I am fifteen when Mrs. Nielsen finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse.
It’s clear when I walk into the kitchen that I’ve done something to displease her. She is quieter than usual, with an air of injured aggravation. I wonder if I’m imagining it; I try to remember if I said or did anything to upset her before I left for school. The pack of cigarettes, which my friend Judy Smith’s boyfriend bought for her at the Esso station outside of town, and which she passed along to me, doesn’t even register in my mind.
After Mr. Nielsen comes in and we sit down to supper, Mrs. Nielsen slides the pack of Lucky Strikes toward me across the table. “I was looking for my green gloves and thought you might have borrowed them,” she says. “I found this instead.”
I look at her, then at Mr. Nielsen, who lifts his fork and knife and begins cutting his pork chop into small pieces.
“I only smoked one, to try it,” I say, though they can clearly see that the pack is half empty.
“Where’d you get it?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.
I am tempted to tell them it was Judy’s boyfriend, Douglas, but realize it will only be worse to drag other people in. “It was—an experiment. I didn’t like it. They made me cough.”
She raises her eyebrows at Mr. Nielsen, and I can tell they’ve already decided on a punishment. The only thing they can really take away is my weekly Sunday-afternoon trip to the picture show with Judy, so for the next two weeks I stay home instead. And endure their silent reprobation.
After this, I decide that the cost of upsetting them is too much. I don’t climb out my bedroom window and down the drainpipe like Judy; I go to school and work in the store and help with dinner and do my homework and go to bed. I go out with boys now and then, always on a double date or in groups. One boy in particular, Ronnie King, is sweet on me and gives me a promise ring. But I am so worried I might do something to disappoint the Nielsens that I avoid any situation that might lead to impropriety. Once, after a date, Ronnie tries to kiss me good night. His lips brush mine and I pull back quickly. Soon after that I give back his ring.
I never lose the fear that any day Mr. Sorenson could be on the doorstep, telling me that the Nielsens have decided I’m too expensive, too much trouble, or merely a disappointment, and they’ve decided to let me go. In my nightmares I am alone on a train, heading into the wilderness. Or in a maze of hay bales. Or walking the streets of a big city, gazing at lights in every window, seeing the families inside, none of them mine.
ONE DAY I OVERHEAR A MAN AT THE COUNTER TALKING TO MRS. Nielsen. “My wife sent me in here to get some things for a basket our church is putting together for a boy who came on that orphan train,” he says. “Remember those? Used to come through a while ago with all those homeless waifs? I went to the Grange Hall in Albans once to see ’em. Pitiful lot. Anyhow, this kid had one misfortune after another, got beat up pretty bad by the farmer who took him in, and now the elderly lady he went to after that has died, and he’s on his own again. It’s a scandal, sending those poor kids out here on their own, expecting folks to take care of ’em—as if we don’t have our own burdens.”
“Ummhmm,” Mrs. Nielsen says noncommittally.
I move closer, wondering if he might be talking about Dutchy. But then I realize Dutchy is eighteen now. Old enough to be on his own.
I AM NEARLY SIXTEEN WHEN I LOOK AROUND THE STORE AND REALIZE that it has barely changed in all the time I’ve been here. And there are things we can do to make it nicer. A lot of things. First, after consulting Mr. Nielsen, I move the magazines to the front, near the cash register. The shampoos and lotions and balms that used to be at the back of the store I shift to shelves near the pharmacy, so that people filling prescriptions can also buy plasters and ointments. The women’s section is woefully understocked—understandable, given Mr. Nielsen’s general ignorance and Mrs. Nielsen’s lack of interest (she does wear an occasional coat of lipstick, though it always seems to have been randomly chosen and hurriedly applied). Remembering the long discussions about stockings and garters and makeup rituals at Mrs. Murphy’s, I suggest that we increase and expand this section, purchasing, for example, a hosiery carousel with seamed and unseamed stockings from one of the vendors, and advertise it in the paper. The Nielsens are skeptical, but in the first week we go through our entire stock. The following week Mr. Nielsen doubles the order.
Recalling what Fanny said about ladies wanting to feel pretty even when they don’t have much money, I convince Mr. Nielsen to order small inexpensive items, sparkling costume jewelry and gloves made of cotton velvet, Bakelite wrist bangles and colorful printed scarves. There are several girls I watch avidly at school, a grade or two above me, whose well-to-do parents take them to the Twin Cities to buy clothes. I notice what they wear and what they eat, what music they listen to, the cars they dream about, and the movie stars they follow. And like a magpie I bring these scraps and twigs back to the store. One of these girls will wear a new color or style of belt or a button-plate hat tilted to one side, and that afternoon I’ll pore through our vendors’ catalogs to find similar designs. I choose mannequins out of a catalog that look like these girls, with pencil-thin eyebrows and rosebud lips and soft, wavy hairstyles, and dress them in the latest styles and colors. I find out the perfumes they favor, like Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, and we stock those as well as standard ladies’ favorites such as Joy by Jean Patou and Vol de Nuit by Guerlain.
As business grows, we push the shelves closer together, erect special displays at the ends of the aisles, crowd the lotions. When the shop next door, a jeweler’s called Rich’s, goes out of business, I convince Mr. Nielsen to remodel and expand. Inventory will be in the basement instead of in the back, and the store will be organized into departments.
We keep prices low, and lower them even more with sales every week and coupons in the paper. We institute a layaway plan so people can buy more expensive items in installments. And we put in a soda fountain as a place people can linger. Before long the store is thriving. It seems as though we are the only business doing well in this terrible economy.
“DID YOU KNOW YOUR EYES ARE YOUR BEST FEATURE?” TOM PRICE tells me in math class senior year, leaning across my desk to look at them, first one and then the other. “Brown, green, even a little gold in there. I’ve never seen so many colors in a pair of eyes.” I squirm under his gaze, but when I get home that afternoon, I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and stare at my eyes for a long time.
My hair isn’t as brassy as it used to be. Over the years it has turned a deep russet, the color of dead leaves. I’ve had it cut in the fashionable style—fashionable for our town, at least—right above my shoulders. And when I begin to wear makeup, I have a revelation. I’ve viewed my life until now as a series of unrelated adaptations, from Irish Niamh to American Dorothy to the reincarnated Vivian. Each identity has been projected onto me and fits oddly at first, like a pair of shoes you have to break in before they’re comfortable. But with red lipstick I can fashion a whole new—and temporary—persona. I can determine my own next incarnation.
I attend the homecoming dance with Tom. He shows up at the door with a wrist corsage, a fat white carnation and two tiny roses; I’ve sewn my own dress, a pink chiffon version of one Ginger Rogers wore in Swing Time, and Mrs. Nielsen loans me her pearl necklace and matching earrings. Tom is affable and good-natured right up until the moment the whiskey he’s tippling from a flask in the pocket of his father’s too-big suit coat makes him drunk. Then he gets into a scuffle with another senior on the dance floor and manages to get himself, and me, ejected from the dance.
The next Monday, my twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Fry, takes me aside after class. “Why are you wasting time with a boy like that?” she scolds. She urges me to apply to colleges out of state—Smith College in Massachusetts, for one, her alma mater. “You’ll have a bigger life,” she says. “Don’t you want that, Vivian?” But though I’m flattered by her interest, I know I’ll never go that far. I can’t leave the Nielsens, who’ve come to depend on me for so much. Besides, Tom Price notwithstanding, the life I’m living is big enough for me.
AS SOON AS I GRADUATE, I BEGIN TO MANAGE THE STORE. I FIND that I am suited to the task, and that I enjoy it. (I’m taking a class in accounting and business administration at St. Olaf College, but my classes meet in the evenings.) I hire the workers—nine in all, now—and order much of the merchandise. At night, with Mr. Nielsen, I go over the ledgers. Together we manage employees’ problems, placate customers, massage vendors. I’m constantly angling for the best price, the most attractive bundle of goods, the newest option. Nielsen’s is the first place in the county to carry upright electric vacuum cleaners, blenders, freeze-dried coffee. We’ve never been busier.
Girls from my graduating class come into the store brandishing solitaire diamonds like Legion of Honor medals, as if they’ve accomplished something significant—which I guess they think they have, though all I can see is a future of washing some man’s clothes stretching ahead of them. I want nothing to do with marriage. Mrs. Nielsen agrees. “You’re young. There’ll be time for that,” she says.