Anybody Can Do Anything (8 page)

As time went on and I made friends of my own, Mary had to resort to ruses other than a promise of just plain fun, to get me to go out on some date she had arranged. Sometimes it was the promise of a good job. “Now I’m taking you to this cocktail party so you can meet Pierre,” she’d say. “He’s very French, quite old, separated from his wife, but he needs a private secretary.”

“What for?” I would ask suspiciously.

“What do you think?” Mary would say. “Because he’s a very successful broker and his secretary left last week.”

“Why?” I would ask.

“How should I know?” Mary would say. “And what difference does it make, do you want a good job or don’t you?”

At the time I was painting photographs, or working for a gangster or a rabbit grower, I can’t remember which, was eager for a good job and so I went.

Pierre was small and nimble, smelled of bay rum, had his initials on his cigarettes and, after we were introduced, propelled me over to a corner to talk business. He began the interview by stroking the inside of my bare arm with one finger as though he were honing a razor, and talking about “loff.”

After an hour of this I worked my way over to my hostess and asked her if she didn’t think I’d been in that corner long
enough. She said, “Have you and Pierre settled about the
job?”

I said, “Unh, unh, he’s been sharpening his finger on my arm and talking about ‘loff.’ “

She said, “Oh, he’s so French. I just adore Pierre. Did he tell you about women being like violins and cellos and plucking the strings?”

“Yep,” I said. “For one long hour. Will I have to take that stuff in shorthand?”

She said, “Oh, Betty! Now let’s just go talk to Pierre.”

We did and Pierre said, “Talk business at a cocktail party? Nevaire!” So I had lunch with him the next day. After we had settled ourselves in a booth in an obscure Italian restaurant and Pierre had pulled the dark red velvet curtains, I thought, “Now he’ll talk about salaries and bonuses and things like that.” I brightened my eyes, firmed my lips and tried to look efficient. Pierre took a bite of breadstick and said, “American women are afraid of loff. They are afraid of loff because they don’t know anything about it. They are like children afraid of the dark. You are afraid of loff. You are like a child. You have been married yes, but to an American. In ways of loff you are a virgin.”

The waiter brought the antipasto. Pierre took a large bite of anchovy and hot pepper then said, with his mouth full, “You are a sleeping virgin. But once awakened, Betty, my dear, you will be an exciting woman.”

I took an hour and a half for lunch, almost got fired from the job I had, and I didn’t learn a single thing about Pierre’s job. After all, when someone is telling you that you are a potential night-blooming cereus but your insides are all shriveling up like withered vines because of lack of “loff,” you can’t interrupt and ask things like, “Are you closed on Saturdays?”

I told Mary that I thought I’d forget about Pierre and his mythical job. It wasn’t that all his talk about “loff” had
made me afraid to work for him, because I had a hunch that Pierre’s virile luncheon talk was like the posing on top of a diving tower by a man who can’t swim. It was just that I couldn’t get him down to cases. I wanted to know how much the job paid, when it started, what the duties were and if I got a vacation.

Mary said, “You call up Pierre and tell him you will have lunch with him tomorrow and I’ll go along and we’ll just settle things once and for all.” So we did.

We ate in an obscure French restaurant, took two hours for lunch and settled a lot of things but they all had to do with “loff,” because just when Mary was getting ready to ask about the salary, Pierre would tell her she was a flaming hibiscus and should wear perfume in her eyebrows.

After we had left Pierre and were walking down the street, Mary said, “Let’s go up to his office and see if he has a secretary,” so we did and he did. A dusty little woman in a gray cardigan and Ground Gripper shoes, who looked as if she had been there all her life, intended to stay, and had never been interested in “loff.”

“I’ll bet he’s got a wife too,” Mary said. And he did. A dusty little woman with gray hair and thin lips, who looked as if she had been there a long time, intended to stay, and had never been interested in “loff.”

But there was something worse than having Mary get me dates, I learned; it was having a man, any man, get me a date with a pal. The thing about men is that they establish friendships on such a flimsy bases and they’re so unreasonably loyal. “You can’t talk that way about Charlie,” Johnny’d say. “Charlie’s my friend. What if he did throw up on the love seat? He said the shrimps were spoiled.”

A man not only doesn’t see anything wrong with Charlie throwing up on the love seat, he doesn’t notice other details like black patent leather oxfords, a long bob tucked behind ears, turquoise-blue suits, maroon silk socks or green teeth.

Nor does he notice faults such as belching, dipsomania, kleptomania or nymphomania, remembering old bridge hands, or a vocabulary of seven words, six of them dirty.

To him Charlie is, was and always will be, “Good old Charlie who got me out of that shellhole,” or “Old Fraternity Brother Charlie,” or “Old Golf Pal Charlie,” or “My Best Friend in High School Charlie” or “Old Outfielder Charlie.” Which all adds up to the fact that men are basically much nicer than women but haven’t any more idea than a corn borer what constitutes eligibility.

“Hello, Betty, this is Jock [Jock was a current fiancé of Mary’s], a pal of mine from California is in town and I thought it would be nice if we all went out on the highway for dinner.” This was my first experience and I said yes.

Old pal’s name was Stan and his first glaring fault was no chin. None at all. I realize that this didn’t keep him from being true blue or from making home runs on the baseball diamond but I had my standards and one of them was all my dates have chins. I said as much to Jock and he exploded.

“Oh, you women make me sick. Stan’s one of the whitest guys that ever lived.”

I said, “I don’t care if he’s so white he shines in the dark, he hasn’t any chin and he can’t dance.”

Jock said, “Jesus, women!”

My brother Cleve said, “Now, Betty, John’s only been in the penitentiary three times and they never did really prove he shot those seals.”

I said, “I don’t care about his prison record, I don’t care that he sharpens his knife on his tongue, I don’t care that he chews tobacco, but I do care that he hasn’t seen a white woman in two years and plays tag for real prizes.”

Our friend Richard said, “Betty, Osbert, an old college friend of mine, is on his way to Honolulu and I thought we’d all go dancing. I know you’ll like Osbert, he’s a wonderful guy.”

Osbert referred to Anne and Joan as “the tykes and little folks.” He called dogs “poochies”—he called Mother “Mom”—he called me “Doll Face” and he called Mary “Ginger.” He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke and he didn’t dance, but when the floor show came on and a girl wearing three strategically-placed very small patches came walking out on her hands under a blue spot, Osbert rammed and shoved his way into the very front row and became so absorbed that he didn’t even notice when the man next to him pressed the burning end of his cigar against his sleeve and set him on fire.

After the number was over, Osbert invited the eccentric dancer over to our table for a drink. She came but she turned down the drink with “No thanks, I haven’t never smoked or drank.” So Osbert ordered for her, at her request, “a chicken sangwidge on whoite bread with all whoite meat.”

The fact that she and Osbert were practically engaged before the second floor show was over, didn’t hurt my pride any. What bothered me was where he was going to pin his fraternity pin.

6: “I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me”

February, 1933, was a terrible time to be out of a job.

The HELP WANTED—FEMALE section of the papers offered “Egg Candler—Piecework basis” and “Solicit Magazine Subscriptions at home.” The employment agencies had very few jobs but were packed to overflowing with applicants—the overflow often sagging wearily against the walls clear around corners and down to the elevators.

Every day found a little better class of people selling apples on street corners and even tips about jobs from friends were embarrassingly unreliable, I learned when I applied for a supposedly excellent secretarial job and was coldly informed, to my horror, that they weren’t quite ready to interview new applicants as the former secretary had only just jumped out the window.

Business colleges persisted in the attitude that getting a job was merely a matter of dressing neatly (which according to their posters meant wearing a small knot, a short lumpy blue suit and medium-heeled black oxfords), being able to write shorthand, even words like “onomatopoeia” and “psychotherapeutic,” 150 words a minute, typewriting without errors or erasures, and not putting “he don’t” or “I seen” in business letters.

Either they didn’t know or were ashamed to mention to their students that in those days when any kind of labor was
a glut on the market, an inexperienced girl, even one with a nice fresh diploma in switchboard, comptometer, mimeograph, dictaphone, calculator, adding machine, multigraph, business law, business English, business spelling, shorthand, typewriting and arm movement handwriting, could seldom get an interview, especially in those low-heeled black oxfords.

How well I remembered my first experience with experience. I was sixteen, it was Christmas vacation and I didn’t want to work. I wanted to stay home, paint Christmas cards, dress dolls for Dede and Alison, make Christmas cookies and be cozy. But Mary had tactlessly gotten herself a job and was clogging the Will Call section of every department store in Seattle with partially-paid-for rich gifts for the family; Cleve was delivering packages for a little gift shop and had already brought home Mother’s Christmas present, a fruit basket painted gold and orange and bearing on one side, like a huge lichen, an enormous white plaster calla lily; and with such stiff competition I knew I would not be able to hold up my head Christmas morning if I gave the usual “made-it-myselfs” of handkerchief cases, sachets or my water-color of “Our Quince Tree in Springtime” slipped into an old picture frame. I had to get a job too.

I asked Mary how to go about it and she said, “Just go down to the department stores and apply. When they say, ‘Have you ever worked before,’ say, ‘Naturally,’ and name a store other than the one you’re in.”

Unfortunately I was too timid to lie and when I made the rounds of the department stores I said, “No experience but willing to learn.” “No experience,” they scoffed. “Run along—don’t waste our time—get out!”

“You can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job,” I tearfully told Mother and so she called up her friend Chauncy Randolph, who owned a large department store and told him what good grades I
had gotten in school and how nicely I kept my room and he said, “Of course, Sydney dear, we’ll find something for Betsy to do. Send her in to see me tomorrow.” So I went and Mr. Randolph, who looked and talked like “Deargrandfather,” Mother’s father, was gracious and charming and escorted me to his employment manager. The employment manager, even though he didn’t recognize me as the little worm he had scorned and thrown out of his office the day before, didn’t seem overly glad to see me.

“Ever worked before?” he sneered as soon as dear old Mr. Randolph had left.

“Not in a department store,” I said humbly.

“Well, what kind of work have you done?” he asked, his pencil poised over some sort of form.

“I’ve taken care of children and helped around the house,” I said.

“Oh, my God!” he said. “What makes you think you’ll fit in here?”

I could have said, “Because my mother’s a friend of the owner, yah, yah, yah,” but I didn’t. I got tears in my eyes and said, “I don’t know.” So the employment manager looked out of the window for a minute or two and then picked up his phone and told somebody named Burke that he had a new girl for the stockroom. Adding, “redheaded friend of Randolph’s—no experience of any kind” (deep sigh).

He had just hung up the phone when Mr. Randolph came beaming back to see how we were getting along and to further cement our friendship by taking a little black pocket comb out of his vest pocket, running it through my hair, pinning back several loose locks with a large tortoise shell hairpin, and saying as he surveyed me, “Now we look pretty and neat and are ready for work. I’ve just checked downstairs and they can use you on the first floor in neckwear. How would you like to sell Spanish shawls, Betsy?”

“Oh, I’d love to,” I chirped, “I’m majoring in art in college.”

“I know, dear, your mother told me,” Mr. Randolph said, taking my arm and leading me toward the elevators. I turned to say good-bye to the employment manager and was alarmed to find him looking exactly like our cat the the day we took the baby robin away from him.

I didn’t do very well in neckwear. I made many mistakes in my sales slips, especially in addition; I infuriated the buyer by advising customers not to buy the ugly shawls, and I laid away more presents than I could pay for, but I got experience.

The next year when I applied for a job I threw back my shoulders and said, “Experience, of course—two years,” and was immediately given a job selling imitation leather goods.

I never did learn to enjoy applying for jobs like Mary did, and I never conquered my fear of employment managers, whose intent glances and prodding questions could crush my ego like an eggshell and expose a quivering and most unemployable me—I even hated the smell of employment offices—the hot, varnishy, old-lunch-baggy, desperate smell—”but at least,” I told myself after Mr. Chalmers’ office closed, “now I’ve got experience.” I was a private secretary of almost two years’ duration and could lower a blind or kill a fly with the best of them.

So I made the rounds of the employment agencies. Mary said, “Remember, tell them you can do anything, and in any language and check
all
the machines.”

At the first employment agency I heard the woman at the desk turn down about twenty applicants because of lack of experience. “Sorry, kids,” she said, “but these days you gotta have experience.”

Instinctively I brightened. But when it came to ray turn to be interviewed, the woman glanced at my card, on which
I had checked typewriting, shorthand, filing, stencil cutting, legal forms, dictaphone, calculator, switchboard, addressograph, adding machine, multigraph and bookkeeping, in spite of never having seen most of the machines, and said sadly, “Too old.”

“Too old!” I said in amazement. “I’m only twenty-four.”

“Sorry,” she said. “For general office work, most firms want girls around eighteen.”

At the next place I didn’t check quite so many machines and the woman offered me a job as cost accountant for a lumber broker. I got as far as the elevator with the little white card and then I began to think about all that dividing everything by twelve to say nothing of trial balances, linear feet and trying to remember whether it was #2 or #3 that had the knotholes, so I tore up the card and went to the next place.

The next place was crowded but there was a brisk steady movement in and out like cans on a belt going through a labeling machine. “Must be some big plant opening,” I heard the woman in front of me say to the woman in front of her. “Everybody’s being sent out on a job,” I heard another one say jubilantly to her friend.

I filled out my card, lying about my experience and claiming proficiency in even more things like power machine operation, pattern draughting, advertising layouts and lettering, but when my turn came I saw immediately why everyone was getting a job. The woman at the desk was taking cards out of a file box at her elbow and without looking at either the applicant or the card was sending them out. Little old ladies were handed jobs as usherettes: requirements—age 25 or under, bust 34, waist 25, hips 34; stenographers were sent out as waitresses and factory workers were sent to work in beauty parlors. As she handed out the cards, the woman rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Sure, there’s a job for everybody. Sure, I’m just keeping them for my friends. I
like to see people out of work, sure I do.” The card she handed me said, “Chuck’s Speedy Service—tire repair—boy to park cars at night—salary $12.00 a week.” The card was dated July 2, 1928.

The next employment agency was across the street and was run by a woman Mary loved, who had gotten her hundreds of jobs. I showed her the card for Chuck’s Speedy Service and she said, “That poor old woman’s really slipped her trolley—she’s always been queer but this depression has finally gotten her. Now let’s see, what’s come in this morning. Nursemaid, practical nurse, experienced furrier, medical secretary, waitress and car hop. Things are tough, Betty, they really are. What’s Mary doing?”

“Selling advertising,” I told her. She said, “Well tell her to scout around for you. You’ll stand a lot better chance of getting a good salary.”

I said, “Are things really so bad?”

She said, “Things are terrible. A little girl I knew committed suicide and before the papers had been on the street ten minutes the company had had about fifty calls for her job.”

I said, “I was one of the calls. A friend of mine told me about the job but neglected to mention why it was open.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort, the job required bookkeeping experience and I know that’s not one of yours or Mary’s strong points. Well, keep in touch with me and you know I’ll call you if anything good comes up.”

Even Mary’s unofficial employment agency went through a slump that year but we, her steady customers, stayed close to her anyway because just being around her was so invigorating and gave us so many new slants on the employment situation.

“More girls have lost their jobs because of red fingernail polish, than for any other reason,” Mary told Dede one day,
pounding on the table in a tearoom so emphatically to prove her point that a muffin bounced into the cream pitcher.

“Absolutely the only way to
get
a job,” she announced another time, “is to pick out the firm you want to work for, then march right in and announce that you are going to work there because they need you.”

I said, “What if they say they do not?”

Dede said, “Show them your colorless nail polish. They’ll hire you.”

Another time when she wanted me to take a job as a practical nurse, Mary said that there was no point in even trying to get an office job any more—that girls in offices were past history—that from now on everything was to be machines.

Somewhere in between red fingernail polish and the machine age, Mary got me several different jobs. The first she heard about from a friend of an office boy who used to work for a shipping firm she sold advertising to. The job was described as being private secretary to a mining engineer, which at the time seemed too good to be true.

The mining engineer was staying at a small but elegant hotel and we were to meet him at two o’clock on the mezzanine. We repaired to Mary’s advertising agency to wash our faces and put on fresh makeup and for a briefing on my
two greatest assets.

At exactly two o’clock we appeared in the mezzanine lounge, rainsoaked but clean and ready to lie and say I could do anything.

The mining engineer, a Mr. Plumber, who was not only very prompt, but had aristocratic silvery hair and a firm handshake, got right down to business.

“Do you like to dance?” he asked me.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Do you have some girl friends who also like to dance?” he asked.

I looked over at Mary and she was shaking her head and spelling something out with her lips. I said, “I thought this was a secretarial job.”

Mr, Plumber reached over and patted my knee and said, “It is, haha, but, haha, you girls will work at the placer mine, haha, and the boys down there like to dance in the evenings and would a little girl like you be afraid to stay up at a beautiful mountain camp in California with a lot of handsome young engineers sitting around the campfire in the evening strumming guitars and singing?”

I was just going to say, “Haha, I should say a little girl like me wouldn’t. When do we start and can I bring the children?” when Mary grabbed my arm, stood us both up and said, “Come on, Betty, we’ll be late for that appointment. Mr. Plumber, the job sounds fascinating but we’ll have to talk it over with the family.”

He said, “Fine, fine and what about your girl friends?”

Mary said, “We’ll send them down to see you.”

Mary kept a firm grip on my arm but didn’t say anything until we got to the lobby. Then she rushed into a phone booth and began dialing furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked. She said, “Calling the Better Business Bureau. That man’s a white slaver. Secretaries, indeed. He’s shipping prostitutes to California.”

“How come California?” I asked. “I thought they had a lot of their own.”

“The Orient,” Mary hissed only now that she was on the trail of the biggest white slave ring in America she said, “Oddient.”

But the Better Business Bureau didn’t get the point at all. They kept talking about interstate commerce and they wanted Mary to come down and get a lot of forms for Mr. Plumber to fill out; Finally in exasperation Mary said, “Oh, my God!” hung up and went up to see a friend of ours who was a lawyer.

He said, “Probably just some lonely old buzzard who wants to meet some girls.”

Mary said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Andy. This man’s a white slaver. Why he didn’t even ask Betty if she could type. All he was interested in was whether or not she could dance.”

Andy said, “Maybe he’s a front man for Arthur Murray.”

“No wonder this country’s rotten to the core!” Mary said. “You business men are such ostriches you refuse to recognize the fact that eighty per cent of our high school graduates are being shipped to the Orient as prostitutes.”