The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (38 page)

The first time he came home to find flappers slung across his living room, singing along to "Everything Is K.O. in K.C." with Paul Whiteman's orchestra on the Victrola, George bowed, stepped off the porch, and returned from the shed with an armload of home brew. In just the same way now, he brought in a dozen bottles, though I stopped him at the door. "A little early, isn't it?" I said.

"We don't want to be inhospitable."

"Lemonade is hospitable."

"Not to these girls."

"If they start drinking before noon, we'll never get them out of the house." George looked at me, the question plain on his face. Why would I want them out of the house? And who was this person standing in his way? He dimly remembered me, perhaps from a dream.

"Don't be silly, Nell," he said. "Flaming youth doesn't want to spend its weekend drinking home brew with a family in South Gate." Before I could argue further, he said, "Nice to hear your voice again. Welcome back to the land of the living."

He had no way of knowing the morbid little fantasy of my own death. So it was nothing more than coincidence that Lisette chose that moment, while he was still saying "living," to crank the Victrola and let out a peal of laughter—at what, I had no idea. Ten minutes later, the first girls skipped up the sidewalk from the streetcar stop.

I stood at the door to greet them as they streamed in—rash creatures, careless, looking to grab life with both hands, if only life would allow itself to be grabbed. They scarcely glanced at me, but I felt for the second time that day a startled unity with coarse girls who were no proper kin of mine. It made no difference that they paid me the same notice they paid to the porch post; we were, every one of us, cut out of the same length of cloth. Kansas was stamped into the Coty powder of each face that hurried past me.

Weddings, wakes, arrivals, departures. I remembered the oilcloth-covered tables with the heavy pies and cakes made from hoarded white flour. Hard-cooked eggs and cold fried chicken. Ham, for weddings. The shout that went up as soon as the first farmer stained his white shirt, and the expression on his wife's face that told us whether he had another shirt or not. Now a girl standing near my rubber tree scrubbed at the cigarette ash she had dropped on her dress; in no time, she had a gray stain high on her chest, like a corsage. "Odgay amday," she said cheerfully.

"It's a party!" said another girl, which I supposed was true but didn't need saying.

"Thanks," she and the others said when Mary prettily offered a plate of sandwiches, and "You bet!" when George offered beer. Aimée kept the Victrola spinning. Before long, girls had taught George the first steps of the Charleston and swept my milk-glass bud vase from the mantel to the floor.

"Whoopsy-daisy!" said the girl whose elbow had knocked the mantel.

"Don't worry," Lisette assured her. "Nell never cared for that vase."

"It reminded me of Kansas," I said, staring at the pieces on the floor. I had joined in the beer drinking, and now the broken glass swam in front of me. "Clouds used to be just that color. You don't get skies like that here."

"Kansas skies came in two varieties," Lisette said. "Raining or blowing."

"There were sunny days," I said.

"Sun!" she said. "It would blister the skin off your neck."

I kept looking at the pieces of my vase. None of us made a move for the broom. "Do you remember the smell of hay at twilight, when the cool came? It was a sweet smell," I said. "Like flowers," I added to Mary. She was sitting in the lap of a girl with practically white hair and rough elbows. The girl stroked Mary's hair with an absent, practiced gesture. No one needed to tell me that the girl had left behind a houseful of sisters, and her mother had let the chickens come in the kitchen.

"Like dung," said Lisette. Sitting in a ring around her feet, the girls smirked. They hoisted their bottles. George slipped out to get more.

I looked at the girl holding Mary. "Sometimes the sky was so brilliant you could hardly keep looking at it. When I think of what blue is, I think of those Kansas skies."

"Hark at you, the prairie's Chamber of Commerce," Lisette said.

"It wasn't all bad."

"You left before we did," Lisette said.

"That doesn't mean everything was hateful," I said. "The grass flowered in the spring. Tiny white flowers."

"Grass," said Lisette.

"Assgray," said a girl, collapsing with laughter. Mary smiled uncertainly, and I smiled back at her. Later, I would have to tell her about pig Latin, and then tell her not to use it. For now, it did her no harm to sit in this crowded room. My California girl. The fierce blood that sang in the veins of all the girls around her, and of her mother, would never lift its voice in her.

"It was pretty. Nothing wrong with pretty. Show me grass in California that has flowers," I said. There had been bushes at the edge of Pa's land—I remembered them clearly, though I could not recall their name. Come the spring, they leafed out in a tender greeny pink color I'd never seen since. Come the fall, they blazed crimson, a jolt of color in the dun landscape. Was Lisette going to tell me she'd never seen those bushes?

Lisette put down her cigarette, stamped waxy red from her lipstick. "One winter back home when it was hard cold, we went to Mamaw and asked for another quilt. Aimée could hardly talk, she was shivering so. Mamaw didn't have but one to give us, from her own bed, and Papaw wouldn't let her give it to us. 'Whatever's out is going to find its way in,' he said. 'They have to learn to deal with it.'"

"How did you stay warm?" asked George, returning with the next load of bottles. One of the girls planted a loud kiss on his cheek. I shook my head for Mary's benefit, although in that room full of girls, she was not interested in watching her mother.

"Brought in some straw from the barn and hung onto each other."

"That's a grim little story," he said.

Lisette exhaled smoke. "You get strong by these things."

"Everything Is K.O." ground to a halt, and we listened to the Victrola's needle scrape around and around the disk. A girl said, "It doesn't get cold like that here."

"Good thing," Aimée said. "We didn't pack coats."

"The only thing that comes in these windows is the occasional clement zephyr," said George. Clement. He must have gotten the word from a brochure.

"That's not how I heard it," Lisette said. "Here every new thing is in the air. New fashions are in the air. New hair. New—pizzazz."

Aimée said, "Pos-i-lutely."

"What's a zephyr?" said the blonde.

"Wind," said Lisette. "Just ask a Kansan."

"What is pizzazz?" Mary said.

"You don't need to know, baby," I said.

"It's what makes California not Kansas," Lisette said.

"It's 'It,'" said a girl in brown stripes, smiling naughtily at Mary, who was dazzled by so much quick, smart talk and lipstick. How could I be surprised? George was dazzled, too. I was the one who knew without being told about the safety pins in the garter belts, the strips of binding cloth used in place of costly flattening brassieres.

"The girls we like are loaded with 'It,'" the girl went on. She grinned at me. "I mean pizzazz."

Mary said, "How old does a girl have to be to have pizzazz?"

"Fourteen," Lisette said, and Aimée giggled. "Did somebody pass a new law?" I said.

Lisette said, "When Aimée was fourteen, a visiting preacher came through town. Aimée went up during the altar call."

"I liked altar calls," Aimée said. "It was always warm up there."

"He wouldn't baptize her. Wouldn't let her stay on the altar. He said he could feel her sin all over him."

While the girls laughed, George said, "Too bad you couldn't get him to write that down. It's a recommendation that would get you a screen test like that." He snapped his fingers.

"We knew what he meant, even if we didn't know what to call it," Lisette said. "The way she could come into a room and stop everything. And of course, she can dance."

Mary squealed, "It!" managing to sound both innocent and worldly. I would never be able to get the word back out of her vocabulary.

"Go on. Show them your stuff," said a girl whose blond marcelled waves clung to her skull. Lisette went to the Victrola and restarted "Everything Is K.O." We did not have many recordings.

"There's your cue," Lisette said to her sister when the trumpets came in.

Aimée smiled and closed her eyes. Her shoulders started to rock back and forth, and then her spine swayed. She flattened her palms while she pivoted and stepped forward, pivoted again and stepped back. It was hard not to watch her quick ankles, impossible not to watch that snapping, rhythmic backside. Other girls looked mechanical when they did the Charleston, but Aimée, right there in our living room in the broad white light of early afternoon, looked as hot and quick as a spark. "What a smarty," the blond girl said. Mary tried to copy her aunt for a minute, then sat down to watch.

After a few kicks, Aimée cried "Whee!" without a bit of selfconsciousness and shimmied to the side of the room. She ran her finger down the door, smiled, then pressed her liquid back against the door frame and slid to the floor.

"That preacher was smart to get you off his altar," I said, and Aimée straightened as if she were coming out of hypnosis, her smile still in place. Mary was moving toward her as if magnetized. "Where in the world did you learn that?"

"I saw
Daughters of Eve
twelve times. By the time it left Grant Station, I knew how to do everything they did."

I had not bothered to think that since Grant Station now had a movie house, it would be crowded with girls using the screen as a dance instructor. Lucille and Amelia Plat would have been right up front. In their handbags would be a road map to Los Angeles. I said, "If you danced like that, you must have scared the boys."

"I don't think that scared is what they'd be," George said, Mary right at his feet and soaking up every word. There was no point in sending her out to play. Sitting outside, she would hear anything we said through the open windows. If we closed the windows, she'd hear worse from down the street. I had wanted a new life. Here it was.

"Oh, the Kansas boys!" Lisette said. "Straw in their hair, straw in their heads." I could figure out the rest of it:
Straw in their drawers, straw in their beds.

Aimée got up from the chesterfield where she had been finger-combing Mary's hair. She clomped across the room to us, scratched her chin, and mimed chewing on a straw. "Your feet shore is purty," Aimée drawled, looking at the floor. "Them're the purtiest feet I ever seen."

"'N I seen a lot of feet," Lisette said, letting her jaw dangle. "I like feet."

Lisette had a natural mimic's merciless ear, which must have been hell on the Grant Station boys. Mary was hiccupping with laughter. "Wait," Aimée said. She took off the cloche she'd worn into town, dented the top, and folded down the brim. Lisette held still while her sister jammed the hat onto her head so it was practically riding on her nose. "Now go," Aimée said.

Wearing a slack grin and stooping like a cowboy, Lisette edged up to Aimée, who had stepped back and simpered. She pretended to toss a curl over her shoulder. "Yer a girl, aintcha?" Lisette leered. "I like girls."

"I am in the full flower of my maidenhood," Aimée trilled.

"Kin you cook?"

"Sir! I am a lady!"

"Lookit. I brought you a side of beef."

"The man of my dreams will bring me roses."

Stumped, Lisette scratched her nose. She looked at Aimée, who twirled an imaginary parasol. Lisette chewed the end of an imaginary mustache, then said, "I could go back 'n git the head."

I was laughing, George too. Everyone was laughing. But Mary—Mary was doubled over. Of us all, she was the only one who thought that Lisette and Aimée were performing something make-believe. I wanted to make sure that she never understood otherwise, never saw those barns and flat expanses. I wanted to take her to Kansas that minute and show her. I wanted a life big enough to hold all lives, and I wanted no encumbrance, no weight of history, that I might move as lightly as a feather through days filled with clement breezes. I had drunk too much, I thought, setting down the empty bottle.

George shouted, "Unfair! Unfair! Give the poor boys a chance."

"We gave them a chance," said the blonde.

"I gave all of Plain City, Iowa, a chance," said a girl in a wrinkled blue V-neck. She winked.

"What happened?" I said. She looked surprised that I asked.

"Ask Lisette. She tells it better."

"Tell us your story," I said. I would make a point here, if she would just let me. Mary would listen to a girl from Plain City, Iowa.

"Oh, it's pretty much all the same story," the girl said, looking around for help.

"Let me see if I can guess at it," I said. "The boy you've known since you were a sprout comes to call. He can offer you your own wringer-washer and a view of the back eighty from his porch."

"When you talk about a motorcar, he brightens right up," said the blonde, tucking a stiff wave behind her ear. "His daddy was just talking about a new tractor."

"He doesn't begin to understand what you want, and you don't know how to tell him," I said.

"Are you letting me in on something here, Nell?" George said. I wasn't troubled; his voice was light.

"It's the universal story. Somebody should make a movie out of it. Lisette could star," I said.

"That's another movie," Lisette said.

"She's already worked out her first one," said the wrinkled-sweater girl. "It will cata—catapult her to stardom."

"I'm trying to tell you something," I said, though the beer furred my thoughts, and I was losing track of what I'd meant to tell.

"Lisette's picture will make her a star!"

"Why, it's just a trifle," Lisette said, putting on a coy face. I wondered if she thought it becoming. "Really, nothing at all."

"Tell us!" George said. "Please!"

"Oh, do!" I said, and he glanced at me chidingly. Well, he hadn't heard his own voice.