Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  A counselor named Bonita invited Cora into a small office. Cora thought Bonita resembled Joan Crawford. She had velvety white skin, coral cheeks and spidery eyelashes, her hair pulled back in a chignon.

  The school offered a 16-week self-improvement course or an eight-month professional modeling course, Bonita explained. Reading from a sheet of paper, she described the classes: skin care, makeup, wardrobe analysis, leg positions, hand positions, personality, table manners, introductions. “Did you know,” she asked Cora, “that there are 45 different kinds of introductions?” Cora didn’t.

  Bonita put down the paper. “Now then, which course are you interested in?”

  “Well, I’m not sure yet. What do they cost?”

  “Let me see. Where is that price list? I don’t see it here. I must have left it in the modeling room. Would you like to step into the modeling room? You’re welcome to take a walk down the runway and see how it feels.”

  Cora felt her face flush. “Oh, that would be grand,” she said. She couldn’t remember ever before using the word “grand.” She walked down the runway, watching herself in the mirror and felt a new kind of thrill. A man rushed into the room but stopped short.

  “My dear,” he said to Cora, “I think you might be a natural model. Such a lovely face. Such grace.”

  “Why, thank you,” Cora smiled.

  “Oh! And look at that smile, Bonita,” he said to the counselor. “I think this one might just be a natural model.”

  Cora’s smile tilted, her lips twitched at one corner. He’s buttering me up, she warned herself. She’d anticipated this; she wasn’t born yesterday. But she’d also thought about the alternatives. More years at the music store or go into a war plant. But she wasn’t a Rosie the Riveter type, and even if she was, she had a feeling all the Rosies riding high now would get dumped pretty quick when the GIs started coming home. She let her smile stretch broader. Besides, maybe she was a natural model.

  “She is quite attractive,” Bonita agreed. “But her walk needs work. Her hand positions. Her head positions. They need work.”

  Cora looked in the mirror, frowned at her hands, and repositioned her head.

  “But that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” the man cut in. Then, addressing Cora, he said, “My dear, we can never promise anything, of course, the modeling business being unpredictable, but blonds like you … the June Allyson look … well, confidentially, it’s very much in vogue right now. Isn’t that right, Bonita?”

  Bonita agreed that it was, and within minutes, Cora was the owner of an iron-clad contract for the eight-month modeling course at the Capricorn Charm School at an astronomical cost of $268.

  7

  NANCY, 1943

  The Clinton school was a dirty brick building with a tar playground. A row of bare-limbed trees on one side stretched like gray scribbles against the morning sky. I got there early the first day, nervous and shy. The girls wore sloppy joe sweaters and stood in tight groups, tossing their heads and giggling. The boys shifted on their feet and hunched over, as though they weren’t used to being so tall. One of them farted and whirled quick toward some girls nearby and yelled, “Who did that?”

  I laughed but nobody noticed. The air was thin, and I could feel my breathing as I nudged closer to the school-house wall. I tucked my hands deep into my jacket pockets and stared at my bobby socks and loafers. Fingering a poem I had written the night before, I pulled it out and read, “The sad girl gave a soft moan, Like the cry of a lost soul, Carried by the ocean waves, To a land of pale cold blue skies.” The paper was warm from my jacket pocket, and it felt good to hold it, as if it were a friend I could count on. I clutched it in my hand and stared up at the hazy Clinton sky until the bell rang to go in.

  The rest of the day was a blur of sweater sets, crew cuts, the smell of chewing gum and sweat and the sound of short, quick laughs as sharp as broken glass. Nobody paid any attention to me except once I went to the bathroom and found a note taped to the back of my white blouse that said, “Oink Oink.”

  I started collecting insults. In two months I had a list of thirty-three, copied from a book Aunt Cora had called a thesaurus. All day at school I muttered them under my breath—saphead, doodle, dimwit—to get back at the snooty Clinton kids, but I never talked to anyone out loud until I met Molly Bobst.

  Molly was in literary club with me. She had a birthmark on her cheek the color of eggplant and shaped like Texas. One day Miss Eberlee sat us together. “Both you girls write such nice poetry,” she whispered, her glasses dangling on a string over the table as she leaned down, “I thought you should meet each other.” But that wasn’t the real reason Miss Eberlee put us together, and Molly and I both knew it. We were outsiders. We eyed one another with hate and distrust, but then I spotted a rage in the back of Molly’s eyes that I understood, and she must have seen the same thing in mine. We smiled.

  Soon we were roaming the halls together muttering insults at the world—blockhead, whale brain, goosy, foggy in the crumpet—exchanging looks and laughing so hard we’d hold our sides and bump into walls. Once we walked home together after school shouting insults into the wind in voices as loud as an Army band.

  I entertained Molly with my Carmen Miranda imitation and I showed her how double-jointed I was. I bent down in front and put my hands flat on the floor, then lowered my head until my nose touched the top of my sneaker. I knew by now to do it slow and quiver every once in a while as if I wouldn’t make it but I always did. Then I stood up and folded my hand in from the wrist until it curved back and touched the inside of my arm, making a loop like a letter “p.”

  “Oooh, that’s awful,” Molly hooted, her birthmark scrunching up on her cheek as she smiled. “Do it again.” We pretended we were best friends: two girls who were poets, two girls who were smarter than the others, but we both knew if any other kids at school had given either of us a tumble, we would have dropped the other one flat.

  I loved living with Aunt Cora, though. She treated me better than my mother and she was prettier and had more flair. You could see the difference just in the way she smoked. She’d inhale, then open her mouth slow and let the smoke sort of roll out. Not my mom. When my mom smoked, she’d take a puff and blow the smoke straight out in a stream like a train.

  I’d meet Aunt Cora after school at Jolly Jack’s and have a Shirley Temple while she sipped coffee and we played the latest Billboard Chart hits. “Taking a Chance on Love.” “That Old Black Magic.” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”

  Later we’d go back to the apartment and she’d give me modeling tips. She’d enrolled in modeling school just before I moved in so I learned to walk with a book on my head and cross my legs at the ankles instead of the knees. One day she decided, “Lets get rid of those braids.” Two days later, on a bright April afternoon, I sat on a swivel chair at the Hollywood East Salon of Beauty with a new hairdo—a straight shiny cap down to my ears, then puffed out into cute little clouds of curls.

  “It makes you look a little bit like Jennifer Jones,” Aunt Cora said, her head tilted to one side. “Especially from a three-quarters view.”

  I felt like a million dollars.

  The kids at school started looking at me in a new way, and one day walking home from Library Club, I passed some boys wearing baseball hats who elbowed one another as I passed and one of them gave me a wink and a smile.

  I even started getting along better with my mom and Eddie. Eddie had loaned Aunt Cora the money for the modeling course after I told her he had a stash from working the carnies once in a while, whatever that meant. And later, my mother and Eddie would come to visit on Sundays, and I’d pretend my aunt was really my mom and my mom was just a distant screwball relative. You could laugh at her witless ways because she’d soon say goodbye and go home and be somebody else’s problem.

  Eddie brought me presents—fruit scented erasers, a whistle shaped like a guitar—and he told circus stories. At first I tried to act uninterested, but one day, I
couldn’t help it, I started warming up to him. What happened, I’d had an English assignment to write about an unforgettable character, and then Eddie told us about Rosie, the headless woman.

  Rosie was just an ordinary girl but they billed her in the freak show as someone who’d lost her head in an accident. They hid her underneath a huge dress with a ruffled collar like queens wore in the old days. Eddie showed us a picture. On top of the ruffled collar, there was a bunch of lit up glass tubes with red and yellow liquids running in and out like they were a part of Rosie.

  “People’d pay a dime for a look at her,” Eddie said. “But what was really a riot, sometimes the circus hired a guy who’d put on a doctor outfit and pretend he was keepin’ her alive. Rosie would slow down the liquids into the tubes every so often and tug at the doc’s sleeve when he was looking the other way. He’d ignore her—that was part of the act—and she’d slow the liquids down even more.” Eddie snickered just thinking about it.

  “Finally some mark in the audience would yell, ‘For God’s sake, doc, turn around. Rosie’s dyin.’”

  We all hooted and after Eddie left, I kept thinking about Rosie. I daydreamed that it was me instead of her in the curlicued stand-up collar, thrilled that people were paying to see me, all blinking lights and flashing colors, rooting for me to stay alive. Nobody had the slightest idea that the real me underneath the glitter was small and mean and bitter. I got out my Indian Chief tablet. “The most unforgettable character I ever met,” I wrote, “Rosie, the Headless Woman.”

  One balmy Saturday in October, when I’d been in Clinton eight months, Aunt Cora and I went downtown. We stopped at an ice cream parlor called The Daily Scoop, where I ordered a paratrooper sundae that came with a marshmallow topping, and Aunt Cora got a commando sundae with crushed peanuts. I felt sophisticated, as though eating the sundaes somehow helped the war effort.

  Afterward, we walked over to the Tune Time Record Store. I loved it at the Tune Time. I’d been there twice before. It was long and narrow with huge pictures high up on the walls: Cab Calloway, Dick Haymes, Dinah Shore, Tommy Dorsey, Hildegarde. You name it. There were racks and racks of records with yellow flags sticking up announcing “Super Selection.”

  Aunt Cora’s boss, Mr. Kollwitz, was behind the counter, a short bald guy who wore a button on his jacket lapel that said, “We got the blues.”

  Mr. Kollwitz smiled and handed us a record called “I’ve Heard That Song Before.”

  “Just came in,” he said. “Harry James. Give it a listen.” He jutted his head toward a row of glass-enclosed listening booths on one side of the store. “Go ahead, be my guest. Enjoy.”

  “We always do,” Aunt Cora sang with a smile, and we headed for a booth. She set the record on the turntable and we sat bobbing our heads and grinning out the glass windows at customers strolling by. I felt special, like we were movie stars.

  Aunt Cora turned the record over carefully with the tips of her fingers, and I stood up and twirled as the music started, and that’s when I spotted the familiar-looking shoulders bouncing two booths down from ours. I had seen those shoulders hunch and dip in Mr. Music’s class.

  “That’s Bobby Felker,” I said to my aunt, excitedly. “A guy from Marysville.”

  Aunt Cora turned to look. “No kidding. Well, go say hello.”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. I quick peeked at my reflection in the glass. Not bad. I had on a pink blouse that brought out the rosiness in my cheeks, and my curls were shiny and thick. I ran down to where Bobby was bouncing and knocked on the glass.

  He turned and looked surprised, then grinned. He opened the door. “Hey, I heard you were living in Clinton.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been here eight months.” I was so breathless I forgot to worry what else he’d heard. “So what are you doing here?” I asked. Bobby looked grown-up. He had a crew cut so his cowlick was gone, and his pants were pegged at the ankles.

  “Well, I’m a real jazz nut, and you can’t get any decent records in Marysville.”

  “Oh, no.” I made a face to show I understood it was useless trying to buy decent records in Marysville.

  “So I come to Clinton.” Bobby’s sandy eyebrows had little flicks of red under the store lights. “It’s only twenty-five minutes on the bus, and I know I can count on Mr. Kollwitz for…” Bobby lowered his voice and pounded his chest … “a Super Selection.”

  I giggled as Aunt Cora came up and introduced herself. She told Bobby she worked at Tune Time and said, “Hey, come and visit me and Nance sometime. Call ahead. Any record you want to hear, I’ll bring it.”

  Bobby pulled his head back, as though he needed to get a better look, as though he couldn’t believe his luck. Neither could I.

  He called the next week and came on Wednesday night. We played Artie Shaw records. “Traffic Jam.” “Dancing in the Dark.” “Frenesí.” Aunt Cora made us cocoa and suggested, “Hey, how about you two showing me some new dance steps.” She knew I could do them because she’d been teaching me.

  “Oh, that’d be great,” I said. “Artie Shaw is my favorite to dance to.” Aunt Cora had already told me to be sure to act interested in anything Bobby was interested in.

  We slow danced one number and Bobby did a special little swoop with his shoulders, but I followed him fine. Then we jitterbugged. My aunt sipped beer and clapped and yelled, “Now you’re cooking with gas,” as we twirled.

  Suddenly the Victrola went on the blink and stopped dead in the middle of Glenn Miller playing “Kalamazoo.”

  “Oh, no,” Aunt Cora cried, but Bobby said wait a minute, and he fiddled around and fixed it.

  “Hey, you’re a real handyman,” Aunt Cora said.

  “Well, my dad used to repair things,” Bobby said, looking at the floor for a minute. “I guess I got the know-how from him.”

  Bobby rubbed his fingers across the wooden base of the record player. “He hasn’t been around for a long time though. My mom is married again. Barney Felker is my stepdad.”

  My aunt nodded, thoughtfully.

  “Well, gee, thanks for fixing the Victrola,” I piped up. “One good turn deserves another, right? I’ll get some tollhouse cookies. We made them this afternoon.”

  Aunt Cora told Bobby she went to modeling school and was teaching me some of her tricks. Bobby smiled at me and I smiled back, trying to keep my face at a three-quarters view, so I looked like Jennifer Jones.

  After Aunt Cora said she had to hit the sack, Bobby and I sat and talked. He told me how much he loved jazz. I told him I wrote poems and I’d probably work at a record store when I grew up. It was the best night of my life.

  Sometimes Aunt Cora read me jokes from Uncle Walt’s letters. “The rations here are so tough, they have to marinate corn flakes.” But one day she got teary and said, “Listen to this.” She started reading. “I just spent thirteen hours digging ditches. But I’m not complaining; a ditch could save my life. Anytime I get too far from one ditch I start digging another one. And I hope it’s all wasted effort. I never wanted to do useless work so much in my life.”

  I looked at the tears on Aunt Cora’s lower lashes and I saw a desperation in her eyes that I recognized from some of the soldiers and sailors we joked with at Jolly Jack’s. All the corny jokes they hooted over and the second-hand store smiles they flashed couldn’t hide the rawness you could tell they felt, frightened to death that they might not come back. I got up and gave my aunt a hug.

  That night in bed I worried about what would happen to me when Uncle Walt came home from the war. I tried to picture him walking in and seeing my new curls and saying, “Well, get a load of you, turning into a real looker. Hey, Cora, let’s just keep Nancy here with us.” My aunt would cry and throw her arms around me and say, “Oh, Walt, I was hoping you’d say that. I love Nancy so much. She’ll be just like our own daughter.”

  Still, I couldn’t help but want things to stay the way they were, just me and Aunt Cora making tollhouse cookies and having a few laughs at Joll
y Jack’s and practicing modeling tricks. One thing I’d learned, you couldn’t trust women around men.

  8

  CORA, 1944

  The telegram came on a blustery March afternoon.

  Cora was practicing leg positions in front of the giant round mirror above her Hollywood blond dresser while Nancy watched, sitting cross-legged on the matching blond wood bed.

  “I’ll get it,” Cora sang when the doorbell rang. “Watch my going-down-the-stairs posture. See how I do.” She swished past a tinted wedding photograph that showed her dazzling in a blue velvet draped dress, Walt flashing a mile-wide movie star smile. Sliding her hand elegantly along the bannister, she glided smoothly down the steps in new ankle-strap shoes. Nancy stood at the top, smiling.

  When Cora saw the Western Union messenger through the glass of the door, her heart heaved in her chest like a water wheel.

  “Oh, no,” she cried.

  Nancy sucked in her breath and clenched her fists.

  “Dear God,” Cora prayed, “don’t let him be dead. I’ll do anything you want but please don’t let him be dead.” She opened the door, her face a peaked mask. Nancy stood frozen at the top of the stairs.

  The messenger gave a weak smile. “Cora Dowling?”

  “Yes.” Her lips barely moved, but still, the wind blew her hair into her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but it flew back, bringing with it the bittersweet taste of Colorinse.

  “Telegram for you.”

  The envelope burned her hand, and she closed the door and stared at it for a long time. If he was dead, wouldn’t someone come in person? Wasn’t that the way they did it when Robert Walker got killed in “Since You Went Away”? Hadn’t somebody come in person?

  She raised the envelope to the tip of her nose, as if it might have the smell of Walt to it. Suddenly the smell of him after sex, the strong boozy, smoky, chemical smell seemed like the most important thing in her life. She lowered her eyes and tore open the envelope with a finger, a quick jagged slash. She squinted as she read, as though not sure she really wanted to see. Then her heart leapt. “He’s alive,” she shouted. “It’s from Walt. He’s alive.”