“And just why is that?”
He finished his lunch and started on mine, methodically, without enthusiasm. He didn’t seem to approve of lamb chops and spinach. “You must’ve thought you’d get an easy ride around here. You must’ve thought you could show up and say ‘Hey, I’m from the big city’ and everyone would just roll over—”
“Would it kill you to get to the point?” I inquired.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll keep it simple. People make beautiful things here. We’re interested in the process, not the end product. Now, you — you don’t have what it takes to start that kind of process, let alone see it through. So. There’s nothing here for you.”
I looked him in the eye and said slowly: “Oh, isn’t there?” I wasn’t referring to anything in particular — all I was conscious of was the desire to give him a gigantic scare, right there in the diner, with the rest of the Sunday lunch crowd all around us, happy young families and grandpas carefully chewing the pasta in their minestrone as they listened to the baseball scores.
Arturo didn’t turn a hair. “What were you at home, a dressmaker’s model?”
“No,” I said, amazed that he could have got it so wrong. That “big city” stuff too. New York wasn’t a big city to me. It was no bigger than a Novak rat cage. The nearest of those blinded creatures always knew when I was nearby, and would turn their heads toward me if I made the slightest movement, just as if I’d called their names.
“Well, you could probably do that kind of work here. I know someone who—”
“I’ll find my own job. Thanks.”
That evening I told Webster she should find someone else for her double dates. It was just one of those things, I said.
I found it easy to disregard the suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a genetic memory in me… after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be more specific, the air took on a strong flavor of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of course I knew better than to mention this to anybody.
Arturo was right about the way Flax Hill worked, though. I swept the floors of European-style ateliers and watched luxury made before my very eyes. Brocade gloves in quarter sizes for a perfect fit, peau de soie slippers with a platinum sheen, hall-length tapestries woven from hand-dyed thread, wooden doorknobs shaped like miniature tigers midleap — the people of Flax Hill made all these things, packed them up in crates with no more emotion than if they were hen’s eggs, and sent them to department stores and private clients across the country. The town should really have been called Flax Hills, since it was huddled up between two of them, but maybe that was the locals’ way of instructing one of the hills to scram. The hills are ringed round with old, dark, thick-trunked trees. They’re so tall you feel a false stillness standing under them; when you look all the way up, you see the wind crashing through the topmost branches, but you hear all the commotion only distantly, if at all. I met men out among those trees. Bearded men who carried axes, and drove carthorses, occasionally stopping to deftly bind logs of wood more tightly together. The woodcutters didn’t seem surprised to see me. They’d just say hello and point, reminding me where north was so I wouldn’t lose my way. Light fell through the leaves, liquid in some places, sometimes stopping to hang in long necklaces — but only for a second or two, as if aware it wouldn’t get much admiration in Flax Hill.
There were houses along the road back into town. I hadn’t taken much notice of them when I was walking toward the trees, but the closer it got to nightfall, the more those houses stood out. They were mostly basic, hutlike structures, and the majority of them looked abandoned, but I saw stripy curtains here and there, or a basketball hoop fixed to an outer wall with a freshly chalked scoreboard beside it. One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: “Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years…” and so on. The front door was open, and the porch light was on, and a little girl came around the side of the house, singing loudly. I couldn’t see her face properly — it was obscured by clouds of dark hair with big red flowers plaited into them — but she had a large cookie in each hand and more in the pockets of her dress, and I wanted to go in at the door behind her, sit down at the old piano I could see in the living room while she stood on tiptoes to retrieve the glass of milk set on top of it. Her voice sounded exactly the way I’d thought it would sound. For some reason that scared me, so I didn’t stop at the gate to greet her even though I heard her saying “Hi” in a startled way. I just said “Hi, Snow” as if we’d met before, when of course we hadn’t, and I kept going, kept my gaze fixed on the road ahead of me. “Scared” doesn’t even really describe it. I almost crossed myself. It felt like the evil eye had fallen upon us both.
3
i became well acquainted with the Help Wanted column in the local paper. I read it in the mornings, lying in bed with my little wireless set on my chest, pouring piano concertos directly into my heart as I scanned job descriptions I couldn’t answer to. I continued my reading at the Mitchell Street lunch counter, where Gertrude the waitress called me (and everyone) “schatzie” and kidded that I was cold-blooded because I drank my coffee without blowing on it first. One day I opened the newspaper to Help Wanted as usual, slumped for no particular reason, ordered a cream soda for a change, and started reading an article on the other half of the page. A “shy, quiet” girl of sixteen had been missing for a month and a half, and various developments had led to the police dragging the river. They’d found the remains of a young female, but apparently it wasn’t the shy, quiet girl — this one was older, “somewhere between twenty and twenty-six years old, well nourished…” The police were looking for help identifying the body, and there were a couple of other details, but it was “well nourished” I got stuck on. How could they say that? How was that going to help jog people’s memories? Were they calling her fat? I mean, being well nourished is good, it means you’re healthy. But when you’re dead and someone says that about you without any kind of modification to the description — I guess it’s all wrong to describe a corpse as “well nourished yet slender”—I just wouldn’t want that for myself. I pushed the cream soda away. I should cut back on treats. I pulled my cream soda back toward me, feeling as embarrassed as if I’d just said that out loud. What a way to be thinking when some poor girl had been murdered. I returned to the Help Wanted column and read it with extra attention to make up for the past few minutes’ slacking. A company that specialized in cocktail mixers had put a call out for blondes (lots of blondes, most shapes, shades, and sizes! Tell your friends!) to act as hostesses for their Valentine’s Day soiree. It was a one-off, an evening cruise on Lake Quinsigamond in a party boat, but the money was good, so I picked up the telephone around the corner from the soda fountain and gave my dress measurements to a decidedly unfriendly receptionist who instructed me to be at the club at four p.m. the following Friday. “You’d better not be lying about those measurements, by the way. This party is for the big-shot investors, and the bosses want to make sure that these investors like what they see. So if you don’t fit into the dress we’ll have ready for you, you’ll have to go home.”