Ten Cents a Dance

by Christine Fletcher

  "Ruby! We're coming back here, we're finishing this thing!"

  "Go to hell!" I yelled through the glass. What was wrong with the cabbie, why weren't we moving? I leaned forward and drummed my fingers on the cabbie's shoulder. "Go, please!"

  "Where to?" he said.

  "Just go!" I shouted, at the same time Tom yelled, "You bitch, I'm gonna get what I paid for!" The cab started rolling. More pounding on the window. "Fifty-three dollars, Ruby! You hear me? Fifty-three dollars' worth, flat on your back!"

  That louse, that no-good rotten jerk . . . I grabbed the first thing in my pocketbook I could find and rolled the window down, fast jerks. Tom was already a few feet behind, standing in the middle of the street. "You better see this thing through," he shouted, "or I'll tell that boss of yours what a whore you are, and he'll kick your ass out on the street! What'll happen to your poor sick mother then, huh?"

  I leaned out the window and threw the thing in my hand. It flew a yard wide of his head but he ducked anyway, hands in front of his face. The last thing I saw was the compact shattering on the pavement, powder exploding in a pale cloud. Then the cabbie hit the gas and I fell back inside. Freezing wind roared over me. The sobs I'd stuffed down broke free, wracking me in two.

  TEN

  The next morning I slipped out of the flat without Ma or Betty seeing me. I couldn't face them. Not with Tom's words still careening through my head. Liar. Tease. Whore. Just remembering made me feel fouler than the packinghouse ever had.

  My heels rang on the frozen sidewalks. Up and down Honore Street, lights glowed behind window curtains. Neighbors clumping down their front stoops waved or tipped their hats to me. I hurried past. Ashamed to look at them, as if Tom's words were branded on my skin.

  Fifty-three dollars! Was he lying? He must be lying. I'd lain awake the rest of the night, trying to tally how much money he'd given me, where it had gone. Every time I thought I'd accounted for it all, I remembered something else. Like the dress I'd bought this week: a moss green wool crepe de chine with a matching leather belt. Not from Reinhard's, either—I'd bought it full price, from Goldblatt's, the neighborhood department store, because I'd seen it in the window and it looked cute. And the shoes I was wearing this minute, brown leather oxfords, with darling wide Cuban heels. I'd taken the money to pay for them out of my new change purse. My old one had been fine, but this was embroidered all over in white and blue beads, with a blue silk lining, and when I saw it, I couldn't resist. Hair ornaments and nylons and earrings . . . I pictured my locker at the Starlight, stuffed with things I couldn't bring home because I'd never be able to explain where I got the money, and guilt wrung my stomach like poison.

  I'd meant to get us out of the Yards. Fifty-three dollars could have been a month's rent in a nice flat, in a nice neighborhood with trees and clean air. Fifty-three dollars could have been doctors' visits and medicines for Ma, or half a year's tuition at a good parish school for Betty. Fifty-three dollars should be filling the pillowcase under the bed. Instead, I had barely enough to fill the pay envelope tomorrow.

  We're coming back here, Tom had said. We're finishing this thing.

  "Well, look what the cat dragged in," Angie said when her mother called her to the door. Angie was still in her flowered housecoat, her hair wrapped up in pin curls and tied under a net. It made her cheeks look wider, her face more kittenish. Commotion poured out of the kitchen behind her, kids' voices swooping and diving.

  "We're eating breakfast, Ruby, would you like some?" Mrs. Wachowski asked. She was short, like Angie, but where Angie was delicate, Mrs. Wachowski was solid as a kielbasa, her face almost as red.

  Angie swept toward me and pushed me back out the door. "Go finish eating, Ma. This'll only take a minute." She closed the door behind us. We stood on the stair landing that led down to the street, Angie facing me, her arms wrapped tight against the cold.

  "What'd you come here for?" she said. "To say you're sorry again?"

  "No," I said.

  Angie's face tightened. She spun around and put her hand on the doorknob.

  "Wait!" I said. "Angie, I'm in trouble. I need to talk to you."

  She hesitated. Turned her head just a sliver. "What kind of trouble?"

  I didn't answer. She glanced at me over her shoulder, biting the inside of her cheek, the way she always did when she wasn't sure.

  "Please," I said. "You're the only one I can tell."

  For another breath, she didn't say anything. Then she nodded.

  Angie shared a room with three younger sisters. Her little brothers slept on the sofa in the parlor. Seven kids in all, including Clara. Angie envied me having only one sister, but I loved the Wachowskis' hullabaloo. Always something going on, jokes or fights or secrets. Never boring, never quiet. All my life I wished I was one of four, six, eight kids, like every other family I knew.

  Angie's sister Reena was in their room. Angie kicked her out, slammed the door on her complaining and hollering, then snapped on the radio so Reena couldn't hear us talking. "Woodchopper's Ball" jumped into the air, good and loud. Angie swiped a pile of clothes off the nearest bed. Sitting down, she eyed my brown oxfords. "Those are kind of cute," she said.

  "Thanks. I like your necklace."

  That made her smile. She lifted the silver cross from her chest, tucking her chin to look down at it. "Isn't it pretty? Stan Dudek gave it to me yesterday. We're going together. Almost two weeks now." She looked up at me. "I didn't think you'd care. You never seemed to be interested in him one bit, and he's been so sweet to me . . ."

  "No, I think it's wonderful," 1 said. "Really.'' Angie and Stan Dudek! When just three weeks ago she'd been crazy for Steve Bajovinas, from Holy Cross parish. What else had changed I didn't know about?

  "I know it's awfully fast, but we're thinking about getting married." Angie let the cross fall, stroked it against her skin. "Stan's pop can get him a good place on the beef kill. Skinner would be best, but they'd probably make him start lower, you know, a shack ler or a driver . . ."

  Tossing around the words like she knew what they meant. Angie'd never been in a packinghouse in her life. I dropped my coat and pocketbook on the pile of clothes and wandered to the window.

  "So what happened?" Angie asked. 'Your ma find out about the dance hall?"

  I brushed aside the window curtain, although I knew the view outside as well as my own: the narrow alley, the gray two-flat next door. Now that 1 was here, I didn't know how to start. We'd shared all our secrets in this room. But never anything like this.

  "I've got this customer . . . ," I began.

  " 'Customer'?" Angie interrupted. "That doesn't sound very romantic."

  You have no idea. "Sometimes the cus— . . . the men, you know, they take us out. After the hall closes."

  "Really?" Sharp with sudden interest. "Where? Have you been to the Aragon?"

  The Aragon wasn't even open at two in the morning, didn't she know that? "No, just clubs. And restaurants. So I was out with this man, and he . . . well, he propositioned me."

  "Are you in love with him?"

  "No!"

  "Is he in love with you?"

  I hesitated. Tom, in love with me? The way he watched me all the time, the way he got jealous . . . I didn't know what to call it, but I didn't think it was love. If it was, it sure wasn't any kind I wanted.

  Angie had flopped onto her stomach and was digging through a stack of magazines by the side of her bed. She sat up with a copy of Love Fiction Monthly in her hand.

  "Where is that . . . oh. Here." She sat up straight, one leg tucked under her, and began to read. "In these modern days, any girl who spends time with a fellow is sure to be asked a certain question—but not the one she hopes for! The answer to this particular question, of course, is No . . ."

  "Angie, that's not . . ."

  "No, wait, listen: Pretending not to understand what he means often does the trick . . ."

  Not understand what he meant? After a prostitute laughed at me in the
hotel, after Tom yelled those horrible words at me? "Angie—"

  " . . . especially when accompanied by a show of innocent confusion."

  Not to mention a compact hurled out the window of a taxicab. I remembered the way he'd ducked—like I'd fired a gun at him, for Pete's sake!—and my mouth twitched up at the corners. I felt a twinge of satisfaction, like a tiny flame licking across dank coal.

  "Just because a girl gets a proposition now doesn't mean she won't get a proposal later—maybe from the very same fellow, if she plays her cards right!"

  Angie dropped the magazine to her lap, her expression triumphant.

  "Oh, for goodness' sake, Angie. He's married!"

  "Married?"

  The song on the radio ended, and in the fade of music the word married rang out like a church bell. Angie leaped up and switched stations. A commercial for Lux soap boomed.

  "You didn't say he was married," she hissed at me.

  "Yeah, well, you didn't let me finish. But listen, it's not just that." I sank down next to her and covered my face with my hands. Then dropped them to my lap. Hiding wouldn't help. "He says . . . he says I have to. He says I owe him. Because I borrowed money from him and spent it and now I can't pay him back." It sounded even worse, out loud.

  Angie didn't say anything. I was afraid to look at her. Then: "How much money?"

  "Fifty-three dollars." At her gasp, I shut my eyes. I remembered sweet-and-sour pork soaking through Clara's gown, sticky against my skin. How stunned I'd been, holding a ten-dollar bill for the first time in my life. How fast I'd gotten used to it.

  "Fifty-three . . . Mother Mary on a shingle, Ruby, how could you?"

  "I had to! You don't understand, you don't have to worry about . . . about coal. Or food." I pushed away the thought of my locker at the Starlight. "Anyway, compared to some of these other girls . . . " I told her about Yvonne's fish paying her rent. About Nora's bump and tickle. Angie listened, not saying a word, her eyes wide. When I described the scams Yvonne and some of the other girls pulled, promising to do things for money, then scramming with the dough before the chumps wised up, she raised her hands like a wall.

  "Stop," she said. "Don't tell me any more." She stood up and crossed to the mirror and began undoing her pin curls.

  "But see, borrowing money from a fi—a customer— that's practically nothing." I hadn't mentioned Manny, or the black and tans. She didn't need to hear about that. "I mean, I know I shouldn't have. But I did, and he's being awful about it, and now what am I supposed to do?"

  "Don't you think you should've thought of that?" She yanked a pin out of her hair and turned around. Loosened curls corkscrewed over her cheek. "You knew those other girls were bad. A married man goes to a place like that and you borrow fifty-three dollars from him, why wouldn't he expect what he expects?"

  "You don't understand! I tried to pay him back before, but he—"

  She threw her hands in the air. " 'You don't understand, you don't understand!' If I don't understand, then how come you're telling me all this?"

  I didn't know anymore. The radio blared "One O'Clock Jump." Funny how even Benny Goodman seemed tame after Lily's. But if I told Angie that, she wouldn't know what I was talking about. Even if I explained about the black and tans, how could she understand swing so new it didn't even have a name, if she'd never heard it? Love Fiction Monthly and True Confessions and Stan and the Yards—that was all Angie understood.

  "Well, it's obvious what you have to do," Angie said. "You have to quit." Her fingers dancing quick and light, one pin after the next. She rolled every scrap of her hair up, and it always took her forever to get out all the pins. "You could go back to your old job. Or anywhere, so long as it's respectable."

  Respectable. No more Lily's. Back to jitterbugging with neighborhood boys at Pulaski's drugstore. Back to twelve and a quarter a week, and our gloomy narrow flat, and any chance ever getting us out of the Yards gone straight down the toilet.

  "I can't quit," I said.

  "You'd rather cheat men out of money? Let them . . ." She jiggled her hands tits-high.

  "I told you, I don't do things like that!"

  "Lie down with dogs," she said, "get up with fleas."

  I made Ma's aggravated noise, her exasperated, growling sigh.

  "That place has changed you," Angie said. "Listen to me. You have to quit. Find some nice boy. Stan was just saying the other day you and Hank Majewski—no, listen! He's always been crazy about you, and he's an apprentice mason now. His mother's a dragon, but you could do worse, and—Say, whatever happened with you and Paulie Suelze?"

  Paulie. He'd gotten me into this mess, the creep. I didn't even want to hear his name.

  "Nothing," I said. "I have to go. Don't tell anyone about this, okay? Pinkie secret, right?"

  "Sure, but—Ruby, wait! What are you going to do?"

  I picked up my pocketbook and coat from where I'd dropped them on the pile of clothes.

  "I don't know," I said.

  . . .

  It wasn't until I was almost home—dragging my feet, I still didn't see how I was going to face Ma—when it hit me.

  Paulie'd gotten me into this mess. Paulie could damn well get me out of it. I wasn't sure how, but I didn't care. Paulie would know what to do about Tom, never mind the details.

  But how to find him? I hadn't seen him since my first week at the Starlight, six weeks ago. All I'd heard since then were the rumors Betty passed along. Something about a poolroom—or was it a tavern?—on Fiftieth. Or Forty-ninth. I played it safe and searched both streets, every poolroom between Damen and Racine, a mile in either direction. He wasn't in any of them. Or in the taverns or the saloons or the barbershops. I dodged around women sweeping their sidewalks, little kids playing tag in the streets. Everywhere I went, I asked about him. Most people shrugged. One woman crossed herself. The young men in the poolrooms grinned at each other. "Popular guy, that Paulie," one of them said. The old men glanced at me and muttered things in Polish and went back to drinking their beer.

  "If you see him," I said, over and over, "tell him Ruby Jacinski's looking for him."

  Almost an entire day wasted, and I was no closer to figuring out what to do about Tom than I had been last night. I went home just long enough to eat dinner. Fought with Ma over sneaking out without telling her, then fought with Betty because she'd had to scrub the kitchen floor by herself, which made her miss the matinee of Shadow of the Thin Man. And then Ma jumped on Betty because, after all, where did the eleven cents for the movie come from? From her big sister, that was who, who was working herself half to death keeping this family afloat, and Betty better not forget it even for a second.

  I thought the guilt: might reach right up my throat and choke me. I grabbed my coat and fled for the Starlight.

  It wasn't any easier there. It was Saturday, the hall packed with hundreds of men. I quickstepped and waltzed and Peabody'd like a windup doll. The band could've played "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" a dozen times in a row and Ozzie could've done a back somersault off the bandstand and I wouldn't have noticed. Every half minute, I felt a spidery tickle up the back of my neck. But every time I drummed up the nerve to look around, Tom wasn't there. "I'm the one you're dancing with, over here," one customer complained, the third time I glanced over my shoulder. He didn't tip me. I laughed at something another man said— the tone of his voice sounded like the punch line of a joke— only to realize he'd been telling me about his mother's funeral. No tip there, either.

  If only I could be at Lily's! Dancing to wild, stomping music, dancing so hard I couldn't think, so hard all I could feel was my feet flying and my heart banging and my partner's hand pulling on mine—swing in close, whirl out wide, shim sham shimmy, until I was so tired I didn't care anymore about anything.

  By the end of the night, Tom hadn't shown his face and I was exhausted. In the Ladies', while everyone else hurried into their street clothes, I dawdled, leaving only after everyone else had gone. Under the glare of light
s, the hall seemed like nothing more than a stale-smelling box with a low ceiling and a scuffed, dusty floor. No swirling colored dots, no dark romantic corners. No illusions.

  I cashed in my tickets, ignoring the grumbling of the ticket man about dames who had no respect for folks who wanted to call it a night and go home. On the stairs, I found Peggy waiting.

  "Will a cab ride do the trick?" she asked. "Or are we gonna need Bennie's?"

  "I'm fine," I said, edging past her. I didn't want to talk to Peggy. As far as she knew, I'd paid Tom back two weeks ago. Telling Angie had been painful enough. Peggy would make sarcastic remarks and call me a ninny, and I'd end up feeling a hundred times worse than I already did. "I just have a headache, that's all."

  "A headache, huh?" Dogging my steps all the way down. "What's his name, and what's he done?"

  I pushed through the door onto the sidewalk. We both clapped our hands to our hats to keep them from being blown off. "Come on," Peggy said. "You spent all night looking like the Headless Horseman was after you. The grapevine says two customers complained to Del about you. Seems like a milkshake and apple pie might do you some good."

  The wind stung my eyes, making them tear up. Angie hadn't been any help. Paulie was nowhere to be found. Tomorrow, or the night after or the one after that, Tom would be back.

  "Do you promise not to call me a nincompoop?" I said.

  "Do you promise to take my advice?" She cocked her head at me. Then looped her arm through mine. "I'll take my chances if you will. Come on, let's get that milkshake."

  At Bennie's, as soon as we ordered, Peggy sat back and lit a cigarette. "Spill it," she said.

  As it turned out, telling her was easier than telling Angie. First of all, nothing surprised her. "I knew it," she said when I told her Tom was married. Second, I didn't have to leave anything out. When I described how I'd spit in his face, she laughed so loud a couple of high school boys across the diner turned to look. "Hey, sister, what's the joke?" one of them called.