A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  What did I care how she coped with the war, with her boy’s unknown fate, with the failure every single one of us felt like a splinter we couldn’t pull free? What did it matter to me if I had to assemble a few more panels than she did and let her take the credit? Welcome to Hollywood, Evelyn. If James were here, he’d tell me to be grateful to have any work at all.

  I stormed from the hangar and headed for the bathroom, where I knew I’d find Frankie.

  She was trying hard not to let anyone hear her cry, I’d give her that. From the other side of the stall door, I could barely tell she was there, save for the occasional muffled sob. We all had an unspoken agreement about crying in the bathroom — no one acknowledged it, and no one intruded. I should have done my business, washed my hands, and left as quietly as I could. Instead, I hovered in front of the sink, picking at a loose thread on my coveralls and remembering how I had felt those first days when James had shipped out. Like I was the one whose anchor had been pulled up; like I was adrift, invisible once more, lost in the sea of Los Angeles. Much as I hated to admit it, I knew how she felt — that fishhook pulling inside me, that need to be snared on something, connected to someone, to prove that I had worth. Wasn’t it why I spent night after night hunched over my Underwood, making up stories in the hopes that someday they’d be immortalized on cellulose film? Why should I begrudge her for wanting the same?

  “Frankie — listen.” My voice was about as subtle as a nail head in the barren bathroom. The faint sounds of crying stopped. “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard when your fella’s gone and you’ve gotta fend for yourself.”

  “What do you know about it?” she snapped.

  I looked down at my shoes, my baggy leggings hiding thick ankles. “I mean, all our lives we’ve been raised to take care of men and let them take care of us. Now they’re all gone, y’know? No one told us that we could fend for ourselves, or taught us how. We’re bound to struggle.”

  “I’m not struggling,” Frankie cried. “I’m just . . .”

  “Lonely,” I said. In the silence that followed, I imagined her nodding. I traced the dented door with my fingernail. “Tell you what. Let me make it up to you, okay? Why don’t you come for dinner at my landlady’s house with me? We’d both love the company.”

  I don’t know where the idea came from, but it felt right — two lonely souls should comfort each other, shouldn’t they?

  Even more shocking, Frankie agreed.

  If I’d thought Frankie was a loaded gun before, well, it was nothing compared to the pistol she was at dinner with Mrs. Moskowitz. She could have charmed the mustache off Joe Stalin, the way she complimented Mrs. M’s stewed cabbage from her victory garden — which, let’s be frank, tasted about as appetizing as could be expected from something that came out of L.A. dirt. She didn’t quite lie to Mrs. M the way I’d heard her lie to the other girls at the plant, but she wasn’t the vulnerable, scrubbed-raw girl I’d heard in the bathroom that day either. No tall tales, but plenty of big dreams without the slightest hint of doubt weighing them down. For Frankie, fame was a one-way trip.

  “It must be hard,” Mrs. M said, “to be a girl on your own in these troubled times. When Evelyn first asked about renting a room from me, I was worried she’d never leave! What if she never found a man to marry her? How would she pay her rent? But she’s a strong girl.” She patted my hand but continued speaking like I wasn’t in the room. “She’s got a good man and she’s always found work, even if it’s not the work she wants.”

  “I think all women should be able to make it on their own,” Frankie said. “It’s not about needing a man or not — it just means she knows she can do whatever she sets out to do.”

  I dropped my napkin to the floor as an excuse to duck my head under the table; my cheeks were burning hot red.

  “C’mon,” Frankie said, after she helped me clean up Mrs. M’s kitchen and rinse out the tin cans to take to the war scrap collection. “You got a radio in your room? Let’s go listen to the news.”

  And so we crammed into my rented bedroom, Frankie perched on the edge of my narrow bed and me at my writing desk, listening to the latest broadcast from the front. I expected Frankie to really ham it up, lots of dramatic gasps and gestures like an amateur theater class, but she curled in on herself like a seashell and barely moved through the whole broadcast. Our boys were moving on Berlin. Hitler’s defeat was imminent. More POWs liberated in western Germany, new horrors uncovered in the concentration camps . . . My stomach churned and churned. What use was I against the tragedies of the world? Men like James were out there taking the fight to the brutes, while I fretted over a make-believe story in my head.

  Frankie, though, saw it differently. As soon as the news ended, she unfurled from her ball and smiled. “Just think, Evie. Those planes we built — they could’ve been the ones to drop the bombs on the Nazis. We helped set those prisoners free.”

  Well, I did a heck of a lot more of the building than Frankie did — but I smiled anyway, let her optimism thaw away some of my unease. The radio switched over to a music hour, and the sweet strains of the Glenn Miller Orchestra wove through my room.

  Frankie leaped off the mattress and held her hand out to me. “C’mon, we deserve to celebrate. Let’s dance.”

  I took her hand without even thinking about it. Frankie made everything seem natural with her easy smile. As much as I didn’t trust Frankie, I wanted to feel that ease too; I wanted to go along with her for the ride. We stumbled around at first, both of us trying to take the follower’s steps, but Frankie quickly jumped into the leader’s role and adjusted to account for my limp, threading us deftly through the narrow space between my bed and desk and wall. We were both laughing, knowing what buffoons we must have seemed, but everything else just melted away. My irritation with Frankie at the factory; my stubbornly unfinished script; James, far across the sea; and the fear of what my life would become when he returned . . . No. There was nothing in the world right then but me and Frankie and the silky chords of “In the Mood.”

  I hadn’t been wrong about Frankie, I thought, but I wasn’t wholly right about her either. She was a liar and a show-off and a terrible factory girl, but she was determined and confident and generous too. Of course her looks made it easy to like her, but it was more than just that — I liked the way her soft hands cupped mine and her soapy scent trailed through the air. I liked her gentle steps to Glenn Miller and the way she spun into a snappy dance the moment “Yankee Doodle Dandy” started up, belting in her best James Cagney impression. Frankie was born to be a star, the kind that burns herself into your mind and refuses to be forgotten, and she made me want to bask in her starlight.

  But the Andrews Sisters chimed in, crooning away about apple blossom time, and the rest of the world came crowding back. Before he shipped out, James promised to return to me, just like those song lyrics said, and make me his bride. Now that memory tied a double knot of nervousness and relief in me, and my hands fell away from Frankie’s. There’d been nothing on the news about James’s ship, or any news from the Pacific front. Was the war drawing to a close there too?

  Frankie kept slow-dancing by herself for a few seconds, then stopped and studied the look on my face. She caught her plump lower lip in her teeth and looked around my room, then spotted my typewriter in its case, and her flashbulb grin returned. “Hey, you got any of your movie scripts here? Maybe I can read from them!”

  I bashed my hip against the drawer where I kept City of Angels. “It’s — it’s not ready for a dramatic reading yet.” When her smile faltered, I said, “But why don’t you run through your monologues for me? The ones you’re practicing for the screen test. I can give you notes on them.”

  Frankie shrugged, plopped down onto the mattress. “It’s gettin’ late. I should head back.” But she made no move to stand.

  I glanced out the window; Friday night in Los Angeles was always a dicey affair. What men were still left weren’t the sort you wanted to run into in a darken
ed alleyway — zoot-suiters and draft dodgers and alcoholics and worse. “Maybe I should walk you home. And then — oh.”

  “And then walk back alone?” Frankie rolled her eyes and flopped back onto the bed. “I know. How about we have a slumber party? Like in grade school. Then I can run my lines for you in the morning.”

  I suspected then that I’d been snared in another Frankie trap. From what I’d pieced together at the factory, Frankie’s roommate had a zoot-suit-wearing boyfriend who liked to invite himself over to their place, especially after he’d been hitting the sauce. Sometimes he hit the roommate too. “You take the bed. I’ll get some spare blankets and pillows and sleep on the floor.”

  Frankie smiled at me like I’d pulled the moon down for her, and that made it even harder for me to mind being had.

  She was out cold by the time I set up my pallet — pins still in her hair, even — so I tucked myself in and pulled out James’s photo to whisper good night. I tried to imagine him whispering back, but I couldn’t remember his voice, exactly — sticky and drawling, I thought, but maybe the navy had tightened it up. Maybe I remembered it all wrong

  Two years now he’d been gone, and I’d only known him for four months before that — I was fresh off the bus at sixteen, completely clueless when it came to men. “Complications,” Mama said of them, though I never had trouble keeping away from them, and they kept away from me. James was undemanding, easygoing; sure, his letters all sounded the same after a while, but he was safe. Wasn’t it enough? Why should a girl like me think she ever deserved more?

  I must have drifted into sleep, into dreams of roaring planes and frantic Morse code beeps, then I slammed back into myself with a jolt and sat up. Moonlight trickled through my chintz curtains, highlighting the empty space in my bed where Frankie should have been. I frowned, pulled on a robe, and stepped out into the living room.

  A halo of lamplight wreathed Frankie, curled up in Mrs. M’s armchair, lips moving along with the stack of papers she was reading. My City of Angels script. I stood there for a moment, too shocked at her gall to say anything, but as I watched her, I realized she wasn’t just mouthing the lines to herself — she was becoming Kitty Cohen. Her eyebrows drew down and her shoulders rolled back and she transformed into something . . . magnificent.

  But — that script was private. It was mine. I stormed toward her and snatched it out of her hands, then headed back into my room.

  “Evie, wait!” she cried, following me into the bedroom and shutting the door behind her. “Don’t be mad!”

  “It’s not ready for anyone to see it yet. It’s not even finished.” I shoved it back into its drawer and sank back down onto my pallet, fists at my side like stones weighing me down. “You have no right to take my belongings —”

  “But Evie, it’s good.” Frankie’s eyes rounded; she leaned toward me with a dramatic flair. “I love it. A woman gangster — it’s fabulous. And she’s more than just a gangster. She’s vicious, and wonderful, and she knows what she wants . . .”

  I let my fists unfold. That’s what I wanted Kitty Cohen to be — tough and cunning and determined, a woman for whom beauty, if she had it, was only one of her many tools.

  “But the romance stinks,” Frankie said.

  I jerked my head up. “What are you talking about?”

  “The detective who’s investigating her? There’s no passion there. It’s like she’s flirting with a saltine cracker.” Frankie smiled. “You’ve gotta draw from what you know. Maybe from — from you and your James?”

  I glanced toward the nightstand, where I kept James’s letters. “Um, well . . . Why don’t you tell me about you and your fella?”

  Frankie reached for my hands then and gripped them in her own. She sat down across from me and stared right through me. My anger stilled at her touch. “They have to crackle off each other like a match and flint. Like when you look in his eyes and feel that fire in your gut, that hunger that could eat you from the inside out.”

  I nodded, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Not really. I imagined it, when I watched Lauren Bacall on screen; I tried to imagine it now, staring back at Frankie and her eyes like tarnished bronze. A current ran between us as she was consumed in her words; her hands tightened around mine, and I didn’t want her to let go.

  “You want nothing more than skin on skin, every inch of you burning and open to the other person’s touch . . .”

  The first tear sliced down my cheek, hot as a welding torch. “We’ve barely even kissed.” More tears came, but I couldn’t stop myself now. “I care for James, but I don’t feel any of what you’re — I mean, I just don’t get that from him, or from any man, and I —”

  “Shhhh.” Frankie squeezed my hands. “I know. I know how it is.”

  Then she leaned toward me and kissed my right eyelid. I clenched my eyes shut, not knowing what to do, unable to move as she kissed my left eyelid as well. It was a motherly kiss, a patient kiss — nothing like the slobbery mess I’d made kissing James, but somehow it felt more right to me than all of those combined. I opened my eyes, shaking, to find Frankie’s face looming in front of mine. She let go of my hands and pressed one quick, gentle kiss to my lips.

  Before I could react, she stood up. “Get some rest, Evie,” she said.

  But it sounded like a greeting, not a good-bye.

  Though she was gone when I woke up that morning, I couldn’t push Frankie from my thoughts. Not only the way she’d looked at me, as if she knew a secret about me that I didn’t know, but the rest of her too. Her confidence, her silky way of moving and flowing to embody whatever she needed to be. I dreaded seeing her at the factory — had it all been a foolish moment, the sort she’d flit away from like she did everything else? But she was waiting for me with her rivet gun cocked in one hand, and tossed out a Kitty Cohen line —“Looks to me like we’re gonna have to share this town, Detective”— and I knew I had no reason to fear.

  I corrected her grip on the rivet gun, and she actually followed my instructions for once.

  After that, she wound up at Mrs. M’s more evenings than not, sharing her meat ration when she was lucky enough to snag one, entertaining us with monologues after dinner before the evening news broadcast. When she acted, she was electrified. I listened to the passion in her voice and saw the sharpness in her eyes and I felt that fire spreading through me. The passion she’d spoken of.

  And we’d go into my room, and she’d seize my cheeks and kiss me.

  Slow, fast, didn’t matter; it set my head spinning with hunger. For soft skin and her hardened stare. For the swell of her hips and the dip of her waist, all feminine, all beauty, all weaponized girl. Our fingers tangled together and then parted, and we’d sleep knotted up together, her scent filling my nostrils and my dreams.

  But when I awoke, I’d remember — James. My duties, my promise to be a wife if not a homemaker, though I’d always wondered if he thought one would follow the other. I’d imagine him looking down on us and wondering why he’d never awakened that fire in me, why I’d never craved him like I craved Frankie and her starlight.

  “I love you,” Frankie would murmur, usually in her sleep, but one day she slipped it in between our struggle with a massive sheet of metal. No one was around to hear — I barely heard her through the din — but I was certain she’d said it.

  The words weighed like rope around my neck. Were we allowed to love each other? Was I in love with her? What did it mean for us to love; where could it even go?

  “What about Danny?” I asked her.

  She just shrugged and held the sheet still while I worked the edges into place. “Oh, he doesn’t care. He understands.”

  Understands what? I wanted to scream, but I was too afraid. I didn’t know what we were — laughing and kissing and dreaming together, but never looking more than a day into our future. Our future together, that was; Frankie dreamed of her own future, name in lights and face on posters.

  But maybe Danny understood. Ma
ybe this was something that could be understood. Maybe James would understand too.

  Dear James, I typed on my Underwood. My dearest James. No, cross that out.

  I’m not sure how to tell you this. What was I telling him, exactly? Even I didn’t know. I left the letter unsent.

  “Come on, Evie,” Frankie said. “We’re going out tonight.” She’d arrived at Mrs. M’s in a stunning V-neck dress, tight down to her waist, then swirling into a perfect dancing skirt that hit her calves just so. She’d painted her lips bright red and set her hair in flawless liberty curls. She helped me take in my finest floral dress so it flattered me more, then she drew black lines up the backs of our bare legs with a steady hand. “Just because stockings are rationed doesn’t mean we can’t look like a million bucks,” she said.

  I didn’t want to go out — into the seas of girls clustered around a few shore-bound sailors or, more often, exempted men pretending to be sailors, and angry zoot-suiters and the like. But Frankie said not to worry — there’d be no one like that where we were headed.

  As soon as we ducked into the nightclub, I saw just what she meant.

  In many ways, it looked like the stylish nightclub I went to with James and his friends just before he shipped out — sleek black glass and mirrors and a forty-piece brass orchestra on the main stage. Cigarette girls walked among the tables, wearing not much more than heels and red lipstick, while girls in an explosion of feathery costumes danced up front. But the crowd was all women — not a single Tom or Jerry to be seen.

  “Welcome to the Shrinking Violet,” Frankie said, looping her arm through mine. “A place for girls looking for some fun. Girls like . . .” She trailed off, but I knew what she meant.

  Like us. The words thrummed inside me, strong as a siren’s call. We weren’t alone.

  We crammed into a booth with a trio of well-dressed girls a few years older than us who peppered us with questions between performances. Frankie did most of the answering, her starlight dazzling them the same as it had dazzled me; even the waitress, Madge, seemed locked under her spell, and slipped us a drink on the house. No one was immune to Frankie, I thought; but as her hand rested on my knee, my heart swelled to know that she’d chosen me.