Free The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw Page A

silk slid under my hands like water, so densely woven that even lying folded on the shelf it gleamed. "As blue as the ocean," I said and he agreed, neither of us having seen an ocean. At home now I petted the silk, hidden beneath the grubby denim in the mending pile. Lucille reached out her little hand, too, though I did not let her touch.
    She loved things that glittered—pins or mother-of-pearl buttons or the brass lamp base. My mother-in-law laughed and said she would make a good man miserable some day. Jack said the same thing and did not laugh. I didn't laugh either. Lucille was an unnerving mirror, allowing me to catch sight of myself in glimpses I had not asked for and did not desire. One afternoon she spied a crust of snow outside the window illuminated by a shaft of late sunlight; I watched her gaze at the blaze of cold light until the sun dropped a little, and the brightness was gone. For a held instant, Lucille didn't move, and I felt the child's disappointment like a pinprick. She turned to me, waiting for me to—what? Make the light return? Provide some new brilliance of my own? We gazed at each other, and then she opened her mouth, and the howling did not stop for hours.
    She wanted things. I would have wished it otherwise. I walked and rocked her, showed her my mother-in-law's cut-glass bowl and hat pin, promised her that she would get her heart's desire. I lied to her, and when I felt guilty I lied more, assuring her that diamonds would come, ropes of rubies. Castles made of crystal, and shoes. Weeks of nothing but sunshine, followed by weeks more. Eventually my lies wore her down, or her own tantrums did, and she dropped into black, silent sleep. Her head slumped toward her shoulder, the dark curls pasted down by the same sweat that coated her plump legs. If I picked her up to carry her to the crib, her damp shadow remained on the rug or floor. Anyone, seeing her, would have thought of a tiny coffin—she was that still. "Don't," I whispered to her as I tucked the tiny quilt around her. "Don't believe me. Don't be taken in. You know what you know."
    Poorly as we got along, she clung to me. I even had to take her to the outhouse with me—she didn't seem to mind the spiders—if I didn't want to hear the shrieks. Everybody said that she cried because she sensed the approach of her brother or sister, and I let everybody say that. I did not want them to notice the calculation in her baby grip, the assessing look on her face that sharpened as she adjusted her focus on the world around her. I wondered whether she had learned that look from me and tried to look at her more tenderly, until she bit me again.
    By then Jack and my mother-in-law were accustomed to Lucille's and my nocturnal habits, and so they had no particular comment while I worked on Mrs. Cooper's beautiful silk gown. Lucille and I finished the dress in six nights, with me staying up all the last night to featherstitch the slippery hem. I rode with Jack into town, and my weariness lifted to see Mrs. Cooper twirl before me, catching the light like a dragonfly. With the lilac trim around the high neck, the shadows around her eyes hardly showed at all.
    "Such an improper dress for a reverend's wife!" she said.
    "There is not anything improper about it," I said. "It is very decent."
    Her mouth twitching, she took my hand and rested it on the curve from waist to hip, which I was proud of. The gathers dropped in a lavish rush, like a waterfall, tracing the line of Mrs. Cooper's slim frame beneath the yards of shining cloth. "It is mostly decent," I said.
    She laughed and twirled again, then asked, "Will you make me another?"
    "Will you tell your friends?"
    "Oh, Nell. They already know."
    There was Mrs. Trimbull, the banker's wife, and Mrs. Cates. There was widowed Mrs. Horne, whose husband had left her with six girls, nine hundred-sixty acres, and seven outhouses in back of her wood-frame house, because she didn't want anyone to have to