Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [41]
DAY THREE: I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife decided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight…if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”
In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.
TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND: I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping…bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most…mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a…“light housekeeper.”…Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front…in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.”…Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me…to drag my mother’s trunk against the door…this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.
NEW MANTRA: How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!
BOXED IN: The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast…A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver…and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time…the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”
FIRST DAY OF WORK: Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall…thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels…through the ramparts of machinery, we entered…Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS: “No apron!…Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE: “HOT A-I-R!”
WHAT THEY DO:…paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.
AFTER DOING IT FIVE MINUTES: shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the “strippers.”
TEN HOURS LATER: Dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat [and] foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable.
NUMBER 105 ARRIVES HOME: I stopped myself dead. An older woman said, “Youse didn’t live there, too?” I stood before the mass of red embers…dazed…stupefied…and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging house…. Nobody knew anything definite. “Five, ten dead.”
IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER: Whatever is going to become of me? Why in the name of all common