City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland by Kevin Baker Page A

from her now. She ran a hand searchingly over her nightgown: her breasts, her legs, her stomach, her sex—every place he had touched her today. What did it mean? What was any of it for?
    She never even saw herself—outside of her nightgown, at least. A glimpse of thigh, of pale white flesh, glowing in the mirrorless darkness of the hail toilet. She was only a head that walked around, filled with worry, trying not to think about how tired she was all the time.
    This life is too much for me. There is no place in it for me
    You know what your place is
    Her father’s voice. Ever since he had stopped talking to her—speaking to her only when she had goaded him beyond endurance, like tonight—she had made up her own conversations with him.
    She had thought of these make-believe conversations originally as a test, a way to win him over with the logic of her arguments, and at first the made-up father in her mind had been everything she wanted him to be: wise and rational, merciful and abiding.
    But somehow, as time had gone by, the father in her mind had become just as angry and obstinate, just as cynical and caustic as the one snoring now in the next room:
    The first thing you must learn is what you are.
    I’m no donkey for you to ride, that’s for sure!
    But what are you? A woman without a family is not a woman. A woman alone is nothing, she will never enter into the Kingdom of God—
    And how should I have a family—working all the time, with you on my back?
    If only you knew how deep is your ignorance, then you would be truly ashamed.
    I only know what you let me learn!
    —reduced once more, even in her own mind, to a ranting child. Lying on her pallet of chairs, she felt herself miserably small and insignificant. Wrapped up in her sheets, in this tiny apartment, like her mother before her.
    How he had betrayed her:
    “She shall be brought before the king in raiment of needlework . . .”
     
    She had been thirteen—late for work outside the house, though she had not become a woman yet. At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company off Washington Square, where she worked now, there was a corner on the tenth floor they called the kindergarten. Girls of eight and nine worked thirteen hours a day—fifteen, at the height of the season—pulling loose threads off the finished waists. When the factory inspectors came around Mr. Bernstein told them, “Quick, girls! Into the boxes!”—and they made a game out of it, diving into the big cardboard boxes, giggling and pulling the shirtwaists over their heads.
    Of course, she had already been working on the secret garters for years, at home with her mother. Her father had no idea what they were doing; he could not have imagined anything so immoral as a garter belt even in America or he would never have let them under his roof, and so they conspired to conceal the work they did to earn his daily bread.
    It was good work, as those things went. They could make five hundred in a day, depending on the season and how long her mother could hold up. She sewed on the lace, and Esther added the tiny hooks and eyes around the fringe, and wondered how anyone could wear such a flimsy, frilly thing.
    Once she tried one on, when her mother went out to buy dinner and her father was still at the synagogue. She pulled it hurriedly up under her dress—but no matter how she tugged and twisted it hung limply on her girl’s waist, and fell down around her ankles, and she quickly stepped out of it and flung it back on the table, feeling vaguely humiliated.
     
    She almost never left the apartment in those days. She only got out to use the library, or maybe, during the slow seasons, to go to the public school—a big, drafty classroom with fifty other kids, reciting the impossible admonitions on the blackboard by rote:
     
    I must keep my skin clean
    Wear clean clothes,
    Breathe pure air,
    And live in the sunlight—
     
    At home, her mother brought her tea, and bread with maybe a little quince jam, smiling