kathleen.j.danielsonSaturdays were always a damnable day to work, but this was simply intolerable. Never before had quite so many things gone wrong in one morning, Miri thought, glaring at the automobile driver who honked as she darted back across 14th. This would certainly displace the day she’d awoken to find her shoes thoroughly soaked through with the brackish water of a ceiling leak.
“Morning, Mrs. Zweifel,” she panted for the second time in ten minutes, and narrowly avoided kicking over the old woman’s ashtray as she dashed back up the brick steps of her apartment building.
“Forget something?” Mrs. Zweifel called after her in her familiar smoker’s croak, and Miri grunted in affirmation. The door slammed behind her, rattling the dingy lobby chandelier, and she clattered up four flights of creaky wooden stairs without a care for the racket she was making before seven a.m. Finally!—the fourth floor landing, then down the hall to apartment 402; the key twisted in her sweat-slick fingers, but she fumbled the door open and burst inside.
The cat was crying for extra food just as he had been ten minutes before, the useless fat creature. He hissed when she barreled past him and her tweed walking skirt brushed his fur the wrong way.
“Oh, do shut up, Puck,” she gasped out, sparing no second glance for the chubby tabby. She grabbed her tool-bag, forgotten in a heap of laundry beside the unmade bed, and tripped back into the hall. She barely remembered to lock the door behind her.
Mrs. Zweifel was grounding out the dregs of her cigarette when Miri burst outside again. The younger woman coughed at the smoke that puffed from Mrs. Zweifel’s mouth with a click of her tongue and the words, “You’ll run yourself ragged, you know, dear.”
“I know,” Miri choked out, and then she turned the corner and left her neighbor in her wake, the heavy leather tool-bag thumping a bruise into her thigh with every pounding step. Three blocks east down 14th and then one north to Nicollet, and—there!—the streetcar had just drawn to a halt at the corner. She put on a last spurt of speed, flailing a little as she swerved in front of a plodding old horse pulling a rickety cart, and swung herself into the streetcar just as it lurched into motion.
Eight blocks to relax. She stumbled to the nearest open bench—there was no shortage of these, since no reasonable person was out at this hour on a weekend—and collapsed there, fanning herself with a sweaty hand. With her thirty-second birthday not a month past, she couldn’t help but feel that all this huffing and puffing was further proof of what she already knew: she really was an old maid.
Oh, but does it matter anymore? I’ve had years enough to come to terms with that particular failing.
She sighed and sat up slightly, stretching. This abominable morning had been chaotic since the moment she awoke to the sun on her face and knew immediately that she’d overslept. If the sun had risen high enough to shine through her fourth-floor window, she was already doomed to be late—but she’d fought the inevitability anyway, forgoing breakfast and leaving her hair in its nighttime plait in an attempt to make up for her lost half-hour. It was only when she’d already hurried the four blocks to the streetcar stop that she realized the familiar weight of her all-important tool-bag was missing from her shoulder.
Now it was seven o’clock, and she was thirty minutes late to her shift. The store wouldn’t yet be bustling at such an early hour, she knew, but lateness was never tolerated no matter the day, the time, or the excuse—and of the latter, she had none. She sighed and reached into her right skirt pocket for the handful of hairpins she always kept there, gripped a few between her teeth, and coiled her frizzy braid into something resembling a respectable attempt at a loose bun at the crown of her head. A moment of hesitation, reluctance—then from the left pocket, the larger of the two, she pulled her mirror.
She repressed the flash of oddness she always felt, having this mirror so casually out in the open. It was not the mirror itself that conjured this sense of furtive shame; the unadorned oval frame was wrought of tarnished silver, its edges scalloped, the looking-glass foggy and gray, no different from a thousand other hand mirrors passed down from a thousand other grandmothers. Nor was it the reflection that brought her such discomfort; she’d long ago come to terms with her thin bloodless lips and unfashionably limp hair. And of course, like everyone else, she was accustomed to the sight of the Reflectere, though in the mirror she could see vines choking the rotting streetcar benches behind her—benches that, if she glanced over her shoulder, would be clean and shiny with recent paint.
No, it was not that, although she winced as some sort of knock-kneed sprite bounded into the streetcar’s reflection and began tearing strips from the aluminum roof with abandon. No, the reason she rarely used this mirror in public, the reason she now slipped it back into her velvet-lined left pocket with restrained urgency, was that the little oval looking-glass provided the source of half her income—and no one could ever know.
The streetcar ground to a halt, the wheels screeching slightly on the rails, and Miri glanced out to see the dome and plate glass of her destination looming across the street. She dropped her fare clumsily into the driver’s till and called a hurried apology over her shoulder when the token went rolling to the floor. Without pausing to check for traffic, she rushed headlong across Nicollet. Darting behind an automobile, leaping over a pile of freshly steaming horse dung, turning her head toward the sound of a horn blaring at her, she did not notice the puddle until her left foot splashed ankle-deep into it.
“Damn!” she cried, and a mother walking by with three dolled-up little children glared at her. Miri huffed and hopped one-footed out of the puddle and onto the sidewalk, where she bent to untie her shoe.
Why is it, she thought, that whenever something goes wrong for me, it’s always a wet shoe to blame?
Miri upended her shoe and watched the mucky water stream back into the puddle, disturbing the image there: the familiar ribbed glass dome of L.S. Donaldson Co., not glinting with sunlight as it was above her, but instead dull, mud-splattered, hairy vines curling round it, swaying like great snakes from the lighthouse-like spire at its crest. She scowled at the dome at her feet, the last droplets from her shoe rippling across the murky image of the Reflectere, and dropped the sopping thing onto the sidewalk. With some effort and several more muttered curses, she shoved her foot into the shoe—and then over the bustle of the two blocks between her and the church, she heard St. Olaf’s chime the quarter hour. Damn it all! Forty-five minutes late now, and growing later by the second. She fumbled the laces into a bow and turned toward the Donaldson’s entryway.
The bright sun of late May glinted off the glass block doors, obscuring any hint of the Reflectere that could normally be faintly seen there. Miri hurried through the entry and onto the first floor of the department store, the glass-encased shelves and tables of jewelry and fine leather goods gleaming in the light of the grand chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling. The store was busier than she’d expected, and she had to weave past groups of ladies perusing the jewelry cases before she could duck left into the employee lounge; usually crowded with Donaldson’s workers arriving for their shifts or shoveling down their lunch, the lounge was now deserted. Sighing, Miri scribbled her name and arrival time on a card, slipped it into its slot in the time clock, and then shoved her tool-bag into one of the cubby holes lining the walls of the windowless room.
She turned to rush back out, and instead pulled up short. In the door stood the manager.
“Mrs. Lillis,” he said coldly, one hand on the doorframe and the other in the pocket of a striped suit coat that likely would have cost two months of her salary. “You know full well that we do not tolerate lateness.”
As always, hearing herself called Missus startled her, and she reflexively reached down to fiddle with the battered gold wedding band on her ring finger. She’d bought it from a pawn shop four years ago, after she moved away from home and realized that one simple lie would smooth her passage through life. The ring transformed her: now she was not a tastelessly modern single woman, but a wife working as a milliner to supplement her husband’s income until the first baby came. Mrs. Miriam Lillis—that was a name that could garner respect.
Miri forced herself to stop twisting the ring, and cast the manager a quick, shamed glance.
“No, sir,” she said, with as much deference as she’d ever shown in her life. “It won’t happen again, I can assure you.”
He surveyed her for a moment, his eyes flicking from her scuffed Oxford pumps—the leather of the left stained a darker brown than the right—to her rumpled tweed skirt and sweat-dampened shirt, then to the ill-pinned hair that surely was frizzing a halo round her head. Wishing she’d remembered to stuff her hat onto her head before rushing out her apartment door, she lowered her eyes in the face of this scrutiny and stared fixedly at the tiles between her shoes and his.
“Hm,” he grunted finally. “On your way. You’ve a customer waiting.”
Miri swallowed a curse and squeezed past him through the doorway, hating herself and him in equal measure.
If only I didn’t need his damned eight dollars a week.
She seethed all the way to the elevator. Then she found a cluster of people already waiting to file into the lift, and seethed harder. The leather of her wet left shoe let out an obnoxious squeak of protest with every step, and the damp wool of her stocking was beginning to chafe; between the start of a blister forming on her heel and the odd glances cast her way as she squelched past the crowd, she wanted nothing less than to take the stairs. But the wait for the elevator would be far too long, so the stairs she must take, and quickly: the great clock on the far wall read five to eight, and she could not afford to leave a customer waiting any longer than she already had. She paused for a heartbeat at the base of the wide marble staircase at the center of the first floor, and then started up, two steps at a time.
By the time she reached the fifth and top floor, a stitch bit mercilessly into her side, her foot throbbed, and she gulped for breath. She limped past the ladies’ fitting rooms and into the millinery department as quickly as she could, trying to regain some composure before she had to face a customer no doubt infinitely more respectable than she. Indeed, as she rounded the corner into her little domain, she saw a fashionable lady of upper middle age waiting by the milliner’s counter, tapping a fanciful little gilt cane against the tile floor.
“Apologies, ma’am,” Miri gasped out as she at last stumbled into her post behind the counter, resisting the urge to double over with her fists pressed into her side. “How may I help you?”
“I am here to purchase a hat,” said the woman; this, spoken among countless rows of shelves lined with hats of every style, seemed rather a redundancy to Miri. “In the Merry Widow style, if you please.”
“Merry Widow,” said Miri, nodding, and turned to gaze at the wall of wide brims behind her, using the moment to wipe the sweat from her forehead and take a deep, full belly breath. The woman sighing and tapping behind her, however, seemed to take this as some sort of clumsy coverup for bafflement.
“Is there…someone else who might assist me? The milliner, perhaps?” The woman peered around Miri, as if somewhere in the shelf-laden wall at her back there might be a door, through which there might pop someone who did not look as though she had been tossed in the Mississippi and then forced to run all the way to Donaldson’s.
“No, ma’am,” Miri said, arranging every last tattered scrap of her patience into an appropriately apologetic smile. “I’m the milliner.”
#
So went her day. By the time her shift came to an end at six o’clock, the heel of her left foot had been chafed raw against her damp wool stocking and even damper shoe, and she limped all the way to the elevator, then all the way across the still-bustling first floor to the employees’ lounge. Good God, she’d be grateful to fall into bed tonight and sleep away half of Sunday. Maybe Puck would even do her the courtesy of waiting till past ten to start yowling for breakfast—as if he couldn’t live off his pudge alone for at least a year.
But before she could return to Willow Street for cat and comfort, she had work to do. She slipped her timecard into its slot in the time clock and collected her tool-bag from her cubby hole, wincing as she slung it across her shoulder and its bulk bumped against her bruised thigh. A trio of young men came in to drop their cards into the time clock, and Miri pretended to fumble with something inside the bag for a moment—though really, she was busy freeing her hand from the cursed weight of the wedding ring. She did not need it for this second part of her work day.
The men hardly noticed Miri as they filed out of the lounge, chattering all the while. The room was empty in their wake, and no one was there to see her slip into the ladies’ washroom, leaving the door ajar. No one was there to see her pull the silver mirror from her left pocket and crouch low on the washroom tiles, the antique looking-glass held horizontally before her. No one was there to see her cast one last glance around the room, and step into the mirror.