Authors: Christina Baker Kline
“You don’t have to.”
“The longer you’re in there, the longer my fingers get a break.”
The shed is drafty, and I can see a sliver of daylight through the slit. A black toilet seat, worn through to wood in some places, is set in the middle of a rough-hewn bench. Strips of newspaper hang on a roll on the wall. I remember the privy behind our cottage in Kinvara, so the smell doesn’t shock me, though the seat is cold. What will it be like out here in a snowstorm? Like this, I suppose, only worse.
When I’m finished, I open the door, pulling down my dress.
“You’re pitiful thin,” Fanny says. “I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
Hongry
.
She’s right. My stomach feels like a cavern. “A little,” I admit.
Fanny’s face is creased and puckered, but her eyes are bright. I can’t tell if she’s seventy or a hundred. She’s wearing a pretty purple flowered dress with a gathered bodice, and I wonder if she made it herself.
“Mrs. Byrne don’t give us much for lunch, but it’s prolly more’n you had.” She reaches into the side pocket of her dress and pulls out a small shiny apple. “I always save something for later, case I need it. She locks up the refrigerator between meals.”
“No,” I say.
“Oh yes she does. Says she don’t want us rooting around in there without her permission. But I usually manage to save something.” She hands me the apple.
“I can’t—”
“Go ahead. You got to learn to take what people are willing to give.”
The apple smells so fresh and sweet it makes my mouth water.
“You best eat it here, before we go back in.” Fanny looks at the door to the house, then glances up at the second-floor windows. “Whyn’t you take it back in the privy.”
As unappetizing as this sounds, I am so hungry I don’t care. I step back inside the little shed and devour the apple down to the core. Juice runs down my chin, and I wipe it with the back of my hand. My da used to eat the apple core and all—“where all the nutrients are. It’s plain ignorant to throw it out,” he’d say. But to me the hard cartilage is like eating the bones of a fish.
When I open the door, Fanny strokes her chin. I look at her, puzzled. “Evidence,” she says, and I wipe my sticky jaw.
Mary scowls when I step back into the sewing room. She shoves a pile of cloth at me and says, “Pin these.” I spend the next hour pinning edge to edge as carefully as I can, but each time I put a completed one down she grabs it, inspects it hastily, and flings it back at me. “It’s a sloppy mess. Do it again.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue. You should be ashamed of this work.”
The other women look up and silently return to their sewing.
I pull out the pins with shaking hands. Then I slowly repin the cloth, measuring an inch apart with a metal sewing gauge. On the mantelpiece an ornate gold clock with a domed glass front ticks loudly. I hold my breath as Mary inspects my work. “This has some irregularity,” she says finally, holding it up.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s uneven.” She won’t look me in the eye. “Maybe you’re just . . .” Her voice trails off.
“What?”
“Maybe you aren’t cut out for this kind of work.”
My bottom lip trembles, and I press my lips together hard. I keep thinking someone—maybe Fanny?—will step in, but no one does. “I learned how to sew from my mother.”
“You’re not mending a rip in your father’s trousers. People are paying good money—”
“I know how to sew,” I blurt. “Maybe better than you.”
Mary gapes at me. “You . . . you are
nothing,
” she sputters. “Don’t even have a—a family!”
My ears are buzzing. The only thing I can think to say is, “And you don’t have any manners.” I stand up and leave the room, pulling the door shut behind me. In the dark hall, I contemplate my options. I could run away, but where would I go?
After a moment the door opens, and Fanny slips out. “Goodness, child,” she whispers. “Why you have to be so mouthy?”
“That girl is mean. What’d I do to her?”
Fanny puts a hand on my arm. Her fingers are rough, calloused. “It don’t do you any good to squabble.”
“But my pins were straight.”
She sighs. “Mary’s only hurting herself by making you do the work over. She’s paid by the piece, so I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. But you—well, let me ask you this. Are they paying you?”
“Paying me?”
“Fanny!” a voice rings out above us. We look up to see Mrs. Byrne at the top of the stairs. Her face is flushed. “What on earth is going on?” I can’t tell if she heard what we were saying.
“Nothing to concern you, ma’am,” Fanny says quickly. “A little spat between the girls is all.”
“Over what?”
“Honest, ma’am, I don’t think you want to know.”
“Oh, but I do.”
Fanny gazes at me and shakes her head. “Well . . . You seen that boy who delivers the afternoon paper? They got to arguing over whether he has a sweetheart. You know how girls can be.”
I exhale slowly.
“The foolishness, Fanny,” Mrs. Byrne says.
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“You two get back in there. Dorothy, I don’t want to hear another word of this nonsense, you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There is work to be done.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fanny opens the door and walks ahead of me into the sewing room. Mary and I don’t speak for the rest of the afternoon.
That night at supper Mrs. Byrne serves chopped beef, potato salad stained pink by beets, and rubbery cabbage. Mr. Byrne chews noisily. I can hear every click of his jaw. I know to put my napkin in my lap—Gram taught me that. I know how to use a knife and fork. Though the beef tastes as dry and flavorless as cardboard, I’m so ravenous that it’s all I can do not to shove it into my mouth. Small, ladylike bites, Gram said.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Byrne puts down her fork and says, “Dorothy, it’s time to discuss the rules of the house. As you already know, you are to use the privy in the back. Once a week, on Sunday evenings, I will draw a bath for you in the tub in the washroom off the kitchen. Sunday is also washday, which you’ll be expected to help with. Bedtime is at nine
P.M
., with lights out. There’s a pallet for you in the hall closet. You’ll bring it out in the evenings and roll it up neatly in the morning, before the girls arrive at eight thirty.”
“I’ll be sleeping—in the hallway?” I ask with surprise.
“Mercy, you don’t expect to sleep on the second floor with us, do you?” she says with a laugh. “Heaven forbid.”
When dinner is over, Mr. Byrne announces that he is going for a stroll.
“And I have work to do,” Mrs. Byrne says. “Dorothy, you will clean up the dishes. Pay careful attention to where things belong. The best way for you to learn our ways is to observe closely, and teach yourself. Where do we keep the wooden spoons? The juice glasses? It should be a fun game for you.” She turns to leave. “You are not to disturb Mr. Byrne and me after dinner. You will put yourself to bed at the appropriate time and turn out your light.” With a curt smile, she says, “We expect to have a positive experience with you. Don’t do anything to threaten our trust.”
I look around at the dishes piled in the sink, the strips of beet peel staining a wooden cutting board, a saucepan half full of translucent cabbage, a roasting pan charred and waxed with grease. Glancing at the door to be sure the Byrnes are gone, I spear a hunk of the flavorless cabbage on a fork and swallow it greedily, barely chewing. I eat the rest of the cabbage this way, listening for Mrs. Byrne’s foot on the stairs.
As I wash the dishes I look out the window over the sink at the yard behind the house, murky now in the fading evening light; there are a few spidery trees, their thin trunks flayed into branches. By the time I’ve finished scrubbing the roasting pan, the sky is dark and the yard has faded from view. The clock above the stove says 7:30.
I pour myself a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and sit at the table. It feels too early to go to bed, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have a book to read, and I haven’t seen any in the house. We didn’t have many books in the apartment on Elizabeth Street, either, but the twins were always getting old papers from the newsies. In school it was poems I liked best—Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley. Our teacher made us memorize the words to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and alone in the kitchen now I close my eyes and whisper
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time . . .
but that’s all I can remember.
I need to look on the bright side, as Gram always said. It’s not so bad here. The house is austere, but not uncomfortable. The light above the kitchen table is warm and cheery. The Byrnes don’t want to treat me like a child, but I’m not so sure I want to be treated like one. Work that keeps my hands and mind busy is probably just what I need. And soon I will go to school.
I think of my own home on Elizabeth Street—so different, but truthfully no better than this. Mam in bed in midafternoon, in the sweltering heat, lying in her room past dark, with the boys whining for food and Maisie sobbing and me thinking I’ll go mad with the heat and the hunger and the noise. Da up and gone—at work, he said, though the money he brought home was less each week, and he’d stumble in after midnight reeking of hops. We’d hear him tramping up the stairs, belting out the Irish national anthem—“We’re children of a fighting race, / That never yet has known disgrace, / And as we march, the foe to face, / We’ll chant a soldier’s song”—then bursting into the apartment, to Mam’s shushing and scolding. He’d stand silhouetted in the grainy light of the bedroom, and though all of us were supposed to be asleep, and pretended to be, we were rapt, awed by his cheer and bravado.
In the hall closet I find my suitcase and a pile of bedding. I unroll a horsehair pallet and place a thin yellowed pillow at the top. There’s a white sheet, which I spread on the mattress and tuck around the edges, and a moth-eaten quilt.
Before going to bed I open the back door and make my way to the privy. The light from the kitchen window casts a dull glow for about five feet, and then it’s dark.
The grass is brittle underfoot. I know my way, but it’s different at night, the outline of the shed barely visible ahead. I look up into the starless sky. My heart pounds. This silent blackness scares me more than nighttime in the city, with its noise and light.
I open the latch and go inside the shed. Afterward, shaking, I pull my knickers up and flee, the door knocking behind me as I run across the yard and up the three steps to the kitchen. I lock the door as instructed and lean against it, panting. And then I notice the padlock on the refrigerator. When did that happen? Mr. or Mrs. Byrne must have come downstairs while I was outside.
Sometime in the second week it becomes clear to Molly that
“
cleaning out
the attic” means taking things out, fretting over them for a few minutes, and putting them back where they were, in a slightly neater stack. Out of the two dozen boxes she and Vivian have been through so far, only a short pile of musty books and some yellowed linen have been deemed too ruined to keep.
“I don’t think I’m helping you much,” Molly says.
“Well, that’s true,” Vivian says. “But I’m helping you, aren’t I?”
“So you came up with a fake project as a favor to me? Or, I suppose, Terry?” Molly says, playing along.
“Doing my civic duty.”
“You’re very noble.”
Sitting on the floor of the attic, Molly lifts the pieces out of a cedar chest one by one, Vivian perched on a wooden chair beside her. Brown wool gloves. A green velvet dress with a wide ribbon sash. An off-white cardigan.
Anne of Green Gables
.
“Hand me that book,” Vivian says. She takes the hardbound green volume, with gold lettering and a line drawing of a girl with abundant red hair in a chignon on the front, and opens it. “Ah, yes, I remember,” she says. “I was almost exactly the heroine’s age when I read this for the first time. A teacher gave it to me—my favorite teacher. You know, Miss Larsen.” She leafs through the book slowly, stopping at a page here and there. “Anne talks so much, doesn’t she? I was much shyer than that.” She looks up. “What about you?”
“Sorry, I haven’t read it,” Molly says.
“No, no. I mean, were you shy as a girl? What am I saying, you’re still a girl. But I mean when you were young?”
“Not exactly shy. I was—quiet.”
“Circumspect,” Vivian says. “Watchful.”
Molly turns these words over in her mind. Circumspect? Watchful? Is she? There was a time after her father died and after she was taken away, or her mother was taken away—it’s hard to know which came first, or if they happened at the same time—that she stopped talking altogether. Everyone was talking at and about her, but nobody asked her opinion, or listened when she gave it. So she stopped trying. It was during this period that she would wake in the night and get out of bed to go to her parents’ room, only to realize, standing in the hall, that she had no parents.
“Well, you’re not exactly effervescent now, are you?” Vivian says. “But I saw you outside earlier when Jack dropped you off, and your face was”—Vivian lifts her knobby hands, splaying her fingers—“all lit up. You were talking up a storm.”
“Were you spying on me?”
“Of course! How else am I going to find out anything about you?”
Molly has been pulling things out of the chest and putting them in piles—clothes, books, knickknacks wrapped in old newspaper. But now she sits back on her heels and looks at Vivian. “You are funny,” she says.
“I’ve been called many things in my life, my dear, but I’m not sure anyone has ever called me funny.”
“I’ll bet they have.”
“Behind my back, perhaps.” Vivian closes the book. “You strike me as a reader. Am I right?”
Molly shrugs. The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.
“So what’s your favorite novel?”
“I dunno. I don’t have one.”
“Oh, I think you probably do. You’re the type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”