Free The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw Page B

wait. Pumping the sewing machine pedal, I'd had plenty of time to think about these ladies. I had calculated and projected. "I can make children's clothes, too," I said to Mrs. Cooper. Lucille sat on the floor between us in a blue canvas sailor dress, playing so quietly that not a curl was disarranged. I'd hardly known it possible.
    Mrs. Cooper bent to finger the dress's wide collar. "How old is she?"
    "Six months."
    "She's a pretty child." At that moment, Lucille truly was a pretty child, dimpling and kicking her round feet. The reverend's wife's house had a pleasing effect on both of us. When Mrs. Cooper squeezed Lucille's hand, my daughter gurgled.
    "Hush, love," I said mildly.
    "You do love her, don't you?" Mrs. Cooper said.
    "When she lets me."
    "You're brave," Mrs. Cooper said.
    "I don't know about that."
    "My mother said that a baby has to be a year old before you can allow yourself to start loving. In the first year, so many sicknesses can come. You cannot afford to be destroyed." She peered at me. "Your mother didn't tell you?"
    "I've never heard such a thing," I said. Then, meaning to soften the words, "My mother doesn't say much."
    She tucked a curl behind Lucille's ear and wagged a finger for the baby to grasp. "You, missy, are a lucky girl. Your mother loves you."
    I looked at my dusty shoes. Maybe people ordinarily talked like this in Baltimore or Philadelphia. To my relief, Mrs. Cooper straightened up and reached again for the mirror. She said, "I can't go to see Mrs. Astor without a hat."
    "Mr. Cates can order ribbon," I said.
    In the wagon, I pressed Lucille against me. "This isn't love," I told her fiercely, my heart actually hurting. My complicated, difficult child. Who but a mother could possibly love her? I kissed her soft neck, which was grubby from the long day and smelled like dirt. I kissed it again. Lucille stared at the horse's rump and made an idle, ugly noise. "This isn't love," I told her again, the words breaking apart in my mouth. "We still have six months left." The new baby sagged in my womb. Lucille pulled away from me and tried to pinch my breast. For the rest of the ride home, to steady my shaking hands, I thought about money.
    I had given my mother-in-law three dollars from the first dress, then three more from the second. The money gave me new rights, and I started sewing town dresses as soon as I had stacked the breakfast dishes. A dress for Mrs. Trimbull to wear to Topeka. Sailor suits for Mrs. Cates's twin boys. A whole wardrobe, a bonanza, for the housekeeper Mrs. Horne had shipped out from Killarney to scrub what my mother-in-law called Outhouse Row. Money that I had never suspected in Grant Station materialized along with treasured pictures, crumbling at the edges, from a three-year-old
Harper's Bazaar,
the Sears catalogue, even an ancient
Godey's Lady's Book
—"But with bigger sleeves," "Can you attach a train?" "I think this high neck would suit me."
    I learned to steer wistful women past waists too delicate for their thickening bodies, showing them instead how prettily a skirt might hang from a substantial frame. I taught them to take pleasure in a thoughtful sleeve length. One night, Jack sat up beside me, watching for nearly thirty minutes while I stitched a tight bodice, twice stopping to rip out stitches that were too big or had tilted off the marked seam. "Leave it. Little as those stitches are, nobody's going to see," he said.
    "They have to be right, or the cloth won't stand up the way it's supposed to." My new clients turned those bodices inside out once they got home and examined every inch. If they found a wandering stitch, they would bring it back to me, as was their right.
    "Mighty finicky work, for a dress that will just come out on Sundays."
    "Gives a gal a reason to look forward to Sundays," I said, and caught his tired expression. "It's
pretty,
Jack. Women want one pretty thing, like your mother and her rug. Pretty is reason enough. And I'm helping to pull us