Daddy had hammered holes through the pages and the covers she’d made from cardboard boxes left behind at gas stations, after she’d stained them with beet juice and egg paint. She’d coiled a piece of wire through the holes. It all stayed together if she flipped her pages carefully while she wrote. In her tiniest print, she had filled those notebooks with the details of their migration.
She flipped through this one now, reading about ripped upholstery, stuck windows, the smell of mites and sweat, gritty blowing clouds, inside-the-tent moans and laughter, hard paved gray dirt, red clay, and fine brown silt. The musky smell of beer in the morning, fingertip calluses, a gasoline station Coke’s cool condensation drops on a hot, puffy hand, and the bitter, fatty taste of red-eye gravy—coffee grounds, lard, and water poured over fried bread and butter.
Then she returned her notebook to the hope chest, latching it. She locked the car and walked back to her sunporch.
BACK at the flat, everything was still quiet, just the occasional sound of one of the girls turning in bed. Jane decided to make breakfast for them the way she’d watched Sweetie do it for her.
She filled the percolator, got the metal basket out of the drying rack next to the sink, scooped in ground Folgers, settled the metal post into its hole and capped it. She plugged the tines into the wall socket and the machinery thunked itself awake, its yellow light blinking. Easy electricity, shiny machines.
She got a loaf of Wonder Bread out of the breadbox, opened the cellophane, and smelled the sweet white dough before putting two slices in the toaster. Listening to it click, she took Welch’s grape jelly out of the icebox.
Cooking here, eating here was much better than doing it on dirt by the river.
“Getting winky.”
She heard Rivka say this through the vent into the girls’ room, where they slept in matching pine beds with matching dressers and nightstands. How’d they pay for all the matching furniture?
“That’s a new one. You’ll have to get me a glossary.”
Jane tilted her head up, toward the vent.
“She is better now.”
“It’s just been three days.”
“She is throwing everything off.”
Jane leaned into the tile counter’s rounded edge.
“What’s off? We do the same things.”
Jane held her breath, trying to make no noise.
“It is not same,” Rivka said in her strange way—no the or a or an.
“What’s winky?”
“So distracting, with all your mothering. I cannot practice with constant flow of mercy.”
Jane looked down and pointed the toes of her injured foot, back to its natural size. How much mothering had it taken? She hadn’t asked for much.
“We don’t want her just wandering town.”
“It has been week.”
“Three days. What can it hurt for me to help her get a start?”
“Oh. So you have time to help her?” Rivka asked. “You have nothing else to do?”
Jane looked around at the neat kitchen, at its stocked cupboards. Sweetie was the one keeping things nice, before and after work, but Jane figured it was Rivka who paid for the things Sweetie kept nice.
Sweetie said something garbled. Jane’s heart raced, anxious to hear. She lifted up one knee and then the other, climbing onto the counter, standing on clean tile, and pressed her ear against the vent next to the dish cabinet.
Rivka said, “We had arrangement.”
This was a nice place to live at the height of the Depression, a clean, well-fitted floor of a fancy building in a fancy neighborhood of a fancy city. They had an arrangement.
“Simmer down.” There was a soft thud and a scrape. “She’s almost healed.”
“What then? Toss her out? What do you see as finale? Shall we send her home?”
Jane gasped and kicked the hot percolator, rattling it, spilling coffee on the counter, down the cabinet, to pool in a black puddle on the white tile, white grout. Her hand rose to her mouth.
“What was that?” Rivka asked.
Jane’s breath came shallow and fast.
“She’ll get a job.”
“There is depression on. She will not.”
Jane squatted on the counter and climbed down, grabbed a cloth, started wiping up the spill, then wet the cloth, scrubbing furiously at the grout.
She didn’t want to go back, couldn’t after what she’d done. There was no home to go to. She tossed the cloth in the trash, leaving no evidence.
She was going to stay on Clay Street, her bed piled with blankets, windows all around, this kitchen with these appliances, this food—soft bread and jelly, the smell of yeasty warmth. She couldn’t lose this. She’d established things with Sweetie. They hadn’t said a specific word yet about her staying, but they had a kind of pact—she could tell—the kind you silently make. Rivka just didn’t understand Jane yet, didn’t know what she could do. Jane would learn how to become someone here, so neither of the girls would think of kicking her out. She had to get a job and make both of them her friends. That’s what survival meant now.
She buttered and sliced toast, putting paired triangles on matching plates next to a dollop each of purple jelly, and then put the plates and mugs of black coffee on a handled tray.
Carrying breakfast to their room, she composed a list in her head of the work a tomato-picking Okie girl was qualified to do in San Francisco, California. She didn’t need a pencil or paper as it was a very short list.
SUNUP, Monday, Sweetie brushed Jane’s hair until it shone. Working with lotion, she finger-waved it so it moved in an S near her cheek before she pinned it up in a bun, the whole thing softening her face, making her look almost good, like a handsome woman.
Sweetie dressed her in a body-hugging girdle that stretched from her shoulders to her thighs, snaps attaching to dark hose, seams down the back, which made her legs itch. Next came a beige silk slip, which Jane couldn’t enjoy the feel of because of the interfering girdle. She’d never worn such things before. Momma’d sewn her baggy panties out of feed sacks with a twine drawstring. When they came untied, her drawers sometimes dropped below the hem of her skirt.
On top she wore a lined, jade gabardine suit Sweetie had brought home from the opera discard bin and altered over the weekend, a wide-shouldered, three-button jacket nipping in at Jane’s waist and flouncing out all the way around her hips, just where she needed it, implying flesh that didn’t exist. The high lapels covered her collarbones, softening her edges. She’d never worn anything that complimented her before. She scarcely knew herself. She looked like a McCall’s pattern figure. She could be somebody, a city girl, this way. Even so, she felt a prickly dread in this costume. She wasn’t quite herself.
Sweetie had jumped into the project, sewing and styling cheerfully late into the weekend nights, chattering as she worked. Though she wanted to see this as proof of Sweetie’s genuine attachment to her, some of her comments were overly flattering, tissue-like. Jane did enjoy a compliment but had an ear for insincerity and thought she heard it in Sweetie’s “You’re so pretty!” and “Just like a model!” But she put that aside as unnecessary distraction.
JANE sat on a hard mahogany chair in the reception area of the NBC Blue Network radio station where Rivka worked. Thirty other girls sat on other hard chairs in a circle around the room, with so much perfume in the air—orange blossom, jasmine, lemon, narcissus, lilac, hyacinth, cloves, rose, sandalwood, musk, violet—that she felt nauseous. They were all waiting for their turn to land a receptionist job, which Rivka described as “looking pretty while answering telephones.”