“There’s no room, Rose. We can hardly breathe here.”
“Then hold your breath, we’re hungry and there’s nowhere else to go.” Rose elbowed her way in to a few inches of counter, then grinned at me.
“So how do you like it so far?” she asked. “Isn’t it fun? Like being on holiday, huh?” She rolled her eyes.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said.
“Ain’t that the truth. I tell you, Molly, if I could find something else to do, I’d be out of here like a shot.”
“What else is there for poor girls?” I asked.
“Only walking the streets, which makes more money, so I hear, and I understand it may even be more pleasant.”
“Rose Levy—if your father could hear you talking like that!” The girl Rose had elbowed aside spun around to look at Rose in horror. “You ask for trouble, you know. You and your mouth.”
“Just joking, Golda. For God’s sake we need to joke sometimes, don’t we?” Rose rolled her eyes again and looked back at me. “They all take life too seriously. Most of them just try to keep going until their parents make a match for them—hopefully with a guy who can afford for them not to work.”
“Their parents make a match for them? They don’t choose their own husbands?”
“That’s how it’s done in the old country.”
“So will you marry someone your parents choose for you?” I shuddered as I thought of the great, clodhopping louts that my parents would have chosen for me.
“Not me,” Rose said with a look of bravado, “only don’t tell my father. I aim to be a lady writer and support myself.”
“You do? Then you must—” I had been about to say that she must come and meet my friends in Greenwich Village, before I remembered that nobody must know I wasn’t a poor Irish girl just off the boat.
“I must what?” she asked with interest.
“You must keep going until you succeed,” I said lamely. “Have you written anything yet?”
“Lots of things, but mostly just for me. But I’m hoping to get a weekly column in the Forward someday soon. I’d like to write articles exposing the injustices in this city.”
“Like the treatment of girls in sweatshops?”
She looked at me curiously. “You’ve only been here one morning and already you notice that we’re not justly treated?”
“Paying for the company’s power and the use of the company’s mirror?” I said. “And that cold, damp room. Do they bring heaters in when it gets really cold?”
“They brought in two oil stoves last winter, but what good were two stoves for a room that size? The W.C. froze. That’s how cold it was. I tried complaining to Mr. Lowenstein himself, but it didn’t do any good. He told me if it was too cold, he’d shut down the place until the weather warmed up again. None of us can afford not to work.” She chopped off a big piece of matzoball and chewed it with satisfaction. “I’m the only breadwinner in my family.”
“Is your father sick?”
“No, just religious.” Again that wicked smile. “I told you, he’s a rabbi. In the old country he was well respected. He ran a big shul and we lived well. Here there are too many rabbis and no one earning enough money to make donations.”
“So he won’t try and get a real job, just until you’re settled here?”
“You haven’t met my father. God will provide, like Moses in the desert. I tell you, Molly—if I didn’t work, we’d all starve and God wouldn’t care.”
I looked at her with admiration. She was clearly younger than I, probably still not even twenty and yet she had taken the responsibility for her family on her young shoulders.
“I’m just not good at keeping my mouth shut,” she went on. “This is the third shop I’ve worked in. I can’t seem to shut up when the foreman is being mean to a girl or they are cheating us again.”
I found that I was staring at her in amazement. It was like looking at myself.
“What?” she demanded. “Have I spilled soup down my chin?”
I laughed. “I think you and I are going to get along just famously.”
On the way back from lunch, our stomachs satisfied and our bodies warm, I had to remind myself that I must not become too intimate with any of the girls, even Rose. Least of all Rose. Because one of them could be a link in the chain that smuggled designs out of Mostel’s and into Lowenstein’s and I ultimately would have to expose her.
As we made our way down the slick, crumbling steps and ducked into the workroom the foreman was waiting for us, hands on hips and an indignant expression on his face. “Late again! Won’t you girls ever learn?” He pointed at the clock on the wall behind him. It showed twelve thirty-three. “That will cost you ten cents. At this rate you’ll end up paying me by the end of the week.”
“We can’t be late,” I blurted out. “I looked at the clock at the deli and we had five whole minutes to cross the street.”