Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties Read Free Page A

the rooming house had told me about it. Said I could earn two dollars a night modeling jewelry for a man who worked fancy parties for Chicago’s elite.
    The two dollars I’d been promised turned out to be a buck fifty, but I needed the money. That extra seven fifty or ten fifty a week, depending on if I worked every night—especially during the holiday season—meant I didn’t have to choose between making my rent and going to bed hungry. Plus, I got to wear pretty dresses and real diamonds and pearls. Working those parties put me smack in the center of a lot of impressive, glamorous people and you never knew who you’d meet. The day after a party I’d always see the photographs all over the society pages. Once I even managed to get myself in a picture. I recognized the dress first and realized the shoulder and back of the head belonged to me. I clipped the photograph and tucked it up in the corner of my mirror. Someday, I told myself, I would be important enough to be the subject of a society page photograph.
    “I didn’t hear you come in,” Evelyn said. “Was it very late?”
    “After one.” I yawned. “I missed my train and had to wait forty minutes for the next one.”
    “Poor thing.” Evelyn bent down and stroked my hair. She didn’t need to work a second job. She was a faster typist than I was and the best speller among us typewriters. Mr. Schlemmer insisted she proofread his most important documents, even if another girl had typed it. That right there made her weekly pay envelope ten dollars thicker than mine. Not that I begrudged her. She’d helped me plenty, lending me a dollar or two when I came up short, and it wasn’t as if she had much to spare.
    “C’mon, now,” she said. “You have to get up! You’ll be late.”
    “I’m always late.” I rolled onto my back and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand.
    Grabbing her toothbrush, Evelyn slung her towel over her shoulder and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom we shared with the other girls on the floor.
    Evelyn Schulman and I had been best friends from the time we were seven. Hers was the house on the corner, the big one with the steep front steps. Evelyn’s father owned a sporting goods store on Grand Avenue and all five of the sisters had matching bicycles, lined up one after another on their front lawn. I was jealous—not of the bicycles, but of Evelyn for having all those sisters. I didn’t have any sisters or brothers. I didn’t even have a father. He died when I was four years old. They found his body behind a saloon on Whiskey Row. His head, hands and feet were missing. Butchered like an animal. My mother never talked about his murder. She’d never used that word or even said out loud that he’d been killed. When she did speak of him it was always followed by, “May he rest in peace.” She acted like the rest of it hadn’t happened. But whether we called it by name, whether or not we acknowledged it, I slept with a light on until I was fifteen. I kept a lookout, leery of unfamiliar motorcars parked outside our house and strangers coming down our sidewalk. That was how I spent the bulk of my childhood: keeping watch, waiting for and expecting something else to happen.
    Growing up it was just my mother and me, and Evelyn, my chosen sister. When we turned sixteen, our mothers sent us to the Queen Esther dances. Every Saturday night in the summertime they held dances outside the synagogue, beneath a big white tent. The music was never any good and the boys didn’t know how to do the bunny hug or the black bottom. But still, we went week after week, until my mother heard that I’d been spotted behind the tent, sitting on a crate with my skirt hiked up to my knees, smoking cigarettes and playing five-card stud with a group of boys. That was the last Queen Esther dance for me. My mother was angry but not surprised. She was used to me stirring up trouble. By the time I turned fifteen I was sick of being too afraid to live.