FRANKIE AND MARGY rented a one-room, bath and kitchenette apartment on Bushwick Avenue. It had a Murphy bed which was a break as it saved them the cost of buying a bed. It upset Flo’s plans, however. The bedspread she was working on would not be needed since the Murphy bed folded into the wall. So she took her many years’ collection of Lion Brand Condensed Milk wrappers, tied with thread in rolls of fifty and redeemed them for a set of dishes—with violet sprays and a gold band around the edge of the plates. The china looked beautiful on the kitchenette shelf.
They missed the furniture sale at Batterman’s but a store on Graham Avenue sold them a three-piece living-room suite on time—dark green wicker with bright cretonne cushions. They bought a gate-legged table painted to look like mahogany and two straight chairs to match. Margy set a black glass bowl on the center of the table and filled it with artificial red roses. She thought it looked beautiful. Flo let Margy have the dresser from her bedroom at home. A secondhand porcelain-topped kitchen table and two white chairs completed the furnishings.
Aside from the black bowl there were a few other artistic touches. Margy’s pride was a fringed tapestry, the newest thing in home decorations, tacked up on the wall behind the table. It was a medieval hunting scene. It was a nice tapestry only the seam down the center was not quite straight which made the upper half of the huntsman’s hand an inch forward from the lower part. Flo pointed out the defect saying: “You got skinned.” Margy explained that the defect had been brought to her attention before purchase and the price reduced accordingly.
Two pictures hung on the wall; a framed lithograph of the “Weeping Magdalene” with her Titian hair and blue robe, and Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” Margy loved blue.
A cedar hope chest, the gift of Frankie, stood between the two windows. Reenie’s wedding present, a French doll, with its exaggerated legs tied in knots, sat on the hope chest propped against cushions that almost matched the furniture upholstery. When asked, Flo agreed that the chest could pass for a window seat.
After a thorough inspection of the apartment and a dire prophecy that cockroaches would come in from the people upstairs and bedbugs from the people downstairs, Flo pronounced the apartment “very mod-dren and up-to-date in the bargain.” Henny said nothing. But he was proud. Already Margy was doing better. An apartment was a step up from the flat.
Margy spent her evenings there that last week, fixing it up. Reenie and Ruthie met her there one night by appointment. The girls examined the place with squeals of delight.
“It’s the nuts,” was Reenie’s judgment. “I wish it was Sal’s and mine.”
“Someday,” soothed Margy. “Someday.”
“And a private bath!” Ruthie exclaimed. “Your intended must be coining money.”
“I intend to live in that bathtub,” said Margy.
“. . . and soak your troubles away,” sang Reenie.
“It’s smoke your troubles away,” corrected Ruthie.
“I think it’s sing your troubles away.”
“It’s soak!”
“It’s smoke!”
“It’s hoke!” clinched Margy.
They started to laugh. They laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop. “What are we laughing at?” they asked each other gaspingly. They didn’t know. They were too young to know that they were laughing for no other reason than that they were young.