Chapter 35
Birdie
At the first wink of light Sunday morning, I opened my eyes and for a few seconds, I wasn’t quite sure where I was. Then the springs in my cot squeaked and—Oh, that’s right. I turned my sister’s house into a brothel and the items for sale ain’t selling.
I dragged myself downstairs to milk the cow and saw that Charlie had already made coffee.
Something had changed between me and Charlie last night, after our discussion, which had continued into the early morning hours.
The best way I could describe it was to say our friendship had darkened and grown thicker, like a roux for gumbo.
There were still some hard feelings between us: She had tricked me into opening a brothel, and I’d kept the truth from her about the Heidelbergs.
And Welty. And Garnett. But what we were both pretty sure about was we wouldn’t deceive the other one again.
We needed to be a united front to figure out how to fix this business.
It helped, too, that we liked each other’s company, and it didn’t hurt that we liked each other’s coffee, strong to where it made your words fry on your tongue.
By nine, the entire population of the house had gathered in the kitchen and Ruby’s Little Fella radio played the Grand Ole Opry from on top of the icebox.
It was stuffy in here and hot and prostitutes kept getting in my way, but it was nice to have the company while I cooked everybody breakfast. It gave me a feeling that was the opposite of lonesome—full was how it felt.
Like I’d eaten too much of something rich, on the verge of turning, but it was still better than not having eaten at all.
I flipped the first omelet onto a plate and handed it to Dixie. She’d cut the line in front of Ruby. The twins were always starving.
“Watch it, Number Two,” Ruby snarled and jerked the plate out of her hands.
Number Two was one of Ruby’s many names for Dixie, though she’d never called Trixie something as nice as Number One.
“Thought you geeks preferred live chickens for breakfast.” A geek was the caged man at the fair who ate the live animals.
Ruby’s loathing for most of us was unpredictable—one minute she’d offer you a cigarette, the next a knuckle sandwich—but she seemed to loathe the twins fairly predictably.
At the big round kitchen table, Charlie was wearing black and a look of utter confoundedness, squeezing her temples.
We’d already gone over the facts of the matter: On Friday the girls had handed out almost fifty cards to boys at the depot, the filling station, the Tea Hound, the Mecca, and plenty of places in between, except campus, because they’d run out of cards.
They’d flirted and made eye contact and even drawn promises from boys that they’d show up.
Last night, after we’d split the earnings in half with the girls and divided the rest by three, everyone had made zero dollars and zero cents each.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Charlie said at the table. “There are 950 boys three miles down the road.”
“Well, 949 of ’em must be headed to the priesthood,” Ruby said, I suppose taking into account the one who’d shown up here but left.
“I think it’s this house is the problem,” Flossy said. “It just don’t feel like a whorehouse. I betcha nobody’s fadoodled in that pink room a mine in since maybe ever.”
I looked over at Flossy. She could really sense that? I banged the skillet to loosen the omelet.
Charlie stopped rubbing her head, maybe realizing how desperate it looked in front of her employees. “Things will pick up. We just have to do more advertising.” She went back to cutting up more of Frances’s calling cards.
“What if we tried a gimmick of some kind?” I said. “Like at the picture show. They punch a coupon, and after five shows you get a full place setting.”
“Hell is a coupon?” Ruby asked.
“Hell is a place setting?” Flossy said. “Sorry, Bird, that ain’t how this business works.”
Virginia came in the back door. No doctor’s coat on today, she wore a white nurse’s dress with a little white cap pinned to her head.
“Customers sure would like that nursing getup you got on,” Flossy said.
Virginia pulled the white hat off, scowling at it, and stuffed it in her dress pocket.
“It’s ridiculous I have to wear a dress, when all the boys get to wear doctor coats.
” Without the hat, her dark frizzled hair rose loose around her face.
I’d heard Flossy ask her, not unkindly, “You look like a Jew I used to know from Brooklyn, you a Jew?” This had caught my interest because I’d never met a Jewish person before, but Virginia’d shrugged and said she’d never known her father.
She hadn’t looked ashamed about it, she’d looked grounded and driven.
She’d have to be, if she was really going to become a doctor: There’d been no breaks in life for Virginia, not from looks and not from money.
Eyes bright, eager to test for a fresh batch of diseases, she asked, “So did anybody show up with symptoms? Anybody’s condom slip off?”
When no one answered, I said, “No customers showed up.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What do you think about the girls doing some advertising on campus today?” Charlie asked Virginia.
“You want to hand out cards for a cathouse in front of teachers and parents? Even the churches’ll be up there recruiting for Sunday service. You better be careful.”
Virginia sat at the table and drew them a map of the campus.
I brought her an omelet, topped with hoop cheese and parsley, and she took a bite and groaned her thanks.
Pointing to X’s she’d drawn, she said, “Those are the men’s dorms, Barr, Falkner, and on down, but watch out for the house mothers, they’re like spies.
And stay away from Ward, Isom, and Ricks, those are the girls’ dormitories, and don’t even look in the direction of the Lyceum. ”
As she marked the map, she did not seem troubled a bit by the ethics of not just testing prostitutes in a root cellar turned laboratory but now ushering them to her former classmates as customers.
Since she hadn’t charged Charlie for the first round of tests, clearly it was in Virginia’s best interest for this thing to work.
“You can probably catch some coming out of the Sigma Chi or the KA houses too, but I’m warning you, those frat boys can be enormous jerks.
One of them poured sulfuric acid all over my lab book because he couldn’t get square with the idea of a girl getting a medical cert.
I had to borrow money from my poor mother to buy a new one. ”
“Whus his name? He need a lesson from Ruby Slipper?” Ruby popped her fist against her palm so hard, I could feel the smack.
Virginia shrugged. “I heard it’s only going to get worse in med school, so I better get used to it.” She tucked a lock of wild hair behind her ear. “I typed it up on hospital stationery that he was positive for gonorrhea and sent it home to his parents.” She added, “And to his fiancée’s parents.”
That got a good laugh from the room. At least for a second, I felt better about the world.
“The ones you ought to go after are the saps that don’t ever get dates,” Virginia said.
“The girls call them the Last Resorts. There’s a bunch that hang around University Sandwich—they’re actually pretty nice, but don’t clobber them all at once.
They’re kinda shy.” She marked the sandwich shop on the map too.
It was already nine thirty. “I better get dressed,” I said.
“Where you going on a Sunday morning?” Flossy asked.
“I have a date,” I said. “For church.”
Flossy stood up and followed me to the back stairs. Behind me, I heard her say, “Ruby, bring me the plucker.”
They sat me on the toilet upstairs, with Esmeralda standing back, appraising the procedure. “Ow!” I cried. It felt like a dang bee had stung my eyebrow. “You’re going to make my face even redder than it already is!”
Arms crossed, Esmeralda said, “More.”
“Don’t make them all thin and dramatic,” I said. “Remember, I’m just an ordinary.”
After a few more, Esmeralda said, “Alright, that’s good.” She opened a square blue train case and took out a bottle that said Max Factor on it and rubbed a thin layer of something creamy across my face.
“What is that?” I asked as she smoothed it in with her fingers.
“All the girls in the pictures use it,” she said. Then she dabbed rouge on my cheeks and powdered my face, cocking a gorgeous eyebrow to concentrate. If she thought she could make me look anything like her, she was about to be very disappointed.
“I want to see,” I said.
“Not yet. I want to put a little spit black on you, so close your eyes.” She rubbed a tiny wet brush onto a black cake of something and swept it up my eyelashes, holding it there. “Now blink. Let’s make these puppies curl.” She did this several times.
Next, she uncapped a deep red lipstick. “Your lips are nice, full,” she said, dabbing the lipstick on them, then wiping the edges with a tissued fingernail.
She did not blot. Then Flossy bent me over and brushed my hair up—“Now flip it over”—and then down again.
She parted it far to one side and pulled the heavier side back in a loose clip.
Thanks to Charlie, I had a terrific wardrobe of clothes to choose from now—four dresses, two skirts, and three blouses, simple and slim like the style, with a bit of “de-luxe” added to it, as Flossy called it, which was brass or shiny buttons or some kind of trim.
This morning, Charlie came into the bathroom holding a cream-colored dress, cut on the bias, printed with large magnolia blooms. It was lovely. Not too loud, not too hot.