The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Gertie was gathering up the kindling when she realized that just behind her was someone else, watching. She looked around and saw, standing knee-deep in the drifted snow between her door and that of the man who had pounded, a smallish girl-like woman, her face rising above two sacks of groceries, clasped one on either arm across her stomach. Her eyes, large, and of a peculiarly light, almost golden brown, were fixed on Gertie in a speculative sort of way. She held her head tipped slightly sideways as she looked at her, gum still between small front teeth, sharp-looking and white, like those of a child, behind the softly curving woman’s lips.

  A gust of wind screamed down the alley banging unhooked storm doors in and out, whirling snow about the woman so that she for an instant seemed a face only, peering at Gertie through the snow. Gertie stooped for a bit of kindling, and behind her the woman’s voice came, low and pretty, after the sounds from the child and the pounding man, “Whatcha dream about last night?”

  Gertie turned and looked at her while she repeated, “Whatcha dream about last night?” The girl was past her indecision now, the speculation gone, the gum moving, then still as she said, almost plaintive, “I gotta have a dream.”

  Gertie considered, staring at her; little she was, and dressed in boots, pants, and a plain dark blue jacket, but even with the wind blowing snow over her and the groceries hiding her breasts the womanliness of her was plain. She made her think of a heifer she’d had once; even when the heifer was little and unbred a body could see the femaleness of it across a wide field. “I didn’t,” Gertie said. She hadn’t slept; she couldn’t dream; but the eyes needed a dream. The brown woman was like a dream—now. “Paradise,” Gertie said.

  “Paradise,” the other repeated, rolling her gum once, then holding it still. Her eyes were speculative again. But almost at once the girl was satisfied, taking the dream. “Paradise,” she said, nodding. She turned toward the steps behind her, then called as she fitted a key into the pounding man’s lock, “Yu got salt?”

  “Salt?” Gertie asked, gathering up the last of the kindling.

  She never answered, but was out again in a moment, a shiny pot in her hands. “Rock salt,” she said. “Yu gotta saltcha steps, or yu’ll break yu neck,” and she flung the little salt rocks on the steps and up and down the walk.

  Gertie remembered later that she had thanked her for neither salt nor kindling. Enoch had stuck his head out shouting: “I fixed that ole contrary bake oven, Mom. You push in thet knob uv a thing, an then she turns. Lookee.”

  Gertie, coming in with the kindling, smiled. There was room for only one chair, and that sidewise to the oven door, but on it Clytie sat with Cassie in her lap and Amos in Cassie’s lap, so that three pairs of cold feet were on the let-down oven door.

  The taste of fresh outdoor air only resharpened the close, sickly smell of the indoors, thicker now with the oven going. Gertie hurried to start the fire in the heating stove. She had put one match to the damp pile of kindling, watched it go out, and was lighting another, wishing for a little coal oil, when someone knocked on the door. Even Enoch looked worried, and Clytie scolded in whispers, “You youngens has been a maken too much noise.”

  Enoch had the door only partway open when there came soft bubbly laughter that made Gertie think of Cassie, and then, more as if blown in than walking, came a slim girl, with a white cloth tied over hair, black as Reuben’s, but fine and soft and curling down almost to her waist when she shook her head quickly to make it right itself after the wind. “It’s wild out there,” the girl said, smiling as if she loved wild weather.

  Gertie struck another match. “It makes a body need a fire.”

  “Francis—he’s my little brother—said you was cold.” She came over to the heating stove and peered in. “I couldn’t find no kindling, but I gotcha some newspapers an bacon grease—that’s what we use—from Mrs. Bommarita.” She handed Gertie newspapers and small pieces of some flimsy dry wood. She then dropped a piece of cardboard holding a great gob of bacon grease, good enough for biscuit making, down into the stove.

  Gertie frowned on the waste of good grease, and her knife hesitated above the gift of wood. “Honey,” she said, studying it, “ain’t this a piece a some kind a toy?”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not no good, just part of a old doll bed.” But when she looked up at Gertie, there was in her eyes—bright blue and set under lashes as long and black as Cassie’s—a something like sorrow for the broken bed, and her voice was impatient for the hurt to be finished quickly as she insisted: “Go on, break it up. It’ll make good kindling, dry like it is. I’d kept it onu top shelf inu hall where du kids couldn’t find it; I meant some day to try to glue it back, but now I’m too big fu doll beds.”

  “Why, honey, you’re not so old,” Gertie said. She broke the flimsy wood, but glanced swiftly at the face downbent as the eyes followed the broken toy into the stove. The girl watched an instant, then turned sharply toward the kitchen door.

  She seemed a very little child when, after looking through the half of the kitchen window left from the icebox, she exclaimed: “Yu know, if yu don’t look high up yu can think yu gotta tree there an notta telephone pole. Some a th units does have trees—close. Onu other side a da through street they’s real big trees. An one amu girl friends, she’s got two big trees right inu yard—all her own. But her folks is gotta private.”

  “Private?” Gertie asked.

  “Yu know, a real house, all by itself. I’ll bet you’re glad to get out ina big place like this—lots a room an kinda quiet.”

  Gertie gave the laughing, crying eyes a quick suspicious glance. “I wouldn’t call it so big ner quiet neither,” she said. “An sean as how we started out to it, I reckon we’re real glad we’re here.”

  “Yu outta be glad,” the girl said. “I betcha yu got pull. Yu come to Detroit straight to a big three-bedroom place like this. These houses, they’re good an warm anu rent’s cheap, an they’re the only places in Detroit where they keep u niggers out, really keep um out—sagainsa law. The niggers got into u last neighborhood where we lived and—” There came a banging on the door that threatened to break the glass, and a child’s shrill cry of, “Tell Maggie Daly if her’s here her’d better git …”

  The girl reached for the door, but before she could open it the bottle breaker had swung it wide, and was shouting, “Git home, Maggie, git home. Pat and Jim’s inu water fight. Water’s all over. Youse better git.”

  “I’ll be there,” Maggie said, unflustered, smiling as she turned and explained to Gertie that her mother had gone shopping for the day, and she was staying home from high school to mind the younger children. She pulled a small pink slip of heavy paper from her jacket pocket, held it out to Gertie. “Wouldn’t cha like u ticket to the bingo party? They’s door prizes an everything—donation’s only twenty-five cents. It’s all fuda good sisters—a new piano they need.”

  Gertie started to shake her head, then remembered the grease and the doll-bed kindling. Reluctantly she reached into her pocket and fished out a quarter. Maggie hurried away, for Francis was screaming again.

  The children crowded around and studied the card when the girl was gone. But to all their questions of what was bingo, who were the good sisters, what did Maggie have on the little thin chain around her neck, Gertie could only shake her head. Clytie said, looking happier: “Wasn’t she pretty, Mom? An not a bit stuck up. Can I have some overall pants like hers? They’d be good to keep a body’s legs warm.”

  The fire was singing soon, not loud, as the wind in the telephone wires, but with a good hearty crinking of iron and hissing of flame; and Gertie began the job of feeding the children out of the curious packages Clovis had left on the kitchen table. Tin cans she had seen, but never milk in a bottle. The children, warmed now, and all, even Reuben, happier after the coming of Maggie, crowded round her, hungry for bread and milk. Clytie got glasses, and the three quarts of milk and two loaves of bread were gone in an instant. Only Cassie
wrinkled her nose and declared the milk tasted funny. “It’s pasteurized, silly,” Clytie said, “like in th health books at school.”

  “An it’s made in a factory,” Enoch said.

  “But they’s a cow somewhere’s behind it,” Clytie said, and while they argued there came another knocking, low down on the door, like a kicking, sharp and insistent, as if the person were in a great hurry, but hurry or no, determined to come in.

  Gertie shoved the outer door open just as a small foot in an open-toed high-heeled slipper below a bare ankle hooked itself around the corner and began to pull. A dried up, puny-looking little woman came through the door, a steaming pot in one hand, a steaming skillet in the other. The arm of the hand that held the pot held together a bathrobe of some blue silk-like material quilted into a design of flowers and embroidered with golden peacocks. In spite of her eyes being squinted against the smoke of the cigarette in one corner of her mouth, she managed to smile as she held the pot toward Gertie. Her hand, freed of the pot, took the cigarette, and she blew two long rolls of smoke down through her nostrils, rolls so long that Enoch looked at her in awed admiration.

  Clytie stood still with a glass of milk halfway to her mouth, choking a little from a too hasty swallowing of the soft bread, and stared at the woman’s toenails; bright red pink they were between the golden bands of the slippers. Even Cassie edged closer for a better look at the golden birds. Gertie, as she took the pot and smiled, stared in wonder at the woman’s hair. Permanent waves with many tight little curls such as this she had seen but never the color. It was a rich pinky gold under the buckshotty drops of snow, but the strangest thing about it was that the color seemed familiar. She remembered at last the fat-faced child with the yellow cur dog on her mother’s rug. The woman’s hair was the color of the cur dog’s.

  Gertie realized she had not thanked her for the pot, though now she was holding out the skillet, saying through the cloud of her smoke: “Here’s some corn bread to go with them beans. Th only kind a meal we can git round here comes in them little round boxes, an it ain’t no good. An th beans ain’t much. I run out a ration points and Clovis didn’t have none. I had a little bacon grease, an put in a dab a cooken oil.”

  “It was shore nice a you to go to all a that trouble,” Gertie said, and added in genuine admiration, “Your bread’s bound tu be good; it’s mighty pretty.”

  “Oh, Law”—the woman had glanced at the heating stove—“I’m plum ashamed a myself. I told Clovis I’d start you uns a fire this mornen when I got up to git th youngens off to school, but I laid back down a thinken, ‘Pretty soon I’ll git up an hunt some kindlen an git um a fire started.’ Th next thing I knowed, I was a smellen them beans. A little minute more an they’d ha burned.”

  Gertie tried not to look at the sleazy pink rayon nightgown, its lace-edged bottom trailing some inches below the bathrobe, as the woman continued after a long pull on the cigarette: “Then soon’s I got up, Wheateye, she told me, ‘Mommie, a strange boy come a knocken while you was sleepen,’ an I knowed it was one a you uns, an—”

  “Butcha said yu’d knock my head off if I woked yu up agin,” and a skinny, pale-haired little girl stuck her head around the half open inner door.

  “Git, Wheateye,” the woman said. “I toldcha to stay home an start gitten ready fer school. Claude Jean an Gilbert,” she was talking again to Gertie, “them’s mu boys—they’ll be gitten in fer lunch right away. If you uns needs anything like somethen frum th store er anything to borrie—holler. I live next door. M’name’s Meanwell—Sophronie, an I’m right sorry that fu th first time in six months when somebody does come a knocken an th youngen don’t come a waken me screamen, ‘Mommie,’ it hadda be one a you uns.”

  And she was gone, the golden slippers tripping through the snow, golden peacocks, smoke, and cigarette sparks whirling in the wind. Gertie stared after her, the pot in one hand, the skillet in the other, until Clytie said, “Wasn’t she dressed pretty, Mom?” and Enoch, said, “Mom, I’ll bet she’s frum somewhere’s back home. She kinda talks like us,” and Cassie whispered, “Mom, I bet that’s th kind a shoes th angels wears.”

  Reuben came sniffing hungrily at the beans, but Gertie was silent, shaking her head, staring at the door as if she could still see the woman past it. Clytie took the skillet and asked: “What’s th matter, Mom? Wasn’t it nice a her to come over. Don’t you like her?”

  Gertie spoke as if to the door. “I was jist a thinken Mom was right. I ought to be up here with yer daddy. An that nightgown—a wearen a nightgown this time a day. A body could see right through it an—” She realized that Clytie was listening with too much attention. She turned away from the door too sharply, and struck her hip on a corner of the sink.

  Her uneasy wonderings on Clovis were smothered out by an ever growing awareness of the pale walls, the overcrowded little rooms, and the air that with the unventilated gas stove going grew even worse than that on the train, something thick and dirty that burned her nose and gave her eyes a heavy, sleepy feeling. Several times she tried opening the outer kitchen door for a bit of breath, but each time the wind knocked it back and forth so violently the glass seemed ready to break. The windows seemed to have been made to let in light only. None of them would open at the top at all, and only two of the bottom sashes were neither stuck nor frozen shut. Once these were opened, there was still the second pane of glass; true, a body could open three little holes in the bottom of the frame, but the bit of wind that came through seemed only to make the floor colder without freshening the air.

  She had turned the oven off as soon as the coal stove began to throw out heat, but during supper getting she not only had to turn it on again to bake the corn bread, but also keep most of the burners going. Soon, some curious moisture in the air made the kitchen wet as a dripping stewpan. Condensing steam ran down the windows in rivulets and dripped from the gas and water pipes that ran through the kitchen, the bathroom, and one bedroom; more water made an oozy sweating on the walls.

  The cookstove itself turned out to be a contrary little thing: she was always turning the wrong knob, and twice she burned her fingers on pot handles that had got across the next flame. Worse, she was always hurrying up to it, thinking she had let the fire go out. She would stoop, reaching for wood, each time remembering only when, instead of the woodbox back home, she saw the gray cement of the floor.

  She was continually bumping into the children, especially Cassie. She had just shooed her from underfoot again when a brassy-voiced man cried from the bedroom behind the kitchen, “Now, don’t forget, tell your mother about Tootsie Rootsies, the cereal our soldiers eat.”

  Gertie sprang toward the sound. Some crazy man must have broken through the thin wall on Sophronie’s side. She almost fell over Cassie, terrified into muteness, followed by Amos screaming with fright. Last came Enoch, doubled up with laughter. “They thought it was a man, Mom, a real live man,” and then the greatest thought of all came over him, and he jumped up and down crying: “We’ve got a radio, Mom. We got a radio. Pop had it hid.”

  Clytie, too, jumped up and down and cried, “Oh, goody,” but Gertie cried above the radio:

  “Shut that thing off—all that racket in this little place.”

  “Aw, Mom,” Enoch said, making no move to obey, “everbody—”

  His voice was drowned by that of the radio, which, under Clytie’s inexperienced manipulation, had grown louder instead of softer.

  Gertie was crying in agony, “Make it quit, Enoch. Make it quit,” when on the other bedroom wall the same banging fist sounded.

  “Damn. Go-od damn. Yu make da noise too much.” And the fist banged again, until Gertie, who had run to the sound, stood blinking at the wall, expecting to see the fist, hairy and huge as that of a Goliath, come crashing through.

  Enoch hastily turned down the radio. Silence came to the wall, but Gertie continued to stand by it, held by her memory of the man’s outcry. The tone had been more begging than commanding, a weak hel
plessness in misery, hopeless, the man a Samson with his hair grown long again—but blinded; a man like herself.

  There came a banging on the kitchen door, but before she could reach it in six steps and three bumps, the door was shoved open, and a big chunk of a red-faced, eyebrowless man took the two steps between door and icebox. He jerked open the top door, and with no glance at either the milk or at Gertie, when she cried to him to watch out for it, swung ice from his shoulders, shoved it in, and strode out again as she reached frantically for a tipped-over bottle.

  She was sopping at the gome the milk had made, run as it had down through the wooden slats into the bottom part, when he came back with a smaller chunk of ice. Giving her no time to get out of his way, he swung it over her head and wedged it in with the other chunk, pushing hard with one huge red-haired hand. It took a still harder push to shut the door on the ice, but it immediately popped open and a trickle of sawdust, coal dust-laden water began to drip onto the floor. “Forty-six cents,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “You’ve spilled my milk an crammed that box so full th door won’t shet, an I didn’t ask fer none,” Gertie said.

  “Huh?” the man said, his blue child-like eyes opening still wider, as he repeated, “Dat’s forty-six cents, lady.”

  “But I didn’t ask fer no ice.”

  The “Huh?” that seemed more belch than word came again as he looked at her. “Lady, youse gotta have ice. I gotta sell. Youse gotta buy.”