Anybody Can Do Anything (11 page)

The nicest thing about it to me was its friendliness and the fact that they were all trying to sell
me
something. Everybody spoke to us as we went by and in spite of the depression, which was certainly as bad down there as anywhere, everyone was smiling and glad to see everybody. A small dark fruit-dealer named Louis, who was a great admirer of red hair, gave us a large bunch of Malaga grapes and two bananas. “Go good with your sandwiches,” he said.

The dining room was three flights up in the market loft, so we climbed the stairs, got our coffee, climbed more stairs and sat down at the large table by the windows always saved by our friends and always commanding a magnificent view of the Seattle waterfront, the islands and Puget Sound. Our friends, mostly artists, advertising people, newspapermen and women, writers, musicians, and book-store people, carried their sandwiches boldly and unashamedly in paper bags. Others who ate up there were not so bold.

Bank clerks, insurance salesmen and lawyers were lucky because they had briefcases and could carry bottles of milk, little puddings and potato salad in fruit jars, as well as sandwiches, without losing their dignity. But accountants and stenographers usually put down their coffee, looked sneakily around to see if they knew anyone, then slipped their sandwiches out of an inside coat pocket, purse or department store bag, as furtively as though they were smuggling morphine.

I must admit that I had false pride about taking my lunch and hated the days when it was Mary’s turn to fix the sandwiches and she would slap them together and stuff them into any old thing that came to hand—a huge greasy brown paper bag, an old printed bread wrapping, or even newspaper tied with a string.

Mary, one of those few fortunate people who are born without any false pride, laughed when I went to a Chinese store and bought a straw envelope to carry my sandwiches
in. The straw envelope made everything taste like mothballs and incense and squashed the sandwiches flat but it looked kind of like a purse. Mary said, “So we have to take our lunch. So what?” and went into I. Magnin’s swinging her big brown, greasy, paper bag.

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 bookkeeper and fur coat modeler. 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 downtown 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 gray, 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 downtown, 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-colored 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 OUT 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 seaweedy 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 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 5¢ 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 your 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 bookkeeping. “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 bookkeeping 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 neighbors 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 entry way.

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 photographs 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 bounced 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-blond hair instead of the black or bright brassy yellow that adorned most of her clientele.

Marliee 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-colored, 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 show 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 color 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 color 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 complected,” 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.