didn’t know why she was telling me. Did I look like the kind of girl who was at home on a barstool? I lifted my chin a little so I was looking down at her and sneered, “What of it?”
She wasn’t put off. “Besides”—she jerked her head at the others, shivering ahead of us—“today’s not our day, sister.”
There were an awful lot of us. The line stretched right up the block and disappeared round the corner. And it would be so nice to sit down and get warm. I didn’t have any money for breakfast that morning, so my stomach was playing a selection of squeaky, off-key tunes all on its own.
Still, if they could only see my qualifications, give me a chance.
The poodle-haired brunette wasn’t waiting any longer. “Fine!” She rolled her eyes, the voice of reason in a world full of idiots. “I was trying to do you a favor, but if you want to catch frostbite just to be told thanks but no thanks, that’s up to you!”
“Is it heated?” I’m on the thin side, being warm is something of an Achilles heel for me.
She shot me a look like I was from the backwoods of West Virginia. “Sure it’s heated! And they got free peanuts at every table, as much as you can eat.”
As soon as I stepped out of line, the girl behind me shoved forward like I was all that was standing between her and destiny. I tossed a sad smile her way just to show her I knew better. I was off to be fed and watered for free. I’d graduated from waiting around.
The poodle brunette had a name like Ivy or Ida or Elsa, and once inside the club on Lexington, she told me right where to sit and how to play it. She got us both a basket of peanuts and we ate as much as we could stand before she brushed the shells off the table and swung into action. Hers was an entirely democratic brand of lazy hospitality—everyone was included in its warm glow, but no one was singled out; every guy figured he had a chance. Maybe because of this she was a past master at getting men to buy more rounds. It wasn’t long before the morning slipped into the afternoon and the afternoon into the evening. I probably ate a pound of peanuts that day. Soon it was time to head over to Broadway to begin another shift at the dance palace.
Now here I was, eighteen hours later, tripping over Nancy Rae’s lucky green dress, crumpled in a heap on a stranger’s floor.
My life was full of cracks, ever-widening gaps between the person I wanted to be and the person I was. When I first came to this city, they used to be small enough to laugh off or ignore. But over the past year they’d grown wider, deeper. I’d fallen in one again last night.
This was the last time, I promised myself.
The very last time.
I found my coat in the corner, thrown over a chair. My new hat, the one I’d splurged on when I got my first job, had been stepped on, squashed into a flat felt circle, the black net that had framed my face so charmingly torn and dangling miserably from a few threads.
I got dressed. Unfortunately I’m good at this—navigating creaky floorboards and sleeping men, finding clothes in the dark. It’s a loathsome talent.
All I needed now was my handbag.
I searched the floor, the bedside table, then on the dresser. A watery blue beam of moonlight streamed in from the crack in the curtains. An old-fashioned gold pocket watch and a pair of cufflinks sat on top of it. Next to them was a photograph of a dark-haired woman holding a toddler. Both were smiling—big, wide, foolish grins. “To Daddy, with all our love” was written in a woman’s rounded hand across the bottom right-hand corner.
I wanted to throw up.
The guy in the bed snorted, coughed. I spotted my bag, jammed between the bedposts, and eased it out.
The room was quiet except for the snoring and a gentle ticking sound; a steady march of time.
I picked up the watch. Solid, smooth, and heavy, it had a pleasant, reassuring weight. My fingers closed round it; it fit neatly into the palm of my hand.
Three twenty-three a.m.
Plenty of time to get back to the boarding house and sleep it off before work tonight. Plenty of time to re-iron Nancy Rae’s dress before returning it. Maybe I’d buy a paper on my way home, get a head start on finding another job. That’s what I told myself. But more likely I’d just stay in my room, too ashamed to let the other girls see me coming in at dawn, lock the door, and lie in bed all afternoon, listening to the music of the landlady’s radio seeping through the floorboards. And I’d imagine how maybe soon things would be different; a man would come into the dance hall who was decent and kind or I’d stumble across a real job or maybe finally I’d just give up altogether, go home …
Tomorrow my luck would change. Tomorrow I’d try again.
Only I had to get through tonight first.
I don’t know why I took the watch. Maybe it was just an accident. Or maybe because of the stupid hopeful grin on the woman’s face in the picture, or because of the way the man in the bed smelled like mothballs and sour sweat. Maybe just because it gave me something to hold on to.
I don’t know why. But I did.
And I really wish I hadn’t.
Because after that, things got a lot worse.
New York City was the knife’s edge of opportunity—modern and progressive. A place where a girl could leave her past behind and get a job and a life that really mattered. Every day smart young women with bobbed hair and cherry-red lips poured out of the subway stations at eight in the morning to take over the world, and no one batted an eye. No one cared either when they ended the day sipping cocktails in underground clubs next to their male colleagues.
I told everyone that I went to New York City because I didn’t want to end up just another pair of hands in a typing pool. Sharp, efficient, able to anticipate every need before it arose, I saw myself rising through the ranks and becoming indispensable to a high-powered corporate executive. I wanted freedom and excitement; that’s what I said. And that was partly true, but it wasn’t the whole story.
I had just enough ability to make my hubris seem like healthy ambition. Even after the Crash hit, I’d always landed on my feet in Boston; even been able to take my pick of jobs. I thought I could make it. And for a short time, I suppose I did. I got a job at a brokerage firm working for the CEO and bought myself a fancy new hat to celebrate. But after six months the business went bankrupt and they found him underneath his desk, burning pages from his address book. After that I received an extended lesson in humility.
Turns out I wasn’t as uniquely talented as I thought, that the city was crammed to the gills with girls with the same credentials, and the landlady at the Nightingale wasn’t very patient when it came to rent. I ended up working as a taxi dancer at the place on Broadway, the Orpheum. They were short on redheads and prided themselves on catering to all tastes. So I got a job dancing with strangers.
I went from top of my typing class to bottom of the pecking order in the girls’ locker room. I rented a secondhand gown from one of the other dancers and borrowed a pair of slippers until I got paid. The other girls weren’t particularly nice or mean, just jaded and tired. And luckily for me, there wasn’t that much competition in the redhead section. You have to sit in groups round the edge of the dance floor, blondes with blondes, brunettes with brunettes, and the guys stroll around eyeing you up the way
