Aldine didn’t understand, and she was tired of not understanding, so as she sat down to take off her shoes she asked, “What do you mean?”
“It’s a joke the railroaders tell. For six months of service, Harvey Girls get to marry a fireman, but for twelve months they earn an engineer!”
Aldine forced a small laugh that sounded like a hiccup. She took off her stockings. “Which will you get?”
“Oh, none of ’em. I want to move to the Grand Canyon. I’ve put in for a transfer twice but all the girls want to go there, Gore says.” Glynis sat back on her own small bed, still holding Aldine’s uniform on her lap. She scratched her ankle and said, “How’d your folks feel about you coming here from Scotland?”
“They’re no longer living.”
“Oops. Sorry. I thought Gore said your dad put you on a train.”
Aldine shook her head. She unzipped her dress but didn’t take it off.
“My parents make me write them twice a week. They wouldn’t have let me come if the drought weren’t so bad. My sister ran off when I was nine.”
“Oh,” Aldine said.
“By the time we finally found her, the man had took off and left her.”
Aldine waited for the end of a story she didn’t want to hear.
“She died.”
Aldine couldn’t help worrying about the time. She wanted to know why the sister died but she just said how awful it was and held out her hands for the uniform.
“Homely, isn’t it,” Aldine said.
“Hoom-ly?”
“Ugly,” she tried, though she didn’t say that word in the American way, either.
“You shred it, Wheat,” Glynis said. This turned out to be just one of her queer catchphrases, along with “Mitt me, kid,” which she said at the end of a busy shift, and “dead hoofer,” which she called the clumsier railroad men who asked her to dance at the weekly romps. While Aldine zipped herself into the dress and wriggled into the cross straps of the apron, Glynis checked the finger waves in her own hair, then pinned Aldine’s black bow to her collar. “Well, there’ll be some eyeballs rolling after you in the room,” she said, and Aldine said, “Oh. Should I do something different then?”
Glynis laughed. “Not a thing. You’ll be out-tipping us all before the week’s out.”
Downstairs, Mrs. Gore recited the lunchroom rules: no flirting with customers, never carry a glass in your hand (always on a tray), the cup code, the code for various salads and dishes, each of which she would have to memorize because at no time would she be writing down the orders—Harvey Girls didn’t take notes but kept everything in their heads.
By the end of the seemingly endless day Aldine had worked three not-busy rush times (“used to be murder,” Glynis said, “before times got hard”) and had heard about every celebrity Glynis had seen come through on the Chief: Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Shirley Temple, and Gloria Swanson (“togged to the bricks,” Glynis said). Aldine did not know who most of these people were, but she knew Clare had liked Tom Mix, so she asked if he was nice.
“Hard to tell. He just sat and ate while all his group swilled and whooped it up. It wasn’t my table. But he left a big tip and when he went away he said to Betty Smart, ‘That was good pot roast.’ Those were the only words anyone heard him speak the whole time.”
Aldine had heard about Betty Smart, the neighbor girl with whom Glynis had been hired (“my folks felt better sending me with the neighbor girl, and anyway they like to hire two good friends ’cause then you won’t get homesick and quit”). Betty had married a railroader, though, according to Glynis, and gone on to a plum job at La Casta?eda, the sort of job that Aldine ought to try for once she learned the ropes.
“I’ve heard of girls seeing the whole country that way,” Glynis said. “Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and even California.”
The word California was like a poke in the stomach. What if she kept hopping and skipping west until finally she was serving pie in California? Would that be good or bad? Bad, probably. That’s what her head said. But the rest of her was ready to go.
“Stick with me, kid,” Glynis said into the dark, her raspy voice silenced by the approach of a thudding freight train, the first of a dozen that would shatter the night and seem, in Aldine’s dreams, to be headed right for her iron bed.
51
It seemed to Clare that California changed everyone except Neva, the one person whose life it was supposed to change. Neva still ate too little and coughed too much. Charlotte was happier—she was sewing new clothes and wearing Aunt Ida’s jewelry. Instead of worrying and nagging everybody, his mother more or less ignored them all. But she was happier, too, singing to herself as she cooked with Ida, smiling and gossiping about people he’d never heard of. His father stopped reading aloud. He stopped reading to himself. He stopped shaving. His beard began to take over his cheeks and neck. He worked picking fruit six days a week and on Sundays he sat in Ida’s bottle garden smoking cigarettes (Uncle Hurd smoked, so Clare supposed that was why he’d started) and watching the horizon, usually with a hand on the head of Charlotte’s dog. Clare figured his father was thinking of Aldine, but when Neva asked him, he said, “Oh, just things, Nevie.” Charlotte asked him, too, what he was always thinking about, and he turned to her and said, “I think you know.”
His voice was so low and serious it seemed to set Charlotte back a little. She said, “The place, you mean.”
He turned his eyes slowly away from her and in the same serious, low voice said, “Yes, I’m thinking about the place.”
Once, when Clare asked him if he wished he’d brought his fretted dulcimer, his father considered it a moment or two and then said, “No.”
Clare had hoped to go to high school, and everyone agreed that he should, but not right away. Better, Hurd and Ida said, to start fresh in the fall when he could start right alongside all the others instead of jumping in when the school term was almost done. Clare didn’t argue. He picked fruit together with his father and after supper he sometimes walked alone to the town library, where he could read magazines and, each week, write a letter to Aldine.
Well, we finally made it to California. It’s every bit as pretty as they say. Did you get to Emporia all right? My mom says being a Harvey Girl was the most fun she ever had.
He didn’t know why he was writing to her, or why he still thought about her all the time.
Write and tell me what it’s like. Neva wears the hat and scarf all the time even though it’s too hot for it.
Yours ever, Clare.
The next week:
We sure miss you. Specially Neva. She asks about you alot. At first her cold seemed to go away but now she’s had a repeat and I know a word from you would mean alot.
Then he added,
Remember when I said I loved you I still do. I think of you all the time, please let me know how you are. They say California is the place to come for cures, but Neva is still poorly and my dad—