The Hired Girl(37)

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive!

Miss Chandler taught me that, and it’s true. When I told Malka I had only one dress, her eyebrows rose so high I thought they’d crawl up under her kerchief and vanish. Her eyes got that tragic, shocked look. I said that I was hoping to buy another dress with my wages, but she frowned at me sharply and said it was wrong to talk about money so close to the Sabbath. So that was that. I don’t know what I’m going to do about my wages. I could buy myself a dress with my Belinda money if I had an afternoon off, but I can’t ask for an afternoon off, because Mrs. Rosenbach hasn’t told me I can stay.

At suppertime, I felt kind of lonesome. On Shabbos, Malka dines upstairs with the Rosenbachs: Mrs. Rosenbach, Mr. Solomon Rosenbach, and Mirele, who is Mr. Solomon’s little sister. (I’ve only caught glimpses of her, but she wears perfectly sweet frilly clothes. It takes hours to iron them.) Mrs. Rosenbach’s husband is in New York with her other son, David. It turns out that Mr. Rosenbach owns a department store — Malka was affronted when I told her I’d never heard of Rosenbach’s Department Store. There is also a married daughter, Anna, who comes to Shabbos supper when her husband is away and brings her two spoiled children — that is, Malka says they’re spoiled. She was there, too.

So I ate dinner by myself. Malka filled a generous plate for me, but I wasn’t at the feast. I was a kind of Gentile Cinderella. Upstairs there was candlelight, and wine in shining glasses, not to mention my sponge cake, but there I was, alone in the kitchen. If I’d had a book to prop up beside my plate, I wouldn’t have felt a bit lonely. But as it was, I kept thinking of how much my feet hurt. I kept glancing at all the dishes on the sideboard. Once Shabbos starts, Malka can’t do any dishes, because it’s work, but Mrs. Rosenbach says it’s all right for me to do them, because I’m not Jewish.

After I finished the dishes, I tidied the kitchen and swept the floor, and now I’m upstairs, feeling melancholy. I think I’m homesick. I never thought I would be that, but when I think of Miss Chandler, my o’ercharged heart seems to swell. I miss the country: the fresh air and the birdsong in the morning. I miss the food. Malka’s a good cook, but her meals are all spicy and rich, and my stomach longs for something plain. I miss ham, but ham is treif, which means the Jews aren’t allowed to eat it. And I miss starting the day with a glass of real milk. The city milk tastes kind of faded. There’s no life in it.

I miss Mark, a little. But not very much, because I’m still mad at him for not taking up for me. I imagine Mark’ll get stuck looking after my chickens. I’m glad of that, because he’ll take good care of them. I wonder if anyone will think to pick the hornworms off my tomatoes. Malka has a little patch of garden out back, but her tomatoes are spindly and poor-looking — I’d be ashamed of tomatoes like that, but she seems to think they’re thriving.

What I miss most of all is my books. Jane Eyre and Florence Dombey — they were like my sisters. And I wish I had Ivanhoe again, because there are still many things I don’t understand about the Jews.



Sunday, July the ninth, 1911

Today was a downright awful day. I woke up feeling prickly and queasy, with a familiar pain in my stomach. I felt outraged, because I didn’t want all that again. But of course, there’s no way out of it. It seems to me that God was very hard on Eve, punishing her so cruelly just for eating an apple. He wasn’t nearly as strict with Adam. I don’t think it was fair. But that is probably a wicked thing to write, and not refined.

I put on my chocolate-colored dress, because what else is there for me to put on? That frets me, too, because in spite of my best efforts, that dress is beginning to smell. Last week I thought if I could only please Malka and win my right to work here, I’d be content. Now it seems I’m likely to stay, but I’m as full of worries as a hive is full of bees. Nagging, buzzing, stinging worries they are, too.

On top of that, the weather was perfectly awful. It was very hot and damp with a white sky, which is my least favorite weather in the world.

After I finished the breakfast dishes, Malka told me Mrs. Rosenbach said that I could have Sunday mornings off so I could attend church. I ought to have been grateful, but I wasn’t. It isn’t that I don’t want to go to church, but if my only time off is to be Sunday mornings, I’ll never go anywhere but church. I won’t be able to visit a library or a picture gallery, and all the stores will be closed.