by Vicki Grant
“Mrs. Smees?”
“What is it?” She didn’t look up.
“I’m here about the waitressing position.”
She stopped typing. She flipped up the watch safety-pinned to her dress and checked the time.
“At eight in the evening.”
“There was a rockfall. My train was late…”
She snorted as if she’d heard that one before and started typing again.
“I got here as soon as I could.”
“Not soon enough.” Now she looked at me, her mouth turned up into a mean little U. “The positions have been filled.”
“But the sign. In town. On the bulletin…”
She slapped her hands on either side of the typewriter, slung her lower lip over her right shoulder and shouted, “Bas!”
There was a half-open door behind her. Someone inside went, “Yup.”
“You take down the signs in town?”
“Eldridge was doing that.”
She glared at me as if I was in cahoots with this Eldridge guy. Her face had no color and neither did her dress, except under the arms, where there were two chocolate-milk-brown crescents. She shook her head and got back to her typing.
Normally, I’d have been afraid of her but I needed a job. I needed a job here because Eddie Nicholson was going to take me on a ride around the lake.
“I’m a good worker,” I said.
“Pity you didn’t come earlier then. Apply next year.”
“I don’t have to be a waitress. I could do something else. Anything else. Don’t you have anything else?”
“Not for a girl.” She licked the end of her pencil and started erasing something she’d written. The light from the desk lamp lit up her hair. It was dull brown and teased thin as a spiderweb.
“Thank you,” she said, meaning beat it, kid.
I didn’t move. I could not leave without a job.
There was a knock, and at exactly the same time the door opened, slamming my suitcase into my shin.
It was the laughing waitress from upstairs, still carrying the armful of tablecloths. She saw me rubbing my leg and mouthed, “Oops,” then said, “Mrs. Smees?”
The girl’s voice sounded happy, but Mrs. Smees looked up from her typewriter with her eyebrows arched, wickedstepmother style.
“What now, Rathburn?”
“Mr. Oliphant sent me down here. I have”—she bit her finger—“a small problem.” She lowered the tablecloths. Her uniform was ripped wide open at the seam from armpit to waist.
“What in the name of hell-o did you…?” Mrs. Smees was up and wiggling her skinny hips past the piles of linen. “Goofing around, no doubt. You don’t get a tear like that folding napkins or restocking the cutlery trays, that’s for damn sure.”
She grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled it up as if she’d just declared her welterweight champ. Mrs. Smees studied the rip for a second, then threw the waitress’s arm back down.
“Small wonder the seam blew. Even them floozies hanging outside the Legion Saturday night would be ashamed to wear something this tight.”
The girl tucked her lips into her mouth, but the laugh escaped through her nose.
“Funny, is it?” Mrs. Smees flicked her chin at her. “Funny? I’ve got 126 members of the Knights of Arundel upstairs for their annual dinner. I’ve got 126 orders of Baked Alaska to be brought steaming to their tables in”—she checked her watch again—“four minutes and here you are, uniform torn to bejeezus, one bosom busting out for all the world to see—”
The girl made her mouth into a little circle as if she was shocked by the language.
Mrs. Smees’s eyes went as slitty as buttonholes. “Always the smart one, aren’t you? So what do you suggest I do? Send you back in looking like a stripper and give them poor old men heart attacks? Make the other girls do your section too and just pray they get them Baked Alaskas served before they’re all melted into soup? Huh?”
The girl rubbed her chin. “Gee. Maybe if you hadn’t spent so long telling me off, we’d have had time to tape the hole shut or something, but now…” She flipped over her palm and gave a pained smile.
A vein on Mrs. Smees’s neck pulsed, as thick and pink as an earthworm. “So help me, Glennie Rathburn. I don’t give a good goldarn who your Right Honorable father is. This is the—”
“I can fix it,” I said.
The girl blinked like, Really? Mrs. Smees turned and scowled at me.
“I can do that up in a second.” I was already moving toward the sewing machine. “Just take it off.”
The girl peeled out of her dress and tossed it to me. She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be standing there in the middle of the room, all va-va-voom flesh and pink underwear. Mrs. Smees squawked and threw a tablecloth over her.
The rip was big but not hard to fix. I lined up the edges and sewed it together in a jiffy. I tossed the uniform back to the girl, who dropped the tablecloth—Mrs. Smees squawked again—and stepped into it.
“Seams are pretty frayed,” I said. “If I had a little more time, I could patch it, maybe, and…”
Mrs. Smees wasn’t listening. She was holding up Glennie’s arm, checking my handiwork. She reached into the front of her dress, pulled a little pair of scissors out of her brassiere and snipped off a thread. She gave Glennie a little push. “Now get going. But report back here the second your shift is done. And I mean it.”
Glennie craned her head around Mrs. Smees and waved at me, a big smile on her face. She was still buttoning her uniform as she headed out the door.
Mrs. Smees stuffed her scissors back down into her bra and went to her desk.
“The hem is coming undone in the back,” I said. “I could fix that too.”
Mrs. Smees sat down, took off her glasses and rubbed her face. There was a mark the shape and color of a kidney bean on either side of her nose.
“You can sew?” she said into her hands.
“Sew, iron, clean, cook.” (The cooking part was an outright lie.)
She leaned back in her chair, took the remains of a cigarette out of the cuff of her sleeve and rolled it between her fingers.
“Who’s your father?” She struck a match on the under-side of her desk, lit the butt and took a drag. “Anyone I should know?”
“I’m not from here,” I said.
“No, none of you college girls are. You’re all too good for the likes of Buckminster, aren’t you? Doesn’t mean your daddies aren’t going to be sticking their noses into my business.”
“My father won’t. I’ve never known him to do anything like that.”
She laughed, flicked a little tobacco off her tongue, stared at me. For some reason—Lorraine’s clothes?—I was a lying college girl, no better than Glennie Rathburn. I didn’t know if the truth would be worse than that or not.
“What’s your name?”
“Dorothy Blythe. They call me Dot.”
“Well, Dot”—she spat out the t at the end—“you’re in luck. Mrs. Casey’s been doing our sewing for donkey’s years, but her sciatica’s acting up, so she’s not coming back this summer.”
My face bent into a smile, but I unbent it when I realized this wasn’t a smiling matter.
“I’ll give you one week to prove I didn’t make a big mistake hiring you. If I did, you’re out on your behind, no questions asked. Until then, it’s seventy-five cents an hour, eight to four, Monday through Friday, and any other damn time I need you. Understood?”
I was nodding like the plastic hula dancer on the dash of Joe’s truck.
“There’s a pile of napkins need mending in the corner. Work on those until Rathburn shows you where you’re sleeping. Tomorrow I’ll get you going on bedspreads and her uniform—if I don’t come to my senses and fire her before then.”
She licked her fingers and put out her cigarette.
“Now get to work,” she said, but it didn’t come out as nasty as it sounds.
Four
IT MUST HAVE
been ten thirty or eleven before Glennie Rathburn made it back down to the housekeeping office. Mrs. Smees told her to take me to the seamstress’s cabin.
“Do your best not to corrupt her in the two and a half minutes it takes to get there, if you don’t mind. And here.” She pushed a green Dunbrae uniform at me. “You got lucky again. Only one left, and it’s an extra small. Didn’t want you blaming me for messing up them fine clothes of yours.”
Glennie led me out what she called the servants’ entrance at the backside of the lodge and up toward the parking lot. The evening had finally cooled off. Everything smelled clean and sort of familiar. There were the sounds of our feet and the buzz of crickets and somewhere across the lake a man laughing, but otherwise the night was quiet.
“Hungry?” Glennie pulled two chicken drumsticks out of her hip pocket and handed me one, still warm and slippery as a newborn puppy. “Most of the food here is crap, but, I must say, their coq au vin is downright passable.”
I tried to refuse, but she insisted. “Take it. I owe you. I’d have purloined a few more, but Earl was cooking tonight. Poor man’s got a brain the size of a bedbug, but boy, eyes like an eagle. I put my life on the line just to get these.”
She wolfed hers back in a couple of bites, then wiped the grease off her face with the heel of her hand. You don’t expect girls who look like her to act that way.
“So what did you think of Smees? Isn’t she a howl? Can you believe how mad she got? It’s, like, a ripped seam. Who cares?” She tossed the bone on the ground.
“Oh, geez. Almost forgot. I’m supposed to be giving you the guided tour. Okay”—she pointed like a model in a car commercial—“to our right, the lodge. The beach is in front of the lodge. The parking lot behind.”
She beetled ahead of me, then stopped at a walkway cut through a tall hedge running the length of the lawn.
“And here, deep in the bowels of the ninety-fourth circle of hell, is what we lovingly refer to as the Feudal Colony.”
We walked through the entrance into a sort of compound. A couple of shabby two-story buildings. A clothesline between them drooping with bathing suits. A truck parked beside a picnic table and a garbage can.
“Hovel A—to your left—is the Meat Department, where out-of-town male employees hang their hats. Don’t ever step inside without a chaperone—unless you’re damn sure you can get away with it. Hovel B—to your right—is the Harem, but take note: Smees will have a conniption if she hears you call it that. In her imaginary world, we’re all proper young ladies with no interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. And this”—she turned toward a small wooden shed half hidden behind a scraggly lilac bush—“is the seamstress’s cabin. Sorry. I’ve no suitably scandalous nickname for it. Mrs. Casey appeared to live quite a virtuous life, at least compared to the rest of us.”
She took a key out of her pocket and wiped off the chicken grease before handing it to me.
“I’m such a pig.” She smiled, teeth and hair platinum in the dim light, and I could see why she drove Mrs. Smees crazy. Hard not to like Glennie Rathburn.
“Thanks for the food,” I said.
“Rob from the rich. Give to the poor…” She bowed humbly, then popped back up. “Oh, my Lord. Love your shoes. Where’d you get them?”
I looked at them, shrugged.
“They’re adorable! Linen?”
“I think.”
“I die.”
“Trade you,” I said.
“No! Really? For these old things?”
“Yeah.”
I was going to tell her they weren’t very comfortable, but she was already toeing off her white sneakers. She slipped a foot into my shoe and pivoted it back and forth like she was about to break into a tap routine. She grinned. “Damn. Now I’m going to owe you again.”
She twiddled her fingers goodbye and skipped off, saying something about having to be “shaved, showered and shoveling eggs into the ancient by 7:00 AM.”
I climbed up the two steps to the cabin, unlocked the door and fumbled for the light.
Nothing fancy, even by my standards. An old steel bed. An apple crate for a bedside table. An alarm clock. A lamp. And a romance novel held together with an elastic band.
I plunked onto the bed. The springs squeaked and groaned like the old music box Malou and I found behind the wood-shed one year. I looked around the room. Last year’s calendar was tacked beside the window. August 13 was circled.
Cady’s birthday was September 13. I wondered where she was.
I wondered where they all were.
Gone.
I knew that, but I still kept figuring they’d walk in the door any second. I’d shared a room with Sara and Tess for as long as I could remember. We’d all slept, ate, played and had our classes at the Home together. Every day of my life, wherever I was, I could stick out my hand and someone would be there. Sometimes I’d stick it out and they’d slap it away and say, “What now, Dot?” but that was still something.
And now, here I was, alone on the very day I had real news to report. No letters from a pretend boyfriend this time. I pictured us in our room, lights out. Tess would probably have snuck out the window by then to be with her boyfriend, but Sara would be there. She’d whisper how Luke had showed up at Loretta’s for her that day and how much she loved him or how much she hated him, and maybe I’d put in my two cents’ worth—I always figured she deserved better than that guy—and then I’d say, “Oh, by the way, I met someone.”
Sara would go, “Dot!” and I’d have to shush her before she woke everyone up. I’d tell her how I’d made a fool of myself, taking off like a scared rabbit, and she’d shake her head and say, “I bet it wasn’t that bad.” And I’d laugh and say, “Maybe—because I ran into him later and he called me pretty and double-rode me all the way to the lodge. And that’s not all.”
“What?” she’d say. “What? What? What?”
“He’s taking me on a ride around the lake.” Then we’d squeal into our pillows for a while and spend the rest of the night planning exactly what I was going to wear.
I stared at the cobwebs hanging from the rafters. Looked like the seamstress hadn’t cleaned there in years. What was I going to wear?
This was going to be okay.
Five
DAYS PASSED WITH no word from Eddie. My bedtime dream conversations with Sara got shorter. Pretty soon I was just staring into the dark, listening to her talk about Luke again. It was okay. I’d always sort of known I wouldn’t hear from Eddie.
I’d set my alarm every night for seven, but every morning I’d be awake long before that, blinking at the ceiling, trying to figure out where I was, what I was doing, why. The answers always snuck up on me like bad news, but then the alarm would go off and I’d put on my uniform and just push all that stuff aside.
There was a staff cafeteria attached to the Meat Department, and I’d stop there to grab breakfast. For a while, I was worried about running into Glennie—or worried about not running into her, I didn’t know which—but none of the waitresses were ever there when I was. Mealtime was their work time. The only people I’d see in the cafeteria were Ida, who ran the place, and the old guys who looked after the grounds. They’d nod at me, faces blank, then go back to their tea and their copies of the Buckminster Gleaner.
Mrs. Smees wasn’t a whole lot friendlier. She’d give me my orders first thing in the morning, then spend the rest of the day sucking her teeth over whatever she had her dander up about then. She erased the chores blackboard as if it was covered in swearwords. She counted towels as if she’d just caught them trying to escape. She couldn’t even be nice nicely. Once, out of the blue, she brought me a sticky bun. Before I could say thank you, she went, “You get one crumb on that linen and so help me…”
The only time she’d soften up was when Bas dropped in from the laundry room next door. He was a little younger than her, maybe thirty-five or so, with a ducktail and matching attitude. He’d lean his bum against her desk and h
is head against the wall and the two of them would complain about the guests or the bosses or somebody named Dutchie they’d known growing up in Buckminster.
I took Bas for a tough guy. The type you’d see loping home from the foundry with his lunch bucket tucked up under his arm or squirting tobacco juice out the gap between his teeth. The type Mrs. Hazelton always told us to avoid.
I was scared the first time I had to take the mending to him. With the machines all rocking and sloshing, he didn’t hear me come in. I couldn’t bring myself to call him Bas and didn’t know what his last name was, so I just stood there until he turned around. Scared him half to death.
We both screamed. I dropped the mending all over the floor and tried to apologize, but he just put one hand on my shoulder and another on his chest and laughed like I’d got him good.
He helped me pick everything up, then said that if I got behind, he could always come and get it himself, not to worry. He liked the break.
Mrs. Smees hollered to find out where the heck I was, and I started running for the door. Bas went, “Whoa” and pressed his hands down in front of him like he was pushing the air flat. “Slow down, girlie. Let her treat you like that, and she will. Now, walk in there like a lady—and not until you’re damn well ready to neither.”
So I pretended I was damn well ready and walked in only slightly faster than I would have normally.
At noon most days, Mrs. Smees would say, “What are you waiting for?” then hard on that, “You be back here by 12:45 sharp. No excuses.” I’d pick up an egg-salad sandwich from the staff cafeteria, then sit on a log at the far end of the beach and watch.
Even this early in the season, the beach was squirming with kids carrying yellow pails and little blue shovels they were always claiming not to have slapped someone else in the side of the head with. Ladies in bathing suits and earrings sipped pink drinks and played cards at a table near the lodge. College girls lay on their backs, stiff as Barbie dolls, while the hit parade buzzed away on their transistors. Occasionally, they’d flip over to get a better look at the boys in green Dunbrae button-downs tying up boats, filling gas tanks or helping papery old men up onto the dock.