Hilda and Pearl Page 7

  “You must be sorry you said we could do this,” she said.

  “Why should I be sorry?” said Hilda firmly.

  “You’re crowded already.”

  “I like having people around,” said Hilda. “Sometimes Nathan’s quiet.”

  “I’m not quiet,” said Pearl. “I’m warning you.”

  “Well, neither am I,” Hilda said. “I’ll say when I’m sick of you.”

  “That’s fine.” Pearl even tossed her chin, as if she were bouncing a ball off it toward Hilda at the sink, as if she was sure Hilda was joking. “I’m helpful,” she said. “I’ll clean the bathroom. I’m not a good cook, but I’ll try.”

  “We can clean the bathroom together,” said Hilda. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite Pearl to drink it.

  “You don’t take milk?” said Pearl.

  “No, I like it black.”

  “No sugar either?”

  “No.”

  “Oh—” said Pearl, and she laid her hands flat on the table, palms up, open. “You know what?” she said, before she knew what she was going to say, but wanting it to be pretty spectacular. “I always wanted a friend who drank black coffee. I never knew people like that. In high school, I wanted to know the girls like that.”

  Hilda looked annoyed, as if she didn’t know what Pearl meant and didn’t want to know, but Pearl said, “Don’t worry, I’m nice, even if I talk funny.” She was scared, despite this brave speech, because Hilda looked irritated. But Hilda didn’t say anything and now Pearl thought that maybe she wasn’t angry. Hilda was looking at her with her eyes wide and interested, very black. She was shorter than Pearl but several years older, and Pearl felt childish near her, maybe because Hilda’s clothes and gestures were so simple.

  “It’s a nice apartment,” said Pearl.

  “Thank you.” They stood up and toured it, and figured out where there was room for a new chest of drawers. Pearl and Mike could afford one piece of furniture. If they bought it now, they’d have something when they found their new place. It could go in an alcove in the living room—a room Pearl liked, with a dark maroon rug and checked drapes in maroon and tan. There were two easy chairs and between them was a radio. Pearl looked out the window, but the view was just the courtyard in the center of the building.

  “The quiet side of the building,” she said, though she was disappointed. She’d have preferred to look out at the street.

  When Nathan and Mike arrived, carrying the mattress and then the box spring, Hilda and Pearl made the two beds in the living room with one sheet over them, but that night Pearl’s bed moved whenever Mike turned over. Mike wanted to make love, but she was afraid Hilda and Nathan could hear them from their bedroom.

  “We’re married,” Mike whispered.

  She was sore after the two nights in the hotel. “Tomorrow,” she whispered back. Mike tried to take her in his arms, just to hold her, but his bed shifted and the crack between the beds opened into an abyss with the sheet stretched over it. He got out and pushed the beds back together, but then he came around to her side. She giggled and claimed she was going to fall into the space, but he just said, “Well, hold on tighter, then.” It was a long time before she fell asleep.

  The next afternoon Nathan asked her if she liked to listen to music. He had a record collection and a good record player, and he played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for her. Pearl was surprised when a voice began to sing, and then a whole chorus, after Nathan had stood up many times to change the record.

  “What does it mean?” she said, and thought of Mike’s shorthand.

  Nathan shrugged, turning the record over carefully, holding it by its edges. “This is the real Germany,” he said. “Better to listen to Beethoven than the bandits in charge now.” He had told her he was preparing to become a teacher and he talked like one already. He seemed much older than Mike. He was comfortable with his arms and legs. Like his wife, he could sit still. Mike never could, and was always moving his hands: fiddling with something, ripping something up, lighting a cigarette. Hilda scolded him now for tearing an envelope, ripping it studiously back and forth so it turned into one long crooked strip. “Stop it, Michael,” she said. “You’re like a little kid.” Pearl was fascinated.

  Mike laughed at Hilda. “I thought you socialists were liberated from bourgeois notions about neatness. I thought you had higher things to think about.”

  “Not me,” said Hilda. “Maybe your brother. I’m just a housewife.”

  Nathan frowned at them for talking during the music—now it was a different symphony—and quietly swept Mike’s trash into his hands and carried it off. “There,” he said, when the music paused. “Plenty of room for socialism, a clean carpet, and Beethoven too.”

  Pearl liked the way he talked and she liked the music and the living room. It was starting to get dark outside, but the lamps had been on all afternoon. She felt safe in her big chair. Nathan had brought in a wooden kitchen chair for himself, and Hilda was sitting on the bed, which now took up most of the room. The warm lamplight was on Pearl’s arm. She and Hilda had conferred about dinner, and Hilda had started a pot roast. Soon they’d peel the potatoes. Pearl wished she could stay home and keep house for the four of them, but she knew she had to look for a job, and then that they’d have to find an apartment. Her brother-in-law leaned over the stack of records, putting the ones he’d played back into their brown sleeves. They came in a big album that was dark red like so much else in this room.

  After Pearl and Mike had been living with Hilda and Nathan for a little more than a week, Hilda said there might be a job in her office for Pearl. Pearl had been reading the want ads in the paper every morning, but she couldn’t find anything that looked right. She didn’t want to work in a factory, but she thought she might have to. Hilda was the bookkeeper for a small company that made women’s blouses, and she said they needed a receptionist. Pearl would have to type a little, too. Pearl had taken an academic course in high school, not a commercial course, but she’d taken one year of typing as an elective. She explained to Hilda what she’d done at the hotel, and realized that she had learned something over the summer. She had learned to write things down in order and keep pieces of paper having to do with the same thing in one place. At the candy store, her father wrote on scraps of paper that he stuck under the corner of the cash register and never saw again. He didn’t know how much money he had or what he ordered each time the salesmen came through. Partway through the summer, after the hotel manager had spoken sharply to Pearl for not writing something down, she had suddenly realized that it was possible to keep track of things. She had decided that must be what people learned in the commercial course, and maybe now she knew it. She was sure she could work in Hilda’s office.

  “There are two bosses,” Hilda said. “Mr. Glynnis and Mr. Carmichael. Mr. Glynnis seems nice but I like Mr. Carmichael better, even though he seems strict.”

  Pearl listened eagerly. “Is Mr. Carmichael older?”

  “I guess they’re about the same age. Mr. Carmichael might be a few years older.” She arranged for Pearl to have an interview.

  Pearl had to take the subway alone to Hilda’s office in downtown Manhattan because Hilda left for work early in the morning, but the bosses had said Pearl should come in at about eleven. Pearl was nervous. She was home alone for an hour when the others had gone to work. The last person she saw was Nathan, who left a little later than Hilda and Mike. He had worked in a printing plant, he’d told her, but he’d become active in the union, and now he was a full-time union organizer.

  “Do you like it?” Pearl said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want a strike,” said Nathan. “I’m afraid of a strike.” He wanted to quit and be a teacher, and he had passed his exam and was waiting to be called from the list.

  “Do you go around and make speeches?” Pearl said that morning, to keep Nathan a moment.

  “No, I leave that to
other people,” Nathan said. “I write, and I organize meetings. Today I have to make sure the door will be open and the lights will be on for a meeting tonight. Very exciting.”

  “I think it’s exciting,” said Pearl loyally.

  “Maybe it is,” said Nathan, and he sighed and looked sorrowful, but she’d noticed that he often looked that way. “Maybe it’s a great moment in history.”

  Pearl followed Hilda’s directions and reached the right building twenty minutes early. It was on Nassau Street. She walked two blocks away and back and it was still ten minutes early. Then she crossed the street and counted the items in the window of a stationery store. When she reached one hundred, she shrugged and went across the street and into the building, whether it was early or not. The blouse company, called Bobbie’s, was on the second floor, and when she’d climbed the stairs she found herself in a large room where women were sorting and folding blouses. Hilda had explained that the blouses were not made on the premises, but at a factory in Brooklyn. Here, however, they were labeled, folded, and readied for shipment to stores. “In the big season, we all have to pack,” she said. “I don’t mind. It’s fun. Mr. Carmichael brings in delicatessen and we’re there late.”

  At one side of the room were the offices, separated by glass partitions from the floor. The room was noisy. Pearl stood in the door-way of the first office until she was noticed. She didn’t see Hilda. Finally someone told her where to go, and she found Hilda, too, in an anteroom to Mr. Glynnis’s and Mr. Carmichael’s offices at the back of the big room. Hilda looked her over and took her in to see Mr. Carmichael. Pearl thought Hilda didn’t like something about what she was wearing—or maybe she was sorry she’d suggested the interview.

  “Now, can you handle yourself on the phone is the main thing?” said Mr. Carmichael, even before asking her to sit down. “Do you have a Brooklyn accent?” He didn’t give Pearl a chance to answer. “Let’s say I’m an impatient customer and I call up. What do you say? Ring!”

  “Hello?” said Pearl, giggling and putting an imaginary receiver to her face. It was like a game.

  “No. Wrong. You say, ‘Bobbie’s, can I help you?’”

  “Bobbie’s, can I help you?” said Pearl.

  “Much better,” said Mr. Glynnis, who had come in behind her. They had only a few more questions. They seemed pleased that she was Hilda’s sister-in-law. She got the job. Riding home on the subway, she worried about whether Hilda had disapproved of her dress or her hat—whether Hilda would be ashamed of her.

  “You have no idea how lucky you are,” Mike said that night, although Pearl wasn’t a baby and she knew she was lucky, that jobs were almost impossible to find.

  Pearl started to work at Bobbie’s, and she and Hilda rode there together every day and rode back home at night. Hilda introduced her to the other women in the office, and one of them showed Pearl what she was supposed to do. Pearl liked being a receptionist. She had some trouble with the switchboard but gradually she caught on. She spent much of her time filing, which wasn’t hard, and sometimes she typed letters. Mike taught her a little shorthand, and she learned to take dictation, although she was faking it, and she hid her notes—a combination of shorthand, abbreviations of her own, spelled-out words, and blanks where she’d have to remember or invent when she typed. Luckily, the letters Mr. Glynnis and Mr. Carmichael dictated were short.

  Pearl had more problems at home than at work. Mike said it would be a good idea to stay with the Levensons for a few more weeks and save up some money, and he insisted that he and Nathan had talked it over and Nathan had said it was fine. They needed extra money for furniture, he pointed out. But Pearl wanted to find an apartment and move out. She thought more about not displeasing Hilda than she did about her new husband. They contributed money for food, but Pearl worried that Hilda thought they ate too much. Mike was always looking for snacks, and she thought he ate more than the rest of them put together. And Hilda wouldn’t let Pearl cook. “I don’t cook,” she insisted. “I just put something on the stove. I don’t fuss.”

  It was true that their meals were simple—baked potatoes, canned vegetables, some kind of meat. Sometimes Hilda made a meat loaf. One day she said she’d make beef stew, and then she went out of the room for a little while. She had a headache, she said; she’d just lie down. They’d come home from work a few minutes earlier and Pearl was tired, but she thought she ought to start the beef stew, and she began browning the meat. Hilda came into the kitchen in her bathrobe, her dark eyes flashing. “I told you I’d do it,” she said.

  “Why shouldn’t I do it?”

  “Look, I’m trying to rest. I have to get rid of this headache. Here I am jumping up because I can smell the meat browning. Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

  Pearl was bewildered. “But I don’t understand,” she said, fighting tears. “Did I use the wrong pan?”

  “No, you didn’t use the wrong pan,” Hilda said, and returned to her bedroom. Pearl turned off the light under the meat and went into the bathroom, where she laid her face on her towel and sobbed. She stayed there as long as she dared—there was no place else in the apartment where she could be alone—and when she came out, pushing the hair that had come loose off her face and trying to get her mussed braid back into place, Hilda, still in her robe, was making the beef stew.

  “I’m sorry,” Pearl said.

  “It’s all right,” said Hilda. Pearl peeled potatoes and carrots and set the table. That night, in whispers, she tried to explain what had happened.

  “She was just tired,” Mike said.

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Why shouldn’t she like you?”

  “She hates me,” Pearl insisted.

  Mike was impatient with her, but she thought he was also interested. He wasn’t used to people who hated each other. It was like something out of the movies. He said they could start trying to find an apartment, and from then on, they spent their weekends looking. It helped. Hilda seemed friendlier when they came back, even if they hadn’t seen anything that would do at all.

  Pearl didn’t find out whether Hilda disliked the dress or hat she had worn to her job interview, but after a while she didn’t think it was her clothes. Hilda couldn’t help backing away from her at times the way some people couldn’t help from shrinking if a cat brushed against them. “I’m a ninny,” Pearl told herself, excusing Hilda. One night the four of them put on jazz records and danced, and when Pearl got excited, and danced fast with Mike until he stumbled away, then danced on her own with an imaginary partner, she caught Hilda looking at her and her look was not hateful or friendly either but eager, as if she wanted to become Pearl. Yet that night, too, Hilda grew bitter and tired. “I suppose you know enough to turn the lights out when you go to bed?” she said, going to her bedroom while Pearl was still dancing.

  When they found an apartment it was only two blocks from Nathan and Hilda’s place. Pearl was afraid they’d mind, but Nathan borrowed a car from a friend to help them move, and Hilda said she’d help Pearl put shelving paper in the kitchen cabinets. The apartment was on the second floor of a building with an elevator. Pearl liked the dim hallway with its armorial ornaments, and liked pushing the large round buttons to make the elevator come. The elevator didn’t work until you had closed first the heavy outer door, which had a long handle, and then the inner door, made of metal strips in an accordion pattern that threatened to pinch Pearl’s fingers. The first time she took Hilda there, she had to struggle to make it work. Hilda was impatient. “We could take the stairs,” she said.

  They took the elevator and Pearl showed Hilda the apartment, and then they put on aprons and began cleaning the kitchen cabinets. Hilda stood on the sink to clean them. She insisted it was necessary, though the apartment had just been painted. Pearl cut shelving paper. Hilda didn’t look quite as formidable, perched on Pearl’s new sink.

  “I won’t have much to put into the cupboards,” Pearl said. Her mother had given her some pots an
d pans, and she’d received a few wedding presents. She did have some things.

  “You’ll put food up here, won’t you?” said Hilda. “I think pots and pans below.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Of course that was right. She’d have to make a shopping list. She’d never bought food herself before, except under her mother’s direction—she’d never thought about what was needed.

  “You’re going to cook a lot,” Hilda said. “Mike eats so much.”

  Pearl laughed and nodded. “They’re so different, even though they’re brothers.”

  “Very different.”

  Pearl was a little afraid of Nathan. He was older than Mike, who was older than she was, and he seemed older yet. He never lost his temper. He knew about music and kept track of world events. He listened to everything Pearl said as if he expected her to be interesting, even though she knew she wasn’t. She’d asked him shyly why he was a socialist, and he’d said with a sigh that he couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t, that it was only fair. “Go talk to the people in the shantytowns,” he said. “Ask them how much good capitalism has done them.”

  Pearl said she agreed with him, that socialism was much better. Only later did she remember that her father owned a business—he was a capitalist, she supposed. But when she asked Nathan he said no, not really, Mr. Sutter was not the problem. Nathan was starting to get bald, and he combed his hair back so his bare scalp showed. When he stared at Pearl she felt extremely looked at.

  Now she watched Hilda competently cleaning cupboards. Like Nathan, she looked as if she knew how things would turn out and had agreed to them. But Pearl still thought Hilda didn’t like her.

  “Nathan’s wise,” she said. “I never knew anybody before who was wise.”

  “No, he’s not,” Hilda said. “He’s just pretending. He can be as dumb as anybody else.”