The Night Mark(48)
Blankets, cotton, white or tan—she could buy a pair for $2.75.
Men’s silk socks in black or white—$1.48 a pair. Not bad considering the silk and cashmere socks she’d gotten Hagen for Christmas had cost more than a hundred dollars.
“Oh, my God...” Maybe 1921 wouldn’t be so bad. If Faye had a spare $14.45, she could order a “Home Vibrator.” The drawing showed a woman using the vibrator to massage her head. She’d always heard foreplay began with stimulating the brain, and this woman seemed to take that literally. The advertisement said it was for “Household Use.” And she could hear Will in her head saying, “Household use? As opposed to what? Business use?” Too bad they didn’t have electricity at the house, as the vibrator needed to be plugged into a wall socket. Then again, Faye was content to take her orgasms into her own hands if necessary. Or Carrick’s.
“Not Carrick,” she said to herself. Even if she wanted to sleep with him—she didn’t—she shouldn’t. Apparently she was married, and Carrick was Catholic with a decent streak as wide as the ocean. And she was in another woman’s body in 1921. Was there any sort of birth control in the 1920s? The pull-out method, of course. She remembered the old joke—what do you call people who use the pull-out method? Parents.
Near the back of the catalog, she found houses for sale. Not real-estate listings, actual house kits that one could order and then assemble—brick and mortar not included. These weren’t the generic-looking manufactured boxes of her day. No, these houses were nice. One model called the Castleton was a beautiful two-story home with a basement and a porch. Four rooms on the first floor, four rooms on the second. She wondered what the cost of shipping on a house was. You couldn’t buy a house-assembly kit off Amazon.
“Get on that, Bezos,” Faye said. “You’re behind the times.”
A two-story four-bedroom home, and all for the low price of $1,989.
That amount was about half the mortgage payment on Hagen’s five-bedroom brick McMansion in their Columbia, South Carolina, gated community. She’d told him five bedrooms was a little excessive for two people. “But we’ll have the kids,” he’d said, as if children were inevitable and not, as they turned out to be, an unattainable fantasy.
Faye was almost scared to look at the cameras, but she made herself do it. There they were—on page 587. In 1921, Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold the Conley Junior film cameras in four sizes ranging in price from $9.85 to $17.25. The advertising copy promised they were “modern in every detail” and equipped with “Extra Rapid Rectilinear Lenses.” The Conley Fixed Focus folding camera pledged “no focusing, no guessing at distances and snapshots always sharp.” Film was for sale, of course, at forty-one cents per roll of six exposures. When Faye thought of the thousands of photographs stored on her iPhone...
She felt naked without a camera on her. She’d been a photographer since her junior year of high school. The editor of the school newspaper had been a sixteen-year-old smart-ass named Kev Conner who had been sexy in a junior-in-high-school sort of way. Being nerdy and gangly and not knowing how to flirt, Faye had joined the paper, since it had seemed like the best way to get closer to her crush. Quickly her loyalties had shifted from the guy to the job. She’d taken all the pictures for the newspaper that year, and most of the club and team photos for the yearbook. In front of a camera, she felt uncomfortable and trapped, but behind it...that was where she belonged. She’d felt powerful bossing the football players around, telling them how to stand for their team photo. And they’d done what she said. When she’d seen her name as the photo credit for the first time in the newspaper, Faye had found her calling.
It could be her calling again for the low price of $9.85 for the fixed-focus camera. She wanted to take pictures of the island and the lighthouse. The question was, did she have $9.85? Did Carrick? How much did he make a year? Did she have any money at all? Carrick had said she’d sacrificed a great deal to be with him. And apparently she didn’t do housework, at least not until today. Once upon a time, Faith Morgan must have had money. Faye would have to find out if Faith still did.
Asking Carrick for a camera was out of the question. She’d pay for it herself or she would live without it.
Faye leaned back on the couch, her hands crossed over her stomach, which was aching now from a combination of fear and greasy food. Buy a camera? Why would she buy a camera? Was she planning on staying? What choice did she have? She was here either by accident or design, so she might as well face facts.
Faye slapped the catalog closed, placed it back on the coffee table under the Bible and headed upstairs. Last night it had been so dark in the house, Faye hadn’t seen any rooms other than her bedroom and the bathroom. She’d assumed the door across from the bathroom was a linen closet or something, but when she leaned her ear against the door, she heard a low hum from inside, a sound like a wheel turning rapidly. Slowly so as not to startle Dolly, Faye opened the door and slipped inside.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Faye laughed at the sight of the Singer sewing table. It looked identical to the one in her room at the Church Street house. Except this sewing table still had the machine on it and the treadle and someone using it like it had been intended to be used. Dolly sat at the machine, her foot pumping the treadle with an easy rhythm.
Faye glanced around the room, enraptured by its feminine beauty. A twin bed sat by the wall. The rectangular wooden footboard and headboard had been painted a pale yellow, and the quilt pattern was all yellow-and-white squares. Someone had sewn a pillow-size turtle and given it a green shell. The curtains were a lacy blue and the walls a soft buttercream color. The rug on the floor was blue and yellow, and someone had decorated the bed table with three perfectly formed conch shells, one large, one medium, one small. A mirror with a bamboo frame hung on the wall, reflecting a slender white vase set in the windowsill that held a single yellow daisy. If Faye had ever dreamed of what her and Will’s baby’s nursery would look like, it would be something like this. Only they’d have a yellow crib where the bed stood. She was in her dream house. What did you call a dream house when you dreamed it in a nightmare?