City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“You don’t have your own bath, unfortunately,” said Olive, as the men in overalls were depositing my trunks and sewing machine in the dressing room. “There is a common bath across the hall. You’ll be sharing that with Celia, as she is staying at the Lily, just for now. Mr. Herbert and Benjamin live in the other wing. They share their own bath.”

  I didn’t know who Mr. Herbert and Benjamin were, but I figured I’d soon enough be finding out.

  “Billy won’t be needing his apartment, Olive?”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “Are you very sure? If he should ever need these rooms, of course, I can go somewhere else. What I’m saying is that I don’t need anything so nice as all this. . . .”

  I was lying. I needed and wanted this little apartment with all my heart, and had already laid claim to it in my imagination. This is where I would become a person of significance, I decided.

  “Your uncle hasn’t been to New York City in over four years, Vivian,” Olive said, eyeballing me in that way she had—that unsettling way of making you feel as though she were watching your thoughts like a newsreel. “I trust that you can bunk down here with a certain sense of security.”

  Oh, bliss!

  I unpacked a few essentials, splashed some water on my face, powdered my nose, and combed my hair. Then it was back to the clutter and chatter of the big, overstuffed living room. Back to Peg’s world, with all its novelty and noise.

  Olive went to the kitchen and brought out a small meat loaf, served on a plate of dismal lettuce. Just as she had intuited earlier, this was not going to be enough of a meal for everyone in the room. Shortly, however, she reappeared with some cold cuts and bread. She also scared up half a chicken carcass, a plate of pickles, and some containers of cold Chinese food. I noticed that somebody had opened a window and turned on a small fan, which helped to eliminate the stuffy summer heat not in the least.

  “You kids eat,” Peg said. “Take all you need.”

  Gladys and Roland lit into the meat loaf like a couple of farmhands. I helped myself to some of the chop suey. Celia didn’t eat anything, but sat quietly on one of the couches, handling her martini glass and cigarette with more panache than anything I’d ever seen.

  “How was the beginning of the show tonight?” Olive asked. “I only caught the end.”

  “Well, it fell short of King Lear,” said Peg. “But only just.”

  Olive’s frown deepened. “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened per se,” said Peg. “It’s just a lackluster show, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over. It’s always been lackluster. Nobody in the audience seemed unduly harmed by it. They all left the theater with the use of their legs. Anyway, we’re changing the show next week, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “And the box office receipts? For the early show?”

  “The less we speak of such matters the better,” said Peg.

  “But what was the take, Peg?”

  “Don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to, Olive.”

  “Well, I will need to know. We can’t keep having crowds like tonight.”

  “Oh, how I love that you call it a crowd! By actual count, there were forty-seven people at the early show this evening.”

  “Peg! That’s not enough!”

  “Don’t grieve, Olive. Things always get slower in the summer, remember. Anyway, we get the audiences we get. If we wanted to draw larger crowds, we would put on baseball games instead of plays. Or we would invest in air-conditioning. Let’s just turn our attention now toward getting the South Seas act ready for next week. We can get the dancers rehearsing tomorrow morning, and they can be up and running by Tuesday.”

  “Not tomorrow morning,” said Olive. “I’ve rented the stage out to a children’s dance class.”

  “Good for you. Resourceful as ever, old girl. Tomorrow afternoon, then.”

  “Not tomorrow afternoon. I’ve rented the stage out for a swimming class.”

  This caught Peg up short. “A swimming class? Come again?”

  “It’s a program that the city is offering. They’ll be teaching children from the neighborhood how to swim.”

  “To swim? Will they be flooding our stage, Olive?”

  “Of course not. It’s called dry swimming. They teach the classes without water.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that they will teach swimming as a theoretical concept?”

  “More or less so. Just the basics. They use chairs. The city is paying for it.”

  “How about this, Olive. How about you tell Gladys when you haven’t rented our stage out to a children’s dance class, or to a dry swimming school, and then she can call a rehearsal to begin working on the dances for the South Seas act?”

  “Monday afternoon,” said Olive.

  “Monday afternoon, Gladys!” Peg called over to the showgirl. “Did you hear that? Can you gather everyone together for Monday afternoon?”

  “I don’t like rehearsing in the mornings, anyhow,” said Gladys, although I wasn’t sure this constituted a firm reply.

  “It shouldn’t be hard, Gladdie,” said Peg. “It’s just a scratch revue. Throw something together, the way you do.”

  “I want to be in the South Seas show!” said Roland.

  “Everyone wants to be in the South Seas show,” said Peg. “The kids love performing in these exotic international dramas, Vivvie. They love the costumes. This year alone, we’ve had an Indian show, a Chinese maiden story, and a Spanish dancer story. We tried an Eskimo romance last year, but it was no good. The costumes weren’t very becoming, to say the least. Fur, you know. Heavy. And the songs were not our best. We ended up rhyming ‘nice’ with ‘ice’ so many times, it made your head ache.”

  “You can play one of the hula girls in the South Seas show, Roland!” Gladys said, and laughed.

  “I sure am pretty enough for it!” he said, and struck a pose.

  “You sure are,” agreed Gladys. “And you’re so tiny, one of these days you’re just gonna float away. I always gotta be careful not to put you right next to me on the stage. Standing next to you, I look like a great big cow.”

  “That could be because you’ve gained weight lately, Gladys,” observed Olive. “You need to monitor what you eat, or soon you won’t fit into your costumes at all.”

  “What a person eats doesn’t have anything to do with her figure!” Gladys protested, as she reached for another piece of meat loaf. “I read it in a magazine. What matters is how much coffee you drink.”

  “You drink too much booze,” Roland cried out. “You can’t hold your liquor!”

  “I surely cannot hold my liquor!” Gladys agreed. “Everybody knows that about me. But I’ll tell you another thing—I wouldn’t have as big a sex life as I have, if I could hold my liquor!”

  “Boot me your lipstick, Celia,” said Gladys to the other showgirl, who silently pulled out a tube from the pocket of her silk robe and handed it over. Gladys painted her lips with the most violent shade of red I’d ever seen, and then kissed Roland hard on both his cheeks, leaving big, bright imprints.

  “There, Roland. Now you are the prettiest girl in the room!”

  Roland didn’t appear to mind the teasing. He had a face just like a porcelain doll, and to my expert eye, it looked as though he tweezed his brows. I was shocked that he didn’t even try to act male. When he spoke, he waved his hands around like a debutante. He didn’t even wipe off the lipstick from his cheeks! It’s almost as though he wanted to look like a female! (Forgive my naïveté, Angela, but I hadn’t been around a lot of homosexuals at that point in my life. Not male ones, anyhow. Now lesbians, on the other hand—those I’d seen. I did spend a year at Vassar, after all. Even I wasn’t that oblivious.)

  Peg turned her attention to me. “Now! Vivian Louise Morris! What do you want to do with yourself while you’re here in New York City?”

  What did I want to do with myself? I wanted to do this! I wanted to drink martinis with showgirls, and listen
to Broadway business talk, and eavesdrop on the gossip of boys who looked like girls! I wanted to hear about people’s big sex lives!

  But I couldn’t say any of that. So what I said, brilliantly, was: “I’d like to look around a bit! Take things in!”

  Everyone was looking at me now. Waiting for something more, maybe? Waiting for what?

  “I don’t know my way around New York City, is my primary obstacle,” I said, sounding like an ass.

  Aunt Peg responded to this inanity by grabbing a paper napkin off the table, and sketching upon it a quick map of Manhattan. I do wish I had managed to preserve that map, Angela. It was the most charming map of the city I would ever see: a big crooked carrot of an island, with a dark rectangle in the middle representing Central Park; vague wavy lines representing the Hudson and East Rivers; a dollar sign down at the bottom of the island, representing Wall Street; a musical note up at the top of the island, representing Harlem, and a bright star right in the middle, representing right where we were: Times Square. Center of the world! Bingo!

  “There,” she said. “Now you know your way around. You can’t get lost here, kiddo. Just follow the street signs. It’s all numbered, couldn’t be easier. Just remember: Manhattan is an island. People forget that. Walk far enough in any direction, and you’ll run into water. If you hit a river, turn around and go in the other direction. You’ll learn your way around. Dumber people than you have figured out this city.”

  “Even Gladys figured it out,” said Roland.

  “Watch it, sunshine,” said Gladys. “I was born here.”

  “Thank you!” I said, pocketing the napkin. “And if you need anything done around the theater, I would be happy to help out.”

  “You’d like to help?” Peg seemed surprised to hear it. Clearly, she had not expected much of me. Christ, what had my parents told her? “You can help Olive in the office, if you go for that sort of thing. Office work, and such.”

  Olive blanched at this suggestion, and I’m afraid I might have done the same. I didn’t want to work for Olive any more than she wanted me working for her.

  “Or you can work in the box office,” Peg went on. “You can sell tickets. You’re not musical, are you? I’d be surprised if you were. Nobody in our family is musical.”

  “I can sew,” I said.

  I must’ve said it quietly, because nobody seemed to register that I’d spoken.

  Olive said, “Peg, why don’t you have Vivian enroll at the Katharine Gibbs School, where she can learn how to type?”

  Peg, Gladys, and Celia all groaned as one.

  “Olive is always trying to get us girls to enroll at Katharine Gibbs so we can learn how to type,” Gladys explained. She shuddered in dramatic horror, as though learning how to type were something akin to busting up rocks in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  “Katharine Gibbs turns out employable young women,” Olive said. “A young woman ought to be employable.”

  “I can’t type, and I’m employable!” Gladys said. “Heck, I’m already employed! I’m employed by you!”

  Olive said, “A showgirl is never quite employed, Gladys. A showgirl is a person who may—at times—be in possession of a job. It’s not the same thing. Yours is not a reliable field of work. A secretary, by contrast, can always find employment.”

  “I’m not just a showgirl,” said Gladys, with miffed pride. “I’m a dance captain. A dance captain can always find employment. Anyhow, if I run out of money, I’ll just get married.”

  “Never learn to type, kiddo,” Peg said to me. “And if you do learn to type, never tell anybody that you can type, or they’ll make you do it forever. Never learn shorthand, either. It’ll be the death of you. Once they put a steno pad in a woman’s hand, it never comes out.”

  Suddenly the gorgeous creature on the other side of the room spoke, for the first time since we’d come upstairs. “You said you can sew?” Celia asked.

  Once again, that low, throaty voice took me by surprise. Also, she had her eyes on me now, which I found a bit intimidating. I don’t want to overuse the word “smoldering” when I talk about Celia, but there’s no way around it: she was the kind of woman who smoldered even when she wasn’t intentionally trying to smolder. Holding that smoldering gaze was uncomfortable for me, so I just nodded, and said in the safer direction of Peg, “Yes. I can sew. Grandmother Morris taught me how.”

  “What sort of stuff do you make?” Celia asked.

  “Well, I made this dress.”

  Gladys screamed, “You made that dress?”

  Both Gladys and Roland rushed at me the way girls always rushed at me when they found out that I’d made my own dress. In a flash, the two of them were picking at my outfit, like two gorgeous little monkeys.

  “You did this?” Gladys said.

  “Even the trim?” Roland asked.

  I wanted to say, “This is nothing!”—because truly, compared to what I could do, this little frock, cunning though it appeared, was nothing. But I didn’t want to sound cocky. So instead I said, “I make everything I wear.”

  Celia spoke again, from across the room: “Can you make costumes?”

  “I suppose so. It would depend on the costume, but I’m sure I could.”

  The showgirl stood up and asked, “Could you make something like this?” She let her robe drop to the floor, revealing the costume beneath it.

  (I know that sounds dramatic, to say that she “let her robe drop,” but Celia was the kind of girl who didn’t just take her clothes off like any other mortal woman; she always let them drop.)

  Her figure was astonishing, but as for the costume, it was basic—a little two-piece metallic number, something like a bathing suit. It was the sort of thing that was designed to look better from fifty feet away than up close. It had tight, high-waisted shorts decorated in splashy sequins, and a bra that was decked out in a gaudy arrangement of beads and feathers. It looked good on her, but that’s only because a hospital gown would have looked good on her. I thought it could have fit her better, to be honest. The shoulder straps were all wrong.

  “I could make that,” I said. “The beading would take me awhile, but that’s just busywork. The rest of it is straightforward.” Then I had a flash of inspiration, like a flare shot up in a night sky: “Say, if you have a costume director, maybe I could work with her? I could be her assistant!”

  Laughter burst out across the room.

  “A costume director!” Gladys said. “What do you think this is, Paramount Pictures? You think we got Edith Head hiding down there in the basement?”

  “The girls are responsible for their own costumes,” Peg explained. “If we don’t have anything that will work for them in our costume closet—and we never do—they have to provide their own outfits. It costs them, but that’s just how things have always been done. Where’d you get yours, Celia?”

  “I bought it off a girl. You remember Evelyn, at El Morocco? She got married, moved to Texas. She gave me a whole trunk of costumes. Lucky for me.”

  “Sure, lucky for you,” sniffed Roland. “Lucky you didn’t get the clap.”

  “Aw, give it a rest, Roland,” said Gladys. “Evelyn was a good kid. You’re just jealous because she married a cowboy.”

  “If you’d like to help the kids out with their costumes, Vivian, I’m sure everyone would appreciate it,” said Peg.

  “Could you make me a South Seas outfit?” Gladys asked me. “Like a Hawaiian hula girl?”

  That was like asking a master chef if he could make porridge.

  “Sure,” I said. “I could make you one tomorrow.”

  “Could you make me a hula outfit?” asked Roland.

  “I don’t have a budget for new costumes,” Olive warned. “We haven’t discussed this.”

  “Oh, Olive,” Peg sighed. “You are every inch the vicar’s wife. Let the kids have their fun.”

  I couldn’t help but observe that Celia had kept her gaze on me since we started talking about sewing. Being in her line of
vision felt both terrifying and thrilling.

  “You know something?” she said, after studying me more closely. “You’re pretty.”

  Now, to be fair, people usually noticed this fact about me sooner. But who could blame Celia for having paid me so little attention up until this point, when she was in possession of that face and that body?

  “Tell you the truth,” she said, smiling for the first time that night, “you kinda look like me.”

  Let me be clear, Angela: I didn’t.

  Celia Ray was a goddess; I was an adolescent. But in the sketchiest of terms, I suppose I could see that she had a point: we were both tall brunettes with ivory skin and wide-set brown eyes. We could have passed for cousins, if not sisters—and decidedly not twins. Certainly our figures had nothing in common. She was a peach; I was a stick. Still, I was flattered. To this day, though, I believe that the only reason Celia Ray ever took notice of me at all was because we looked a tiny bit alike, and that drew her attention. For Celia, vain as she was, looking at me must have been like looking in a (very foggy, very distant) mirror—and Celia never met a mirror she didn’t love.

  “You and me should dress up alike sometime and go out on the town,” Celia said, in that low Bronx growl that was also a purr. “We could get ourselves into some real good trouble.”

  Well, I didn’t even know what to say to that. I just sat there, gaping like the Emma Willard schoolgirl I so recently had been.

  As for my Aunt Peg—my legal guardian, at this point, please remember—she heard this illicit-sounding invite and said, “Say, girls, that sounds fun.”

  Peg was over at the bar again mixing up another batch of martinis, but at that point, Olive put a stop to things. The fearsome secretary of the Lily Playhouse stood up, clapped her hands, and announced, “Enough! If Peg stays up any later, she will not be the better for it in the morning.”

  “Darn it, Olive, I’ll give you a poke in the eye!” Peg said.

  “To bed, Peg,” said the imperturbable Olive, tugging down her girdle for emphasis. “Now.”

  The room scattered. We all said our good nights.

  I made my way to my apartment (my apartment!) and unpacked a bit more. I couldn’t really focus on the task, though. I was in a buzz of nervous joy.