Lizette spotted a brown parcel, wrapped in burlap string. “What’s that?” she asked.
“When you come late, you miss out,” said Natalya, lifting the box into the air.
That was when she knew. “No!” said Lizette running to the rear counter, nearly tripping on the uneven floor. “Is that what I think it is?”
Natalya looked up. She had kind, translucent blue eyes, fine wrinkles about her face surrounded by red hair. She puffed on her cigarette. “No smoking when open it.” She winked.
“It is!” Lizette shouted. “My wedding dress fabric.” She was dancing now, snapping her fingers, swinging her hips. With a happy laugh, she reached out, as if asking for a slice of cake.
“Not so fast,” Natalya said. “I need drop-off today. Then we open your package.”
Lizette wilted like a frostbitten rose. “Natalya,” she whined, but it was clear the dressmaker didn’t care.
“The address here,” she said, handing Lizette a piece of paper and a wrapped bundle of cotton slips that they had sewn the week before. The slips had expandable waists and were to be delivered to the Saint Agnes Home, on some street in Capitol Hill Lizette had never heard of. Lizette crunched her face as she grabbed the bundle.
Natalya dashed out her cigarette on a white dish. “Hurry back,” she called as Lizette exited the shop.
* * *
—
The Queen Anne mansion looked like any other from outside. Red brick, flamboyant windows, a large encapsulating iron gate with murderous spikes, either to keep people out or to keep them in. As she walked the sandstone footpath, Lizette hardly thought of anything else besides delivering the damn slips, collecting payment, and getting the hell out of there. For months, she had been perfecting her wedding dress pattern, imagining the pull and grainy texture of the taffeta, the satin train, and her face proudly unhidden by a veil. Whatever the hell this place was, it was keeping her from her happiness.
Lizette knocked and waited, then with no response yelled out, Delivery, open up. She was startled when a young nun in a white veil opened the door.
“Right this way,” she said, ushering Lizette into the mansion of dark wood and marble stairs. The young nun’s habit skirt was loosely cinched at her broad waist with three knots, signifying her three vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience. Lizette shuddered.
“I got some slips for you,” she said. “Just need payment.”
“Of course,” said the young nun, motioning with her draped arm toward an airy hallway with floral wallpaper, reddish like scabbed knees.
As they walked the hallway, Lizette eyed framed photographs of Anglo girls with distant, somber expressions, as if the camera had captured their ghosts. They were seated on the lawn during some kind of festival, balloons and streamers on the sides. Lizette was nervous and felt her heartbeat charging into something quick, preparing her to flee.
“What kind of place is this?” she asked as they reached a dining room with an oversized table and deep mahogany chairs. There were water glasses stacked on a hutch with a bell-shaped pitcher, fogged in condensation.
“It is a home,” said the young nun, opening a side door and directing Lizette into an office.
“You don’t say,” said Lizette.
“Please have a seat,” the young nun said. “Sister Florence will see you soon.”
Lizette sat down in front of the metal desk, a single piece of paper and a cup of dull pencils before her. In rich-people handwriting, curly and thin, someone had written the Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.
Lizette laughed, imagining this was some kind of punishment room. Well, she thought, money is money. Beyond the desk was a latticed window cloaked in lace curtains. Outside on the lawn, young women with yellow and brown hair were gathered in a circle. Lizette walked to the window for a better look, but as she got closer the office door opened and an older nun entered the room in a shuffle of fabric, her wrinkled pale face squeezed by the black veil of her habit. She cleared her throat, a wetness in her lungs. The room suddenly smelled of chalk and milk.
“May I help you?” she asked.
Lizette waved. “Yes!” she said overly enthusiastic. “Can you pay me for these?” She handed over the bundle of slips. “Please.”
The old nun pulled a long set of rusted scissors from inside the desk. She cut the strings, unwrapped the burlap. She pulled the first slip from the set, held it thinly into the air, and inspected the seams. She then reached her veiny hand inside the slip through the neck hole, grabbing around as if gutting a chicken. “There isn’t enough room on the front end,” she said.
Lizette smiled, showy and fake. “Oh my, how can that possibly be? We followed your directions to a T, Sister.”
The old nun looked at Lizette, marionette lines along her mouth.
Go on, Lizette thought, try me.
The old nun softened her gaze. “I asked for more inches. You can always take in with pins, but you can’t let out.”
Lizette held up her right index finger, energizing her posture. “May I?” she said, and waited for the nun to hand over the slip before she revealed the hidden network of ties at the top left.
“It’s really quite ingenious,” Lizette said. “It’s simple yet effective. Saves me and you both money and time, or,” she said, “whoever wears these.”
Through a stone-like face, the old nun nodded. She told Lizette one moment and turned around, clearly trying to hide that she was opening a chest of drawers and turning the combination of an iron safe. Lizette wished that old bat knew she could read those numbers if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to and instead looked once more through the window. The group of young women had dispersed—the lawn was as green and empty as it had ever been.
The old nun stepped from behind the desk, handing Lizette an envelope containing a single paper bill. She placed her hand on the small of Lizette’s back, guiding her out of the office and into the cavernous dining room as a bell rang throughout the mansion. At the far end of the airy house a door opened, daylight cascading onto blond floors covered in red rugs. A dozen or more Anglo girls with flushed pink faces and large pregnant bellies walked single file in felt slippers, filling the room with their bodies like a flash flood of white women. They stepped to the stacked glasses at the hutch and waited while perhaps the most pregnant of all poured each of them water. Lizette was dizzy with the unpleasantness of the whole situation, and she turned to leave without so much as saying goodbye to the old nun, but as she stepped toward the front door, someone caught her eye.
A redhead stood in the parlor, slowly making her way toward the dining room, waddling from the fullness of developing life.
Lizette stepped back, as if pushed by a cold wind.
Eleanor Anne stood between the open French doors. She slowly frowned as if the sight of Lizette had harmed her like a blow.
They looked at each other straight.
Lizette felt sad all over, her skin, her mouth. She knew exactly what this place was, and in that moment, surrounded by those young Anglo women alone without their families and only in the company of one another and bitter nuns, Lizette was grateful that she didn’t come from a people so unbearable as to hide their own women away when they believed them full of unfavorable babies.