Ellie stood in the pantry, a freestanding shed Ansel had built for her when they were first married, a room where even in summer the air smelled of well water and mold. She was taking stock, not that there was much to take stock of. No pork, no beef, and no chicken, but the holidays were coming—Thanksgiving in four days, then Christmas. She had always been good at special occasions. It was why the Harvey House had been her perfect world, and why a farm miles from the closest town was not.
Ellie would turn forty on Thanksgiving. Her birthday usually fell before or after the holiday, near enough that there was never any time or thought for another celebration even if Ansel had been so inclined. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the years when she’d been Herr Hoffman’s daughter Eleanor and the younger, less lively sister of Ida Marie had been full of birthday parties and pink cakes and presents. At eighteen, she’d worn jet beads to Ida’s birthday dance at their house on West Park Boulevard and been paired off with her father’s chosen suitor, Monty Pike, a boy with a lot of money and no kindness in him at all, not even for animals.
Becoming Harvey Girls had been Ida’s idea because she despised the boys their father picked for her, too. Wouldn’t it be glamorous, anyway, a life on your own, a salary, those smart uniforms?
“We won’t be on our own,” Ellie had said gloomily, picturing them working in the Cleveland station for about two minutes before their father showed up, but Ida said they’d go to some other state, probably Kansas, because Kansas was packed with Harvey Houses.
Like most things done by young people, it was poorly imagined. Only later did she know exactly how far it was from Shaker Heights to Emporia: nine hundred miles. And yet she was happy from the very beginning in Emporia, handing cups of coffee and plates of steaming food across the counter to men leaving on the next train. The tables of the Emporia restaurant—mahogany tables, mahogany chairs—had been set with white linen and silver. The clothes of every waitress were pressed and clean, black and white, like English maids in a movie. She stood every day behind the long gleaming counter, waiting for the sound of Ernie’s gong. The train whistle came first, a warning that the train was just a mile away, and then Ernie, who was watching for the first glimpse of the engine, struck that funny Chinese gong. All the orders had been wired ahead and she could hear the cooks stirring, basting, pouring, and frying. There was always something to do, yet there was always time to dream. She’d often felt that the coming train would carry the California hotelier or Hollywood producer who would be so impressed by her efficiency and friendly (but not overfriendly) manner that he would find a reason to stay a few days in Kansas, taking all his meals at the Harvey House and sitting where Ellie Hoffman could take his order for banana pie. And then, after a very refined and respectful courtship, she would become the wife in a household that, like the one of her childhood, required dressing up, formal dinners, and mahogany furniture.
Meanwhile, she would ask: “Coffee, iced tea, hot tea, or milk?” and set the cup in its coded position so the girls behind her would know where to pour what.
Cup upright in the saucer: coffee.
Cup upside down in the saucer: hot tea.
Cup upside down, tilted against the saucer: iced tea.
Cup upside down, away from the saucer: milk.
Ansel Price had been working there awhile. A salad man, not a chef or a manager, and he was handsome, though Ida thought that was only half the attraction. “The other half is his faraway eyes that all the girls want to get close to,” Ida said. All Ellie knew was that more than one of the girls on her shift had faked an interest in the making of Thousand Isle dressing so Ansel could show them. He sang, too, and played a beautiful old dulcimer that he laid across his lap as he crooned the sentimental old ditty about Harvey Girls and looked into the eyes of all the waitresses who asked him to play when things were slow. Ellie didn’t plan to fall for someone like that.
Ida married first—a kind, sunny fellow named Hurd who had thick orange hair and took her away to a town he’d heard about that was north of San Diego and where they never had snow or frost or, to hear Ida tell it, unpleasantness of any kind, but Ellie didn’t want to follow unattached. One day, she found herself standing at a window near Ansel Price during a lull. He seemed transfixed—he stared out at the light, swirling snow as if it made him perfectly content. Perhaps that was what had drawn her over. But now the silence, with her standing so close, was discomfiting, and she said, “Good skating weather.”
The longest moment passed before he freed his gaze from the snow, and then—this all seemed to happen in slow-motion—he was turning and his dark eyes were settling on hers and he was nodding and saying, “Mmm,” which might have meant Yes, it is good skating weather, or I was just trying to enjoy a moment to myself, or I have never seen you in quite this light before.
She had been thinking of the pond near Shaker Heights where she and Ida used to skate, but now she remembered something else. “But Ernie said they went all last year without finding a frozen pond here.”
“Mmm,” Ansel said again, and his eyes were fixed so intently on hers, and exerted such an unanticipated pull, that she said, “Excuse me,” and fled back to her tables without another word.
Three days later when she walked by him in the kitchen, he said, “A word please.”
It was so odd and formal that she wondered if she’d misheard him. “Pardon me?”
“I was wondering if you have ever roller-skated?”
She shook her head.
“You might like it,” Ansel said.
That evening after her shift she heard scraping noises in the basement and a soft whirring sound and then music tantalizing enough that when Flora Ambrose came upstairs to say there was a nice surprise waiting for her, she let Flora coax her down to the basement, and there, roller-skating in a nice big oval he’d created through wholesale rearrangement of the crates, was Ansel Price.
“Care for a turn?” he asked, his eyes bright. The roller skates were the kind that buckled over your shoes, and he’d found a pair roughly her size, which made her wonder when he’d been assessing her feet. He taught her to skate, and then he taught Flora, and then he asked Ellie to go around with him one more time.
“It’s not quite ice-skating,” she said, and then when she saw a hint of disappointment in his face, she added, “but it’s lots warmer.”
When the record stopped, Flora wound up the phonograph and put on a new one: a pretty tenor voice singing “Good Night Little Girl, Goodnight.” Ellie and Ansel fell into an easy, graceful rhythm of leaning and pushing and gliding, and she was surprised when the music stopped again so soon, and surprised, too, in looking about, to find that Flora had slipped away, but Ansel Price moved blithely ahead, and as they kept pushing and gliding, she enjoyed the shushing of the skates and, it was true, the warm pressure of his arm. It was so pleasant that she was almost disappointed when he spoke.
“If a fortune-teller looked into a crystal ball,” he asked in his soft, deep voice, “what would you want to hear about yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Anything except, I zee you vashing dishes.”