The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (45 page)

"This season's new lines suit many different figures," I said.

"They say that Madame Annelle is the one to go to for the newest looks. She can erase ten years from the dowdiest figure." He did not shift from his unhappy posture. "They say she's telling stories, too."

"You can hardly blame me for that, George."

"A pretty tawdry way of drumming up business."

I peered at him—the unnaturally high color in his cheeks, the peculiar pinch to his mouth. "'Tawdry,'" I said. "To choose a word at random."

"Madame Annelle was always too refined to gossip."

"Not a bit. Madame Annelle has always known how to tell a story with refinement. She is famous for it."

"You've got to stop," he said. I can only guess what my face looked like, because he immediately amended, "Please stop. No one needs to know our business. The stories are making it too hard."

He didn't meet my eyes, and I didn't blame him. He should be ashamed of himself. "Goodness. Who would have imagined that ladies' gossip would make any difference to a fellow who fixes oil rigs?"

"I've been scouting new sites, starting new wells. I meet people every day. You're not the only one with a career."

"Things have changed, George. I'm a lady alone now. If my career doesn't succeed, Mary and I cannot survive."

"You're making it hard," he said doggedly.

"You've said."

"You're making it hard for Lisette."

The moment glittered. "That's a shame."

"Her sister is getting ahead. She's been cast in a picture."

"A Western. She'll play a barmaid. Already people are talking about her 'natural charm.'"

"I see I can't surprise you," he said.

"Perhaps Aimée's new success will open doors for her sister."

"They better open fast," George said. "She's expecting."

The tiny noises that surrounded us—birds, a light breeze, Rose's laundress laboring over a scrub board outside—rushed away from me. My head rang with silence. Like an actress in an old nickel flicker, I put my hand to my breast and could feel my heart thundering. "You have surprised me, George. Congratulations."

"You misunderstand. She was pregnant when she arrived at our house. That's why she came."

This time I literally took a step back, steadying myself against the table. I thought of Lisette reaching for another biscuit at supper, wearing loose chemises, avoiding any dress with a waist. When she pulled herself out of bed, she wanted coffee and a cigarette and breakfast, right away. She had not inherited my tendency to morning sickness.

I sank onto a straight chair, and George pulled up another beside me. "She thought that if she could get started in pictures quickly enough, she might pull this off. Even now she can put on a corset and you'd hardly know."

"How far along is she?"

George held out his hands to indicate a belly, easy with Li-sette's proportions. I said, "Take that corset away from her. She'll harm the child."

"I wondered. I wasn't sure what to tell her."

"A cat would know that."

"Lisette doesn't seem to know very much, to tell you the truth." Eager now, George leaned toward me. "She said the baby had been kicking her for two weeks before she figured out what the feeling was. She thought it was indigestion and kept taking milk of magnesia."

"It doesn't feel a bit like indigestion," I said.

He inched his chair closer to mine. He was not smiling, but the redness had faded from his face, and he looked familiar again. "She's like a kitten that's having kittens. She keeps looking at her body like it's talking to her in a foreign language. She fell the other day, on the front step. Lost her balance. She was put out when I insisted on picking her up."

"Was she now?"

"I brought her back to the chesterfield and let her eat there; it didn't seem like a good idea for her to walk until the dizziness passed. Aimée was home, and she helped. But a sister and me—we're not what Lisette needs."

I didn't mean for the pause that followed to be cruel, although it probably seemed that way to George. He ran his fingers over his thin hair. Then he did it again. "You told me to leave," I said.

"I didn't know about Lisette then." Into the next long pause, he said, "She's your daughter."

"Which doesn't give me much option."

"No, it doesn't."

Through the window, I could hear Mary's laugh. Probably she had found the cat. I was glad she was not able to see George's sad face. I said, "You're asking me to come back."

"Yes, I am."

"Would you have asked me anyway, if Lisette weren't in the family way?"

What followed was the longest silence yet. I could feel George picking up and discarding answers. Mary's footfalls, muffled by the thick grass, ran out of earshot and back again before George said, "What do you want me to tell you, Nell?"

"Never mind. I shouldn't have asked."

"I feel like I'm living in a dream. I open a door, and it leads into a new room that has a door in it that leads to a new room. The rooms haven't stopped yet."

"Isn't that just—life?"

"No. Life is what is waiting in South Gate. It was sitting on the chesterfield when I left and it will be sitting there when I get back."

"You got that right." The rage was upon me so abruptly that I did not have time to contain myself or to remember that I had no right to rage. "You don't want much, do you? Just someone to come in and tend your mistress, who's carrying another man's child. You could have picked better, George."

"I didn't know that mistresses were on offer. And I didn't bring her into the house. That was your work, Nell. Christ, you were always a hard worker."

"There was a time you thought that was a good thing."

"I'm here now." His words weren't an answer, nor did he intend them to be. But his eyes were beseeching. I could not for the life of me tell whether he was beseeching me to come back to him with our child, or to come and take care of the woman who had moved into our bed.

Not everything that breaks between people can be repaired. George's face was yellow from lack of sleep, and he didn't look altogether clean. Hairs had started to crop up along the tops of his ears. Madame Annelle appeared in my mind, so
chic,
so
élégante.
My mouth automatically screwed itself into Madame Annelle's moue, that tiny, unyielding expression. Eventually her mouth would disappear entirely, an act that would be applauded by her public, who loved everything she refused to give them.

Deliberately, I ran my tongue over my lips and opened my mouth. I said, "A daily walk would be good for Lisette and for the baby, too." If I concentrated, I could keep every whiff of a French accent from my words.

"She needs you to tell her that," George said.

"Things will sound different now," I said.

"I know," he said. "It's time for her mother to take charge."

To pack up Mary's and my things wouldn't require more than an hour. I had no intention of taking the plates and vases and pictures and teapots that had come to clutter the cottage. But I wanted to talk to Rose, who protested that there was still much we had not done—the lunches she had planned, nights at the theater. "I'm going to South Gate," I said. "Not to the North Pole."

"We were starting a new life," she said. "Two scrappy girls from Kansas."

"I thought we put Kansas behind us."

"Don't be silly," she said. "We brought it with us. Kansas is the secret to our success."

"It's a secret to me, too," I said, suffering the look that Rose gave me, both pitying and amused. Her Kansas had been different from mine.

George came for me the next day, wearing a straw hat I had not seen before, with a deep maroon ribbon. Mary snatched it and put it on her own head, where it hung over her ears. "The season's new color," I said.

"I was told."

"I expect you've been told all kinds of things lately."

Packing us into the Ford, he didn't answer. When Rose came out to bid us goodbye, he managed to be polite, but he tapped his foot and jiggled his hands in his pockets, and once we were in the car he practically threw it into gear, roaring onto Montana Avenue with its deep lawns and fanciful houses. Mary's favorite was the one that looked like it had been plucked out of Italy, with its red tile roof and wide verandas. Beside it was my favorite, half-timbered and draped with climbing roses like a fairytale castle. Our house in South Gate boasted white shingles and looked exactly like the houses on either side. Taking a corner hard, George clutched his hat to keep it from flying off.

"Did Lisette get a matching hat?" I said. "That maroon would suit her. Did she tell you that?"

"Give her a chance, Nell."

"I'm asking a question."

"The girl needs you, even if she doesn't want to admit it. She cries."

The way he cut off his sentence made me understand he had nearly said,
She cries at night.
She could join the club.

I let Mary run into the house ahead of George and me. Her appearance would let Lisette know I was coming, in case she wanted a moment to prepare. As things turned out, though, I was the one who needed the preparation. Lisette was reclining on the chesterfield when I came in, and she turned her head slowly. "Hello, Mother."

She was massive. She must have been wearing corsets already before I left, because no one could put on this much flesh in a few weeks. Her belly was huge in every direction, not only forward but side to side, so big and awkward that I could imagine not merely a baby in there but a layette, too, and perhaps some small piece of furniture.

Her ankles had nearly disappeared, and her arms gleamed, shiny and taut as balloons. Even her back, whose creamy length had been her best feature, must have broadened, judging from the pull at her dress. Normally when I was around big women I felt lithe, but Lisette's size didn't have the roll and sway of fat. She had the quality of a rock formation, and I felt insubstantial before her.

"Did George tell you to come?" she said.

"Yes."

"I told him not to do that."

"Well, he did."

She turned her impassive head away from me, a boulder resettling itself atop a mountain. I heard what she was not saying: the conversation in which she had told George not to fetch me. The many conversations she and George had had, and the many things they had talked about. Looking at her, I realized that she had not been to any studios since I left. She probably could not ride the streetcar. Whatever George had heard about the stories I told clients, he heard himself, not through Lisette.

"You need to walk more," I said. "You and the baby need the exercise. Have you started to think about names?" Into the pool of silence that followed, I added, "You'll get used to thinking about the baby. It's a normal thing to do. Most mothers like it." I said, "I loved thinking about you. You were the one thing that made me happy, when I was carrying you." Eventually, I left the room. I couldn't force her to talk to me, even when I told her the truth.

Through the next days, as Mary happily settled back into what she called her "right life," I watched Lisette move from one resting place to another—already she needed help getting up from the bed. At the kitchen table, she picked up a fork, put it down, picked it up again. To bend over had become impossible, and she gave up on stockings. In the hot afternoons, she gave up on shoes, too, and moved unshod with surprising grace. Once, while I watched Lisette, the image of Mama flew back into my mind with a vividness I hadn't felt in many years. Her body had filled our soddie's dark rooms. Her powdery skin and the coarse cloth of her aprons, her bare feet patting across the smooth dirt floor. Her sweet, low voice, which sounded as if it were singing even when she was reminding us to fetch water. At that moment, I would have given everything I had—memory and chance for happiness, career, everything except Mary—to see my mother again.

I watched Lisette only the more avidly after that; she was the keeper of my happiness and my unhappiness, which I suppose is one definition of a daughter. Like so many of my thoughts anymore, it was bleak. I didn't suppose Mama would have understood it, but Pa would have. And Lisette, too, though I had sense enough not to share it with her.

She and George operated around each other with grave courteousness that made it difficult to remember the heat that had blazed just weeks before. What existed now was familiar without being warm. When he came home from work, George opened a can of sardines, reached for Mary's favorite flowered plate, and arranged the oily little fish, bright as nickels, in a circle with a handful of saltines in the middle. He had never picked up a plate before; I didn't think he knew how. Now, when I tried to help him, he restacked the saltines I had disarranged. "I know how she wants them," he said.

I couldn't find the spirit to be hurt. There was no surprise on that fussily arranged plate, as there was no surprise in the practiced way Lisette accepted it. When George had ordered me out of the house, he had been ignited on pure wrath, and Lisette had burned with fuel of her own—vengeance, thrill, perhaps some genuine affection for George with his open face and considerate ways. Anybody knew what would happen in a building holding these two. The amazing thing was that they hadn't burned the place down.

Now that I was back home, George looked at me with a face both hunted and hopeful. He was ready to talk. Sweet God, wasn't there enough broken between us? His broad face met me at doorways and around corners, and I could see the words boiling behind his lips. Even without knowing what they were, I could see that they would take our lives beyond repair. Maybe we needed to do that. Probably we did. But that was no reason for me to embrace my ruin.

With a cunning Lisette might have admired, I cut him off at every conversational pass. I chattered about Mary, about weather, about the complaints concerning the noise and smell from the new foundry half a mile away. At night, I slept on the chesterfield. In the morning, George would catch me by the elbow and pull me outside to walk, where we couldn't be overheard. Before he could say anything, I started up again: Lisette didn't look healthy. Did he think she was eating well?