“Break that foot and we’ll have to shoot you,” Sweetie said from the doorway, laughing in a tinkly, nickels-dropping way. “Sorry. Joking, joking.” She crossed the room and turned off the phonograph.
Another girl, dark-haired, stood with her hands on her hips, assessing Jane. Her lips twisted to the side, like she was having a private joke.
“Jane, Rivka. Rivka, Jane,” Sweetie said.
Rivka looked like a Cherokee girl Jane remembered from a corn stand in Oklahoma. Her lids covered the top third of her eyes, making her look almost sleepy, though below the lids her brown eyes were focused, critical. Her nose bone rose in a bump and then veered to the left on the way down. She wore pajamas, top and bottoms, buttoned all the way up to her throat, and a bracelet of oddly shaped pearls, each wrapped in silver strands, spinning around her ankle. On her ankle, Jane thought. Her feet were bare, toenails buffed and shiny but unpainted. Jane remembered how everybody treated the Cherokees bad in Texas and Oklahoma, needing to feel somebody was below them. Rivka didn’t look like she’d had that sort of treatment.
“Pills and bath,” Rivka said, and walked out again.
When she’d gone down the hall, Sweetie said, “I recall your momma and daddy had a habit of fighting.” Her voice rose up at the end, inviting Jane to talk.
She’s gossiping about me, to me, Jane thought. “Your papa ain’t no Jesus.”
Sweetie sat up straighter and patted the skirt of her dress. “He’s a good enough man. He isn’t violent. I know that.”
“He’s a good number cruncher. Ain’t a good man.”
In spite of how she felt about Momma and Daddy and how badly she needed help, she wasn’t going to lose a parent contest to Uno’s girl. Judging by a little slump in Sweetie’s shoulders, it didn’t look like she planned to argue the point anyway.
Rivka returned with water and a small bottle, shaking three pills into her hand, passing them and the glass to Jane, looking her straight in the eye, like she saw who Jane was, knew she didn’t measure up, was a waste of her medicine.
“Go on,” Sweetie said, nodding, and Jane swallowed the pills.
Rivka left, and moments later Jane heard water running.
“Come on! Before it gets cold!” Rivka yelled.
Sweetie put her arm around Jane’s waist and helped her to the bathroom, the two of them at the end of a rope pulled by Rivka.
Sweetie removed Jane’s clothes and undergarments and settled her into a clawfoot tub of hot, foamy water, all the way to her chin. Jane winced at the heat at first, and then it felt better, numbing her body. She began to disappear that way in her head, too, and was grateful for the pills and the heat, in spite of the vulnerability they created.
Rivka returned, grumbling as she used Jane’s ruined clothes to mop blood and clay off the tile, and then she carried the clothes out of the bathroom by her thumb and pointer finger, away from her body—“Would that we had incinerator.”
Even fuzzy-headed, Jane thought there were words missing in that sentence.
Sweetie sat on a towel on the floor, pushed up her sleeves, unbraided Jane’s hair, and used a measuring cup to pour bathwater over her head, lathering it up with a thick, orange-smelling soap that foamed into a crown. Jane sank below the water and considered staying there but rose up anyway when she had to breathe.
Sweetie scrubbed the mud from Jane’s hairline and the creases around her nose and the cleft in her chin. Then she scrubbed in and around Jane’s ears and the dirty necklaces of skin around her throat. She scrubbed her hands, not just the red stains in her calluses, but also all the way round and under her rough fingernails, until they looked pink and clean as a schoolgirl’s. She brushed Jane’s knotted hair until it lay flat and plaited it, right there in the tub.
Then Sweetie reached into the water and picked up Jane’s foot, holding it in the light.
Jane didn’t like her touching that.
Sweetie shook her head. “I’m sorry, hon.”
Something wedged in Jane’s throat.
Sweetie put the foot carefully down and took Jane’s hand to help her out of the water. With her own free hand Jane covered her bosom. When she was standing, balanced on one foot, she covered her other private parts. She’d not stood this way in front of another person in years, and even so medicated, she was ashamed to be stared at.
Rivka held out a nightgown, looking at Jane’s skinny frame, and whistled.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she lied.
“Apparently you need more than pills and bath.”
Sweetie giggled. “You make such a nice nurse, so empathetic.”
Then she handed Jane the towel and the gown, which she pulled over her head before she was dry.
With Sweetie’s support, Jane limped down the shotgun hallway after Rivka, through a black-and-white kitchen, and out a glass door to a white wood room with uncovered windows on three walls and a second glass door to the landing out back. A narrow bed was laid with chenille blankets in a space scarcely bigger than the Ford.
Sweetie turned down the covers.
Jane lay down, and Sweetie sat on the side of the bed, lifting Jane’s foot. Rivka came back and handed Sweetie a small tool, which she used to pick splinters and grit from the wounds. Tears wet Jane’s face. She was defenseless, prone to Sweetie’s small surgery.
Rivka returned again with a pile of extra blankets, dropping them on the end of the bed with a grieved exhalation.
Everything here was different than home—the mineral smell was different, no irrigation-on-dirt smell. Here it was brisk, even inside, but also spicy—garlicky aromas floating in from the neighborhood.
When Rivka walked out again, Jane took her chance. “Can’t I please stay for a while?”
The skin under Sweetie’s eyes pinked. “She won’t like it. She’ll say no.”
“Can’t you just tell her?”
“That’s not how it works. I tend things for her. She rescued me when I showed up.” Sweetie dimpled, like she was proud to be chosen for rescue or proud to be needed, maybe both.
“Rescued how?”
Sweetie frowned. “Got me together.” She looked down at her dress. “She’s something,” she said, shifting. “Plays piano in the symphony on KGO. She knows everybody, all the musicians, of course, but also the celebrities who come to the radio. She knows Dorothy Lamour!” Sweetie beamed at this. “She opened me up to so much.” Sweetie looked around the bare little room, appreciative.
At home, Jane had pinned a picture of Dorothy Lamour in a sequined aqua gown up on the wall of her tent over her pallet as some kind of ideal. Rivka knew the real Dorothy, and Sweetie knew Rivka. Jane understood how she must feel about that.
“Do you work at the radio too? Did you meet her there?”
Sweetie’s eyes rounded. “Oh no! We met sitting next to each other at the Castro Theater to see San Francisco. I had hardly any money, but that didn’t stop me going to the movies. We both got the hysterics at this one part—have you seen it?—Clark Gable tells Jeannette MacDonald to show him her legs. She says, ‘I said I’m a singer.’” Sweetie recited this in a loud, offended voice with her hands on her hips, her laughter trilling.
Jane hadn’t seen the movie, just the poster, but the poster was what had gotten her here.