Chapter Six
As she walked with the rose in her hand, her eyes drank in the shop windows filled with everything from ladies’ shoes to necklaces to sausage links to guitars.
One store sold nothing but gloves; another, toupees.
She found an alley off High Street where a palm reader sat out on a chair in front of her narrow storefront waiting for customers.
Right next to her was another palm-reading place, and beside that a signboard advertising predictions of the future read in your palm.
All of them together in one stretch, as if the city had zoned it that way.
She felt surprisingly grown-up in her decision to waste twenty-five cents on the palm reader.
The little room they sat in had no ventilation; someone hammered down the hall.
The woman wore a sequined scarf tied around her head and ran her finger up and down Margaret’s palm.
She predicted romance. That was exciting, until Margaret saw the woman eyeing the rose in her lap.
“Whoever gave you that rose is going to be your husband,” the woman said.
“God, I hope not,” said Margaret. She paid the woman and left her the rose as a tip.
From there, she went to the fine arts museum and looked at paintings by people she’d never heard of.
Picasso, Degas, Braque, Matisse. Then she walked through the narrow park along the Scioto River, where she came upon artists with sketchpads and canvases set up on easels.
The painters painted the river, the American Insurance Union tower, the statehouse dome.
The sketchers sketched portraits of people willing to sit (and pay a little).
The likenesses they achieved were remarkable.
But perhaps her favorite thing about the city, those first few days and nights, was the signs.
Block after block of projecting signs that snatched playfully at your eye as you rode past on the streetcar.
And the neon! The Rexall sign in Doyle had been neon, that was it.
In downtown Columbus, she spotted neon almost everywhere she looked.
In the evening, on the way back to the lodging house, she rode the streetcars and stared at the signs as she passed them, then closed her eyes and saw them on the backs of her eyelids.
—
The lodging house was filled with young women who seemed drained of most of their hope by the end of the day, and in that way it was like an orphanage for grown-ups.
Some of the women were Polish immigrants who worked in the nearby Ford factory; they kept mostly to themselves.
The rooms were all single, but the walls and doors, even the floors were thin; Margaret heard every sneeze, every cleared throat.
Still, it was a luxury to have a place to be alone when she was tired—especially those first few days, when she was feeling so excited and overwhelmed.
As promised, she called Lydia at the end of the third day—from inside the phone booth in the lobby of the lodging house.
Lydia wanted to hear about everything, but she had so many questions that it was hard to get a word in, at first. Margaret told her she was fine and safe and happy and yes, she wouldn’t eat every meal in a diner for the rest of her life but would buy groceries and use the shared kitchen in the lodging house, and no, she wasn’t talking to strangers, and yes, she was going to that cafeteria the very next day to see about a job. And she would call again in a week.
Another lodger—standing just off to the side of the booth in the lobby—was waiting to use the phone. Margaret pulled the door open, smiled at her, and stepped out. The young woman smiled back and said thank you and stepped in. Just like grown-ups, Margaret thought.
Then came her fourth day in Columbus.
—
The cafeteria was on East Long Street and had an orange brick facade and an orange awning sticking out over the sidewalk.
It was still called Anton’s, but it wasn’t owned by Mr. Anton anymore.
It was owned by a Mr. Higgs, who was around forty and wore a shiny brown suit and had Valentino hair and full, almost feminine lips.
Margaret could see how a person might find him attractive.
He invited her into his office, which had an overseer’s view of both the twin serving lines and the enormous dining room with its dark-paneled walls and field of orange tablecloths.
He offered her a chair, told her he ran a “tight ship,” went over the rules of the place, and, without asking her a single thing about herself, told her she was the most promising candidate he’d met for the position he was presently looking to fill: line server.
But he was just on his way to lunch at the moment; would she care to join him?
“Is there a Delores who works here?” Margaret asked. The friend of a friend Lydia had mentioned.
No Delores, Mr. Higgs said. But what about lunch? His treat, of course. “Mind you, I’m not the kind of boss who fraternizes with his employees.”
Whatever kind of boss he was, she needed a job and had planned to eat a bologna sandwich for lunch. She accepted his invitation.
They walked several blocks to a place called Kuenning’s.
There, he recommended the lobster. Margaret admitted she’d never had lobster before, and soon there were two dead, pink prehistoric creatures on platters between them.
The waiter startled Margaret by tying a bib around her neck.
Mr. Higgs said, “Follow my lead,” and selected from the instruments lined up beside his plate.
As he worked, he talked about the cafeteria business, federal interest rates, and—licking his fingers—the Smoot–Hawley Tariff.
He talked about how he was expanding into real estate, and as they were leaving the restaurant, he asked if he could show her a nearby apartment he was thinking of purchasing—a place that turned out not to be empty, as she’d imagined, but fully furnished and decorated.
Someone’s name was on the buzzer, and that person’s mail was on the table.
But Mr. Higgs had the key. Once they were inside and the door was closed, he said, “Good, then,” and began kissing her neck.
When Margaret was sixteen, Lydia had explained sex to her in flat textbook terms—Tab A, Slot B, baby—adding, “You don’t ever have to do it if you don’t want to.
” Margaret had also heard about sex from the last girl to be older than her at Open Arms, a girl named Sophia who’d told her it hurt like hell the first time.
It hurt the second and third time too, she said, but after that it was Fourth of July, siss-boom-ba.
Margaret asked how many times Sophia had had sex and Sophia counted on her fingers and said five.
You just had to make sure all the boy’s yoke went into his poke so that he didn’t knock you up.
(An explanation of all those terms followed, and Margaret never looked at eggs the same way again.)
Mr. Higgs’s almost feminine lips didn’t feel bad on her neck, actually.
She wasn’t sure how far he wanted to take things—this was always the part in the picture where the view switched to curtains billowing or a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray—but if he wanted to go further, maybe she could kill two birds with one stone.
Get the painful part over with (since it had to happen sometime) and secure employment.
She needed to survive in order to find a husband and have a wonderful life; she needed a job in order to survive.
He wanted to go further. He took off his suitcoat, his shoes, his pants, and his underwear, but left on his shirt, tie, socks, and garters.
He had a poke with him and kept his yoke in it.
And it hurt like hell, just as Sophia had said it would.
His tongue tasted like lobster and his breath smelled like cigarettes, and all Margaret could think about as he grunted over her was that Thelma might have suffered this very thing under Mr. Selby. Poor, fifteen-year-old Thelma.
Afterward, she gathered her clothes and carried them into the bathroom, where she was tempted to draw a bath and climb into it (since the tub at the lodging house was usually claimed in the evenings).
If only she were alone. When she came out, Mr. Higgs was back in his shiny brown suit and standing before the mirror over the fireplace, combing his hair with a little tortoiseshell comb.
How fun that was, he said. He hoped it was fun for her, too, despite the timing.
He’d noticed the blood on the sheet and assumed she was having her period.
“It was fun,” Margaret said, thinking, It’s over. Catching his eye in the mirror and realizing they hadn’t discussed the job since leaving his office, she added, trying to sound playful, “But I thought you told me you weren’t the kind of boss who fraternized with his employees.”
“Ah,” Mr. Higgs said. “Good then. On to business.” He snugged up the knot of his necktie. “The only reason this happened is because I haven’t hired you yet.”
There was a smaller mirror with a stamped tin frame on the wall next to the door. Beside it, a desiccated Palm Sunday palm tied into a cross. Who lived here? Margaret checked her hair. “Yet?”
“The job is yours, of course.” He mentioned the salary, which sounded low, but she had nothing to compare it to.
“And I keep my word,” he said. “This won’t happen again, now that you’re on the payroll.
I’m a married man, after all.” He told her she could start the next day, that she should be there at 7:30 a.m. and report to Mrs. Conroy.
There was, by the way, no need to mention any of this to Mrs. Conroy.
“Any of what?” Margaret asked. She hated the sight of him.