frankie’s father. Frankie’s first payday, she handed the money over to her father, only to see him turn around and hand the crumpled bills to Ada. “For room and board, for you and your sister,” she had said.
“Ada hates us,” Frankie told Loretta the first visiting Sunday she could get away. “And so do Bernice and Cora.”
“I could have told you that,” Loretta said, pulling a wrapped meatball sandwich and a jar of leftover spaghetti from the bag Frankie had brought. Loretta unwrapped the sandwich, took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. “I remember Ada coming here to visit all those kids of hers, staring down her nose. She looked like a crow. No, that’s not fair to crows. She looked like a vulture.”
“Not fair to vultures,” said Frankie. “At least I got my job, so I’m gone all day. You should see how they treat Toni, like some kind of Cinderella. She might as well be in here with you.”
Loretta chewed, looking up out of the corners of her eyes the way she did when she was thinking. “How’s your job?”
“Fine, I guess,” Frankie said. The truth was that the job was so boring that it made her bones ache, and she got a terrible pain in her wrists, and the other girls scared her sometimes, made her feel tongue-tied and alien, but she felt spoiled rotten for even thinking that, with Loretta still scrubbing down floors. So Frankie said, “It’s sort of dull to type all these forms all day, but it’s better than washing dishes, so I shouldn’t complain.”
“No,” Loretta said. “You shouldn’t. How much do they pay you over there?”
“Seventy-five cents an hour.”
“Seventy-five cents an hour!” Loretta said. “You really shouldn’t complain! You’re rich!”
“Yeah, well. I have to give it all to my father. To pay for me and Toni.” She reached down and fixed the laces on her shoes so that Loretta couldn’t see the resentment on her face. “They don’t have much, and every penny counts. He gives me some for the streetcar.”
“Well,” she said. “It’s good that you got the job, then.”
“Yeah.”
“And maybe when the war is over, your dad’s business will pick up and you can keep a little more of that money. For this.” She pulled a small piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Frankie. It was an ad. “I found it in a magazine that Sister Bert gave me.”
CHICAGO PAINTING ACADEMY
Practical training in decorating, paperhanging, graining, marbling, sign and pictorial painting.
“What is this?”
“Art school, silly!” Loretta always got excited when she was talking about school. She was so strange, that she thought that everyone would want to go to school for as many years as possible.
Frankie studied the ad. “Painting I get. But what’s
graining? And marbling?”
“I have no idea, but they’d teach you. Isn’t that a thrill?”
“I guess,” Frankie said.
“Come on, Frankie. It would be fun! More fun than typing, don’t you think? Somebody has to draw all those signs and billboards and stuff. Why couldn’t it be you?”
The truth was, Frankie had asked her father about art school, not long after he’d brought them home. She’d said, “Maybe after I’ve worked for a while, I can go.” He just laughed and laughed.
Frankie folded the ad into a tiny square. It felt as if she were folding herself up.
“I always loved your drawings,” Loretta was saying. “I think you could make a lot of money. Or some money. Or at least you’d be happy.” Loretta finished the meatball sandwich and licked her fingers. “Have you drawn anything lately?”
“No,” Frankie said. “I have to work all the time. And I have chores when I get home, so . . .” She rubbed the grain of the wooden table. “Not much different than living here, I guess. It’s just a lot harder to talk to people.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
Loretta’s question battered Frankie, made her burst like a dam. “They weren’t raised in the orphanage. They don’t know what it’s like. And I don’t know what anything else is like. I get confused when I’m sent to the grocer to buy something. All these red stamps and blue stamps, sugar stamps and shoe stamps. I’m not used to the cigarette lines, meat lines, and soap-flake lines. I can’t talk about . . .” She swallowed. “Sam. I can’t go to dances. Every time someone shuts a door, or opens one, I jump, because I keep thinking about Sister George, getting trapped somewhere with someone who wants to beat me for no reason, and it doesn’t matter that I know they won’t. I can’t even keep the lines on my legs straight. I don’t know how the other girls do all these things. I don’t know how the other girls are girls. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Loretta leaned back as if Frankie’s torrent had washed her downstream. “Oh,” she said. “Well.”
Frankie flushed, embarrassed that she had said so much. “What about you?”