“Sure thing.” Anne grinned, producing a match from the depths of her coveralls and striking it on the bottom of her work boot. Phoebe shook her head, smiling. Even with no makeup, her red-gold curls bound under a bandanna, and oversized denim coveralls hiding her Marilyn Monroe figure, Anne was a head-turner.
“It’s ten years since we stopped building fighter jets,” Phoebe said. “And here you still look like the world’s prettiest model for Rosie the Riveter.”
“Now I’m covered in acrylic paint, not grease,” Anne pointed out, poking Phoebe’s shoulder. “Going all right?” she asked, jerking her head at the typewriter.
“Fresh piping-hot justice will soon be served,” Phoebe said.
“That’s how we know it’s fiction,” said Anne. “Sure would be something if just once the criminals got away clean.”
“Fantasist,” Phoebe chided her. “Go on, get back to the masterpiece.”
“Peggy Guggenheim will open a new gallery just for me,” Anne promised. She and Phoebe pointed at each other, an old gesture that meant this was a promise that would be kept, and shut their doors.
Ten years. Phoebe didn’t miss building planes, and she certainly didn’t miss the war—but she missed the easy camaraderie of the women working on the assembly line. The day Phoebe’s first sketch aired on the radio, Anne and Dolores Goldstein had rounded up the whole crew to listen. Anne decreed the fifteen-dollar check from CBS “a glorious thing.” “Not so glorious that I won’t hightail it straight to the bank to let them worship it,” Phoebe rejoined. Anne kept her old Brownie camera in her locker and insisted on taking a photo of the check. Though Phoebe protested against making a relic of her first pay for writing, the photo lived in her keepsake box, and she couldn’t imagine it ever being anywhere else.
Dolores Goldstein, their forewoman, claimed she was going to be the manager of a factory within seven years. Instead she’d married within one and had three children. Possibly more, but she’d stopped answering letters over a year ago. Most of the women at the airfield were married now. Only Phoebe and Anne had pursued their dreams all the way to Greenwich Village. “I bet they envy us,” Anne liked to say. Phoebe hoped not. If there was one thing all those women deserved, it was happiness.
The phone rang again. Phoebe took a long, deep breath and answered in her most mellifluous tone, “Adler residence.”
She heard a crackling, a vague buzz, almost like the hum in a meadow’s air on a hot summer afternoon, but nowhere near as soothing.
“Hello?” Phoebe asked, trying not to sound uneasy. “Is anybody there?”
If they were, they didn’t say. After a few moments, Phoebe hung up.
It was the third time in ten days. It was getting to the point where she had to stop pretending it was nothing. But she couldn’t. Not yet. She just couldn’t.
* * *
• • •
Monday morning, Phoebe got up early so she could enjoy her breakfast before she went to her meeting with Hank. She soft boiled an egg and thought how nice bacon or sausage would be, but such things were treats, only allowed one morning a month, after a check cleared. She switched on the radio, listened for half a minute to a news report about Communists in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then clicked through the stations, hunting for a new comedy she could send a submission to. The only female voice she heard was that of Hedda Hopper, the vitriolic Hollywood gossip columnist whose nose for scandal earned her a radio program along with her much-slavered-over nationally syndicated newspaper column. “Everyone in Hollywood knows,” she purred in her affected mid-Atlantic accent, “there are Reds under the bed!”
“Attention, housewives!” Phoebe intoned in her deepest boom. “The newest-model Electrolux will suck up those Reds with just one swipe!” Ah, I oughta be an announcer. She shook her head, wondering if kids were actually frightened of Communists, if the specter of them under the bed had replaced the bogeyman. She flipped away from Hedda Hopper before the woman could reel off a list of Closeted Homosexual Actors of the Week whose careers she would promptly ruin, and settled on Jimmy Witherspoon singing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” as she finished her coffee and went to put on her makeup.
Hank’s tiny office was on the top floor of the Linwood Theatre, which housed the studios where At Your Service and several other shows on the Adelphi Network were filmed. The Linwood was on Sixth Avenue, just within sight of the heart of television: Rockefeller Center. “Greatness adjacent,” Hank labeled the Linwood. Phoebe rather liked the sleek structure, made of all the glass and steel that was her shiny dream of Manhattan. Staff entered through a side door and went straight upstairs, so as not to interfere with the soundstages on the ground floor. Only the head writers on Adelphi shows had permanent offices on-site, but Phoebe knew that on better television shows, on the big three networks, there were staff writers who came in every day and had assigned desks. Phoebe was sure there could be nothing greater in life than walking through an office door with your name on it. Hanging up your coat and hat, and settling yourself at your very own desk. From there she would have no world left to conquer.
She took the bus to Midtown. The subway was faster, but it was more fun to watch the people in the streets, and the progression of the buildings as they grew taller and grander the farther uptown they went.
Phoebe liked to imagine the stories her fellow passengers told themselves about her as they traveled. A career girl, through and through. Plenty of women wore suits to go out in New York, and plenty were sentenced to glasses, but Phoebe knew her attaché case and air of purposefulness set her apart. One or two men flicked her an approving look she knew well—the one that said she wasn’t pretty enough to marry, so good for her, making something of herself. Then they turned away and forgot her. She didn’t care. It was much easier, not being noticed. It meant she could study people openly, wondering who in the crowd was the kleptomaniac, the con man, the workplace scofflaw, the would-be romantic—who would start romancing his secretary after his wife had their third child.
She nodded as she turned ideas over in her head, smiling, not caring if anyone watched and thought she was off her rocker. Let them watch. Let them remember that smile for the day she won an Emmy Award.
Outside, a messenger ran in front of a taxi, and there was the usual jazz trio of brakes, horns, and howls. The bus passengers with the best views rated the show, bringing to bear all their knowledge and expertise. Then came the inevitable: “Awful shame for a lady to have to hear language like that.”
You fellows are lucky you weren’t with me at the airfield. If a shipment was late coming in, we ladies used language that would have shamed sailors.
Her stop was next, and she took a deep breath, readying herself for the excitement to come. The bus had fallen silent again, the men’s eyes back on their newspapers, Phoebe’s eyes on the most story-worthy men. She almost didn’t notice the tingling in her neck, her own realization that she, too, was being scrutinized. Probably by someone who regretted calling her a lady, if she was the sort who ogled men. She glanced behind her, but only saw hats peeping over newspapers.