12

IT WAS A tiny room, dark and musty, but Ginny was glad to have it.

She’d searched all day, walking till her feet ached in her thin leather boots. With hopeful ignorance, Ginny worked her way through the places she couldn’t afford, getting a quick and brutal lesson in Manhattan real estate. She’d lowered her sights as the day wore on, the neighborhoods growing less and less fashionable, the rooms smaller, the light nonexistent, the grime thicker.

Her emotions ran at random as if someone else was controlling them, pulling levers and flipping switches at an antic pace. But mostly she worried, worried that she wouldn’t find a room at all, worried about Mike and if she would ever see him again, worried about how she’d support herself, find a job, buy clothes, eat. The thought of Mike left an empty, sinking feeling in her middle. She could only imagine what Miss Gertie might say about the circumstances of her leaving. What would Mike think if he knew she’d cracked a customer’s head with a pitcher? She didn’t like to imagine that. Her only chance was to somehow find him and tell him her side of the story. Maybe then she’d have a chance, maybe.

The shadows had crept across the avenues and were crawling up the west-facing walls when she had finally found rest. It was a room in a tenement apartment above a millinery shop. Ginny knew when she happened across the ROOM TO LET sign in the window that she’d find shelter there. Shops like that had a reputation; smoke shops, too. There were often willing girls working behind the counter, stacking shelves or making no pretense at all. Store owners often turned more profit on that than on their legitimate businesses. It wasn’t that Ginny wanted to work that way again. She simply knew that it was at a place like this that she’d find a level of acceptance she wouldn’t elsewhere, coupled with a veneer of respectability that suited her situation.

The woman who owned the shop knew she was a whore. Ginny could see it in her eyes when she walked through the door, felt their quick appraisal, running head to toe, and the way they’d narrowed until Ginny explained she was interested in renting the room. They exchanged pleasantries as if she was an ordinary working girl, dragging a pathetic carpetbag door to door before the terrors of the night closed in. They built up an illusion of respectability between them, Ginny with a story of coming to the city to find work, the shopkeeper with an air of knowing acceptance. The woman even went so far as to say she allowed no loose women to let her rooms above the shop, an assertion that Ginny said had her hearty approval.

Ginny paid what the woman asked, handing her the crisp bills she’d gotten at the bank that morning. A week’s deposit and a week in advance; eight dollars in wide, green notes. When the door closed behind her new landlord, Ginny was consumed by darkness, relieved only by the transom window above the door. She lay on the iron bed, felt the springs digging into her back, heard them creak when she moved, and thought she’d never heard or felt anything so wonderful. Though her stomach echoed like an empty barrel, Ginny would not rise. She closed her eyes, erasing the walls that she could almost reach out and touch, the single dresser with the missing drawer knobs, the painted chair with the badly repaired leg and a cracking coat of paint, the wallpaper blackened by years of lamp wick, tobacco, and cooking smoke. Sleep crept into her room, lifting her like a feather.