Page 8 of The Harvey Girls

Five

The retching was so violent it practically made the walls shudder.

Half-asleep, Billie rolled into a sitting position on the side of her bed, remembering only then that it wouldn’t be one of her sisters or brothers, to whom she was ready to run with a wet rag and the old tin bucket.

It was… someone else. A stranger hurling the contents of her stomach—and possibly a few of her smaller organs, from the sound of it—in some unknown room in this rabbit’s warren of a building.

“Stop…,” Charlotte murmured in her sleep and tucked her knees up over her own stomach. One arm snaked quickly across her chest while the other went up over her head. “Please…”

Billie rolled her eyes. Miss Smarty-Pants had probably never had to deal with a vomiting sibling.

High-society college girls had maids for that sort of thing, she supposed.

Maybe the maids even did the puking for them.

She chuckled at the thought. “It all comes out the same in the privy,” her father would say.

The retching started up anew, and Billie wondered if the poor thing might need help.

After all, who would help you in a place like this with no family?

Silently she took her mother’s green cardigan sweater from the armoire and tugged it on over her nightgown, unlatched the door, and slipped into the hallway.

Locating the retcher was not hard. She was in the bathroom, her cheek resting on the toilet seat, a clump of damp black hair stuck across her sweaty neck like a velvet choker. “Sorry for waking you,” croaked Alice (or possibly Edie).

“I was almost awake anyway,” said Billie.

“Farmer’s daughter?”

“No, a father and two brothers to get out the door for the early shift at the brick factory, three brothers and sisters to get ready for school, and three little ones who rise at dawn for no reason at all!”

The girl smiled wanly but then suddenly pushed up onto her knees, her stomach convulsing inward, the muscles on her neck bulging as she heaved into the commode.

Billie held her hair away from the bowl with one hand and pulled toilet paper off the roll with the other.

When the girl finished and sank back down again, Billie handed her the paper for her mouth.

“I’m embarrassed—” said Billie.

“ You’re embarrassed,” the girl muttered. “Think how I feel.”

“I can’t remember your name.”

“Elsie.” (Not Edie or Alice!)

“I’m Billie.”

“I know.”

“You do?” Billie’s heart sank.

“No, not really. I was just teasing.”

“That’s pretty quick thinking for a girl with her head in the pot!”

“It’s all that Harvey training,” Elsie muttered. “If the devil himself sat down at the counter, you’d be expected to smile and get him a nice plate of brimstone.” She groaned and got up on her knees again.

They went on like this for a bit, chatting in between bouts of upchucking. The sun began to creep above the bottom of the windowsill, bathing them in its fiery light, and Elsie said, “I think I’m about done.”

“I’ll tell Frances you won’t be down.”

Elsie slowly got up onto her knees again, hanging on to the edge of the deep claw-foot tub to hoist herself to a standing position “Maybe for the lunch shift…”

“Yer bum’s oot the windae,” muttered Billie, taking Elsie by the elbow to keep her steady.

“I’m sorry, my bum is where, exactly?”

Billie chuckled. “Out the window. Something my father says. It’s a Scottish way of saying you’re talking nonsense.”

“Well, regardless of the location of my bum, I’m starting to feel a little better.”

“You just about coughed up a toe. Besides, you don’t want to be passing this along. Imagine a trainload of heaving passengers—they’d have to hose out the cars at the next stop.”

“I suppose you’re right. I just hate to let the others down. More work for them.”

“I’m starting to get the hang of it—I can help more.

” It wasn’t a lie, exactly, more of a fib.

She’d been allowed to fetch desserts, but not to take meal orders, which were expected to be committed to memory.

This was hard enough when there was only one or two in a party and they didn’t ask for anything unusual, like a baked potato instead of mashed.

That Charlotte, though. Billie was sure her roommate could memorize the Encyclopaedia Britannica , volumes A–L, without breaking a sweat.

She was also familiar with the menu items in a way that was frankly infuriating.

Blue Point oysters—who ever heard of that?

And for the love of all that’s holy, who would actually want to eat such a slimy, bad-smelling mess?

By six a.m., all eight girls on shift were to be dressed and eating breakfast at a long oak table at the back of the kitchen. The first train would arrive at seven, and they had to be poised and ready to greet and feed.

This morning, of course, there were only seven girls.

“Charlotte!” barked Frances, the head waitress, and Charlotte felt her neck muscles go taut. “You’ll fill in for Elsie. And I’ll remind you that every last customer should be treated as if they were the king of England on a royal tour.”

Charlotte nodded curtly but muttered under her breath, “No doubt Topeka, Kansas, would be his first stop.”

Breakfast was easy—the menu was limited to generally accepted morning foods like poached eggs, hotcakes, or Grape-Nuts cereal.

Of course, there was the occasional strange substitution—one gentleman with the pallor of old snow ordered hotcakes with bacon, “but I don’t like bacon, so I’ll have buckwheat cakes instead. ”

“I’m sorry,” said Charlotte, brushing a wisp of hair from her temple and wondering where Billie was with the coffee, “buckwheat cakes instead of hotcakes?”

“No, I like them both.”

“Buckwheat cakes and bacon?”

“No, both, I said both .” Annoyance rose in his voice. “Buckwheat and hot.”

“Hot…?”

“Cakes!”

“Right away, sir.” Charlotte turned on her heel and strode toward the kitchen to place the order so he wouldn’t catch her eye roll. Cakes with a side of cakes , she thought. No wonder you look as bloodless as a blanket.

She glanced up just in time to see Mr. Gilstead arch a woolly eyebrow. “Difficulties?” he murmured as she passed him.

“None whatsoever,” she said, voice coated in dusting sugar.

It was the showgirls at lunchtime that nearly did her in.

They click-clacked in from the train platform on their kitten heel pumps, about ten of them. The men in the room sat up a little straighter, gazes lingered a little longer. Mr. Gilstead offered the women various seats in ones and twos along the winding lunch counter.

“We’d like to sit in there,” said the girl with the brightest lip color, tipping her chin in the direction of the dining room.

Their skirts were as short as their bobbed hair, eyebrows especially black, cheeks clearly powdered. Mr. Gilstead hesitated.

“It’s better to be together,” said the girl and gazed at him steadily, in a way that indicated there was more to it than the pleasure of the other girls’ company.

“Yes, of course.” His smile had a bit of an oily slick to it that Charlotte hadn’t noticed when he addressed, say, an elderly woman, or one with a child on her hip.

He indicated to Pablocito the busboy (which seemed a misnomer—though shorter even than Charlotte, the man had to be almost forty) to shift two tables together in the dining room.

Gilstead caught Charlotte’s eye and gave a curt nod.

Her first table in the dining room, and he was giving her showgirls. Naturally.

They dithered over what menu items would add “padding in the wrong places,” emphasis on wrong , since there were clearly right places.

They wanted to share food but get separate checks.

At least two of them were utterly flabbergasted when it was their turn to order, as if Charlotte had descended from the chandelier and asked them to recite the multiplication table beginning with the nines, for goodness’ sake.

But she was patient and polite, fully aware of Mr. Gilstead’s attention to her courtesy.

Also, there had been a dancer named Marcinda who lived in the room next door to Charlotte and Simeon at the boardinghouse, and Charlotte, desperate for any half-pleasant conversation, had befriended her.

Marcinda had been smarter than she looked, and in fact had a penchant for the poems of Sara Teasdale, especially “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

“?‘Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,’?” Marcinda liked to recite after a particularly loathsome night at the dance hall, “?‘if mankind perished utterly.’?”

Desperation walked in all kinds of shoes, Charlotte had learned. The kitten heel. The sole-worn boot. The expensive black pump with the torn-off bow.

Tildie, a nosy little thing with a penchant for gossip, was the drink girl for the dining room.

Charlotte watched as she haughtily poured their coffee, failing to respond to the weary “Thanks, hon” or enthusiastic “You’re a doll!

” As if waitressing were so many rungs up the ladder from burlesque dancing.

Two , thought Charlotte. About two rungs.

She was just returning from the kitchen with a tray of brimming soup bowls balanced on her shoulder when one of the girls walked toward her in the lunchroom, likely on her way to the powder room.

Charlotte saw a young man in a new black suit that was a little too large across the shoulders slide his hand behind his swiveling seat, twist at just the right moment, and grab a handful of the woman’s bottom.

“Oh!” she yelped and swatted him away, face crimson with fury and embarrassment.

Charlotte was right there, not three feet away. With all that soup.

She felt the ever-present embers of her righteous fury ignite just as they did when Simeon manhandled her.

Her fingers on the underside of the tray seemed to press upward of their own accord.

She was new at the tray-handling business, after all.

The back of the tray tipped upward; she could feel the bowls slide forward until one of them slipped over the tray’s edge and onto the young man with the ill-fitting suit.

Regret for such impetuousness crashed over her like a tidal wave before the soup had even landed. She would pay. She knew this for a leaden fact.

“You’ll pay for that haughty remark,” Simeon would say as he raised a fist balled so tightly it might as well have been a hammer.

She had paid for words, or the lack thereof; for her attempts to help him when he was so drunk he couldn’t make his way to the john down the hall, or for her lack of assistance; for a look, or for a face so blank it might as well have been an owl’s.

The bowl hit the man’s lap, thank goodness, not his head. There was a good deal of squawking by him, while his friend next to him went from gargoyle-faced guffawing to silent shock as he stared at his own splattered trousers.

“Look what you’ve done!” sputtered the young man, bits of barley and carrot sliding down his pant legs in a sluice of beef stock. “How’m I supposed to go back to work?”

Mr. Gilstead was there in a moment, apologizing and calling for a damp cloth. “Terribly sorry, sir,” he must have said about six times. “She’s new. Terribly, terribly sorry.”

“Sweetie, trust me,” the showgirl exclaimed loudly to Mr. Gilstead. “She couldn’t help it one bit. With me yelling like that, who wouldn’t be startled?”

“And why on earth were you yelling?”

“A certain fella who now smells like stew took a liberty as I walked by.” She said it as if he’d stolen the flag off a soldier’s coffin.

Mr. Gilstead turned back to the young man. “Sir, is this true?”

Now it was his turn to flush. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Sir, this is no saloon. There are standards of gentlemanly behavior by which we expect our patrons to abide.”

“How is it my fault?” The young man stood and puffed his unimpressive chest toward Gilstead. “I’m not the one sashaying around like a trollop, and I’m not the one who dumped soup, bowl and all, on a paying customer!”

“Sir, I will have to ask you to leave and not to return until you can conduct yourself with propriety.”

“I certainly will not return!” He looked at his friend. “Geez, get up, will you?”

The other man took one last crocodile-sized bite of his sardine sandwich and the two of them made their way out the door, titters of stifled laughter following in their wake.

“Charlotte…,” growled Mr. Gilstead.

“ She couldn’t help it ,” the showgirl insisted again. “Besides, what are you making your girls carry such heavy loads for? Big guy like you—you shoulda carried that one yourself, then none of this woulda happened.”

Mr. Gilstead had shooed Charlotte back to the kitchen with the tray of now-cooling soup, but he hadn’t said another word about the incident.

She laid the tray down on the counter and asked Leif to refill the bowls with hot soup from the pot.

Then she turned and put her hands flat against the cold glass of the kitchen window, heart still pounding, awaiting the blow.

You’re fine , she scolded her heart. You’re safe now.

But it galloped like a spooked colt nonetheless.

When she returned to the dining room with the hot soup, one of the girls started to clap, but the others quickly shushed her.

Then one by one, as she lowered each bowl, they whispered something in her ear: “Nice one, hon” or “You’re a peach.

” One said, “Lucky they’re not all like that,” and the girl next to her snorted in disagreement.

After they’d paid their bills and click-clacked back out to the waiting train, Charlotte found that every single girl had left a couple of quarters by her plate—nearly the cost of an entire meal—except for the girl who’d been grabbed. She’d left two dollars.