Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  But, even drugged, she knew she couldn’t tell the truth.

  What she’d done to Daddy, what he’d done to her, would sound too bad. She didn’t know if Sweetie could understand how so many strands had wound together to create a rope Jane had to cut—had to!—just exactly as she did. Only a certain kind of person, someone like Jane, could understand that. A lie would be better for now.

  Besides, there was something about the tension wafting off Sweetie when Jane said Daddy fought her, that he’d caused these injuries. It bothered Jane. She didn’t want to reward her morbid eagerness. She could blame Daddy, but she didn’t want Sweetie to do it. So she changed her story right there.

  “Then your papa fought him over my momma,” she said. “He killed my daddy.”

  Sweetie gasped, and the glow of her face shrunk to a pencil point of light Jane could hardly see. The air in the room flowed into that dot, after that shrinking face, altering the room’s pressure, tightening Jane’s lungs.

  Would Sweetie believe her? Uno was a fearful man, but scared dogs bite. Somebody like that can do damage. He was cruel in the way a coward can be. This was his fault, she thought, though she knew that was a lie. She could feel the crowbar in her fingers even now.

  Sweetie’s hand, which had been resting on Jane’s knee, now gripped it hard as she looked over her shoulder to the door and then back.

  “Quiet! Don’t ever say that again. To anybody!”

  She’d gone too far, but she could fix it.

  “I won’t. Never.”

  She put her own hand on Sweetie’s, but Sweetie threw it off.

  “Rivka’s an important person. I can’t bring that into this place! It would ruin her, that mess! You want me to help you? Then don’t bring that in here, get it? I don’t need you throwing mud all over things. Nobody can know anything—especially that—about Papa. Nothing about Sacramento, the camp. Not your momma, your daddy, none of it!”

  Jane’s throat burned, wanting to backtrack, make a new story, but instead she answered simply, “It didn’t happen. None of it.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. I’m gonna start over, like you. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  Sweetie groaned. “I’ll talk to Rivka.”

  She understood how it would be.

  Sweetie rose to leave the sunporch, and, when she did, Jane’s bones melted into the bed, the smell of ocean seeping through gaps in the windows like ether.

  LIGHT speckled through salty windows onto her bed. For the first time in three days, when her eyes opened, she wasn’t thinking about pain.

  On the first night she dreamed about what she’d done, a dream like a memory, a precise retelling of horrible facts, and woke to her foot throbbing, her whole body vibrating to it, especially her head. On the second night she dreamed about Momma, what she’d made her do, things she’d said, traps she’d laid, and in the morning her foot pain was more in the skin, less inside. On the third night she dreamed of Uno, and in that dream she got it the way it needed to be. His power—his cabin, his paycheck—had tempted Momma, causing her to push Jane and Daddy into the things that happened. In that dream Uno was nothing compared to the three of them, but still, it was his fault. They didn’t feel like her own dreams, not like the kind she’d ever had before, but like somebody else was dreaming them.

  Through her windows were the backsides of several tall buildings, porches, and stairwells leading down to a patch of grass where a terrier and dozens of cats went to do their business. She pushed off the covers, examining her foot, sore but normal sized, swallowed another of Rivka’s pills, just in case, put on a housedress and pink slippers Sweetie had left for her, got Uno’s key, and opened the back sunporch door, walking downstairs to the square patch. She exited the back gate onto Clay Street. She hadn’t been outside since her arrival. The air was a salve, though people stared at her, like she’d escaped the county hospital.

  She walked two blocks to Uno’s Ford, unlocked it, and got into the back seat, keeping her feet off the part of the floorboard where Daddy had vomited. She opened the hope chest and picked a notebook off the top of a pile nineteen-deep, a pile surrounded by real books stolen from libraries in Tucum-cari, Albuquerque, Holbrook, Flagstaff, Kingman, Needles, Barstow, Bakersfield, and Fresno.

  When they’d been packing up the Studebaker to move to California four years ago, Jane had told Daddy she needed help finding paper because she was going to write up their trip.

  He’d seemed to like this idea because it put a nice polish on it—an adventure, not a failure. So he had gathered wrinkled, pocket-stuffed, left-on-the-sidewalk handbills—MEN WANTED! GOOD PAY! LAND OF MILK AND HONEY! NO CHINESE!—printed in capital letters, underlined, bolded, always exclamation marked, stapled on road signs, tree trunks, and fence posts.

  He’d stuck the point of his pocketknife under each staple to pry them off without tearing the edges. He’d tucked the sheets, folded once on the vertical, into the car’s glove box, so by the time he’d gathered enough, they all smelled of tobacco and motor oil. He’d gathered enough of those sheets for nineteen books.

  While Momma made dinner, Daddy and Jane would heat a cast iron presser at the edge of the campfire, lay one piece of paper at a time on a flat rock, place a cotton picking bag on top, sprinkle it with a few drops of water, and then press the paper until the steam laid it flat, embossing a pattern of fine scars on the underside in the contours of the stone, so you could almost see the fish and ferns embedded there between No Chinese! and Men wanted!

  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.

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p; “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.”

  She sat for two and a half hours in the radio lobby, twisting her handkerchief and trying to picture herself at the desk in the middle of this room. She’d ripped the hose on her right shin and had to remember to tuck that leg behind. Her girdle twisted, tugging her waist. No other girl in the reception room was squirming like she was. The others were delicate, right sized. Jane took up too much space, her head rising inches higher on the wall than theirs.

  When her name was called, she hobbled, unsteady on her tender foot in a heel, into a room with a massive wood table, gold shaded lamps at every seat. At the end of the table was a pink box of pastries, its lid open. Her mouth watered for flaky sugar. She’d been too nervous for breakfast.

  “Good morning, Miss Hopper. Aren’t you a striking one?” said a tiny woman with a powdered face and ruffly eyelashes, her hair still and geometric as shellacked brown concrete. “Nice to meet you.”

  Jane was so focused on slumping to get her head in the same range that she didn’t see until too late that she should reach out to shake the lady’s hand, and, by the time she did, the lady had already pulled hers back.

  “I’m Mrs. Fazio. I’m helping Mr. Simpson, our president, choose our new receptionist.” Everything dimpled, little parentheses on both sides of her mouth, on the outside of her eyes, in the middle of her cheeks, precise, delicate. “Have you worked as a receptionist before?”

  “I’ve picked tomatoes. Cotton. Walnuts.” She almost belched these wrong things.

  “My.” Mrs. Fazio frowned and smiled at once. “Well. As a receptionist, you answer telephones. Sit at the front desk and greet people. Get them to the right other people. You’re the first line of defense for the busy staff inside the building. You use your charm to manage the expectations of people who come to see someone or do something.” She closed her mouth, turning its edges up into a pretty smile that ended at her nostrils.

  Jane had no idea what she meant by all this, and her lip chewing must have telegraphed that. Did she have charm? This job didn’t sound like her, though she did wonder what the busy people inside the building did. Something in her didn’t want to play along with this.

  Mrs. Fazio blew air through pursed lips. A little more pressure and it might’ve been a whistle.

  “Why don’t we go on to the next step?” Mrs. Fazio looked at the clock over the door and dragged a big black telephone in front of Jane. “Sit. I’ll leave you here. When the telephone rings, pick it up and talk to the person on the other line. Any questions?”

  Her head was full of doubt, but she couldn’t form a question.

  Mrs. Fazio clicked her way out of the room and pulled the glass door shut behind her.

  She thought Mrs. Fazio was probably having a cigarette or going to the bathroom, relieved for some privacy. Jane wished she could escape too. She didn’t fit here.r />
  The telephone jangled six times before she picked it up. She’d never used a telephone before, though she’d seen it in the movies. The handset felt cool and heavy against her face.

  “Hello?”

  There was silence, and then a whiny male voice asked, “Who is this?”

  “Jane.”

  “What place of business?”

  “Don’t you work here?”

  “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you pretend you work here too?”

  Piss-ant, said the voice in her head.

  The contempt she heard in the phone would run through this place. People would make fun of her here. She couldn’t take that. This was a poor use of her effort.

  “This how folks prove their worth in Frisco?”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “Mrs. Fazio!” the man yelled.

  Jane’s receptionist interview was finished two minutes later but not before she’d stashed a cinnamon roll in her purse.

  Showing her back to the reception area, Mrs. Fazio advised, “Don’t call it Frisco.”

  THE next morning, Jane struggled to keep pace with Sweetie, weaving in and out of the bodies flowing down Van Ness, heading to the opera costume shop where Sweetie’d gotten Jane an interview for a junior workroom assistant job, the very one Sweetie had held at the beginning of her climb to head assistant to the designer.

  Sweetie said she liked to walk to work rather than take the bus, liked the cold morning wind, up Clay to Van Ness. Jane didn’t see how she did it so fast in heels.

  “Forget the radio. That wasn’t for you. All show, no go. Just practice.”

  Jane was grateful for Sweetie’s not acting like the radio interview was a failure.

  “This won’t be so fakey-fake. You’ll be doing actual stuff, in a hurry, for people who are making actual stuff. Much better.”