Today was my first day at the ticket booth in the theater. Glass cage is more like it. Prisoners would complain if it were their cell, that’s how small it is. A chicken would squawk if it were his coop.
I said: A dead man would complain if he knew this was his coffin.
Rosie was moving things around lightning quick, a lockbox, a roll of tickets, a tin can full of sharpened pencils. She slapped a notebook on the counter.
She said: Then I guess you’d better rest in peace.
She stepped outside of it and ushered me inside. I bruised my hip on the countertop squeezing in there. That countertop had already marked me for life.
I flopped down on the swivel chair and spun myself slowly around. There was just enough room for that. There was a heater in one corner, already blowing like it had been waiting for me all along. A clock ticking off the minutes before nine in the morning. A calendar on the wall. One month gone, February lay blank. Life was going to happen all around me. The truth of the moment struck me. I started to tear up like a stupid baby girl.
Rosie said: Oh, you poor thing, putting in a hard day’s work
I said: It ain’t that. I’m not afraid of work.
She knew I was telling the truth. I’d always done what Louis had asked me to do.
I said: It’s just that I’ll be all alone in here, and everyone else will be out there.
I suppose I was being a little dramatic and I flung my arms out. Of course they bumped right up against the window, only proving my point further.
Rosie started laughing at me, and it just sounded so good, to hear her laughing. I almost didn’t care what she was going to say. Even if she was teasing me, I was happy to hear her laugh.
She said: Mazie, there’s one thing you’ll never feel in this job, and that’s alone.
She squeezed in next to me, and showed me my tasks. How I’d keep track of how many tickets I started with in the morning, and how many I ended with in the evening. She taught me the combination to the lock. She slid open a small drawer underneath the countertop. Inside was a flask. She looked at me and shrugged.
She said: It does help move the day along.
I said: Well, well.
Then it was ten all of a sudden and there was a line of people building up in front of the theater.
She said: Don’t let anyone give you any trouble.
She left me with a small paper sack, lunch for the day. I settled myself. My hips and chest and belly all shifted into some kind of position and I tried to sit up straight but I knew I’d be slouching by the end of the day. The train rumbled on by over my head again, a thundercloud rolling through. I couldn’t even hear myself think but what was there to think about anyway? It was just me and the line. Rosie was still standing there, off to the side, watching everything. She was smiling so hard I thought her face would split in two, straight down the middle, two cheeks floating off in the sky. She had rearranged me. I was a movable part to her. And now I was in this cage.
I slid aside the front guard to the cage and slotted it into place. The whole of the line took a step forward all at once, like they were taking one big breath together. I looked at them all. Women holding hands with their little ones, a few sailors and soldiers, more than a few men in suits looking like they might be trying to sleep off their night out on the Bowery.
Then I got a little dizzy for a second. It’s just a job, is what I was thinking.
Finally, Rosie spoke.
She said: This is Mazie, and she’s in charge now.
And damn if they didn’t all wave at me and say hello.
Lydia Wallach
My great-grandfather was responsible for the movie selection, staff management, concessions, and the care of the theater itself. Basically anything that was contained within the doors of the theater, he managed. And Mazie sold the tickets and handled the money, and if anyone got out of line, she also ran security. Rudy was a tiny, gentle man. I have seen pictures of him and he looks much shorter than everyone else around him. He had immaculate skin and hands, as did my mother, and I do, too. Look at my hands. Look at how tiny they are. [Holds up hands.] Those are the Wallach hands. So Rudy wasn’t in any place to be roughing up any of the bums. Also he was the child of intellectuals. That’s right, I always forget that part. My great-great-grandparents were Russian intellectuals escaping some sort of persecution I never quite understood, and they moved to New York when he was just a baby. He was just this fine, sensitive man, fair to everyone, and he wasn’t interested in any of that rough-and-tumble business. So I guess it happened quite naturally that it fell to Mazie.
Mazie’s Diary, February 5, 1918
The movies make me sick in my gut.
I knew this before and then I forgot but now I remember, oh buddy do I remember.
I shut down the cage last night early. All day long I’m sitting there, wondering what’s going on inside. So I wandered through the theater. The high ceilings made the place feel like a castle out of a storybook, somewhere far away. Europe is what I was thinking, although what do I know of Europe?
I wanted to watch the last show of Tarzan. I slipped into the theater, onto those bruised red velour seat cushions, soft under my fingertips. There was a romance to it, I could see it. All those rows of big, beautiful, round bulbs that lined the walls. Rosie shows up once a week and tells the ushers to dust the lights. Sweep and dust, dust and sweep, she repeats it. She should ask that gypsy of hers if she were a general in a past life.
The movie was just starting, and everyone hushed up. At first I liked seeing all the animals, the giraffes and the lions and the snakes and the alligators. They looked like trouble. It was dreamy, watching something wild and alive and different than my own life, up high, so much bigger than anything I know.
But it only took a minute till I started to feel wobbly. The animals on the screen swelled up, then they floated and waved around in front of my eyes. Something gooey started to boil in my stomach. I turned my head away from the screen but it was too late. I was retching in the aisle like a bum on the corner after the bars closed for the night. Someone shushed me, but then there was someone else by my side, a small hand holding my hair. Some lady, I figured. When I stopped retching I looked up and there was Rudy.
I said: I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
He said: Let’s get you outside, Miss Mazie. Get some air in you.
I put my arm around his neck and we stumbled together through the lobby and out the front door, and then he leaned me up against the cage.
He asked me if I was sick and I said no. He asked me if anyone in my house was sick and I said no.
He said: Sometimes one of the boys gets sick, and then we all do. Just out of nowhere.
I said: It’s not that, I’m fit as a fiddle. It’s looking up at the movies. I don’t know what to tell you. All that jumping around.
He said: No more movies for you.
I said: Who needs to go to the movies anyway? Real life’s more interesting. Flesh and blood.
I was getting my spunk back in the cold air. I was feeling a little humiliated too. Bending over that like that, him seeing me weak, I didn’t like any of it.
I said: It’s just a movie, who cares.
He said: So you stick to tickets and I’ll stick to the movies. Front of the house, back of the house, that kind of thing.
I said: It seems fair.
We shook on it and it was like his hand nearly disappeared in mine. He’s a strange little doll of a man, that Rudy.
Mazie’s Diary, February 8, 1918
It’s one thing to walk the streets, and it’s another thing to watch them. I used to be just one of the crowd, stretching my legs, mixing with the rest of those lugs. But now I’m sitting still while the world moves on around me, and I’m seeing things a little differently through the bars of this cage. Hustlers and cons I knew here and there but not so much. Now I watch them every day and I’m learning. They don’t care where they land as long as they get what they’re looking for. Maybe they never hit me up before because I was always on the run on the streets, but now I’m a sitting duck and they won’t leave me alone. I must have a bright red target on my forehead that says Easy Mark. But that sign would be wrong. I’ll teach them soon enough not to mess with me.