The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (10 page)

"You baptized her," Jack's father said. "Save Reverend the trouble later."

"You turning papist now, with infant baptisms? I don't aim to learn Latin," my mother-in-law said. Relief had washed every other expression from her face.

"Oh, baby-in-the-water-oh," Jack's father chanted.

"Fetched up clean from the river stream," Jack sang.

"What kind of broken-down Baptist hymn is that?" his mother said.

"Don't you go criticizing my husband," I called. I was so numb I could barely move my mouth, but I could look, and see. Frolicking in the water, Jack and his parents made a ring around the baby, a complete family. Likewise, Mama and Pa and my sisters were probably picnicking today, Mama's stained blue tablecloth spread under the huge oak next to the well. Mama might be singing, my sisters leaning against her as they loved to do. If I were to disappear, there would be little reason for anyone to look up, except for the chores, of course. There was a little shrillness in my voice when I added, "He sings like an angel."

"Huh. Didn't know they made angels so hairy," his mother said, and Jack shot a palmful of water at her. I watched from the bank. I was recovering from a difficult birthing. It would not have been right for them to invite me to join them.

The next day my mother-in-law would say that when she and Amelia surfaced, I was clutching Lucille so hard that sound was pressed out of her, so hard my whole body had gone white. This was a kind interpretation. What I know for a fact is that I didn't move when I saw them go under. I could not speak, and I didn't move a muscle. Jack sang silly verses all the way home.

Once I regained my strength, back in the hot house with two children to tend, I became quicker than ever. Quicker to lash out, quicker to slap. Maybe I would have done better if I could have slept, but the girls were not interested in my sleep. Once Amelia found her voice, Lucille gained an ally, and now two babies cried through the day and night, though Amelia could not match her sister's lusty roars. Instead, Amelia's cries were spindly and querulous, as if she were asking maddening questions over and over again. Jack and his father spent nights in the barn. For all I know, they were eating out there, too. I was surviving mostly on pickles, straight from the crock. Saved washing a plate.

Moving stolidly through the days, I rarely bothered to speak. I couldn't think of one thing to say that wasn't expressed by the girls' squalls, which started sometime before dawn and ended when they wore themselves out, and the children could persevere. I was sleepless and stupid. When my mother-in-law said "wean" and "Lucille," I stared like a cow, unable to fold my brain around the words.

"You don't have a choice. Both girls need nourishment, not to speak of sleep. Are you hearing me?"

"Not to speak of sleep," I said.

"She won't be the first child in the world to go off the breast before she's a year. If you give me some milk, I'll make oatmeal. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Moo," I said. She handed me a cup.

Getting enough milk to make even a small bit of oatmeal took a long time, and it hurt, too. Later I would hear of a breast pump, but Mr. Cates didn't have such a thing in his store. Jack came in while I was sitting on the edge of the bed, squeezing my breast over the cup. "We could just put you in a stall," he said. "Feed you some oats. That'd be simpler."

"This is plenty simple." I didn't look up. If he made me spill I'd have to start all over, and my blistered nipple felt ready to come off.

"If you think so, you're the only one. And that would be about regular," he said.

I dropped my hot breast and said, "I'm trying to make a situation tolerable."

Jack shook his head. "It shouldn't be so difficult, but that's you. You're difficult. I wish I'd have known that two years ago."

"Would it have changed anything?" I was too tired to bother saying that I wasn't the only difficult one.

"I thought I knew." He mounted a crooked smile. "Guess I'm saying your thoughts."

I shrugged. "What's there to do about it?"

Behind his brushy black beard, thick now as a bramble hedge, his face was unreadable. He picked up Amelia from the quilt, a rare gesture.

What'll we do about baby?
What'll we do about thee?
What'll we do about baby?
Up in the air: one, two, three!

He didn't toss her very high; her flailing arm did not touch the low roof over us. But her head flopped on her baby neck; for a moment I imagined her warped head—no hair at all, nothing like her sister—dropping off her body and wobbling across the room. She didn't make a sound, even when he awkwardly caught her. "Stop!" I cried. "What are you doing?"

"Playing."

"She's not near strong enough. You can't do that yet."

"Fine." The fear was on his face, and the frustration. I was sorry I'd been so harsh. This moment would not come again.

"Lucille is old enough. She would love it," I said.

"There's chores need doing. We can't all sit around and play with babies." When he left he forgot to draw the sheet. I went back to squeezing my breast, and when my mother-in-law passed, she frowned at me and pulled the sheet to again.

The experiment was a waste of time anyway. After all that effort, Lucille spat the mess back at me, staining my remaining clean dress. "Not even a year," my mother-in-law said, dabbing at me with her apron. "She thinks she shouldn't have to grow up yet."

"I don't see why not," I said.

Two days after delivering Amelia, I had been able to sit up in bed, where I could hem by hand. After a week, I made my way to the sewing machine. I went into town with Jack to deliver Mrs. Horne's shirtwaists before the end of my two-week confinement, an outing that I paid for with drawers, petticoat, and skirt all soaked in blood by the time we got home. I made Jack let me out at the garden, where I turned around the skirt and covered it with my apron so my mother-in-law wouldn't see, then went in to check on Amelia, who was thinly crying. After that, I doubled up the cloths between my legs and waddled like a duck, but I could resume my calls on the ladies of Grant Station.

Lucille came with me. In other people's houses, she became a new child, chuckling and rosy. "She's a perfect angel," said the ladies of Grant Station. "Does she take after your side or Jack's?"

"She's all her own," I said through the pins between my teeth.

"Has there ever been a more perfect child?" said the ladies, pressing Lucille to their powdered bosoms.

I smiled and lowered my eyes. It would have been vulgar to gloat.

"How you must love her," Mrs. Trimbull said as I measured her for a wrapper, a garment she could have ordered from the Sears catalogue for $1.70. We were calling it a chemise and I was charging her $3.50, Mrs. Trimbull's greed for Parisian fashion matching my greed for dollar bills. As I marked the shoulders, she smiled at Lucille, her jowls trembling. Everyone in Grant Station knew that Mrs. Trimbull was foolish about babies. If Mr. Trimbull had lived, people said, she'd have a dozen by now. She sighed. "And now you have two! Two angels to love."

"Yes, ma'am."

"They are perfect innocents, aren't they?"

"They teach us what innocence is."

I don't know what tone she heard in my voice, but under their dense pad of fat, her shoulders tightened. "You don't sound very loving," she said.

Lucille was clutching the edge of Mrs. Trimbull's pine side chair and pulling herself to her unsteady feet, where she swayed and grinned at us. Then she sat back down, hard, and after a shocked second her face screwed up. I knew this instant, before the wails came, the last instant of peace for hours. Dropping the measuring tape, I flew to my daughter, swooped her up, and cradled her against me, half singing, though I was no singer. Surprised, Lucille closed her mouth, then cuddled against my shoulder. Who knows where she learned the gesture. I could not stop myself from pulling her closer, stroking her curls, touching my mouth to my daughter's milky neck. I pressed my face against the shining skin, knowing it would be better if I did not, and hid my wet eyes in Lucille's snowy bib. Any second my swollen, reckless heart threatened to burst, and I had no one to blame but myself.

"That's better," Mrs. Trimbull said.

I asked in a choked voice whether she would be needing anything else. She paused only a little, watching Lucille cling to me, before bringing up the issue of underskirts.

Later that same week, Jack's father bought the parcel he'd been looking at from Emil Lindstrom's farm to the south, giving us another well, a windmill, and more forage. Jack explained it all to me when he came in from the barn, sly-eyed and grinning, the liquor on him for certain. "This puts us in the top third in the county."

"You're getting somewhere." I shifted Amelia to the other breast. "You're making something."

Jack shook his head, amused at me. "We aren't
getting
anywhere, Nell. We are there." He gazed around the tiny room, and I wondered what he saw. He couldn't have been looking at the flaking sod walls barely illuminated by the lamp's brownish light, the stained quilt slung across a narrow bed that filled the space, the side-by-side rough cradles that I didn't like to touch for the splinters. Lucille breathed noisily in hers.

He said, "We've worked hard. I'm proud of you."

Embarrassment made me smile. I gazed down at Amelia, who wouldn't notice a silly expression on her mother's face.

"When Pa and I were in town this afternoon, I went out on the street and looked. I could tell which dresses you made. I told Pa that you are Grant Station's beautification society. Just ask him. He'll tell you that's what I said."

"Jack."

"There's no one else got a wife like you." He crossed the room and put his hand on my waist. "You have the best mama, don't you?" he said to Amelia. "She's good to have around, and she gives the eyes something to rest on."

"Jack, hush. That's no talk for a baby."

"I'm trying to tell you something."

"I hear you. So do your parents." By now my embarrassment was flaming from my cheeks down across my chest. The breast Amelia was sucking at was red as a poppy.

"It's time to celebrate," Jack said. "Maybe we'll build our own house, for you and me and our thousands of children."

I nodded wordlessly, hot under his gaze, and hotter still when Amelia finished and Jack lifted her from my arms, burped her with surprising expertise, and settled her into her cradle. Then he turned to me. "Let's make the next one a boy," he said.

Jack leaned against me and untied the strings of my shift. I was certain that we could not make a son, this or any night. What Dr. Johnson had torn in fetching Amelia would never heal itself. But I would be lying if I didn't allow that Jack's embrace was a comfort, his hard hand a pleasure against my back. "Everything until now has been work," he murmured. "Now things will get easier."

"Easier? With
more
land?" I laughed, and he joined me.

"Pa hired on all three of Emil's hands. They know the place better than Emil does. With my new tractor I can till forty acres in a day. You'll see, Nell—by the end of next season, we'll be money ahead."

I had hidden my face in his neck, where I smelled the comfortable dust and sweat. Lying like this, with my husband beside me and both of the girls content, it would be easy to fall asleep. In the morning I could present Jack the dollar bills that bloated the pocket of my skirt, a pledge toward a new house on our new land. We would build that house together. I tried to imagine his face when I gave him the money, the surprised gratitude. I tried several times to think of him wearing the unfamiliar expression, or my hand holding out the bills. Every time, my brain stopped like a balky horse. For a year now I had used my thoughts like a pick and shovel to create tunnels underneath the ground of Mercer County existence, and I dwelled in those tunnels. When the unthinkable thought had first presented itself, I simply made room for it—a life with electric lights, with buildings and streetcars, without children. I made room until the thought was the obvious one, the only one, running under every day and night. I could not unthink it now without letting the walls of the tunnels cave in on me.

My brain was careening. Wildly, I tried to imagine the house filled with light, or the cows turning and talking English to us, or Jack and me joyful in the morning to see each other. The sorrow was like lightning, and I clung to Jack, who stroked my hair.

He said, "You have walked with me, every step. Even when you might shouldn't have. You've been right there. I know I don't always say so."

"Hush."

"It wants saying. I'm appreciative."

"I know that. Goodness! You are my husband." His whiskey and leather and sweat smells. I had always liked them. "Not everything needs saying," I said.

"This does," he said. "Going in town today—I felt like I saw you. You were everywhere, all over Grant Station. You're a part of the place."

"I was here at home with your children."

"I'm telling you something. There's nobody here doesn't know you."

"Town folk," I said scornfully. Sometimes that could distract him.

He shook his head. "Even if you're here at home with the babies, you're everywhere a body looks. Christ, Nell, it's a compliment."

"Not one I care for."

"Fine." His voice wasn't just angry, which I had been prepared for, but offended. He might have spent the whole ride home working to create a compliment for me, shaping it as he would shape a bench or fence rail. But Jack was a rough carpenter. When I pointed out a corner where the pieces of wood didn't join, he would say, "No one would see that but you." For him a task was finished or not. Levels of expertise did not occur to him, or the pleasures of harmony, two lines coming together so snugly that the place where they met was invisible. Surely that was beauty. But if Jack had been looking for beauty, he would say now, he wouldn't have married me. Me, Nell? I knew what my marriage had taught me: Jack Plat wouldn't recognize me if I passed him on the street.