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THERE WAS A LINE OF GIRLS outside the fabric factory near the port, waiting to see the owner. Little white clouds came out of their mouths as they spoke. There had been an announcement in the paper that there would be a job opening that week. They had hats pulled down almost to their noses. They had long knitted scarves that wound around and around their necks. Their black tights had been mended and darned over and over again. They were tiptoeing up to the door as if the sidewalk were thin ice and they were about to break through and be swallowed up by the water. They had such a tenuous grasp on their own existence, they could disappear from this earth and there wouldn’t be a trace left. They stomped their feet up and down to stay alive. Everywhere Rose looked, there were strange chorus lines of girls.
Rose almost didn’t want to change anything about them. She wanted them to line up on the stage in their hats and their wet boots, with a little bit of lipstick they had borrowed from their mothers, coughing and cold, the roses in their cheeks blooming, holding their letters of reference. How could art ever capture that?
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THEY ALL WILLINGLY WENT ALONG with Rose. They liked the sound of the Snowflake Icicle Extravaganza. They immediately believed they were taking part in something special. And also Rose had promised them soup.
They were a little bit defiant. They knew somehow that all the men in their lives would be opposed to them joining Rose. Because she was independent, wasn’t she? But no matter what they did, they were probably going to end up beaten by their fathers when they got home. So what did it matter in the end?
When they lined up in the hangar with their coats and woolen tights off, their bare skinny limbs were covered in welts. Their dads beat them for standing on the corner and laughing. Their dads beat them for being pretty. Their dads beat them for putting lipstick on. Their dads beat them for taking too long to come home from the school, for forgetting to take their baby brothers out of the bathtub, for having a snarky expression while putting jam on the table, for leaving kiss marks all over the bathroom mirror.
A skinny girl in a black sweater, who looked as if she’d had a blocked nose her whole life, could sing really quickly, as if she were hyperventilating, as if she had been running and now she was trying to tell you a story. Everyone applauded.
A few could dance, and they tapped to the right and to the left. They looked like they were running on a log knowing that if they stopped some sort of horrible fate awaited them.
But she almost preferred chorus girls who didn’t have any talent. Women were still strange and inscrutable creatures. Men didn’t understand them. And women didn’t understand themselves either. It was always a performance of some sort. Everywhere you went, it was like there was a spotlight shining down on your head. You were on a stage when you were on the trolley. You were being judged and judged and judged. Every minute of your performance was supposed to be incredible and outstanding and sexy.
You were often only an ethical question away from being a prostitute.
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SHE HAD TO BUY THEM new clothes. They all looked so damn homely. None of them could afford proper stockings. They didn’t look like a troupe of exciting, spoiled chorus girls. And so they were all fitted for new, sparkly dresses. One girl, covered in beauty marks, stood in her underwear, as though she had just come out of an enchanted forest and was now covered in ticks.
When the tailor was done, there was a pile of measuring tape on the ground as if a mummy had just performed a striptease.
When they arrived, the dresses were the color of the rain. The girls had sashes around their waists, looking like presents that could be opened. There were also little see-through beads on the dresses that made them look like flowers covered in dew.
The girls all leaned together in their gray dresses, eating their bowls of soup. They were squished up together like a storm cloud. And all their slurping sounded like rain rolling through gutters. Everybody in the company was kind of horny because they had been well fed. They chatted about eligible nineteen-year-old bachelors in the neighborhood. There is no sex without a sandwich.
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