I COULD HAVE TOLD THE SINGER MAN to stop coming around. Our door had a lock. He couldn’t get in unless I let him.
And I kept letting him in.
Within a few weeks it became apparent that the Singer man’s long, fine fingers could handle buttons and clasps as well as a needle and thread. No man was more familiar with the ways that fabric could be bound up and taken apart than a sewing machine salesman. The first time he reached out to my neck and separated my collar from my dress I held perfectly still, surprised by how nimble and quick he could be. In the perpetual dusk of my mother’s parlor, he worked at my dress like a tailor at a fitting, insisting that I stand in the middle of the room while he moved in a circle around me, releasing hooks and pushing pearl buttons through the loops my mother had stitched to hold them. He touched them lightly, as if he were merely testing their strength or checking for flaws in their design. On every visit he released another of the countless ties and latches with which we girls bound ourselves according to the fashions of 1897. It was a few weeks before he made it past the last one, but the Singer man was patient, smiling down on me as he released them. He closed his eyes like a man at prayer when he kissed me.
My mother had impressed upon me the idea that a girl should never sit alone on a divan with a man. And so we never sat on the divan. The Singer man made sure I always stood.
My knees gave out just once, but he pulled me up again.
THE SINGER MAN KNEW BEFORE I DID. He was precisely attuned to the fit of my dresses, having opened and closed them so many times that winter, even adding his own darts and pleats to make them fit better. When he saw my waist straining against his own stitches, he knew.
There was a place in New Jersey for girls like me, he said. One of the other Singer men told him about it.
Other Singer men? All at once I understood that there must have been other girls in Brooklyn taking sewing lessons from Singer men. Whatever bank of fog had been clouding my mind for the last few months cleared at the mention of other salesmen giving sewing lessons to other girls. The room came into very sharp and cold focus when he said it, and my situation was suddenly apparent to me in a way that it hadn’t been before. The words describing my predicament dropped into place like type in a newspaper column.
Still I let him slip his fingers under my skirt to judge whether there was enough fabric to take it out a few inches.
I never once considered telling my mother. There was the fact of the child, and there was the fact that I’d let that man into her house again. A Jew going door-to-door, peddling the machinery of the coming century, taking her daughter apart stitch by stitch, right inside the creaky and cloistered preserve she’d built to hold us.
I didn’t know what else to do but let the Singer man take me to Wyckoff and deposit me at Mrs. Florence’s Country Home for Friendless and Erring Women. There was never any discussion of seeing a doctor or drinking a syrup or tossing myself down the stairs. I didn’t know about any of that. I wouldn’t know about it until I got to Wyckoff and the other girls told me.
So without a word, I disappeared. One summer morning I awoke in my own bed in Brooklyn as I always had, with Norma sleeping fitfully beside me, and the next morning I awoke on a wool mattress in Wyckoff, having registered under a false name the night before, presented as the unfortunate cousin of the Singer man.
I left no note behind. I took nothing with me, not even a change of clothes. In Wyckoff I would make myself a new wardrobe. As a parting gift the Singer man left me his sample machine.