Free Hilda and Pearl by Alice Mattison

because he stepped forward and raised his arms. But he just touched the sides of their heads, both at the same time, her father’s and hers. He hadn’t taken his coat off. It hung open as he touched their hair, just above their ears, and Frances felt his fingers shake. Buttoning his coat awkwardly—Frances thought he might have buttoned it wrong—Mike turned and let himself out of the apartment.

3
    P EARL S UTTER TOOK A SUMMER JOB AT A DILAPIDATED HOTEL in the Adirondacks where a cousin used to work. Her cousin said she’d have to answer the phone and take reservations. Pearl was also supposed to keep track of the band that played on weekends and communicate with the cab service that brought guests from the bus station. Pearl knew nothing of the hotel business. Twice she forgot to arrange for guests to be picked up, but it didn’t matter. It was 1935 and there were few guests at all. She knew she was incompetent, and she didn’t complain when the manager, red-faced, told her that business was so poor he’d have to cut her pay.
    Pearl didn’t mind the hotel, which was simple and quiet, on the edge of a lake in pine woods. Her cousin and the cousin’s new husband had driven her there in June and she didn’t know where she was. She liked being on her own. Up to now she’d lived at home and worked in her father’s candy store, part-time when she was a girl, full-time after she dropped out of Hunter College in her sophomore year. Now her younger brother was working in the store, and he’d taken to it as Pearl never had, rearranging the candy counter and ordering more magazines. Her father didn’t need her, and Pearl, who tried not to think about the end of the summer, preferred being incompetent in the hotel to being incompetent in the store. Other than not knowing what she’d do in September, her main problem was hairpins. She’d forgotten to bring any.
    Pearl was a blonde, and she hadn’t bobbed her hair but wore it in a thick braid which she twisted into a crown at the back of her head. It had given her a certain distinction in college, where everyone else was determined to be modern. Pearl liked feeling queenly, though she knew it put people off. Here at the hotel, she didn’t make friends with the girls who cleaned the rooms and waited on tables, though they were about her age and her sort. She didn’t think she was better than they were, but she knew she looked as if she thought that.
    It took twenty gold-colored hairpins to secure the braid properly, and Pearl had learned to do it swiftly—her left hand supporting the braid while her right hand poked pins around it at even intervals—generally working by feel because she couldn’t see the back of her head unless she had two mirrors. Of course, occasionally a hairpin fell out and got lost. At home she had a good supply, but when she’d come to the hotel, she’d forgotten her little tin box, and had only the twenty hairpins she wore the day of the trip. One must have been lost in her cousin’s car: even the next morning, there were only nineteen. She’d written to her mother, but no hairpins had arrived.
    Now, after three and a half weeks, having taken meticulous care, Pearl had fifteen hairpins. She didn’t see how she could get through the summer this way. She had Thursday afternoons off, and she could have bought more, but she had no way to get to town. Sometimes the chambermaids got rides with friends, but she didn’t know any of them well and hated to ask. One afternoon she walked to a store at a crossroads, but couldn’t find hairpins in the small stock, mostly bread and milk.
    Now she was at the hotel desk on a hot Wednesday afternoon when nobody was likely to come through and need anything. She was reading aloud from a newspaper that was several days old to Mike Lewis, the saxophonist in the band. She was reading an account of a baseball game and