Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  So Sally Bliss would make her living in the city of her dreams as a salesgirl in a department store, fifty-five dollars per week, benefits included. It was the best outcome she could have hoped for.

  All that was left was to find a place to live. It was too late in the day to look, she was exhausted, and Penelope had lost patience and was beginning to whine with hunger. Sally said good-bye to Elena and took her daughter back to the diner for an early supper before returning to the Cadillac Hotel.

  From then on, their arrangements fell into place more easily than Sally could have hoped. She thought it must have had something to do with giving up her unreasonable ambitions; she was ready to accept what the world thought she deserved, to expect no more than her fair share.

  They moved into their own apartment at the end of the week. Advertised as comfortable accommodations on a bus line, at eighty dollars a month, the apartment Sally liked best was located over a shoe repair shop, diagonally across from the municipal post office. The landlord, Mr. Botelia, the shop owner, was a potbellied, grizzled man. When he met them at the side door of the building, he was wearing an apron stained with shades of polish, he smelled of leather cream, and as he greeted Penelope, he held out a sharp-clawed bear’s paw in place of a hand.

  He growled, and Penelope burst into tears.

  No, no, that’s not what he was after. It had been Halloween the day before, hadn’t it, he’d wanted to have a little fun, but he didn’t want to frighten the girl. He pleaded with her to stop crying, and with a swift movement he removed the bear’s paw from his long sleeve and pulled from his tool belt another appendage, a mechanical contraption ending in a pair of shears, which he sliced, clack-clack, in the air. Was that better? he asked Penelope, but she hid her face in the folds of her mother’s skirt and kept bawling. No? Then how about this? He exchanged the shears for a plastic arm ending in a slender-fingered hand, probably a woman’s hand, he admitted as he tucked it up his sleeve, though didn’t they agree that it was hard to tell for sure? He’d gotten it for free, taken it off a store mannequin that he’d found in the garbage.

  In fact, he had two hands of his own. But he couldn’t resist a good joke.

  The apartment he showed them was more spacious than Sally expected, with a bay window and a reading nook facing the street, though the furnishings were meager — a single table, twin beds, a tattered sofa. And it was so dusty that their feet left prints across the floor. But when Mr. Botelia said he’d let Sally determine the rent she thought was fair, she replied with some awkwardness that she thought fifty dollars a month was all she could afford. Mr. Botelia offered better than that and set the rent at forty dollars a month, half the amount listed in the ad and less than the rent she’d proposed because, as he reminded her apologetically, utilities were extra.

  They would get used to the mail trucks rumbling down the road every morning at four. They would get used to the smell of polish and leather, which permeated the whole building. They would get so used to the apartment above Botelia’s Shoe Repair that they’d settle in and stay for many years.

  They soon discovered that their newest home wasn’t far from the river, less than a mile. The first Sunday, Sally took Penelope to explore the neighborhood, and they ended up on the Ford Street Bridge, where they leaned against the rail, trying to catch sight of one of the strange fairy creatures they’d seen in the state park. But this stretch of the river was the color of a rusty pipe, and the stone embankment was coated with a noxious black slime. The reality of it made the memory of their experience in the park seem impossibly distant to Sally, as if it had happened in another life.

  Later in the week they followed a path leading from a warehouse to the water, and they were able to walk right up to the riverbank. But there was a strong sulfur stench coming from the mud, and the shore had served as a dumping ground for trash. Sally gave up hope of ever seeing anything alive come out of the water. Nothing could survive, she decided, not in that poisonous stew. Over time, when she bothered to look at the Tuskee at all, she saw a surface as impenetrable as the macadam of the city streets.

  When Sally described this period in her life, she’d warn that there wasn’t much of interest to say. Who cared that over several months she transformed that dusty wreck of an apartment on Magellan Street into a cozy home? Who cared that Penelope Bliss got used to her name, even came to like the sound of it? And who cared that by the age of twenty-nine, Sally was so proficient in her sales job at Sibley’s that she’d been promoted to an assistant manager of the floor? All the mundane stuff, work, work, work, day in, day out — it might have filled the bulk of the hours of her life, but it hardly figured when she added up the years. Still, it was something when a customer came in to buy a smoking stand and she talked him into buying a brass magazine rack along with it. And there was that woman in search of a casserole warmer who left the store with a new dinnerware service for eight. And what about that day she sold seventeen Mary Proctor ironing boards in three hours!

  Oh, she did work hard, and she was shrewd at gauging what a customer might be willing to add to his purchases. But she was just your average Jane, just another single mother trying to keep ahead of the game, two teeth missing after the loose one fell out and a faint pink wriggling scar poking up from her right eyebrow. It didn’t matter in the larger scheme that having set herself the challenge of saving as much of her hard-earned salary as she could, she’d take a twenty-minute bus ride to the IGA instead of walking to the nearby A&P. If she was lucky, Mr. Botelia’s wife, who was as plump and filthy as her husband, would drive Sally to the grocery store in their car, a battered wood-paneled station wagon that bounced her out of the seat when it hit a pothole.

  And all those receipts she saved — what was the point of them other than to prove that Sally Bliss knew a bargain when she saw it? Not until 1960 did she pay more than fifty-five cents for a package of franks. She would buy frozen mixed vegetables on sale, two for one, and save ten cents. She’d buy the cheapest margarine. Blue Bonnet was her favorite, and at the IGA it usually came on sale at the first of the month.

  She became fond of Dinty Moore beef stew. A twenty-four-ounce can was only forty-five cents. Penelope liked American cheese, Sally preferred pimento, and once she found them on sale together. She bought chuck roast instead of round steak. She bought canned chicken, though she would have preferred the fancy pink salmon. She invited her Polish friend, Elena, for New Year’s dinner and bought a smoked ham on sale, along with an angel food cake, which she covered in an instant lemon sauce from a packet. For her daughter’s fifth birthday, in March of 1958, she invited over a group of little girls from the neighborhood. She borrowed cake tins from Mrs. Botelia, bought a mix and made a cake that was a big hit. She had snapshots of the girls with their mouths rimmed with chocolate. And Sally gave Penelope a real Lionel train set, which she’d bought at seventy percent off the original price because the caboose had been damaged in shipment.

  They bought a used console television, which filled all their extra time. Most nights they would turn to Channel 4 and watch Frank Sinatra. Sally loved Frank Sinatra, even if he did collect girls as if they were souvenirs. He could come along and collect her any day! And that heartthrob Senator John Kennedy… Once Sally had a dream in which the senator appeared on the fourth floor of Sibley’s, said flattering things to her, and they made love on the red velvet sectional. And when in real life he ran for president, she wore a JFK button pinned to her lapel.

  There I am, she’d say, holding up the old newspaper she’d saved with its front-page photograph of the Memorial Day Parade in 1960. She was the girl standing in back of the blurred group of faces, the one in an oversized white sailor’s cap she’d bought at the five-and-dime. If she hadn’t been wearing that white cap, it would have been impossible to distinguish her in the crowd.

  What was there to say to distinguish Sally Bliss from thousands of others like her in America in the late 1950s? She was pert-looking, with full cheeks and rosy skin
. She’d trained herself to keep her mouth closed when she smiled to hide the hole of her missing teeth. She’d put on a few extra pounds around her thighs, but wasn’t that what happened to a woman once she hit thirty? She sang when she did housework but never out in public. She bought wool suits, half slips, and Dacron blouses from the sales rack. She found a fine calfskin bag on the clearance shelf for $7.99.

  Correspondence with her friends in Tuskee kept her posted on the news there. None of them expressed any disapproval of her sudden departure; though they didn’t admit it, Sally guessed that they knew why she’d left. She wished she hadn’t had to leave. Their letters reminded her of how pleasant life had been in Tuskee. Buddy Potter wrote to say that he was thinking about retiring and selling the store. He kept on thinking about it for the next twelve years. On July 4, 1959, Penny Campbell married Arthur Steerforth from the Dockery. They had the wedding in Penny’s hometown, in the backyard of her parents’ house, and it poured buckets all afternoon, though at the end of the day a double rainbow appeared. And wouldn’t you know, within the year Penny was pregnant with twins!

  Implicit in Penny’s letters was the understanding that their music, as fun as it had been, was something they’d outgrown. They both had children to raise and a home to keep up.

  Sally usually ate her lunch in the store’s fifth-floor restaurant. Once in a while she’d meet a friendly man, a customer or another employee. But she wasn’t about to risk getting to know him better, not after all she’d been through. She felt much older than other women her age, more worldly and shrewd, and she was convinced that romance was a notion exploited for commercial appeal. If she ever got married, it would be for pragmatic reasons. She wouldn’t have minded having help paying the bills. But he’d have to be high-class for Sally Bliss to be interested, a real gentleman. And that wasn’t the kind of man who would go for a career girl with broken teeth.

  What Penelope would remember from those first years in Rondo was the train set she got for her birthday, with the caboose that always fell off the track at the top of the figure eight. Chugachugachug.

  She was five.

  When she was six she played a mouse in the class play. Squeak, squeak, she said, and the audience clapped. She had a very nice teacher named Mrs. Doherty, who didn’t give just stars to students when they got a perfect score on a spelling test. She gave blue ribbons. Penelope tacked her ribbons alongside her closet door, and by the end of the year there were blue ribbons going up one side of the doorway and down the other.

  She was good at spelling. She was good at imitating Donald Duck. She knew she was pretty — she could tell because everyone wanted to be friends with her, even the girls who lived in houses with swing sets in their yards. And once a boy named Gregor gave her a present. It was a glass heart almost as big as a regular peach, and on it was written: Kathy and Billy, 1-1-42. She didn’t have a chance to ask Gregor who Kathy and Billy were because the next day he moved to Florida, and she never saw him again. But she vowed to keep the heart forever.

  The time when she hadn’t known how to read seemed like a dream. It felt like something she’d always been doing. She liked reading, and Mrs. Doherty often called on her to read aloud because she was good at it. The only things she wasn’t good at were singing and dancing. They were chores, like wiping the dishes dry with a towel. She even sang in the junior choir at church every week, week after week, but she never improved and she never came to like it.

  Not counting singing and dancing, she was good at everything. She would never say this to anyone, but it was all right to think it, as long as the thought didn’t make her vain. It was all right to be proud, but not vain. She pretended for a long time to know the difference between the two, and eventually she did know, even if she couldn’t explain it.

  When she grew up she wanted to be a nurse. Then she changed her mind and decided that she wanted to be a teacher. Then she changed her mind again because she had a friend named Lucy who wanted to drive a bus, so Penelope wanted to drive a bus, too. After she played the mouse in the school play, her mother predicted that Penelope Bliss would be a star of stage and screen. But sometimes her mother was wrong.

  She was seven and learned to roller-skate at the rink in the park. When she was eight she borrowed a bike from the Botelias and taught herself to ride no-handed. And then everything changed all at once, between yesterday and tomorrow.

  Everything changed because the lawyer representing Bennett Patterson finally succeeded in locating Sally on the fourth floor of Sibley’s. It hadn’t been easy to find her. Initially, Benny had hired a private eye from Buffalo, but the man turned out to be a fraud and conned Benny out of a bundle of money without providing him with any useful information. The firm of Atwell and Stevenson based in Fenton proved more helpful. They obtained records of Sally’s financial transactions from the Tuskee Bank and were able to track her travels north. This was after confirming with hospital records the most relevant fact: Sally’s daughter had been born on March 17, 1953, exactly nine months after Sally and Benny had had their fling in Helena.

  If Benny had only had a job or a steady girlfriend, or if he’d just been interested in any aspect of the world around him, he would have long since forgotten about the tart of a girl he’d met at the Barge. After giving her a good wallop for deserting him, that should have been that. But while Benny was at the hotel nursing a headache the day after finding Sally in Tuskee, his pal went through the items in the purse Sally had left behind and found the photo of her child.

  Sally Mole, formerly Sally Angel, and currently, as the lawyer for Atwell and Stevenson discovered, Sally Bliss.

  So the slippery item who kept changing her name on a whim was the mother of Benny’s daughter. Well, Benny surprised everyone who knew him by caring about the little girl. It mattered to him that he was her father. It mattered that the child didn’t have any decent influences in her life, what with that dumb broad for a mother. He had to fix that.

  He figured he could choose his role. But surely it was ridiculous for a man to presume that he could appear out of nowhere and take his place as the father of a child he’d never met, demanding a share of custody along with a say over her upbringing, her education, her future. Whether or not he really was the father — a point impossible to verify without the mother’s help — Bennett Patterson had only ever proved himself a lout. That was his reputation, at least, and he’d never before evinced any interest in the consequences of his actions.

  Yet a reputation wasn’t the same thing as a purpose in life, and after the family farm was sold out from under him, Benny needed something to think about. A daughter was enough of a something. He was looking forward to being her father. And he was used to getting whatever he wanted.

  He wanted to be a father to the girl, was all — or so his lawyer would go on to explain to Sally, having found her arranging martini glasses in rows on a shelf she’d just dusted. It was Monday morning, normally the quietest period of the week, and the employees were expected to take advantage of the time and put things back in order after the weekend rush. Sally, as assistant manager, could have ordered a salesgirl to dust the shelf, but she preferred this chore to others and was experienced in handling the glassware — though not experienced enough to keep her hand from sweeping three glasses to the floor as she turned in surprise at the sound of the lawyer’s voice.

  Miss Sally Angel?

  While she couldn’t have understood it at the time, the lawyer’s tactic of approaching her from behind and using the name he knew she’d given up would herald a strategy of sneaky maneuverings. Catching her off guard, he would manage to manipulate from her concessions that only later would she recognize were unreasonable. From the start, with the three glasses lying broken on the floor, the triangular bowls snapped from their delicate stems, she would be too confused to defend herself against him.

  And she was too busy gathering the pieces of glass to explain that she was Sally Bliss, not Sally Angel. All she could think to s
ay as she pulled the wastebasket close was “Can I help you?” Can, she heard herself saying — not may. She closed her lips over her teeth.

  She sure could help him, thanks very much. He introduced himself as Griffin Marcus, Esquire. Sally noticed that he was wearing a Dobbs Gamebird, the expensive hat she’d seen advertised in the paper. And here was his assistant, a young man, or a man whose real age was disguised by an abundant mustache, a head of black hair, and a wiry, short build — this was Mr. Melvin Trotter, who took off his tweed cap as he stepped forward, nodded, and then stepped back again into the shadow cast by his superior.

  Mr. Marcus intended to get straight to the point. Time was too precious ever willfully to waste, he said. Indeed, he’d based his recent presentation on this point when he went to Albany to argue — successfully, he might add, perhaps Miss Angel had read about him in the news — in support of a proposal to raise the speed limit on state highways.

  No, she hadn’t read about him, but he didn’t give her the opportunity to say so, for he was proceeding without further delay to the point of his visit. She heard the hum of his voice without hearing the words. And yet somehow she comprehended what he was saying. He’d come on behalf of Mr. Bennett Patterson of Litchfield, Prospect County, to inquire about his daughter and to communicate Mr. Patterson’s concern to Miss Angel —

  “Bliss.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is Sally Bliss.”

  Yes, of course, Sally Bliss, formerly Sally Mole, and before that, Sally Angel. The lawyer apologized for his mistake. But surely she would be pleased to hear that Mr. Patterson was interested in the welfare of the child, their child, after all he was the father, of course he was the father… wasn’t he? Please forgive Mr. Marcus for raising the possibility that such a sacred bond could be cast in doubt, though for the record, and with immense humility, it was necessary to confirm that Mr. Patterson of Litchfield, Prospect County, was indeed the father of Penelope.