[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “Is it?”

  “Aye. Sometimes. I love the big room.”

  “Luve the big rroom!” he said with shocking loudness, rolling his tongue to sound, as he imagined, like her. “I do miss those accents! You know, where you oughta be is Brigham Young. Lots of girls go there, you know, and the boys would go for that accent.”

  Aldine didn’t look him in the eye as she frowned and said, “Aye.”

  “Hey, why don’t you come back with me!”

  “What?”

  Glynis dropped a fork onto the table and looked up.

  “I bet Will and Leenie’d be ten times happier to have you with ’em, and this way you don’t have to make the trip all by yourself.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Right,” he said, forking another bite of haddie, his pink face rosier yet with embarrassment. “Of course not.”

  She didn’t know why he thought she could buy train tickets on impulse and enroll in university. She studied his suit for signs of money, but it wasn’t the best wool. The lining of his overcoat sagged, his scarf had been knitted by a mother or sister from cheap yarn, and his hat had been rubbed smooth along the brim. “It isn’t that,” she said, meaning it wasn’t that she thought he was being forward. She tried to think, as Glynis walked toward yet another table with an armful of linen, of how to say that she, like most people, couldn’t afford to quit her job.

  “I have to stop talking or I’ll lose my place,” she said, flashing him an apologetic smile and walking away. She didn’t want to go to Salt Lake City. She didn’t want boys to “go for” her accent. What she wanted most of all when she carried a tray of empty cups to the window booths was to look out the window and see Ansel Price coming up the way to fetch her, magically free of Ellie and his marriage so he could hold her and be as he was in her dreams, when the warmth of him was like the sun through closed eyelids.

  Elder Lance (she could never think of him as anything else) left a good tip, especially for a counter customer, and his good cheer was unassailable. He would tell Leenie where to write her, he said, and he wished he had a camera so he could take a photograph, and it sure was good to see her once again.

  53

  That evening, when Aldine could find no more reasons to stay locked in the bog, she came back to find Glynis waiting cross-legged on her bed in a pair of man’s pajamas, gluing a picture of Clark Gable into her scrapbook. The radiator was warm and ticking, so the boiler was working. It wasn’t always. Glynis would glue anything in her scrapbooks—a drawing of a little boy she said looked just like her brother Charlie, an Easter poem from the Ladies’ Home Journal, a picture of a red-cheeked girl doing Highland dances in a green plaid kilt. Beneath this she had written, in her girlish print, Like my dear friend Scottish Aldine. Glynis looked up now, checked the tightness of a hairpin, and said, “What a day, huh?”

  “It was,” Aldine said. She leaned against the radiator and yawned. She was ready for rest and silence and hoped Glynis saw it.

  But Glynis merely nodded at their shared tin of scavenged cigarette remnants and said, “Butt me, will you, kid.”

  This was a surprise. House rules forbade smoking in the rooms, and Glynis was not the type to invite trouble. Aldine hoisted up the window and the cold night air rushed in. The roofs were layered with snow, all white except for a large circle of amber under the streetlight. It was startlingly pretty.

  “Well?” Glynis said once they’d lit and inhaled.

  “Yes?”

  “The funny-looking one with the tragic smile.”

  “I met him in Scotland,” she said. “He was a missionary there.” She wanted to stop right there, but she knew Glynis would hector until she told the story through, so she did tell the story, but only in the barest outlines.

  “So you never joined?” Glynis asked when she was done.

  Aldine tweezed a bit of tobacco from her tongue and said no, she never did.

  The room was small and plain. They weren’t supposed to put anything on the walls, though holes in the pink plaster were evidence that other girls had made themselves more at home. She had thought more than once that she’d like some photographs on the walls, of Ayr and of Leenie and Will, and of Neva and Clare and, truly, before all others, of Ansel, though she had none of him or, for that matter, any of the Prices, and he was married so of course she couldn’t. Aldine removed her apron and hoped Glynis was done talking.

  “I guess your sister’ll send for you now,” Glynis said, pressing down on Clark Gable’s forehead.

  “I doubt it. She has no money.” It was cooler now in the room with winter stealing through the open window. Aldine rested her hands on the embossed curves of the radiator and breathed in the heat. The thick iron ribs smelled like scalded milk, and the steady warmth was one way that her life had improved since becoming a Harvey Girl.

  “What did he mean about a Mormon family you were living with? You didn’t tell me you were a schoolmarm.”

  “They weren’t Mormon,” Aldine said.

  “What town was it?”

  Aldine didn’t want to say, but Glynis would know if she made up a town.

  “Dorland,” she said.

  “That how you met Ansel?” she asked. She looked up from the pages of her Hollywood magazine, and Aldine pressed her palms against the radiator. She nodded.

  Glynis studied a gauzy photo and turned the page. “I guess you were living with his family.”

  Aldine nodded again, and Glynis kept looking at her. Aldine’s fingers were red at the tips, and she curled them into her palms.

  “You ought to write your sister,” Glynis said.

  “Yes”—Aldine stubbed out her cigarette on a cracked saucer—“I ought.” She closed the window and left the radiator for the coolness of her bed. She turned her face to the pink plaster wall and pulled up the covers. She would write Leenie just as soon as she was sure she wasn’t pregnant. She felt an approaching freight train before she heard it. From the east, heading west. She’d grown to like the trains passing slowly and heavily through the night, liked to think where they might carry her. Finally this one was gone and the room was still lit.

  “Are you going to moon over Clark Gable all night then?” she asked Glynis, “or can we get to sleep now?”

  “Clark Gable is okay,” Glynis said. She’d had her story from Aldine and evidently didn’t like it. Her voice was sullen.

  “Except Mr. Clark Gable is Catholic,” Aldine said—she didn’t know why—and she soon wished she hadn’t.

  “He’s not,” Glynis said. And then, lower but not so low that Aldine couldn’t hear it: “And he’s not a family man, either.”

  54

  Initially Charlotte didn’t think much about the man. He was a little mysterious, that was all—a tall, brown-headed figure (all bone and tanned skin, like a man from the Far East) wearing funny metal-rimmed spectacles. He owned the packinghouse and was a town big shot of some sort and sometimes came Sunday afternoons to stand under a tree and discuss who knew what with Uncle Hurd before departing in his black Packard.

  After dinner on one such Sunday, Charlotte was at the dining room table laying out pattern pieces for a new dress. Charlotte liked every part of sewing: unfolding the tissue paper and smoothing it out over the fabric, the heavy snip of the scissors as she cut through layers, the gnawing sound the Singer made as she stitched one strange geometric shape to another, the burned-soap smell of the iron as she pressed the seams open. The more complicated the pattern was, the better she liked it: she had made lined jackets, covered buttons, handkerchief hems, and pleated sleeves. The dress she was doing now would have a huge collar that lay open to display not one but six inset buttonholes. She was pinning the tissue to pink pongee when she heard Artemis barking, then someone opening the screen door. That was when the man stepped in and removed his hat from his brown head.

  “This is my niece Charlotte,” Ida said, sweeping in behind him, her big arms draped with pearl bracelets and a
gold chain that held, in each link, a different charm shaped like the birds of California. “Just arrived from Kansas. Charlotte, this is Mr. McNamara, who owns the packinghouse.”

  Charlotte nodded. Mr. McNamara held his hat in his hands, and she noticed that his hands, like the rest of him, were long and bony. There was something distinctive about him, something more than his double-breasted suit and red tie, which she was almost certain was silk. It had to do with the way he regarded her, but in what way he regarded her, she wasn’t exactly sure.

  “That’s a striking color,” he said, touching the thin, soft fabric on the table in a way unexpected from a man. He looked over the complex arrangement of material, pins, and pongee; then he unhinged his gold spectacles from his face, took out a soft cloth, and began to clean the lenses. “You don’t by chance have a teaching certificate, do you?”

  Ida said, “Mr. McNamara’s on the school board. President, in fact.”

  Mr. McNamara held his spectacles up to the light to inspect the lenses he’d just cleaned. The lenses and their thin frames were shaped like octagons, which was a new one for Charlotte.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I was planning to go to normal school in Topeka, but things didn’t work out.”

  He nodded, tucked away his cleaning cloth, and carefully hooked his spectacles behind his ears. “And is your sister doing better here?”

  Charlotte wondered how he knew about her sister. “Yes,” she said. “A little better, anyway.”

  She didn’t know what else to say, and she was a little alarmed when Ida said he should sit down while she cut him a piece of pie. She hoped he would go out into the living room, or maybe even follow Ida into the kitchen, but he simply sat down on one of the high-backed chairs Ida kept on either side of the buffet and said, “The domestic arts are becoming the lost arts. Or so I fear. Did you learn to sew at school?”

  “No,” she said. “At school we didn’t do any home stuff. I liked mythology. We had a sort of appreciation club for it.”

  “A mythology appreciation club?”

  There was something in his voice, amusement or disbelief, she wasn’t sure which. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what it was. We started with six members but it didn’t take us long to boil down to three.”

  She meant this as funny, and he smiled, and fell silent.

  “We had a photography club, too,” she said. “We had a darkroom at the school and everything.” She realized with irritation that she’d lost track of where she was on the pattern.

  “So you have a camera?”

  “Sort of. My grandfather gave one to my mother, who didn’t like it, so I guess I inherited it.”

  “What kind?”

  “Zeiss Ikon box camera,” she said and he let out a low whistle of respect and said, “That cost your grandpa a pretty penny.”

  Charlotte felt a strange flush of pride. She decided not to mention that she’d stopped taking pictures because they couldn’t afford the chemicals for developing.

  He stroked the brim of his felt hat and was looking at her in that way again, the way she not only didn’t understand, but wasn’t even sure whether she disliked or liked. “Have you seen our high school?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, not looking up. “Uncle Hurd showed us all around. It’s swell.” She slipped a pin through the tissue. She was sorry to have said swell to the president of the school board or whatever he was.

  “Pie, James,” Ida said, emerging with a cup of coffee and a huge wedge of lemon meringue. It reminded Charlotte of her mother saying, to practically every guest they’d ever had on Thanksgiving, that when the industry standard was to cut a pie into six pieces, the Harvey House cut theirs in four. Ida had clearly had the same training. “Let me clean off the table for you,” Charlotte said, folding up the edges of the pink pongee.

  “Please, no,” Mr. McNamara said. “Don’t spoil your work. I’m happy as I am.” He set the coffee cup on the buffet beside him and rested the plate of pie on his knees. The meringue looked two inches thick.

  “Charlotte’s a brilliant girl,” Ida said. She was one of those women who always wore makeup and perfume, and she had moved off the conveyor belt at the packinghouse and into the office, where pay was higher. Hurd was a supervisor, so between them both, Charlotte was pretty sure that they had more money than their junk-collecting hobby would suggest. Ida never let her permanent grow out too far, but even as Charlotte admired her, she saw, with fear, that she would have big arms like that, too, one day, and shop from the pages in the catalogue marked for the Mature Lady. Mr. McNamara was a fastidious eater—a small bite, subtle chewing, napkin daubed to the corners of his lips—which suggested a degree of culture past any experience she’d had in Kansas. She remembered Aunt Ida telling her that she’d met Mr. McNamara at a Rotary supper, which had led to dinner at Ida and Hurd’s, and after a tour of Ida’s bottle garden, he said he would give her his blue Milk of Magnesia bottles straight after he finished dosing himself and save her the trip to the dump. She had laughed and said, “Oh, but I live for the search, James, the search for buried treasure.” Charlotte wondered if he’d brought her a sapphire bottle today, and sure enough, when she went into the living room to find her pincushion, there on the table where her aunt generally set a vase of flowers was a clean, empty Magnesia bottle big enough to dose a horse.

  “You should see how many novels Charlotte reads a week,” Ida went on.

  She could feel his eyes settle on her. “So how old are you, Charlotte?”

  “Eighteen,” she said. “Well, next month, anyway.”

  “And what are your plans?”

  “College,” Charlotte said at once, then added: “Though I guess that’s more a hope than a plan.”

  “Mmm,” he said. He wore a constant half smile that she took for inner peace (annoying) or amusement (even more annoying).

  Ida sat down opposite Mr. McNamara, took a sip from her own cup of coffee (black with two teaspoons of sugar), and said, “She can’t make real plans until her family’s good and settled. Then she’ll probably go to normal school or university. Things are different now for women, don’t you think?”

  He nodded mildly. “That’s why we built the Practice House. So many girls now are not learning what they need to learn at home.”

  The Practice House had been on Charlotte’s tour of the high school: a cute little cottage at the top of a hill where girls could learn to dust and iron and mop. Charlotte had been incredulous at the time; what were the girls doing at home, then, she wanted to know? Did they all have servants, or were they just slow learners, or what? It was the craziest idea she’d ever heard, like building a barn at the school and filling it with cows.

  Ida smiled warmly at Charlotte. “Charlotte made the curtains in my kitchen. Also that skirt she’s wearing.”

  Charlotte didn’t like to think that Mr. McNamara would now be looking at her skirt. She kept her eyes on the pattern and sat down—unbearable to bend over now—to measure the distance from the selvage to the long black line on the pattern that helped you determine straightness of grain, then immediately forgot how many inches and eighths of inches it was.

  “Have you seen the sewing and cooking labs, Charlotte?” Ida asked. “They’re nicer than most homes!”

  “I did see them,” Charlotte said. “They’re awfully nice.” As if the Practice House weren’t enough, there was a huge building with a high ceiling like the great hall in a castle, and in that building were black-and-white-tiled mini-kitchens, each one with a stove and a porcelain sink, and two rows of sewing machines and four big tables for cutting out patterns. The machines were brand new, with ruffling attachments that Charlotte had never seen in person, and they smelled intoxicatingly of machine oil.

  Ida collected the plate and took it off to the kitchen and did not immediately return.

  “What else did you like in school?” Mr. McNamara asked. It seemed to Charlotte that he was giving her the same beatific smile he’d giv
en his lemon meringue pie.

  “Astronomy,” she said, and then—why, she wasn’t sure—she looked right at him. “I liked that a lot.”

  His eyes seemed to dilate, or readjust, or did she just imagine it? At any rate, his gaze shifted into the emptiness of his hat. This first tingling hint of her own powers was shocking to her, and strangely exhilarating. When he again looked up, he asked in a soft voice, “Have you ever looked at the night sky through a telescope?”

  “Once,” Charlotte said, remembering the cold night, the spray of stars, squinting at Jupiter.

  “And did you enjoy it?”

  “I did.” She’d never in her life flirted with an adult, but she had a sudden comprehension that she was doing it now. “Very much.”

  “Well, then, you’ll have to come and look through mine.”

  Charlotte took this in, looking at him, then stretched the tape measure from the grain line to the edge of pink pongee and stared at the numbers. “Thank you,” she said, and she knew the polite thing would be to say, That would be nice, but she decided not to say it. She wondered whether she would be alone when she looked through this telescope.

  “Do you know your constellations?” he asked.

  “Some,” she said. (A lie. She knew a great many.) “But I’d like to learn more.”

  He smiled his small smile and looked at her again, and suddenly she had it. The way he was looking at her was a knowing way. But what did he know? She had the peculiar, not unpleasant feeling that he knew something about her that she herself didn’t yet know.

  Mr. McNamara stood. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” he said quietly.

  “Mmm,” Charlotte said. “Why wouldn’t you?” She added a shrug and a smile. “It’s a small town, after all.”

  He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen to say his good-byes to Aunt Ida. He left that way; she heard the back door open and close. It was a warm day and she could see Aunt Ida’s bottle tree from the window, the smallest of the cobalt decorations no wider than her pinkie, the largest like a quart of milk. She’d discovered one day that the bottles had rainwater inside them, rainwater that, when she tipped one of the small bottles upside down, felt warm on her fingers and dripped prettily from her fingertips. She’d tipped one bottle after another, letting the sun-warmed water touch different parts of her bare arm until, suddenly conscious that someone might be watching her, she stopped.