Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wisconsin, Tessie Golden of the presunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen: “Ma, what’d you do with my pink blouse?”
And from the kitchen: “It’s in your second bureau drawer. The collar was kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing while my iron was on.”
At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to texture and precariously low as to neck had Tessie herself not been so reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, very brief; a hat with a good deal of French blue about it; fragile high-heeled pumps with bows.
As she passed through the sitting room on her way out, her mother would appear in the doorway, dishtowel in hand. Her pride in this slim young thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping criticism.
“Runnin’ downtown again, I s’pose.” A keen eye on the swishing skirt hem.
Tessie, the quick-tongued, would toss the wave of shining hair that lay against either glowing cheek. “Oh, my, no! I just thought I’d dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto and picked me up for a little ride. So’s not to keep her waiting.”
Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton’s daughter. Anyone in the Fox River Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing this, you were able to appreciate Tessie’s sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as unaware of Tessie’s existence as only a young woman could be whose family residence was in Chippewa, Wisconsin, but who wintered in Italy, summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line. Angie’s underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and zephyrs, was of silk and crepe de Chine and satin—materials that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course, two years later they were showing practically the same thing at Megan’s dry-goods store. But that was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.
Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother’s eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie’s mother. Tessie resembled her as a water color may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie’s wide mouth curved into humor lines. She was the cutup of the escapement department at the watch factory; the older woman’s lips sagged at the corners. Tessie was buoyant and colorful with youth. The other was shrunken and faded with years and labor. As the girl minced across the room in her absurdly high-heeled shoes, the older woman thought: My, but she’s pretty! But she said aloud: “I should think you’d stay home once in a while and not be runnin’ the streets every night.”
“Time enough to be sittin’ home when I’m old like you.”
And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding.
But in families such as Tessie’s, demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of; affection a thing to conceal. Tessie’s father was janitor of the Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism, loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame house and his new cement sidewalk and his carefully tended yard and garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged between her parents.
Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie’s evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say, “Always gaddin’ downtown, or over to Cora’s or somewhere, like you didn’t have a home to stay in. You ain’t been in a evening this week, only when you washed your hair.”
Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back porch —she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at half-past six to go to work.
Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart. She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some errand or other—to empty the coffee grounds, to turn the row of half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing, to flap and hang up a damp tea towel.
“Ain’t you goin’ out, Tess?”
“No.”
“What you want to lop around here for? Such a grant evening. Why don’t you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora’s or somewhere, hm?”
“What for?”—listlessly.
“What for! What does anybody go out for!”
“I don’t know.”
If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy, “Person’d think Chuck Mory was the only one who’d gone to war an’ the last fella left in the world.”
A grim flash of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. “He is. Who’s there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I’ll doll up this evening and see if I can’t make a hit with one of them.”
She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie Golden’s world.
In order to understand the Tessie of today one would have to know the Tessie of six months ago—Tessie the impudent, the life-loving. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room foreman that anyone else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls’ washroom at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearing the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave an imitation of that advanced young woman’s progress down Grand Avenue in this restricting garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan’s, who, having just returned from the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of the last cry in Paris modes—and no model in Mattie’s newly selected stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.
You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker. Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a blouse or retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and arbor and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls worked with pincers and flame, screwing together the three tiny parts of the watch’s anatomy that were their particular specialty. Each wore a jeweler’s glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, somehow, a spiritual look which made her impudence all the more piquant.
Tessie wasn’t always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of nervous apprehension—a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher’s back is turned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him.