[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  Sincerely yours,

  Charlotte Price

  49

  New Mexico and Arizona lasted forever. California looked just the same, Neva thought, but it smelled better. She was tired of eating stale bread and cantaloupes and watery soup, tired of sitting, tired of being poked by Charlotte and falling asleep with her neck bent over. She missed Miss McKenna, who was much nicer to her than Charlotte was. She looked at the hills outside the car, sandy and bare except for pokey cactuses, but the hills didn’t look like people at all. They looked like stones piled on top of one another. What if it was all a sneaky trick? What if there was no sleeping Indian like in the postcard Aunt Ida sent, no hilly green feet, no gigantic grass-covered head?

  She closed her eyes and when she woke up, everything had changed. The earth on either side of the highways was soft and damp with rain, and there were gentle hills everywhere, as green as can be, even though it had still been winter in Kansas. She thought she saw shoulders and stomachs in the distance, raised knees furred all over with green bushes. It had rained a lot here, it looked like, and in some valleys the clouds hung low like fog.

  “Is that it?” Neva asked, rubbing the window to make a better porthole. She wasn’t supposed to ask anymore, but their father said they were getting close.

  “No, Neva,” her mother said, leaning forward to check.

  “Those hills over there,” Neva said. She thought the two hills looked more like the belly and face of a pregnant woman, but maybe the Indian was fat. She found the postcard on the floor and studied the tinted slopes.

  Her mother looked a bit longer out the window. “No,” she decided. “That’s not it, Nevie.”

  More miles passed, the green grass by the road striking them all dumb. When they finally spotted a large black-and-white sign with an arrow, Charlotte whooped. “Fallbrook!” she said. “My God, I can’t wait to get out of this car.”

  Neva expected Charlotte to get in trouble for saying My God, but she didn’t. “Where is he? Where is he?” Neva almost screamed, kneeling on her seat and rubbing the whole window with her sleeve.

  “The arrow just points to the town,” Clare said. “I don’t think you can see the big stiff from here.” That was a mean thing to say, in Neva’s opinion, but he leaned toward the window and helped her look.

  Neva started reading the signs out loud. “Sunkist Lemons,” she said. “No Trespassing.” They passed a yellow house that she hoped was it and a falling-down white one that had a dog chained up in the yard. Then a red-and-white sign with a chicken on it said, “Fresh Eggs.”

  “That’s it,” Ellie said. “We turn there.”

  The car filled with a feeling like Christmas morning. “Well, yaw-hoo,” Charlotte said, sticking her head out the window and breathing in. “I am never, never going to leave California.”

  Neva wanted the car to go faster so she could get out and play in all that grass, but the muddy lane was so rutted and puddled that the car jolted, then slid into a furrow and ground to a stop.

  “I guess we’ll just have to walk,” her mother said cheerfully, opening the door. She managed to stand up with the leaded glass lampshade, then set it carefully on the seat. Her heels sank in the mud but she didn’t stop to clean them. She didn’t even stop for Neva as she hurried up the hill.

  Neva still wore the beret that was just like Miss McKenna’s. She let Artemis off her leash and walked into the grove, where she stopped under a lemon-studded tree. The bark was so thin it looked like brown skin, smoothly covering a trunk that divided in two and then came together again in a twist. Grass like fine hair grew under her feet, and when she reached out to touch a lemon, it came off in her hand, smelling just like candy.

  “Don’t pick them!” Charlotte said in her mean way, but then there was the sound, higher up the hill, of a screen door slapping, and Charlotte, too, left Neva behind.

  From the house she could hear her aunt saying, “Poor duck, poor duck,” and a man saying, “Welcome to California!”

  Neva crouched down beside the tree and found she could see the bit of yard where people were hugging and laughing. Uncle Hurd was a round man, shorter than her father and dressed like a railroad man in a blue work shirt and overalls. The whole time he was talking and listening, he kept rubbing his hand over the dog’s face and ears.

  Aunt Ida looked like her mother except with darker hair and bigger arms, legs, and cheeks. She didn’t touch Artemis at all but you could tell from her face lines that she liked to smile. She looked around and Neva could hear her saying, “But where’s little Neva?” and Neva knew she should go up and be kissed but instead she just sat very still.

  “She’s probably shy,” Clare said. “She’ll come along.”

  “Neva? Come and eat now! I’ve been cooking for two entire days!” Ida called, and the adults—her father last of all—began drifting toward the square white house, out of Neva’s view. Her stomach hurt, and she was hungry, but the grove was so glittery and green. She looked up, and she saw blue sky. She looked back down. A ladybug was crawling on a long stem of grass that arced like a bridge. She put out her hand and extended a finger to the ladybug. Up at the house, Uncle Hurd was laughing like Santa Claus, “Ho ho ho.”

  When the ladybug lifted its wings and spun away, Neva stood up and crept to the side of the house. The wooden shutters had been painted bright pink, which gave the house a fairy tale look. A brown chicken shied away from her, and then another. The white plaster wall was warm where she leaned against the corner to peek at the front yard. Rusty machinery and old cars were everywhere. It was too organized to be a dump, though. Sparkly blue bottles had been wired to the branches of a little tree. Some of the bottles were pale turquoise and small like they’d once carried perfume. Some were medicine blue and so heavy that they made the branches droop. More glass bottles, clear and brown and green, had been sorted by color and were heaped in wire crates. Stones lined a winding path that Neva followed. Rainwater glistened on everything, and Neva picked up a clear perfume bottle shaped like a girl’s head.

  “Neva!” Charlotte called. She opened the screen door and looked disapprovingly at Neva. “Come in here. We’re going to have chicken and biscuits now.”

  Neva set the girl’s glass head down and went in to sit at a round table covered with a printed tablecloth and all sorts of food.

  “Do you like it so far, Neva?” Aunt Ida said to her from the other end of the table and Neva looked down and said, “I like that blue-bottle tree.”

  Neva didn’t like some of the food, such as mashed sweet potatoes, but some she did, like the fried chicken, which was just like her mother’s. Her mother looked happy, and her father seemed almost like himself again, telling a story about starting the car on a steep hill in Colorado. They all ate three helpings and then Uncle Hurd walked her father and Clare around the place, standing before one rusty machine after another, telling them where he got it, what it used to be, and what he planned to make with it. Neva sat down between the piles of stones and glass bottles and made little houses by arranging them into rooms and furniture. The glass girl lived in the biggest house, with a broken Blue Willow cup for a bathtub and a three-legged china elephant as a pet. The women were washing up inside, and Neva could hear the watery thudding sounds and the high laughter of her mother and Charlotte, as if they had never left their cats behind or sent Miss McKenna away in the middle of the night. She wondered suddenly where Milly Mandy Molly was.

  Uncle Hurd came up to Neva’s crossed legs and crouched down. His work boots were thick and heavy-looking, and he wore a turquoise ring whose stone was larger than the space between his knuckles. He looked down at her houses and said, “Nice setup you’ve got there.” He was grinning so hard she couldn’t look at him. “You like California?”

  Neva nodded, knowing it was what she was supposed to say. “Can you see the sleeping Indian from here?” she asked.

  “Just the head,” Hurd said, pointing beyond a car with three wheels. “See that st
range hummocky thing over there?”

  Neva stood up and followed his finger to a hill like a camel’s hump. It might have been the same shape as the head in the postcard. She wasn’t sure.

  “You can see the whole body from that hill,” he said. “Shall I carry you over there?”

  “All right,” Neva said. She let him put her up on his shoulders, and she held on to the hand that wore the ring.

  “Ansel?” Uncle Hurd called. “You and Clare want to come see the Chief?” Neva kept her eye on the Indian’s head as Uncle Hurd walked, trying to see if the Indian’s face would be clearer than it was in the postcard. Uncle Hurd huffed a bit as they climbed a hill that gave off a green prickly scent.

  When they reached the top, he didn’t have to point. She saw it. She could see the hummocky hill, only now it was connected by a valley to a high table that looked exactly like a chest with a pair of hands crossed high up by the neck. The chest sloped down to the Indian’s flat belly. His long legs connected to a hill that poked up like feet. She couldn’t see the stones that made eyes or the tree that made his nose, but the body was huge and wonderful. Clare whistled and said, “That’s swell as anything.” Even her father said, “Sure enough.”

  “Beyond that lies the ocean,” Uncle Hurd said. “Some days, from the really high hills, you can see it. The air has to be perfectly clear. Morning is the best time to look.”

  Suddenly Neva reached out her arms for her father. He came close so she could move from Uncle Hurd’s shoulders to his. That was better. She could see even farther. She sat on her father’s shoulders and imagined the sea on the other side of the sleeping Indian. The hillsides around them were planted with rows of orange and lemon trees. Clouds with rough gray edges hung down into a clear blue sky. It made her think of the curtains for the Winter Entertainment and then she wondered if this could possibly be the same earth as the one Kansas was on, and she touched her knitted cap to see if it was still there.

  50

  No nail polish, no gum, no makeup,” Mrs. Gore told Aldine. She was the head waitress; Ansel’s friend Gil was the manager. “No smoking, no cursing, no drinking. And absolutely no men in your room.”

  There were four other waitresses, Aldine was told, and one of them was her roommate, Glynis Walsh, who looked too young to be on her own. She was even shorter than Aldine, with freckled skin, a raspy voice, and dark brown, wavy hair cut close to her head. It was midafternoon and Glynis and Mrs. Gore were wearing stiff black-and-white dresses that, to Aldine’s eye, made them look like nuns. The badge on Glynis’s apron said 4.

  “You’ll start out as a ten, like everyone else, and work your way up,” Mrs. Gore said and handed Aldine a badge, a starched apron, a black long-sleeved dress, black stockings, and a pair of black lace-up shoes that were shockingly ugly. Mrs. Gore was at the top of the system: no badge at all, just a pin that said her name. You wouldn’t call her pretty; she was instead the type Aunt Sedge would refer to as handsome. She and Leenie always knew what that meant: a plain sort made less so by community stature. Mrs. Gore said, “It’s not seniority but hard work that moves you up. Do you play softball?”

  Aldine shook her head.

  “Well, you will when it gets warmer. We all do. We have uniforms and you can play any position you like except pitcher. I’m the pitcher.” She ran her finger across one of the window-blind slats and frowned. “Curfew’s ten o’clock. Sneak out and you’re gone for good. Don’t date Harvey employees, and don’t think I won’t find out. Glynis can help you with lunchroom protocol if you forget, but you need to put on that dress right now and comb your hair so I can run through the routine with you before the evening train.”

  Aldine’s head buzzed with exhaustion. She’d slept some on a bench in Dorland, where she’d waited five hours for an eastbound train, then had taken little naps with her head against the train window. Less than a whole day since she’d been in Ansel’s arms, and now he was gone. Fallen woman, that’s what she’d be in books and such. She wondered if she could be a fallen woman even if she didn’t feel like one.

  “I’ll help you with the apron,” Glynis said. “And the cup code. Cup code’s hard the first day.”

  Aldine nodded. At least she knew that much—Neva had taught her the cup code.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. Gore said, touching Aldine’s arm and softening her voice. “I know you’re tired but it’s best to dive right in. Did Mr. Dorado tell you that for the first month of training it’s just room and board? The sooner you start working, the sooner your pay starts. I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

  “Did you sign a six- or a twelve-month?” Glynis asked when they were alone, holding open the black dress like she was waiting for Aldine to undress.

  “Six,” Aldine said, dropping her coat onto the bed, which she was glad to see was covered with a good thick blanket.

  “That means you get a fireman,” Glynis said. “For twelve months, you get an engineer.”

  Aldine didn’t understand, and she was tired of not understanding, so as she sat down to take off her shoes she asked, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a joke the railroaders tell. For six months of service, Harvey Girls get to marry a fireman, but for twelve months they earn an engineer!”

  Aldine forced a small laugh that sounded like a hiccup. She took off her stockings. “Which will you get?”

  “Oh, none of ’em. I want to move to the Grand Canyon. I’ve put in for a transfer twice but all the girls want to go there, Gore says.” Glynis sat back on her own small bed, still holding Aldine’s uniform on her lap. She scratched her ankle and said, “How’d your folks feel about you coming here from Scotland?”

  “They’re no longer living.”

  “Oops. Sorry. I thought Gore said your dad put you on a train.”

  Aldine shook her head. She unzipped her dress but didn’t take it off.

  “My parents make me write them twice a week. They wouldn’t have let me come if the drought weren’t so bad. My sister ran off when I was nine.”

  “Oh,” Aldine said.

  “By the time we finally found her, the man had took off and left her.”

  Aldine waited for the end of a story she didn’t want to hear.

  “She died.”

  Aldine couldn’t help worrying about the time. She wanted to know why the sister died but she just said how awful it was and held out her hands for the uniform.

  “Homely, isn’t it,” Aldine said.

  “Hoom-ly?”

  “Ugly,” she tried, though she didn’t say that word in the American way, either.

  “You shred it, Wheat,” Glynis said. This turned out to be just one of her queer catchphrases, along with “Mitt me, kid,” which she said at the end of a busy shift, and “dead hoofer,” which she called the clumsier railroad men who asked her to dance at the weekly romps. While Aldine zipped herself into the dress and wriggled into the cross straps of the apron, Glynis checked the finger waves in her own hair, then pinned Aldine’s black bow to her collar. “Well, there’ll be some eyeballs rolling after you in the room,” she said, and Aldine said, “Oh. Should I do something different then?”

  Glynis laughed. “Not a thing. You’ll be out-tipping us all before the week’s out.”

  Downstairs, Mrs. Gore recited the lunchroom rules: no flirting with customers, never carry a glass in your hand (always on a tray), the cup code, the code for various salads and dishes, each of which she would have to memorize because at no time would she be writing down the orders—Harvey Girls didn’t take notes but kept everything in their heads.

  By the end of the seemingly endless day Aldine had worked three not-busy rush times (“used to be murder,” Glynis said, “before times got hard”) and had heard about every celebrity Glynis had seen come through on the Chief: Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Shirley Temple, and Gloria Swanson (“togged to the bricks,” Glynis said). Aldine did not know who most of these people were, but she knew Clare had liked Tom Mix, so sh
e asked if he was nice.

  “Hard to tell. He just sat and ate while all his group swilled and whooped it up. It wasn’t my table. But he left a big tip and when he went away he said to Betty Smart, ‘That was good pot roast.’ Those were the only words anyone heard him speak the whole time.”

  Aldine had heard about Betty Smart, the neighbor girl with whom Glynis had been hired (“my folks felt better sending me with the neighbor girl, and anyway they like to hire two good friends ’cause then you won’t get homesick and quit”). Betty had married a railroader, though, according to Glynis, and gone on to a plum job at La Castañeda, the sort of job that Aldine ought to try for once she learned the ropes.

  “I’ve heard of girls seeing the whole country that way,” Glynis said. “Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and even California.”

  The word California was like a poke in the stomach. What if she kept hopping and skipping west until finally she was serving pie in California? Would that be good or bad? Bad, probably. That’s what her head said. But the rest of her was ready to go.

  “Stick with me, kid,” Glynis said into the dark, her raspy voice silenced by the approach of a thudding freight train, the first of a dozen that would shatter the night and seem, in Aldine’s dreams, to be headed right for her iron bed.