The Ten Thousand Doors of January(91)

I pushed the letter across the counter, and then I saw it: a fresh white poster tacked to the wall. My own face looked down from it, printed in smeary black and white.


MISSING CHILD. Miss January Scaller, seventeen, has gone missing from her home in Shelburne, Vermont. Her guardian urgently seeks information relating to her whereabouts. She has a history of hysteria and confusion and should be approached with caution. She may be in the company of a colored woman and an ill-behaved dog. SUBSTANTIAL REWARD OFFERED. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Locke. 1611 Champlain Drive, Shelburne, Vt.

It was the picture from Mr. Locke’s party, the one my father had never liked. My face looked round and young, and my hair was so ferociously pinned that my eyebrows were slightly raised. My neck stuck out from its starched collar like a turtle tentatively looking out of its shell. I checked my own reflection in the post office window—dust-grimed and sun-darkened, my hair suspended in an unruly knot of braids and twists—and thought it unlikely that anyone would recognize me.

But still: a chill, creeping fear slunk up my spine at the thought that every stranger on the street might know my name, that every police officer might be looking for the timid girl in the picture. It seemed to me the Society hardly needed their masks and feathers and stolen magics when they had all the mundane mechanisms of civil society at their fingertips.

I stuck to the winding back roads after that, and took fewer rides.

By the time I reached Buffalo, though, I was hungry and worn enough to take a risk. I staggered into the front office of the Buffalo Laundry Co. and begged for paying work, half-expecting to be tossed out into the street.

But apparently there were three girls out sick and a big load of uniforms recently arrived from the reform school, so the proprietress handed me a starched white apron, informed me that I would earn thirty-three and one-half cents every hour, and placed me under the jurisdiction of a muscly, humorless white woman named Big Linda. Big Linda looked me over with an expression of deepest misgiving and set me to shaking out wet clothes and feeding them into the mangle.

“And keep your damn hands away from the rollers, if you like your fingers,” she added.

It was hard. (If you don’t think laundry is hard, you’ve never lifted several hundred soaked wool uniforms in the steamy heat of a washroom in July.) The air felt like something you drank rather than breathed, a cottony steam that seemed to pool and slosh in my lungs. My arms were wobbly-feeling and shaky after an hour, aching after two, and numb after three. A few of my not-quite-healed scabs split and wept.

I kept going, because the week’s travel had taught me that much: how to keep going even when your hips ache and your dog’s limp has become a three-legged hop; even when all you found for dinner were three unripe apples; even when every stranger and every gust of wind might be your enemy, finally catching up with you.

And yet—here I was. Sweating and aching in the bowels of the Buffalo Laundry Co., but alive, unbound, entirely myself for the first time in my life. And entirely alone. I had a brief vision of olive hands flashing in the night, dark eyes lit with a cigarette glow—and felt a sudden hollowness in my chest, a rawness like the space left behind by a pulled tooth.

No one spoke to me that entire shift except a dark-skinned woman with a half-moon smile and a southern drawl. The smile vanished when she saw me. She raised her chin at me.

“And just what exactly happened to you?” I shrugged. She looked down at my dust-caked skirt, my scarecrow frame. “Been walking a while on an empty stomach, I’d say.”

I nodded.

“Got more walking to do?” I nodded again. She sucked her teeth pensively, dumped another load of clothes into my cart, and left shaking her head.

Big Linda told me I could sleep in the rag pile—“But only for tonight, mind, this isn’t a damn hotel”—and Bad and I slept curled around one another like a pair of birds in a lye-scented nest. We woke to the first-shift bell ringing in the predawn black, and I discovered two things waiting beside our nest: a greasy ham hock with all the fat and gristle still hanging off it for Bad, and an entire pan of corn bread for me.

I worked another half shift, doing rough multiplication in my head, then marched to the front office and told the proprietress that I was very sorry but I had to leave now, and could I please have my payment in the form of a check. She pursed her lips and offered her thoughts on vagrants, layabouts, and girls who didn’t know a good thing when it came to them—but she wrote the check.

In the alley outside I dug the ink pen out of my pillowcase and pressed the check against the brick wall. I added a wobbly zero and a few extra letters, biting my lip. The check fluttered in a sudden wind that wasn’t there, the lettering blurring and curling, and I rested my head against the steam-warmed brick, dizzied. It shouldn’t have worked—the ink was a different color and crammed rather obviously into the blank space, and whoever heard of a laundress with a $40 check rather than a $4 one—but I’d believed it as I wrote it, and so did the bank teller.

By midafternoon I was boarding the New York Central Line, a precious train ticket clutched in my hand with the letters LOUISVILLE, KY. printed in neat red ink.

My pillowcase looked especially stained and grubby beside the gleaming leather suitcases in the luggage rack, like an underdressed party guest hoping to go unnoticed. I felt sort of stained and grubby myself; every other passenger was wearing pressed linen and high-necked gowns, their hats perched at fashionable angles and their shoes gleaming with fresh polish.