Girls In 3-B, The (3 page)

"Let the porter worry," Pat advised. She hadn't changed her clothes for the trip, and she seemed not at all bothered by her shabbiness or the fact that her hair needed cutting and setting. Barby looked at her with wonder. She was always conscious of how she looked and felt uncomfortable if she was untidy.
Maybe,
she thought hopefully,
I'll be a different person from here on out.

I ought to make a poem about the man with the shovel,
Annice told herself,
but then, Sandburg beat me to it. I ought to be feeling
this more.
She opened her compact and examined her reflection carefully, torn between an artistic indifference to appearances and a feminine urge to look her best for this special occasion. She had a thin sensitive face with a spattering of freckles on the high cheekbones, green-gray eyes, a tangle of reddish hair. People who discovered that she wrote verse
--
unpublished so far except in the school paper
--
said she looked like Edna St. Vincent Millay. She snapped the compact shut, satisfied with what she saw.

The train slowed, jolted, gathered speed again, jolted and stopped. A fat matron across the aisle staggered. Pat stood up, gathering her last year's purse and jacket. "Come on, kids, we're in."

Three pairs of high heels clicked in cadence across the vast echoing lobby. But we're nothing
, Annice thought in sudden panic
. It's too big
.
All these people living their own lives and going about their own business--there's too many of them. One person doesn't count for anything. I'm nothing; nobody even knows I'm alive
. She hunched her narrow shoulders as though seeking refuge within herself.

Barby took a deep breath.
I'm safe. Nobody's looking at me, nobody even knows I'm alive.
She took off her glasses, which she wore for studying and close work even though her father hated them. A very young sailor turned to look after her with appreciation. She ignored him. She would ever see him again.

 Pat said crossly, "For Pete sake come on, I'm hungry.”

"How are we fixed for money?"

"I've got a hundred dollars."

"Rich bitch," Pat said. "I've got fifty, and that's all till I earn some."

"I have eighty," Annice said. "But my tuition's paid."

Barby was silent. Her father had found a job for her, after all his reasoning and arguing had failed to change her mind.
Oh God,
she thought,
I
get so sick of being reasoned with, why can't he just tell me like other fathers do? He only does it to get his own way without acting like a boss or turning me against him, it's a fake, and I never think of any good arguments until too late.
Persuaded against his will, then, that she was really setting off on this wild-goose chase, this crazy scheme her mother had aided and abetted her in, he had strong-armed one of the salesmen who came into the store, and now she had a way to earn her living. Fifty dollars a week. That sounded like a lot of money, but she knew it wasn't
--
her gray suit had cost more than that. The work would be easy, though; as Mr. Levin described it, it was no more than she had done in the store on Saturdays and through the Christmas rush
--
tightening buttons, checking zippers, dry-cleaning lipstick spots, making out price tags. Dull, but easy. A job is a job.

Still, she would have liked to find something on her own. If only he hadn't had anything to do with it. "Let’s take a taxi. How far is it?"

"Let's walk a while. I want to look in the store windows."

"Where is this Y hotel anyhow
?
Seems funny for girls to go to a Y."

"It's a regular hotel is all, only cheap. Not like the Y back home."

"Oh."

They came out into the sunshine on Jackson. The bridge vibrated under their feet with the thunder of buses and trucks. Tall buildings rose ahead of them. The people were

ordinary-looking. Annice had expected something exotic and citified, not these sunburned men in sport shirts, these barelegged and bareheaded office girls. Two Chinese girls in high-collared, split dresses went by; she was grateful.

The last traces of Barby's unease vanished. The sunshine was so bright.
It’s so big,
she thought happily, lifting her gaze from the sidewalk to the row on row of windows. The people hurrying past held no menace for her; they had their own affairs to take care of. The buildings were vast and impersonal. This new glass-brick and cement-block structure, with bits of paper still glued to the windows, with baby trees at either side of the entrance still rooted in balled burlap
--
how many people would work there, meaning nothing to one another, going home at five o'clock to live their separate fives? She said softly, "I like it."

Pat said, "I'm hungry." This was the time of day when the little kids would be coming in from their play to have a snack. Mom would pour milk and spread peanut-butter for them, and then sit down at the kitchen table and have a cup of coffee before she tackled the ironing. The familiar shabby kitchen wavered before her.
They didn't have to be so damn happy to see me go,
she thought, "Let's stop in a Toffenetti's and eat."

Barby said reluctantly, "There's a girl I bunked with at camp last summer, Jonni Foster
--
I have her number."

"Well, okay, we'll eat in a drugstore. You can call her."

No,
Barby thought, shrinking from touching another life so soon, spoiling the wonderful impersonality of it.
Not somebody we have to know.
But she kept still; she had started this, she had to see it through.
Me and my big mouth,
she thought.

She went into a drugstore booth and dialed with a reluctant finger, while the others took possession of three stools at the fountain and scanned the mimeographed menu.

* * *

Barby felt better about it, when Jonni was shown up to their room in the Y. She helped them unpack and politely admired the room, although the impressive bulk of the Conrad Hilton, a block over on Michigan, made it look small and shabby. Barby sat on the edge of the bed, barefoot, checking the want ads in the evening papers. They had bought all of them, pleased because they were so bulky. "We’ll find a place right away," she said, running a finger down the To Let columns. "Why do so many places only want men?"

"That figures," Pat said. "Women hang their wet laundry in the bathroom and get cold cream on the pillowcases. I guess they bring men home with them too. Men keep their sex life on the outside."

Annice said, "That sounds like a corny joke."

"Well, I haven't got any sex life, so what difference does it make?"

Jonni Foster giggled. For a year Barby had been thinking of her with shorts and a peeling nose; she hardly recognized the thin, elegant creature in the high-waisted dress and short enameled haircut who sat in the one armchair. Jonni had on the new pointed, thin-heeled shoes; her lipstick was the latest shade; she was fragrant with Chanel Number Five. She had a late date, she said; she couldn't stay. "There's plenty of it around."

"But how do you meet boys
--
men?"

"The same as anywhere. They work in the same office. Or they sit next to you in a restaurant. Maybe live in the same building. I don't know, how do you meet men in Waterloo, Iowa? That's where I'm from."

Barby wasn't interested in men. "Says here two and a half rooms. What's a half room
?
"

"Kitchenette. It would be semi-portioned with a counter and stove, maybe. Where is it?"

"Fifty-six hundred south."

Jonni peered over her shoulder. "That's the University district. It might be okay, or it might not. You run into a lot of fairies down there. Then there's a lot of beautiful old houses, nice people. That's where the artists and intellectuals live, I guess."

"What do you mean, artists
?
"

"Some are just beard and beret boys. Beat generation fakes. There's some real ones too." Jonni shrugged. "I don't know if they're any good or not. But anyhow the rent won't be too high at that address and the I.C. is handy.”

"Is it safe?"

"Safe enough. You don't walk down dark alleys at night even in Waterloo." She had been gone from Waterloo long enough to stop hating it, she explained. A whole year. "It's a nice little town. I only hope I never have to live there, is all. Human nature's the same most anywhere."

"Reminds me of a story I heard," Pat said grinning. "This girl got a scholarship to go to New York and study art, and her mother was all upset about it. So she went to the priest for advice. 'Just think what might happen to my daughter in one of those studios. 'And the priest said, 'Just think what might happen to her in an Iowa haymow.' They bale it now, but it's the same idea."

Barby said with distaste, "Don't you kids ever think about anything but men?"

"What else is there to think about?"

Jonni said, "The boys here are exactly like the ones back home. You can tell every move they're going to make while they're still leading up to it real subtle-like, they think."

Annice was silent. She walked across the room and looked at herself in the long mirror of the dressing table. She wore the flowered pajamas her mother had bought for her, the same pair she had rejected so scornfully only this afternoon
--
it was all right now she no longer had to assert her independence. They were cooler than a dress and more easily laundered than pedal-pushers. The short full top only made her look smaller and thinner. Little, bird-boned, with narrow hands and feet, her chest nearly flat when not helped out with latex and boning, she couldn't help knowing that her looks were right for this year's styles. That pleased her. So did her walk, which was light and graceful. She smiled at her reflection.

"You kids have jobs lined up
?
"

Annice said, "I'm at the Pier, U. of I. But not for long, I hope."

Pat puckered her eyebrows. "I'm looking." "Plenty of jobs around. The papers are full of unemployment, but I haven't seen any.”

"I don't know how to get started.”

"Typing? Shorthand?”

"Some. I can spell."

"There's this girl in my building, she works for a publisher. They might have an opening. I don't know how much they pay," Jonni said, "the more highbrow a job is the less it pays as a rule, but you could ask."

"I could try it, anyhow," Pat said gratefully.

Barby tore off the margin of the Want Ad page for the phone number.

"People are nice," Pat said when Jonni had left. "You hear a lot of stuff about big cities, how cold and impersonal they are and all that jazz. I don't think so."

Barby said, "Maybe it's because everybody comes from someplace else."

After they had gone to bed in the double room Annice sat by the window in the adjoining single, her elbows propped on the grimy sill, looking out. Below were traffic lights, neon signs blinking on and off, the headlamps of cars making a weaving pattern that dazzled her. She shut her eyes, but the glow was still there, behind the lids. A gentle summer breeze blew in from Lake Michigan.

She thought,
this, is where I belong. Somewhere in this big city is all the romance and beauty and excitement I've always wanted to find.
She smiled. Let the others fuss about jobs and finding a place to live. Those things would work out; somebody always took care of them. This was her town. This was the place where she would find love and fame. Fame could wait if it had to
--
she was young, there was plenty of time. But love was the big thing, the thing to look for first of all.

There was a mixture of guilt and pleasure in being downtown when everyone else was at work, like playing hooky from school or going to the movies when you were supposed to be home helping Mom with the Saturday cleaning. Pat crossed the intersection of Jackson and Wabash under the clatter and clang of the El and stood uncertainly watching the pedestrians run into the middle of the street after a slowing bus. A couple of men with briefcases bumped into her from behind. She realized that the light had changed and the cop was holding back a block-long line of cars and taxis. She hurried across, feeling in her embarrassment that the tall buildings were going to tip over on her.

The Walgreen's at the corner of State and Jackson looked comfortingly like the Walgreen's back home, and she thought about going in and having a cup of coffee. Then she decided against it, on the ground that she was too nervous to sit still. She turned north and walked down State, irked because she was early for her appointment and anxious to get it over with. Annice and Barby had been out of bed half an hour before the alarm went off, talking loud enough to wake everyone in the building and trying on all their different clothes and cosmetics. There hadn't been any point in trying to sleep with all that gabble-gabble going on, so she had gotten up too, and now she was out on the sidewalk without anything to do until ten o'clock.

The outlines of the street map she had memorized last night were clear in her mind, but it was hard to relate the complex noisy streets to the line drawings. She paused long enough to verify Adams on a street-corner sign and then walked on with more assurance, reminding herself that she could ask a cop or a newsstand man if she really got lost. Play it cool, she advised herself. It's just a job. If I don't get this one I'll find another. She took a deep breath.

The Fort Dearborn Press was located on the fourteenth floor of an office building on Dearborn, although she found out later that there was no connection. The surroundings were unpretentious; the building was set between a United Cigar store on one side and a Tru-Value dress shop on the other, but the lobby was ornate enough to scare her all over again. It was paneled in marble like pressed veal and had two thick, swirly, obviously genuine oil paintings on the wall
--
you could see the brush marks. In one, an Indian family was sitting in front of their wigwam, or tepee, with a bunch of pine trees in the background. In the other, a black-robed priest was preaching to a respectful Indian congregation. All of the Indians looked alike, with thin, intellectual faces and long noses.