Well, I was in no mood to bend.
I went to the shift mother first thing the next morning, asked her for a new assignment. Said Frankie would just slow me down. “Nonsense, Evie, you’re our best riveter,” she said, never meeting my eyes — no one ever met my eyes, like I was just some ghost. “Just work with her. Show her how it’s done.”
I tried. I showed her how to make a straight line, how to set her jaw to keep her teeth from rattling. But her attention was like a moth, always in search of a new light source: gossip with the other girls, each day’s newspaper (which she skimmed for news from the European front), or the battered book of plays she pored over like a holy text.
Too often, she flitted toward me too. Endless questions, like I was some jigsaw puzzle someone had left out that she was determined to finish. Frankie was relieved, the way people always are, when I told her I hadn’t come west to be a movie star. Was it my uneven gait from a too-short leg? (“Breech birth,” Mama always said, like when she diagnosed cattle on the Steadmans’ ranch.) Maybe just my family tree, ensuring I’d only ever be cast whooping around a stagecoach in feathers and hides. No, I wasn’t here to be in front of the lens. I wanted to be the puppet master, pulling the starlets’ strings. Hearing my words from their mouths.
“I’ve already done a few radio gigs,” Frankie’d say to anyone who’d listen. “My Danny’s assistant to one of the big directors down at Warner Brothers — I can’t tell you his name. Soon as Danny’s back from the war, he’s promised to get me a screen test.”
She had the looks, I’d give her that — glossy chestnut curls, lips quick to smirk. But like all the girls in this town, she knew it, and it soured everything about it. The great playwright Anton Chekhov said if you’ve got a gun onstage in act one, you better fire it by act three. That was how Frankie wielded her beauty in those early days, and I was just waiting for the recoil.
“I’ve got a fella too,” I found myself saying. Like my James was a golden frame I’ve put around myself — Look at me, I may not be a starlet, but I’m worthy. Someone thinks I’m worthy. I never gossiped with the other girls, but I had to shut Frankie up somehow. “He’s a petty officer in the Pacific fleet. We’re gonna get married when he comes back home.”
Frankie’s eyebrows raised at that, and for once she looked at her work. But a few minutes later, she was chatting away again — recounting all the directors she dreamed of working with, the roles she wanted to play, the exhilarating life she led. But I knew it couldn’t be as exciting as all that. She was here for the same reason all the rest of us were here, turning victory scraps into airplanes and spending ten percent of our earnings on war bonds so we’d earn our Minuteman flags. Hollywood didn’t want us, and without a studio paycheck, without our boys to win the bread for us, we had to feed ourselves somehow.
Didn’t stop Frankie from spinning her yarns all over the plant. Once I’d heard her stories, she stopped trying to impress me — or maybe the shift mother said something to her, I don’t know — but every time I passed her and another cluster of girls, I heard the lies fluttering from her mouth, weightless as butterflies. “Well, as I was just saying to Vivien Leigh . . .” “I gotta leave early today, gonna read for the boys down at Paramount . . .” I’d hurry past, grateful for a few moments’ work without her at my shoulder, and I’d let my rivet gun sing.
For a few blessed minutes, it was like it was before Frankie came. I’d clutch that rivet gun and pretend I was Kitty Cohen, the main character in my screenplay, City of Angels. Kitty was a gun moll who fought her way up to being the mob boss while all the men were off at war. Kitty was all curves and sweet poison; she never missed a beat, a word, a whisper, a frown. No one put anything over on Kitty, not even Detective Perry, though Lord knows he tried. Kitty wove a wondrous web around him and snared him so close he couldn’t see the forest of her machinations for her silk-stockinged trees.
It was easier than thinking about James, across that stretch of glassy blue sea. About how our life would be when he returned. I loved him — of course I did. He believed in my writing and he worked hard and made me smile. But it wasn’t like — well, like the movies, as foolish as that seemed.