Leah looked lost. Ella felt terrible for not helping her.
“She’s staying with a friend. Three blocks from here,” Ella said. She got up from her seat almost mechanically, as if she were unconscious of her movements, and went to retrieve the pad and pencil kept by the phone. She jotted down the address.
Casey would be home at this hour. It was the first Saturday of January, and it was only nine in the morning. Jay would probably be asleep, and Casey would be smoking her Marlboro Lights in the living room, reading the papers or a novel. On her second cup of black coffee. Those were Casey’s weekend habits; Ella had not forgotten them.
Leah stared at Ella, not knowing if this was some sort of test. She couldn’t speak. She took the piece of paper and the envelope and tucked them into her Bible.
After Leah left the apartment, the only evidence of her visit was the dark red berries and the white flowers with their thin, curving petals resting on the coffee table, still wrapped in their clear cellophane. Ella went to get a vase and some water.
13 RECOGNITION
CASEY HAD GOTTEN UP AT FIVE O’CLOCK on a Saturday, because it had become habit for her to do so. They were living together now, and it was only mildly different from when she’d stay with him during the weekends when she was still in school. She had more or less agreed to marry him; this life was practice. While Jay slept in, she’d dashed through her daily Bible study and verse selection, and now she was finishing up the head size for her third attempt at the gathered beret assignment. With a cigarette hanging off her lips, she pick-stitched the belting ribbon into her homework hat.
“Shit,” she said, her sewing thread having knotted up again. Once again, she’d forgotten to lick the length of it, as her teacher had instructed. With Jay never home, her workday ending at six, and her weekends free, for the first time in her life, Casey had the luxury of a hobby—she was learning how to make hats. Her first FIT classes in dressmaking, taken two summers ago, had not been as pleasurable, because the courses had been more demanding than any she’d taken at Princeton and because her efforts were scarcely reflected in her final product. Making clothes was difficult. Also, she’d been outdistanced by her peers, many of whom had been sewing clothes since they were little girls. Leah, a resourceful housewife and talented seamstress, had never wanted Casey and Tina to cook, sew, or clean. Being an ace student in reading, writing, and arithmetic, however, had almost zero value in terms of drafting an accurate skirt pattern. After getting a pair of C’s, she’d decided to buy her clothes rather than create them.
But millinery was something else. Making hats was no less difficult than Dressmaking I and II; again, the majority of her FIT peers in millinery were technically superior, but Casey felt she understood instinctively the aesthetics of hats and why women wanted them. It was her intention to take all four classes and get the certificate—the night class schedule was convenient, and her deskmates were hilarious. In her few months on the trading floor, Casey felt occasionally exhausted by the dick-swinging quality of Kearn Davis, and it was a relief to spend time with women who were not mainly focused on beating one another.
As a millinery student, Casey was mediocre. Her hand stitches were crooked, her machine sewing zigzag, and her early attempts at machine welting her brims had been a disaster. Last week, the millinery sewing machine chewed up two thirty-dollar beaver hat bodies. The running joke—with her deskmates, Polly, Susan, and Roni, a police officer, accountant, and gourmet cheese seller, respectively—was: “So what was it that you’d studied at Princeton?” The name Princeton was almost shouted. Two of them had gone to community college, and Roni had gone to SUNY Binghamton. In the company of these vibrant women, Casey felt less lonely in the world. Virginia wrote letters every week, but her stay in Italy was indefinite; Ella and Ted were more and more of a package deal, and Tina was back at school and in the thrall of sleeping with Chul.
Privately, Casey thought it was remarkable to see a flat square of fabric become a baseball hat and a leftover piece of felt grow into a rosette. The fact that she struggled at millinery—compared with her ease at writing term papers, taking exams, selling hairpins, making hotel arrangements for brokers, and scheduling equity sales conferences—humbled her, but not in a bad way. Frieda, her millinery teacher, murmured reluctantly that although her construction grade was a C+, her design grade was a B+. “I see improvement,” Frieda said. That comment prompted Casey to buy a round for her friends after class that night.