The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  “Aw, Gert,” Clovis had said, “they’s millions an millions a people never tastes nothen but what they git outa stores. They’ve never tasted read good corn bread with butter an fresh eggs, so’s they don’t mind eggs that ain’t never fresh, an store-bought bread with oleo. If’n,” he had gone on, half teasing, “spenden a nickel’s goen to be like losen a drop a blood fer you, why you’ll be bled dry in no time atall.”

  She remembered now, looking down at the nickel, that she had forgotten potatoes. The buying of potatoes was a part of the never ending strangeness. Back home, no matter what the season, she had always raised enough to carry her from one potato-digging time to the next. Now she would either have to go to one of the small stores near the project, where, Clytie had said, there were strange-talking clerks that a body couldn’t understand at all, or buy from the man she had seen in the alley, selling stuff from a truck. He was maybe cheaper.

  It was almost school letting out time in the afternoon before she heard the calling like a crying in the alley, and remembered with a sigh that she needed onions and cabbage as well as potatoes. She waited in the snowy alley, standing somewhat apart from the other women, many with babies in their arms, and all seemed like with young children who came crowding round the track crying: “Mom, I wanta apple. Gimme grapes, Mom, gimme. Buy um, Mom, buy oranges.”

  “Buy um, Mom. Buy um.” Amos, loud and brash almost as the Dalys, was yelling for some great greenish-blue grapes, the like of which she had never seen. So much foolishness. Youngens didn’t need grapes in December, or did they? Shoestrings or bubble gum? She stared at the grapes, conscious of the quick, mildly interested glances of some of the women, more conscious that most noticed her not at all. All were buying, crowding round the truck, and she felt foolish and stingy hanging back with Amos pulling at her coat, begging, “Git grapes, Mom, please.”

  She felt more stingy still when a little redheaded Daly came, grapes spilling from his cupped-up hands, holding the grape-heaped hands in front of Amos, commanding: “Yu want grapes? Here.”

  Amos helped himself as if they had been free from his grandmother’s vines. Money enough to buy her youngens a mess of grapes would buy a vine. “What do you think of us? Are you getting all settled?”

  Gertie realized the questions were being put to her. She turned from her pondering above the proffered grapes to see a fairly tall, well shaped young woman with long hair braided and wound round her head, and with a snow-suited baby on her arm. The woman was looking at her, and there was in her large, rather roundish brown eyes the same look that came over Clovis when he went into the insides of a strange car. “I’m your neighbor you’ll be seeing the most of, for I live straight across the alley from you. My name is Anderson.”

  Gertie nodded, puzzled by the woman’s voice. The words told, but the voice, like the eyes, asked, even when she gave her name.

  “Her name’s Nevels. She’s got, I think, five kids, an her man works inu Flint plant. That right?” And the same face that had asked for a dream nodded to her, then smiled at Mrs. Anderson.

  “Why, hello, Max,” Mrs. Anderson said, recovering quickly from an instant’s confusion, but still unable to return Max’s teasing smile. “How’s the job? I’ve wondered how you were; you went back to work so soon.”

  “Yeah,” Max said, turning back to Gertie.

  Gertie smiled at her. Though it was only now that she had heard even a part of her name, she knew her better, in a way, than any woman she had known back home. It was too much to know of any body, but she couldn’t help what she had learned there behind the tin walls the night Enoch coughed so. They’d all taken what Sophronie called Detroit colds, and Gertie had been rubbing Enoch’s chest with turpentine, kneeling by his bed, her shoulder almost touching the other wall.

  She’d heard the woman come home—earlier than common it must have been, for Victor was still home in bed, and usually he seemed to be gone when she came home. Gertie had felt his eagerness through the cardboard walls, and heard the woman’s laughter, soft, giving, nothing held back as in her smile to the woman now. She had left Enoch with his chest half greased, and let him cough until she heard Victor leave for his work.

  She’d gone back to finish her rubbing of Enoch’s chest, and it was then she’d heard the crying. Hopeless it had been, in a way like the roaring cry of Victor himself, but filled with sorrow, lostness, aloneness, the aloneness more than anything. She had heard without listening, but unable to leave the crying, and hardly knowing, she had fallen to talking, as if the chest she rubbed and the hurt thing through the wall were one. “Don’t cry, honey; don’t cry. It won’t allus be like this.” Gradually the crying had lessened, and it was like a listening there behind the wall. She had said aloud the words that for days and days she had heard in her head, “‘As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.’”

  The girl’s voice had come then, apologetic, sorrowful, “But I don’t wanta nest.” The crying had begun again, softer, but more hopeless.

  Gertie had tried hard to think of something. She must have drowsed, for it seemed suddenly she was hearing the cry of the old preacher: “‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’”

  Silence, and then the childlike giggle, “But th lion ain’t dead.”

  The crying had not come again. Gertie had gone back to bed and fallen asleep while hunting a dream for the girl, a pretty dream for one who did not want a nest. Next day, when they had met by the coalhouse, she had given, “Sky, a wide, wide sky filled with stars.”

  The girl had taken it, smiling the gay kind of smile she gave now to Sophronie coming down her steps, booted, blue-jeaned, and lipsticked, ready for work, unable to linger when Max asked, “How yu doen, kid?”

  “Fallen down,” Sophronie said, not taking the cigarette from her mouth, for her hands were busied tucking wisps of hair under a blue bandana as she hurried up to Joe’s truck. She did not look up when Mrs. Anderson, who continued to stand by Gertie acting like a person trying hard to think of something to say, glanced at her face, then asked: “Oh, what happened? You’ve hurt your head.”

  “I fell,” Sophronie said, hefting a head of lettuce.

  “How?” Mrs. Anderson asked, giving the strip of adhesive tape a closer look.

  “Off th merry-go-round, I guess,” Max said, moving toward the truck.

  “Oh? What is that—this merry-go-round?”

  “A thing that goes round an round. What else?” Max said.

  “But this time of year? I don’t understand?” Mrs. Anderson shifted her baby—it seemed cross, like one just beginning to teethe—to the other arm, and looked at Max. She learned nothing there, and after a quick, worried glance toward a child reaching with a mop handle for an icicle by Gertie’s kitchen door she concentrated again on Sophronie. “What is it? Something in the factory?”

  Sophronie nodded as she studied spinach. “Jist like ’sembly, only it goes round. You go with it. Walken thataway made me dizzy.”

  Joe, Gertie realized, was smiling at her, rubbing his hands, asking. “What for you, ladee?” Mrs. Anderson asked for a smaller piece of Hubbard squash, and Joe called over his shoulder into the truck some words she could not understand.

  Mrs. Anderson looked quickly up when the strange words came. “Who’s your helper, Joe? I thought your boys understood English?” And she stood on tiptoe peering into the truck. Gertie, standing behind her, saw in the dusky interior of the closed truck, the moving brightness of what looked to be a red and yellow coat. “Is it another nephew, Joe?” Mrs. Anderson persisted. “He looks like a grown man? Is he a brother to the little one last fall who shivered so?”

  “Tangerines nice today,” Joe said, holding out three in his wrinkled, calloused hand for her inspection.

  She glanced briefly at the tangerines, then back into the truck. “Has your nephew been discharged from the army, Joe, or is he like your boys? No citizen
so he won’t have to go?”

  “Nice,” Joe said, listening now to Max, who was asking about green beans, nodding his head, repeating. “Nice, today—tender,” busy taking things from outstretched hands for weighing, then calling again in his own language over his shoulder.

  Mrs. Anderson listened with a look of utmost concentration, then gave up at last with a little headshake and said, “He must not have been over here long if he doesn’t speak English yet. I’ll take a dozen tangerines, Joe, if they’re nice, and a green vegetable—broccoli, I think, and don’t forget the squash.”

  Joe, busied with her order, did not reach at once for the sack of Max’s green beans held out to him from the inside of the truck. The hands, as if eager to be out of the truck, reached further, waving the sack, searching for its owner. Gertie saw a young man’s face, eager, smiling, the dark eyes leaping from woman to woman until they found Max on tiptoe, one hand reached up for the beans. They searched no further, but now the eyes were like hands going over her body, caressing, pleased with what they found. Max, however, was hunting lettuce for Victor. She took the sack of beans without looking higher than the hand that held it. The boy’s glance lingered on her a moment longer, hoping, but when Max only reached past his feet to the celery, his thirsty eyes went on. They went swiftly over the other women. Gertie’s great size, the smallness of the Japanese woman, checked them for an instant, then they swept away on down the alley. Soon the eyes stopped and held something, smiled on it and caressed it as they had caressed Max.

  Gertie, curious, turned and saw that it was Miller’s car. Unlike Enoch, who by now recognized the cars of the neighbors as back home she had known the mules and the horses for miles around, Gertie knew only this one car because it was the longest and shiniest in the alley, loaded down with more contraptions than she had known existed. The young man continued to look at it, and it was only when old Joe spoke harshly to him, twice commanding him to do something, that he turned back into the truck, and then only his body. His eyes reached for the car still, until Joe whirled and yelled, such fury in his hissing spitting words that Gertie thought he was going to bite him.

  Joe seemed even more angry when Mrs. Anderson, who had been examining a basket of loose bananas, asked in her quick, excited way: “Can’t he understand English at all, Joe? Isn’t it odd how he could come over here with the war on?”

  “Bananas cheap today—nice.”

  “Is the little one, the one that shivered so, his brother?”

  “This piece squash, hokay?”

  “Is the little one learning to speak English?”

  “He learn. Lady, yu wanta squash?”

  “Does he go to public school? Oh, yes, yes, I’ll take that piece. Does he go to public school?”

  “Da good sisters. Cranberries nice today.”

  “Don’t you like public schools?”

  The words came in a quick angry hiss: “Public school no good. Communist.” His voice smoothed like a starched shirt under a hot iron as he spoke to Sophronie, “Green beans nice today?”

  Sophronie shook her head. “Them nice ones last week was tough,” but she bought freely of grapes, oranges, tangerines, and, urged on by the insistent Claude Jean, who went to school only of mornings, she bought ripe tomatoes and fresh pears.

  Mrs. Anderson watched her buying critically, and when she had gone turned with a little headshake to Gertie and Max, the only customers remaining. “It’s pitiful the way that woman works, and the way she spends her money. Pears, compared to dried peaches, are terribly expensive, and have almost no food value or vitamins. And such junky clothes. Rayon dresses for her little girl; they don’t wear half as well as cotton.”

  “Maybe Sophronie don’t want vitamins or clothes that lasts forever,” Max said, her eyes smiling.

  “But her children need them,” Mrs. Anderson said, laying money in Joe’s hand, looking to Gertie for support.

  “Yeah,” Max said, yawning, stretching her arms, her breasts rising, pointed, pushing against the navy-blue jacket. “Who’s gonna say what I need. My pop said that once to a damned social worker when—” She had grown conscious of the pleased eyes of Joe’s helper fixed on her bosom. She was for an instant angry, looking at him, then smiled. “Hiyah, kid. You’re already acting like a good American man. I’ll betcha end up in u mansion in Grosse Pointe.”

  “Grossa Pointa,” he repeated, flushing, stammering. There was in his face more than the simple pleasure of hearing a pretty girl say the one word of English he apparently knew. His eyes glowed as he nodded, smiling, his face ecstatic as if the place Max had mentioned were heaven, but a heaven on earth within his reach. Gertie, watching, thought of the brown woman on the train. Her eyes had been like the boy’s eyes now, when she had repeated, “Paradise.”

  “Grossa Pointa?” The boy was puzzled now. He jerked his shoulder toward the low gray barracks behind him, as if to understand how one like Max, who lived in such ugliness, could know about a place like Grosse Pointe.

  Max studied him an instant, her head tilted, her gum still, then laughed. “It’s America, kid. They taught me to read. I can read about it and see them people in th society section.” Her eyes narrowed. “Say, kid, how come yu know about Grosse Pointe?”

  But the boy could only repeat, smiling, “Grossa Pointa.”

  Joe, who after reaching into the cab of the truck had turned toward Max with something under his coat, stopped on hearing the word spoken by the young one. His smoothish eyes, that made Gertie think of over-roasted coffee beans, blazed. His seamy face paled with wrath as he spattered the boy with an outburst of short sharp sounds.

  The boy scuttled into the truck guiltily, like one who knows he has done wrong. Joe’s anger hardened into surliness as he figured the cost of Max’s purchases. Finished, he darted a black, vicious glance from under his thick brows towards Mrs. Anderson, who, though burdened with baby and vegetables, still stood watching and listening, but now with the look of a person who has solved at least one problem. “Four ninety-three,” Joe said to Max.

  “Yu put um up on me, Joe,” Max said, handing him a five-dollar bill.

  “Twenty-six today, everybody,” Joe said, surly, making change.

  “That’s a heck of a lot for cigarettes,” Max said as she took the package.

  “No wanta. No buy,” Joe said, reaching for the package, shrugging a shoulder.

  “Oh, I’ll take um, Joe. Whatsa nickel? Whatsa dime? Whatsa dollar? Whatsa million dollars? I made forty in tips last night. You make a hundred today with this new price. Old man Flint makes another million on machine guns that blows up an killa th wrong guys. Like my pop used to say, ‘Blood’s th cheapest thing on earth, but they’s money in it.’”

  “Investigation has revealed it was not Flint’s fault,” Mrs. Anderson said, somewhat sharply.

  “Yeah?” Max said, loading her arms with vegetables. “I forgot who’s butter’n your bread. Old man Flint come off luckier than Christ. Somebody found Him guilty.”

  “Oh, Max, don’t always—” Mrs. Anderson’s eyes narrowed as she considered the oblong paper-wrapped package. “Is that a carton of cigarettes? And you said twenty-six cents. That’s above OPA.”

  Joe reached for Mrs. Anderson’s broccoli. “Help you home, ladee?”

  “No, thanks, wait on her,” and still scrutinizing the package, Mrs. Anderson nodded sidewise toward Gertie.

  “Twenty-six cents?” Max was asking. “Why, that ain’t high for imported cork-tipped cigarettes. They’re specials,” she went on, smiling, “BM.”

  “Really. I’ve heard of PMs, but never BMs,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  “We all gotta lot to learn,” Max said, turning toward her steps.

  “Some a th potatoes,” Gertie said into Joe’s asking eyes. “About a peck.”

  She bought, or tried to buy, the things she might have had this time of year at home—cabbage, onions, and a few apples. She only looked longingly at the sweet potatoes. At two pounds for twenty-five
cents, a mess of baked sweet potatoes would cost almost a dollar. Back home she’d sold near twenty bushels for fifty cents a bushel. She wished the molasses, somewhere on the way like the block of wood, would come. It seemed a year since she had seen the wood.

  Mrs. Anderson hurried toward the through street after suddenly remembering that she had not seen her young son Georgie for the past five minutes. Gertie realized the others were all gone. Joe had shut the doors in the back of his truck, and was now looking under it for stray children and dogs. Still Gertie lingered, the heaped Josiah basket on her arms. She stepped up to the dark surly man just as he was getting into the cab. “They’s somethin I want to ask you.”

  “Cigarettes all gone,” he said with a swift impatient glance at her, his hand on the door handle.

  She shook her head. “I mean—I wondered—I jist got here. Did it take you long to—well, to kinda learn to like it, this country. I figger it’s so diff’ernt frum mine—it must ha been worse fer you.”

  He had listened, his thick black brows drawn somewhat together with his efforts to understand. At last he smiled, shrugged one shoulder. “I did not come to like.”

  FIFTEEN

  GERTIE GLANCED OVER HER shoulder to make certain Amos followed. She shifted the Josiah basket to her other arm, and then walked slowly on, head bent as she stared at the snow under her boots. Her thoughts were on the Tipton Place. She was all moved now, her corn and fodder were in the barn, for she had rived shakes and mended the roof. The hens had learned to lay in the nests she had made and lined with fresh hay, the hay so fresh it smelled still of hay instead of hen; and before the hen had put down her egg she’d turned round and round, shaping the nest to her bottom. Up at the house, in the big middle room on the hearth, was her red cedar churn filled with clabbered cream. When she had churned and molded the butter, it would be firm and yellow with little drops of water oozing out. The curving lily flower in the mold her father had made would rise clearly on the butter, and Cassie as always would cut off the lily flower and say, “They’s nothen so good as lily flowers, Mom.”