The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard Read Online Free Page A

own room, whose importance settled over me the first time he pulled down the curtain at the doorway. Neither of us could bear to look at the other, but in the gloom I helped him fumble with the ties on my petticoat, and he guided my hand to the buttons on his trousers. "Adam and Eve never had to bother with this," he grumbled, and the line tickled me so that I was helpless, snorting and hiccupping into his shoulder. "Well, they didn't," he said, clearly pleased to have amused his bride. He lifted me onto the hard bed. Laughter, we found, helped.
    In the morning, shyly full of ourselves, we emerged to his mother. After eating my first meal, she told me to use my time tending the garden and the barns; in the evenings I could do the mending. Just one night spent in the slanted lantern light taught me that I'd need the daylight to pin seams, and that I missed my mama's sewing machine. I didn't mind doing handwork when it was called for, but I hated poking along a straight seam, taking a half-hour to stitch what a machine could finish in a minute.
    Trying to be sweet, I twined around Jack after dinner. "If you bring me home a Singer, I'll do wonderful things with it," I told him. "You'll be glad you spent the money."
    "You don't need you a machine to do wonderful things," he said, a joke that made me blush. Still, I wanted that Singer.
    "You'll see. I'll get better."
    "I don't know how much better you can get, girlie."
    "Find out," I said, then ran away before he could grab me.
    The next time he went to town, he brought me home a thimble, calling it a pledge, the way schoolboys gave each other pledges as promises on debts. That night Jack came to bed and found me fully dressed under the quilt. I took his hand, held it before his eyes, and told him to greet his pledge. His face went dark, and for a moment I was afraid. Then he turned over. In the morning, he slipped out of bed before me, and I was both disappointed and not.
    Daytimes, his mother and I squared off. "Maybe in some places folks like streaky laundry," she remarked as I struggled with the washboard.
    "Maybe in some places folks pitch in and help."
    "I've already got all the cooking to do and another mouth to feed. Some families benefit when their sons get married."
    "Jack already knew about my cooking. Putting me in the kitchen is a waste of my talents."
    "It's a waste of good food, that's sure. What are your talents?"
    "You have a long, pretty waist," I told her. "A dress with gathers would show that off."
    She didn't let much of a pause go by. "Who do you figure I want to be showing off for?"
    "It's a pleasure to look good. And no sin. I'll take in your dress."
    "Not exactly a chore that needs doing," she said.
    "No sin," I said. Looking up from the heavy overalls I was scrubbing, I felt something sparkling make an appearance in me, like a quick fish darting from behind a rock.
    She walked back into the house with a sway and later suggested that I make a fence for the garden, since I was eating so much of the food that it produced. I remarked that most people fenced their gardens before putting down a carpet in the parlor. She said that the carpet needed sweeping as soon as I was finished with the fence—if I knew how to sweep a carpet, coming from a house without any. "Why don't you just show me a few dozen times," I told her. "I'll learn from watching you."
    After I finished her dress, squares of cambric appeared in my sewing pile. The preacher's wife carried cambric handkerchiefs with finely stitched hems. I pulled a clean rag from my pocket, showily dabbed at my face, and asked, "Would you like me to embroider your initials, while I'm at it?"
    "Yes," she said. This wasn't war. It was something like friendship.
    The war, or at least skirmishes, were occurring with my husband. The haze of our bodies didn't last long, and he revealed himself to be a touchy man, quick to note a slight and maddeningly long to forget it. One day when his mother absent-mindedly called