Free Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties by Renée Rosen Page B

said my mother was in the back. I found her standing on a worktable over a giant vat of animal gizzards and hearts and God knows what else.
    “Ma? What are you doing up there?”
    “Oh, good, you’re here! Hand me that wrench over there, would you? This pipe’s leaking.”
    “Why don’t you have one of the men fix it?”
    “They’re busy working. It’s dripping right into the meat.”
    “So hire a plumber.”
    “Ach, a plumber. Listen to you. Miss Big Shot! Working girl! So quick to throw your money away.”
    Thanks to my mother I couldn’t cook a brisket, knit a sweater or bake a cake, but I knew how to fix a flush toilet, feed a furnace, and drive a truck. At seven, I learned to braid my own hair, since my mother had no patience for things she deemed frivolous or tedious, such as housecleaning. In between housekeepers—of which we had many—dishes piled up in the sink, food soured in the icebox and clumps of dust blew across the hardwood floors like tumbleweed. After school I went to Evelyn’s until my mother came from work to get me, filling the Schulmans’ pristine foyer with her repugnant stink of manure, blood, and animal rot. Once she hadn’t had time to do the wash and had pulled something from the hamper for me to wear to school that reeked so from her dirty clothes, the other children refused to sit near me in class. I was forced to stand in the back—just like the children who’d wet their pants—tears of shame running down my cheeks. For years afterward, my schoolmates plugged their noses and stuck out their tongues each time I walked by. From that point on, I vowed that no matter what, I would give people reason to envy me rather than humiliate me.
    I handed my mother the wrench, and after she’d tightened the pipe, she climbed down from the table and took a moment to brush herself off. She was a petite woman who still wore a corset and drab gray schmattas that hung to the floor. She kept her long dark hair pinned up in a bun. Her smile was spoiled by a discolored front tooth that reminded me of an old yellowed piano key. Her hands always looked rough and chapped, her fingernails cracked and brittle. I noticed a smear of animal blood on the front of her dress and when she went to hug me hello, I cringed and tried to pull away.
    “Tell me now,” she asked, “did they get the radiator working at your place yet?”
    “Why? You want to come over and fix it?”
    “Don’t be smart. I’ve worked all my life to make a nice home for you, and it was so awful there that you’d rather go live in that dilapidated shack with your girlfriend?”
    She didn’t know that I’d taken on a second job, or that I preferred to be broke and in a dump than live with her. How could I tell her that even after she bathed, she still stank of the stockyards? She wouldn’t have understood why it bothered me that she never did her hair, wore nice clothes, or bothered to file her fingernails or at least clean the slaughterhouse filth out from underneath them.
    Terrified that I’d end up like her, I had swung hard the other way, losing myself in fashion magazines, primping before the mirror with the makeup I’d stolen from the five-and-dime and kept hidden in my room.
    Back in her office, my mother pulled her pocketbook from her bottom desk drawer, and as she buttoned her wool coat, she glanced at my wraparound jacket and made a face, as if she’d just noticed it for the first time. “What are you doing wearing a schmatta like that? You’ll freeze to death in this weather.”
    “I thought it was going to be warmer today.”
    “You should know better.” She shook her head. “And what? No one in the city wears a scarf and gloves anymore?”
    “Ma, I’m fine.” I stuffed my hands deep inside my pockets, the fingers on my right hand poking through the torn seam.
    We wandered over to Garfield’s, a lunch counter on Halsted and Forty-seventh Street. The smell of grease and fried onions hit us when we stepped