Boy, Snow, Bird(7)

There were houses along the road back into town. I hadn’t taken much notice of them when I was walking toward the trees, but the closer it got to nightfall, the more those houses stood out. They were mostly basic, hutlike structures, and the majority of them looked abandoned, but I saw stripy curtains here and there, or a basketball hoop fixed to an outer wall with a freshly chalked scoreboard beside it. One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: “Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years . . .” and so on. The front door was open, and the porch light was on, and a little girl came around the side of the house, singing loudly. I couldn’t see her face properly—it was obscured by clouds of dark hair with big red flowers plaited into them—but she had a large cookie in each hand and more in the pockets of her dress, and I wanted to go in at the door behind her, sit down at the old piano I could see in the living room while she stood on tiptoes to retrieve the glass of milk set on top of it. Her voice sounded exactly the way I’d thought it would sound. For some reason that scared me, so I didn’t stop at the gate to greet her even though I heard her saying “Hi” in a startled way. I just said “Hi, Snow” as if we’d met before, when of course we hadn’t, and I kept going, kept my gaze fixed on the road ahead of me. “Scared” doesn’t even really describe it. I almost crossed myself. It felt like the evil eye had fallen upon us both.





3

i became well acquainted with the Help Wanted column in the local paper. I read it in the mornings, lying in bed with my little wireless set on my chest, pouring piano concertos directly into my heart as I scanned job descriptions I couldn’t answer to. I continued my reading at the Mitchell Street lunch counter, where Gertrude the waitress called me (and everyone) “schatzie” and kidded that I was cold-blooded because I drank my coffee without blowing on it first. One day I opened the newspaper to Help Wanted as usual, slumped for no particular reason, ordered a cream soda for a change, and started reading an article on the other half of the page. A “shy, quiet” girl of sixteen had been missing for a month and a half, and various developments had led to the police dragging the river. They’d found the remains of a young female, but apparently it wasn’t the shy, quiet girl—this one was older, “somewhere between twenty and twenty-six years old, well nourished . . .” The police were looking for help identifying the body, and there were a couple of other details, but it was “well nourished” I got stuck on. How could they say that? How was that going to help jog people’s memories? Were they calling her fat? I mean, being well nourished is good, it means you’re healthy. But when you’re dead and someone says that about you without any kind of modification to the description—I guess it’s all wrong to describe a corpse as “well nourished yet slender”—I just wouldn’t want that for myself. I pushed the cream soda away. I should cut back on treats. I pulled my cream soda back toward me, feeling as embarrassed as if I’d just said that out loud. What a way to be thinking when some poor girl had been murdered. I returned to the Help Wanted column and read it with extra attention to make up for the past few minutes’ slacking. A company that specialized in cocktail mixers had put a call out for blondes (lots of blondes, most shapes, shades, and sizes! Tell your friends!) to act as hostesses for their Valentine’s Day soiree. It was a one-off, an evening cruise on Lake Quinsigamond in a party boat, but the money was good, so I picked up the telephone around the corner from the soda fountain and gave my dress measurements to a decidedly unfriendly receptionist who instructed me to be at the club at four p.m. the following Friday. “You’d better not be lying about those measurements, by the way. This party is for the big-shot investors, and the bosses want to make sure that these investors like what they see. So if you don’t fit into the dress we’ll have ready for you, you’ll have to go home.”

Webster lent me bus fare. “Must be great being a blonde,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet a millionaire!” I couldn’t find any sarcasm in her gaze. I told her she could quit secretarial college and join “us” anytime she wanted.

I was one of about a hundred blondes who showed up at the dock that afternoon, and none of us got sent home—in fact, quite a few of us found that our violet chiffon dresses were too loose, evidence of the prune juice diets we’d been on ever since we’d heard the secretary’s malignant warning. When we all stood in front of the event director, he rubbed his hands together and chuckled and announced that he liked what he saw. The boat would be sailing to Drake Island, where we’d continue the drinking and dancing begun on the boat before returning to Worcester. This was going to be the best party we’d ever been to, because this party was going to represent the spirit of Herb Hill Beverages—fun, accessible, yet exclusive, just like us lovely ladies. Accessible and yet exclusive? It seemed to me that a party could only be one or the other, never both, and I for one did not understand exactly what it was he expected of us. “Oh, and it’s my birthday,” he finished, and we chorused, “Happy birthday, sir.”

He split us into groups. Then he and a few other suited men who never spoke to us directly gave us little tasks to do—walking up and down the subtly shifting floor of the cabin, with or without a tray that had glasses balanced on it, or saying “Hello” with a smile, or matching tickets to numbered hangers. It turned out I had a genius for matching tickets to hangers, so I was one of ten coat-check girls.