A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [186]
Katie sat on the steps and started to worry. Since war started, prices of food and everything else had skyrocketed. In the past month, Katie had not been able to add to Francie’s bank account. The ten dollars a week hadn’t been enough. Laurie had to have a quart of fresh milk every day and the milk modifier was expensive. Then there had to be orange juice. Now with twelve-fifty a week…after Francie’s expenses were taken out there’d be less money. Soon it would be vacation. Neeley could work during the summer. But what about the fall? Neeley would return to high school. Francie had to get to high school that fall. How? How? She sat there and worried.
Francie, after a brief glance at the sleeping baby, undressed and got into bed. She folded her hands under her head and stared at the gray patch which was the airshaft window.
“Here I am,” she thought, “fifteen years old and a drifter. I’ve been working less than a year and I’ve had three jobs already. I used to think it would be fun to go from one job to the other. But now I’m scared. I’ve been fired from two jobs through no fault of my own. At each job, I worked as best I could. I gave everything I could give. And here I’m starting all over again somewhere else. Only now I’m frightened. This time when the new boss says ‘jump once,’ I’ll jump twice because I’ll be afraid of losing the job. I’m scared because they’re depending on me here for money. How did we ever get along before I worked? Well, there wasn’t Laurie then. Neeley and I were smaller and could do with less and, of course, Papa helped some.
“Well…good-bye college. Good-bye everything for that matter.” She turned her face away from the gray light and closed her eyes.
* * *
Francie sat at a typewriter in a big room. There was a metal roof fastened over the top of Francie’s machine so that she couldn’t see the keyboard. An enormous chart of the keyboard diagram was tacked up in front of the room. Francie consulted the chart and felt for the letters under the shield. That was the first day. On the second day she was given a stack of old telegrams to copy. Her eyes went from the copy to the chart as her fingers groped for the letters. At the end of the second day she had memorized the position of the letters on the machine and didn’t have to consult the chart. A week later, they took the shield off. It made no difference now. Francie was a touch typist.
An instructor explained the workings of the teletype machine. For a day, Francie practiced sending and receiving dummy messages. Then she was put on the New York-Cleveland wire.
She thought it a wonderful miracle that she could sit at that machine and type and have the words come out hundreds of miles away on a piece of paper on the roller of a machine in Cleveland, Ohio! No less miraculous was that a girl typing away in Cleveland made the hammers of Francie’s machine pound out the words.
It was easy work. Francie would send for an hour, then receive for an hour. There were two fifteen-minute rest periods in the work shift and half an hour for “lunch” at nine o’clock. Her pay had been increased to fifteen a week when she went on a wire. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job.
The household adjusted itself to Francie’s new schedule. She left home soon after four in the afternoon and got home a little before two in the morning. She pressed the bell button three times before she entered the hallway so that Mama could be on the alert and make sure that Francie wouldn’t be attacked by someone lurking in the hallways.
Francie slept mornings until eleven o’clock. Mama didn’t have to get up so early because Francie was in the flat with Laurie. She started work in her own house first. By the time she was ready for the other two houses, Francie was up and looking after Laurie. Francie had to work on Sunday nights but she had Wednesday night off.
Francie liked the new arrangement. It took care of her lonely evenings, it helped