Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russell

  Well, to be honest? I just gave up.

  By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.

  And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.

  President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”

  Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had UNITED STATES crossed out and NEW PRUSSIA scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.

  “The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

  A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.

  If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and firm!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a Vogue editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”

  It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true…

  Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with nothing to look forward to as 1921 approached, I came upon a newspaper ad for Halle’s Department Store. “When a woman begins to regard her appearance as a fixed, unalterable quality, that same moment some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”

  Agnes, I told myself, some work for immigrants is better than none at all. And if you try to repair this waistband again, you risk public catastrophe. But you don’t want to go to Halle’s, I could hear Mumma’s “ghost” add. It’s much too expensive! Sears and Roebuck’s is entirely good enough for you.

  I dithered another hour before telephoning the mechanic who valiantly kept Douglas’s obsolete electric running. I would be driving into Cleveland in the morning, I told Brian, and would he be kind enough to put a charge into the batteries tonight, please?

  I drove as little as possible in those days, not because I was afraid, you understand, but because each outing required me to withstand another lecture on the technical and economic superiority of gasoline engines. Holding the telephone’s earpiece away from my head, I pretended to listen as Brian swore that he couldn’t keep that old rattletrap wired together much longer. It wasn’t safe for me to drive it into town. It might break down, and then where would I be? On the side of the road, freezing in this weather. Now listen here, I was instructed, just come on down to the garage and take a look. He had a used flivver that would do fine for my use. Just take a look, that’s all he asked, but he asked relentlessly, and I hated being nagged. Only Rosie’s exultation made the ordeal worthwhile. I can’t imagine anything in the wolf lineage to account for a dog’s delight in automotive travel, but Rosie loved to ride in cars.

  The next day, the electric delivered me without incident to a parking spot on Euclid Avenue. Oh, for heaven’s sake, I could imagine Mumma saying. You don’t belong here. Go to Sears! And I admit that I hesitated at the sight of Halle’s liveried doorman, but once I made my mind up, I could be more determined than you might think. Clutching Rosie under one arm as though she were a furry football, I squared my shoulders as Papa used to and swept right through that door, as though my little dog and I had a perfect right to be in a place where a blouse costing less than nineteen dollars was hardly worth cutting up as a dust rag.

  My spectacles fogged immediately. It’s Mumma, I thought, then told myself firmly, Nonsense, Agnes. It’s condensation.

  I set Rosie down, took a handkerchief from my bag, and carefully polished the mist from my lenses. When I replaced them on my nose, my icy courage thawed and puddled under the heated gaze of three spruce shopgirls, each of whom seemed to have spent her entire salary at Halle’s.

  Despite the advertised reduction in prices, few other shoppers had ventured out that bitterly cold morning. With no one else to wait on, all three girls advanced on me like an army vanguard, each wearing a combat uniform that was some clever variation on the theme of cultured pearls and a dark French frock with a white collar and cuffs.

  “I only want to spend eighty-five dollars,” I told them, backing away. “I—I need clothes. And a pair of sturdy shoes. And an overcoat.”

  There’s just the thing, Mumma said when my eyes fell on a sensible brown tweed. It will wear like iron.

  The least beautiful but most confident of the three girls came straight up to me. “A dachshund!” this young blonde cried. “Oh, I love dachshunds! Half a dog high, dog and a half long—that’s what my boyfriend, Les, always says. Les is such a card! What’s her name?”

  “Rosie,” I said, a little startled.

  “Well, nice to meetcha, Rosie. My name’s Mildred.” With that, she snatched Rosie up with such aplomb, the dog hardly wiggled as she was lifted. “Take off your coat,” Mildred urged me, popping her gum. “Let’s see what we’ve got to work with, Miss—?”

  “Um, Shanklin.”

  Goodness, she’s rude, Mumma remarked, but I soon found Mildred’s breezy cheer a welcome change from the dreary posthumous conversations I’d grown used to, all those months alone. That’s simply the way young people speak now, I told Mumma, even to their elders.

  I unbuttoned my old coat and handed it over, feeling strangely liberated when Mildred tossed it aside with the disdain that it deserved, but my heart, buoyed momentarily, sank to its accustomed level while she considered the challenge before her. Familiar with the sensation of being appraised by someone clear-eyed, pretty, and remorseless, I awaited judgment like a condemned criminal. Agnes Shanklin, I find you flat-chested, hipless, hopeless—

  Mildred sighe
d. “You are so lucky! Miss Shanklin, you’ve got the perfect figger for a dropped waist. Perfect!”

  Dumbfounded. There’s no other word for it. I was dumbfounded by the notion of possessing any sort of perfection, let alone one that was physical. When I stammered my disbelief, Mildred seemed genuinely astonished and told me in no uncertain terms that every fashionable woman between the ages of fifteen and forty-five yearned—positively yearned—for the very “figger” I’d been cursed with.

  “But all that hair!” Mildred rolled her eyes. Fingers busy behind Rosie’s ears, she dropped into a sort of baby talk. “Mommy’s hair has to go. Isn’t that right, Rosie? Awful, awful, awful.”

  Shifting Rosie to the crook of her left arm, Mildred lifted an in-store telephone’s earpiece with her right hand. “Antoine’s!” she ordered into the speaker, eyes on mine, as though there were nothing wrong with what looked back at her. “They’ll say they don’t have time,” Mildred predicted. “Don’t worry. I’ve got Antoine twisted right around this,” she said, displaying a little finger tipped in blood-red enamel.

  And it appeared that was the case. Before I could change my mind, Mildred had secured an immediate appointment for me. Still carrying Rosie, she escorted me up several escalators to the store’s hairdressing salon, where I was relieved of more of my clothing and swathed in a yellow rayon wrapper.

  There was a brisk discussion with the slender and artistic Antoine. A bob, they decided. Just the thing.

  “Oh, gracious,” I said. “I don’t think—”

  Mildred pulled a silver flask from her pocket and handed it to me as though that were just another service she provided to her customers. “Canadian courage,” she whispered, urging me to take a sip. “I know an ‘importer,’” she said with a wink, and then offered to take Rosie out for a walk.

  Recognizing the word, Rosie wiggled and whined rapturously. The two of them disappeared together. Antoine picked up his scissors.

  Two hours later, the salon receptionist summoned Mildred in time to see me whirled in my chair to behold Antoine’s handiwork. Everyone in the shop applauded when I gasped. What had always been long and frizzy and disobedient was now short and shining and perfectly waved.

  “Miss Shanklin,” Mildred declared, “you are the bee’s knees.”

  “Well! I don’t know about that,” I murmured. But truly? From that moment on, I was Galatea to Mildred’s Pygmalion.

  The weather had gotten worse while I was being shorn; with the store now nearly empty, its bored staff was entirely available to bring a dazzled and unresisting customer into the twentieth century. As we sailed down the escalator, Mildred called out assignments to her stylish young colleagues, detailing the elements of my wardrobe each should supply from the Better Coats Department, from Sports Wear, and Dresses, and Ladies’ Shoes. All of Halle’s took on a party atmosphere and I allowed myself to be borne along on the enthusiasm. It reminded me of rainy afternoons in childhood when Lillie would cry, “Come on, Agnes! Let’s play dress-up!” Only, this time, I would be the fairy princess.

  Mildred led me to an elaborately mirrored private dressing room, lifted Rosie’s paw, and wagged it in the direction of a curtained screen. “Off you go, Mommy,” she said in a baby voice, as though Rosie herself were speaking. “You’re going to park that girdle for good!”

  The new underthings laid out for me were dauntingly simple and unconstructed, but with my hair decisively cut, there was no turning back. While I changed, Mildred perched on a stool, chattering about her rapid rise at Halle’s from stock girl to sales and telling me all about her boyfriend, Les Hope, who was thinking of changing his name to the jazzier Bob. “He’s a terrific dancer,” Mildred said, and I didn’t have the heart to point out that “terrific” means very frightening, not good. “He gives lessons, but that’s just temporary, y’know. He’s going to be a star—just you wait and see! Here, now, try this on.”

  She stuck a hand through the curtains; in it was a limp length of ivory charmeuse. “No, really, Mildred,” I started to protest. “I have no use for—”

  “Just try it!”

  The fabric slid over me like a waterfall, and I let Mildred adjust its drape before I looked in the three-way mirror. Then—my fingers went to my lips. What had been woefully inadequate in the era of the Gibson girl was now a slim, elongated, shimmering elegance. And the color made my complexion look fresh as cream.

  Mildred clapped her hands like the delighted child she was. “I just knew you’d be a knockout in that dress! Do you have pearls? Oh, my gosh, you’d be positively stunning in pearls!”

  Agnes, don’t be foolish. You don’t want that dress, said Mumma. It’s completely impractical. What you want is a good woolen skirt and a nice cotton blouse that can take bleach and stand up to hard use. Where on earth would someone like you wear a silk charmeuse—?

  “I’ll take it,” I heard myself say.

  Piece by piece over the next two hours, a wardrobe was assembled. Like a butterfly in reverse, I drew on one cocoon after another. With every change of outfit, a new and different Agnes appeared in the mirror, and Mumma hated them all.

  Tailored frocks with boyish collars and turned-back cuffs, belted low. (You look like a stick in those things.) Simple straight skirts in good Scottish wool, to be worn under the most beautiful costume tunics in crepe de Chine and printed silks. (They’ll be ruined the first time you wash them.) Round-necked voile blouses with hand-drawn embroidery work. (You’ll snag the openings, Agnes, you know how careless you are.) Shoes next, three pairs. (Two are enough, surely. One for church and one for everyday. Why would anyone need three pairs of shoes?) A long loose overcoat in jade green wool, with a deep shawl collar—stunningly expensive, but the loveliest thing I’d ever worn.

  I brought you up to think of others, Mumma said with a defeated sigh. The moment I’m gone, you sink into selfish profligacy.

  I will give an equal amount to charity, I promised silently.

  “I’ll take it,” I said aloud.

  With the dressing room filled and me beginning to wonder where on earth I’d hang all these clothes once I got them home, the jubilant Mildred crooked a varnished finger and led me out to a cosmetics counter. While my purchases were being bagged and boxed, my lips were to be rouged and my eyes smudged with kohl.

  “Oh, Mildred, really, I couldn’t!” Balking at long last, I gestured toward my forehead and confided my reluctance. “It will draw attention to—”

  “What?” she asked.

  “My eye,” I whispered.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it—it crosses.”

  “Which one?”

  “The right. It crosses. When I’m tired.”

  She shrugged. “So? Take naps.” She stared hard and finally admitted, “I suppose it does turn in, but it’s not that bad. Makes you look…like you’re really paying attention. Anyway, you’ve got lovely lips. We’ll play them up.”

  Mildred and the Elizabeth Arden lady consulted on colors and application, and when they were finished, Mildred produced a bell-shaped cloche hat made from the same green wool as my beautiful new coat. She settled it onto my head and tugged it down until it dipped rakishly over my right eye. “In case you get tired,” she said, winking. “What do you think?”

  I walked to the nearest full-length mirror and saw someone chic and modern, youthful if not young. In a daze, I stood there reassessing everything I had ever thought about myself. “Mildred,” I whispered finally, “you are a miracle worker.”

  “Don’t you dare cry!” she warned. “You’ll ruin your makeup.”

  We embraced then as though we were old friends, and I waved to half a dozen other girls beaming happily at the magic they had accomplished. I didn’t even ask how much the bill had totaled. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I am not a penny-pinching schoolteacher anymore. I am a lady of means.

  Not if you keep up this kind of spending, Mumma warned.

  Paying no attention, I sailed out o
f the store followed by three boys laden with the boxes and bags they would carry to my car. The doorman, who barely noticed when I entered Halle’s five hours earlier, looked at me now with frank and cheeky admiration as I departed.

  I tipped the boys a dime apiece when the car was loaded, and gave a nickel to the valet who held my car door open. Rosie hopped in, and for a time I sat still, gazing at the green-gloved hands resting on the steering wheel. I felt as transformed as the society I lived in.

  The spell was not broken, but only slightly cracked when a trickle of melted snow slipped down a newly bared neck that had never before gone out in such weather without a sensible crocheted scarf. Even inside the car and out of the winter wind, my silk-stockinged legs felt exposed and cold beneath the knee-length skirt.

  You’ll catch pneumonia, Mumma said.

  Maybe so, I could hear Mildred say, but she’ll die happy.

  What about Egypt? you ask. What has any of this to do with Egypt?

  Well, I’m getting to that, but you have to know all about Mildred to understand why I went to the séance. You see, Mildred and Mumma began to argue on my way home, and they never seemed to stop. Every time my mother rebuked me for that spending spree or anything else, for that matter, Mildred’s voice would come to my defense.

  What would she be like if you’d let her make the most of herself instead of the least? Mildred demanded, bold as brass. You always acted like her life was over before it got started.

  But a silk charmeuse dress! A waste of money if ever there was one. It’ll sit in the closet forever.

  Not necessarily…Why, it’s perfect for a cruise! It’s the very sort of dress ladies wear when they eat at the captain’s table on a cruise.