I forced myself to make calls the rest of that week but I diluted the agony with visits to second-hand book stores. I rationed myself, one call—one second-hand book store. Saturday morning I told Mary that we might as well face the fact that I couldn’t sell anybody anything.
“I’ll never be a salesman”, I told her as she checked her accounts and figured her commission. “I’m scared to death all the time and I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to be selling. Friday, when I called on that piston ring company, the girl asked me what I wanted and I said I didn’t know. She thought I was crazy.” Mary argued with me a little but finally had to admit that she would never get me in a frame of mind where I thought my ideas were better than Standard Oil’s.
“I guess you should take an office job”, she said. “Only don’t try to find one for yourself or you’ll end up paying them and working twenty-four hours a day. Leave it to me.”
So I did and when the next five or six months were over I had certainly had all kinds of experience or experiences, to say nothing of the several new trades I had learned and could now proudly X on employment agency cards without lying.
The first job Mary got me she told me about by saying, “It’s certainly fortunate you’re so thin.” I was so anxious to go to work I already had one arm in my coat but I stopped right there and came back to face her.
“Is this job stenography?” I asked.
“Well, in a way”, she said. “It’s a combination book-keeper and fur coat modeller. That’s why it’s so lucky you’re tall and thin.”
“It would also be lucky if I could keep books”, I said. Mary ignored me.
She said, “Remember, Betsy, we are in a depression. Nowadays anybody can do anything and does.”
“Where is it and when am I supposed to be there?” I said. “I told Mr Handel you’d be down this afternoon”, Mary said, writing the address on a scrap of paper. So I put my other arm in the other sleeve of my tweed coat and headed toward the manufacturing district. The farther down town I went the more congested the streets were with aimless, unemployed people. It had been raining all morning, it seemed to me it always rained when I was out of work, and the sky between the buildings was heavy and grey, the sidewalks were wet and everything and everybody looked cold and miserable.
The address Mary had given me was down past the Skid Road, Seattle’s flophouse district and the hangout of the unemployed loggers and millworkers, as well as the gathering place for all radicals, bums and religious crackpots.
‘This will be a good place to study the unemployed and test Mary’s theory that only the inefficient are out of work’, I thought, but as I worked my way farther and farther down town, my progress along the streets was hailed with so many catcalls and whistles that I had to abandon testing and keep my eyes straight ahead.
On one corner a seedy little man with small shifty eyes and a runny nose had collected a small crowd and was begging them to repent, while a tall sandy-haired man, with a high-domed head and large ascetic eyes, was shouting to the same apathetic crowd to do something about the dirty capitalists.
An old woman pushing a baby buggy full of newspapers and rags turned into an alley and began poking in the garbage cans. A drunken bum grabbed my arm and asked me for a quarter. Two Filipinos in huge belted camel’s-hair overcoats, long sharply-pointed mahogany-coloured shoes and hats with little feathers in them, picked their way along the street amid the jeers and rude comments of the loggers and bums.
There seemed to be a pawnshop on every corner, huge screaming banners announcing FIRE SALES, CLOSE DOWN SALE, FORCED OUT OF BUSINESS SALES, every other doorway. The musty choky smells of unwashed clothes, rancid grease, fish, doughnuts and stale coffee mingled with, and overpowered, the delicious sea-weedy salty smell of the Sound that was carried up every cross street by the wind.
‘Complete meal—15¢’ advertised restaurant after restaurant in their fly-specked windows, while unappetizing smells oozed out of their doorways. I was curious to know what they served for fifteen cents and finally by walking slowly without appearing to loiter, I was able to read a menu pasted outside a window. ‘Stew, bread and butter and all the coffee you can drink’, it said. ‘Soup and pie 50 extra.’ ‘You could live a long time on five dollars down here’, I was thinking when a soft voice behind me said, “Whatsa matter, sister, are you hungry?” I turned and fled.
At the next corner, I asked a policeman where Handel’s was and he kindly escorted me the rest of the way to the dark, gloomy, pleasantly-deserted manufacturing district, and pointed out Handel’s sign in the second-floor window of a very old red brick building. The elevator, an old-fashioned open cage, had an operator with no teeth and crusty eyes who was too feeble to close the door and asked me to help him. I did and he said, “Shanks, lady”, and wiped one of his crusty eyes on his dirty black sleeve. The marble floors of the building had a decided list to the right and I felt as if I were on board an old sailing ship as I walked down the long gloomy corridor.
Mr Handel had apparently been crouched behind the door waiting for me, for when I timidly opened the door I almost fell over him. I apologized but he, not at all nonplussed, grabbed me and shook my hand clear to my shoulder.
“Come in, come in”, he said. “Glad to see you. Take off you coat and let’s see what kind of shape you got.” I disentangled my hand and arm and took off my coat and Mr Handel looked me over very, very carefully, then said, “Kid, you got elegant lines and real class. Now let’s see you walk.” The office was only about six feet square but I walked back and forth and around the desk, weaving sinuously to avoid Mr Handel’s groping, stroking, clutching, fat little hands.
He said, “That’s fine but don’t be in such a hurry, Baby. Now I’ll get a coat and we’ll see how you look.” He slipped through a door in the back and returned with a silver musk-rat coat, a fur I had never cared for, even before it came equipped with Mr Handel’s arms as an extra dividend.
I shrugged away from him, dodged behind the desk and asked about the book-keeping. “Oh, that”, he said. “We usually do that at night.” Just then a man with a tape-measure around his neck and a white fox fur in his hands came to the back door of the office and beckoned to Handel, who said, “Wait for me, Baby, I’ll be back in a minute.” I didn’t. I ripped off the muskrat, grabbed my tweed and ran all the way to the elevator.
“Mary Bard,” I yelled ten minutes later when I burst into her office, “I’ll go back to the farm before I work for that Mr Handel. He pinched and prodded me like a leg of lamb and he said we’d do the book-keeping at night.”
Mary said, “You know he used to be such an old raper I had to sell him his advertising from across the street but I thought he’d changed.”
“What made you think so?” I said.
“Oh, I saw him up at the Olympic Hotel at a fur show I’d done the invitations for and he seemed very quiet and dignified. Of course, we were in the main dining-room”, she added reflectively.
The next job she got me was tinting photographs. She said, “This darling little woman has a photographic studio just a few doors from here, and she needs somebody to tint photographs and she’s swamped with work.”
“Does the fact that I’ve never tinted photographs interest you?” I asked.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Mary, “because I know somebody who knows how and she’s going to teach you this afternoon. Her name’s Charmion and she works across the street in that sporting goods store. She’s waiting for you now.”
Charmion had green eyes, and long black hair on her legs and arms and while she was teaching me to dip dabs of cotton in paint and rub it on photographs she also sold basketballs, golf clubs and duck decoys and went through three husbands, four lovers and four bottles of ergot, which she said worked like a charm on her. At five-thirty, Charmion had a date to have her palm read and I was pretty good at the photographs, so Mary and I went home.
The next morning, which was of course rainy, armed with my
new accomplishment and the knowledge that we needed a ton of coal, I reported for work at Marilee’s Photo Studio. The studio, which was narrow and two-storied and gave the impression of a tall thin person squeezed into a dark doorway out of the rain, was in the middle of the block on a hill so steep it had cleats on the sidewalk, and all the little shops located along it seemed to be either bracing their backs against their upper neighbours or leaning heavily on the one below. There was a shoe repair shop on one side and a print shop on the other, all a little below the street level and sharing the one trash-littered entryway.
The studio had a small show window with a skimpy, rather soiled tan half-curtain across the back and a bunched-up ratty piece of green velvet on the floor. Arranged on this were tinted photos of bold, feverish-looking girls, brides wearing glasses, and sailors and girls leaning on each other. The subjects of all the photographs bore a remarkable resemblance to each other due, no doubt, to the wholesale application of purple on cheeks and lips, red jabs in the corners of the eyes, red to the lining of the nostrils and large, white dots in the pupils of the eyes.
I tried the door but it was locked so I flattened myself against the doorway, out of the rain, and waited. I knew I was early and so was not resentful of the ten or fifteen minutes I spent watching female office workers come toiling up the hill, their chins stuck out, their behinds lagging, their faces red with exertion, or go finicking down, their black licoricy galoshes feeling for the cleats, their knees stiff so they bounded from cleat to cleat like pogo sticks.
At last the shiniest, blackest, pointiest-toed pair of galoshes turned into our entryway and I recognized Marilee instantly, because she looked exactly like all her photographs, even to the rimless octagon brides’ spectacles, except that she had ash-blonde hair instead of the black or bright brassy yellow that adorned most of her clientèle.
Marilee smiled at me, winked, said, “Wet enough for you?” and unlocked the door. The studio, square room with walls covered with a dark brown material like burlap, and a floor of a completely patterned mustard-coloured, terribly shiny linoleum, had a green-curtained doorway at one end behind which Marilee disappeared, an appointment desk in one corner, a table with a screen around it just behind the shop window and hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the bespectacled brides, bold girls and sailors and brides or sailors and bold girls. There was not one picture of a plain man, a child or somebody’s mother. Either Marilee didn’t take men, children or older women or she didn’t consider their pictures glamorous enough to adorn her walls.
When Marilee appeared again, she had removed her black satin belted raincoat and black felt policeman’s cap and was wearing a black pin-striped suit, a high-necked white blouse, black patent leather pumps, big pearl earrings and orange silk stockings. She snapped on a light over her desk, checked her appointment book, winked at me and said, “Good weather for ducks. Let’s see. Nothing doing till nine-thirty. That’ll give us time to get you started.”
She ushered me behind the screen, showed me a hook where I could hang my hat and coat, gave me a very dirty Kelly-green smock, handed me a huge stack of pictures and said, “Your sis says you was experienced so I’m going to start you right in on some orders. I take all my own photos but I send them out for developing, retouching and printing. Now up here in the corner I’ve wrote the colour of hair, eyes and so forth and so on. When you get done with a photo put it over here on this rack to dry. Here’s the cotton, here’s the paints, here’s the reducer but don’t use much. I like the colour strong. Now I gotta get set up for my first appointment. If you want to know anything, just holler.”
I picked up the first pictures. A brunette with pale eyes, a heavy nose and a straight thin mouth stared boldly right at me. I looked at the slip of paper clipped to one corner. ‘Eyes - blue—hair - black—light complexion’, it read. I gave the girl turquoise-blue eyes, luminous white skin, a bright pink mouth, a shadow on her bulbous nose, and blue highlights on her black hair. It took me quite a while but the girl looked pretty and not nearly so hard when I had finished. I was doing the mouth when I heard the studio door open and close and then voices. The appointment said, “I vant yust the head. Not the body. Yust the head.” Marilee said, “Four dollars, payable in advance, entitles you to four poses and one five-by-seven without the folder. A tinted photo is two dollars extra. Now do you want to fix up any before I take you?”
“No”, said the appointment. “Yust the head. My modder vants to see how I look before she die.”
“Okay, honey”, said Marilee. “Now sit right here. Look over here. Look over here. Look right at me. Now look up here at my hand. Now you’re all done. You can git your proofs Wednesday.” The door closed and from my work-table I watched Yust the Head’s black torso go toiling up the steep hill.
My next picture was also a brunette but with brown eyes, it said in the comer. I gave her olive skin, orangy red lips and golden highlights in her dark brown hair.
Marilee’s next customer was a fat girl with scarlet cheeks, who shyly asked if she could be posed to look thinner. “The camera don’t lie”, said Marilee heartlessly. “Four dollars in advance, do you wish it tinted and what type folder?”
I peeked around the screen. The fat girl was crouched on the piano bench on which Marilee posed her subjects, looking terrified as if she were about to have a tonsillectomy without anaesthetic. Marilee came out from under her black cloth and squinted at the girl. “Come on, honey”, she said winking, “let’s have a nice big smile, look at the birdie, now. Tweet, tweet.”
She adjusted her light so that its several hundred watt illuminated the fat girl’s miserable face harshly without any shadows, reduced her eyes to squinting pinpoints and changed her from a nice shiny apple to a doughy pudding. Still not satisfied, Marilee clicked over on her shiny black slippers, gripped the girl by the chin and the back of her head and forced her head to the side and back into a most unnatural tortured position. “That’ll give you a neck”, she said. “Now let’s have a great big smile.”
The girl tried again. Marilee said, “Oh, golly, honey, that was a dream and would it look good tinted. Our tinting’s only two dollars for a great big five-by-seven. Now look right at me. Think of that boy friend. Now to the left. OK. All done. You can git your proofs Wednesday. With your colouring you should really have one tinted.” The girl mumbled something and Marilee said, “That’ll be two dollars. All tinting’s paid for in advance.” I checked my colours to be sure I had a full tube of red for those enormous cheeks.
At noon Marilee came to examine my work. I had all my finished pictures on the rack and was frankly proud of them. Marilee squinted her eyes, clicked her tongue with her teeth and said, “God, honey, you’re not getting’ the idea at all. Not enough colour. When people pay for tinting they want colour. Now here watch me.” She grabbed one of my best pictures, a redhead with copper-coloured hair, amber eyes and coral lips, and went to work. She changed the hair to bright unrelieved orange, the eyes to turquoise blue with large white dots in the pupils, scrubbed plenty of magenta on the cheeks and lips and then carefully, with a toothpick dipped in paint, put red jabs in the corners of the eyes and outlined the nostrils in bright red. The girl, except for the colour of her hair, now looked exactly like Marilee and exactly like all the other pictures. Marilee said, “That’s better, eh? Now fix up the rest of ’em.”
At first I was resentful, then I thought, ‘How ridiculous—it’s Marilee’s studio and if she wants purple lips and flaming red nostrils it’s her privilege.’ So I tinted the photographs the way she wanted them and the work went much faster.
By Saturday noon I had caught up with all the orders and Marilee and I were ‘real girl chums’. I knew all about Mama, who was a Rosicrucian, a diabetic and raised lovebirds. I knew all about sister Alma who was married to a sailor and followed him to ‘Frisco, Dago, L.A. and Long Beach’. I knew about Marilee’s boy friend, Ernie, who was a chiropractor and would love to give me treatment any night after work.
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She said, “Honest to God, some nights Mama is all tied up in knots and Ernie works her over and you can hear her bones crack a block away—it’s just like pistol shots. Mama says she don’t think she could carry on if it wasn’t for Ernie.”
I didn’t want any bones cracking like pistol shots and I didn’t relish being worked over by Ernie, but I didn’t want to hurt Marilee’s feelings so I said I’d call her and set a date.
She said, “Gosh, honey, it’s been like a shot in the arm havin’ you here. I’m real sorry the work’s all caught up but I’ll call you the minute I pile up some more orders.”
Marilee gave me $28.45 in crumpled bills and a little package. “Open it”, she said, winking and smiling. “It’s a surprise. Go wan.” I did and there in a little leather frame was a tinted photograph of me. I could tell it was me because the hair was orange.
“Oh, it’s beautiful! Thank you, Marilee”, I squealed, looking with horror at the turquoise-blue, hard, sexy eyes, flaring red-lined nostrils and purple lips.
Marilee said, “You remember that day I asked you to pose for me so I could adjust the camera?” I remembered. “I tinted it last night”, she said.
I kissed her good-bye and promised to have her out to dinner but I never did, because when I went to look for her, after working for a rabbit grower, a lawyer, a credit bureau, a purse seiner, a florist, a public stenographer, a dentist, a laboratory of clinical medicine and a gangster, I found her little shop closed, the bespectacled brides and sailors and girls gone from her show window.
I asked the shoe repair man next door if he knew what had happened to Marilee but he said, “I dona know. People coma and goa inna depresh.” The printer, however, told me that Marilee’s mother had died (I wondered if those treatments of Ernie’s with her poor old bones cracking like pistol shots had anything to do with her sudden demise), and she and Ernie had gone to California to be with her sis. I thought that Ernie and Marilee could work out a dual business. After she had twisted and bent a customer into one of her poses, Ernie could give him a treatment to get him back in shape.