The Hired Girl (15 page)

It reminded me of the night of the party in
Jane Eyre,
when Mr. Rochester spoke to Jane on the stairs, except that Mr. Solomon scarcely glanced at me. I ventured, “Good morning, sir.”

He looked a little startled. Then he smiled. “Good morning”— he paused —“Jane. It is Jane, isn’t it?”

“No, sir,” I said, “it’s Janet.” And I guess I seemed crestfallen, because he looked contrite.

“Janet,” he corrected himself. “Of course. I understand you’re doing well.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and I launched into the speech I’d planned for him. It was all about how he’d rescued me, like one of King Arthur’s knights, and how grateful I was, and how I’d vowed to mention his name in my prayers every night. I tried to express my thanks in elegant phrases, so that he’d understand that even though I’m a hired girl, I’m not just a hired girl.

But I forgot the beginning of my speech. I plunged into the middle, and had to go back and stick the beginning back in. I could feel my face getting red. The awful thing was that I could tell that Mr. Solomon wanted me to stop talking. He looked as awkward as I felt. “I’m glad everything’s worked out so well,” he said when I paused for breath. “For your sake, and for Malka’s.” And with that, he brushed past me and went down the stairs.

For my sake, and for Malka’s.
That’s when the truth sank in: to Mr. Solomon, I’m just a servant like Malka. In fact, I’m much less to him than Malka is, because he’s known Malka all his life. He’s her pet among the Rosenbach children, and she calls him
Shlomo;
Malka’s almost like his grandmother. But I’m just a servant. The dress that made me feel so pretty is a servant’s dress.

I felt like thirty cents. I guess I’d had some fool idea in my head that the way we met, with him rescuing me, would forge a link between us. I’d started to think that Mr. Solomon was a little bit like Mr. Rochester. Well, he isn’t, and that’s all there is to it. Mr. Rochester knew that Jane Eyre was his equal, even though she was a governess. But when Mr. Solomon looks at me, all he sees is a hired girl. He even forgot my name!

I watched him descend the stairs, and I noticed something. The hair on top of Mr. Solomon’s head is getting a little bit thin. He’s going to have a bald spot there. I didn’t know that a man so young could be losing his hair. I wonder if he knows. The idea that he might not suspect makes me feel a little bit sorry for him. It seems very melancholy. Of course, a bald spot wouldn’t matter if he were more like Mr. Rochester, but —

Altogether it was very unsettling.

Thursday, July the thirteenth, 1911

Today was busy with shopping and getting ready for the return of Mr. Rosenbach — Mrs. Rosenbach’s husband, that is, not Mr. Solomon. Malka was determined that the master should have all his favorite foods. She sent me to the market three times to get things she’d forgotten — allspice for red cabbage, Jamaica ginger for the beef, and peaches for dessert. In the midst of all this, the child Mirele complained of a sore throat and asked for a tray of cinnamon toast. It seems that cinnamon toast is invalid’s fare in the Rosenbach household. Malka was exasperated because she said Mirele was no more sick than she was, but she had me make the toast and carry up the tray.

I wasn’t sorry to be sent upstairs, because I’m curious about Mirele, who seems to do nothing but change her clothes and play with her friends in Druid Hill Park. I iron her dresses and tidy her room, and the one thing I know for sure about her is that she’s a slob. Of course
slob
isn’t a very refined word, but
slatternly
is too harsh. And in fact, the child isn’t slatternly; she is dainty in her person, but her room is the room of a slob. It’s nothing to find her hairbrush in her unmade bed and orange peels all over the dresser.

I found little Miss Rosenbach in bed. She wore a summer nightdress decorated with pale-green ribbons, and she was playing solitaire.

“Oh, good,” said Mirele, reaching for the tray. “I’m famished. You can put the tray on the bed.”

I didn’t want to. Those sheets were changed on Tuesday, and I didn’t want them full of crumbs and sugar grit. I coaxed, “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable at your desk, Miss?”

“No,” answered Mirele promptly. “I like eating in bed. When you’re sick, you get to have cinnamon toast in bed. That’s part of the fun.”

I sighed and put down the tray, but Mirele had no intention of letting me leave. “Sit down and talk to me,” she commanded.

“I can’t,” said I. “Malka needs me in the kitchen.”

“If you leave, you’ll have to climb the stairs to take the tray back,” Mirele pointed out. “It’s easier if you stay. It won’t take me long to eat two slices of toast. Stingy old Malka, I wanted three. I’m glad you’re here, because I want someone to talk to. Are you really eighteen? Mama says if you’re a day over sixteen, she’ll eat her hat. Are you sixteen?”

“No,” I said, with perfect truth. “Your mother’s mistaken.”

“I’m twelve,” she said, and took a gulp of milk.

I stared because she didn’t look twelve. She might have been ten or even nine, she was so tiny. It was funny to think she was only two years younger. “I guess you’re small for your age,” I said.

“Yes. It’s good in a way,” Mirele explained. “People treat me like a baby, but I get away with more. I don’t believe you’re eighteen years old. You played with my dollhouse, didn’t you?”

I had, actually. It was more cleaning than playing, but I’ll admit it: I’ve never seen anything like that dollhouse. It’s four feet tall, with three floors full of perfect miniature furniture: needlepoint carpets, and cunning little chairs upholstered in striped silk, and a kitchen full of tiny willowware plates stuck with cardboard food. I could never have imagined such an elaborate and expensive toy. If it had been mine — when I was little, I mean — I’d have kept it in apple-pie order.

But Mirele is a slob, and her dollhouse is a mess. That’s a problem for me, because the house has only three walls and you can see inside. The first time I cleaned Mirele’s room, I stood in the doorway and checked to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. My gaze fell on that dollhouse: a pigsty and an eyesore. The dolls were lying on the floor like drunkards, and the chairs were tipped over, and the dolly beds weren’t made — the little quilts and pillows were all over the floor.

I couldn’t stand it, so I put it to rights. It didn’t take five minutes, and that was the fun of it — you could clean a whole mansion in five minutes. I made the little beds and rearranged the furniture and set the dolls in chairs so that they looked comfortable. And the next day — well, I guess it was silly — I cut up a tiny section of Malka’s Yiddish newspaper so the papa doll could have something to read. He did look comical, sitting with that newspaper. After that — well, I allow myself one little change every day. Once I put the baby doll in the bathtub, with the mother kneeling next to him — I rolled up her sleeves to the elbows. Another time I made the china cat sleep on top of the piano. The Thomashefsky cat does that, and I think it’s cute.

I guess I
do
play with the dollhouse, just a little. It makes cleaning that sloppy room more interesting.

“It looked awful the way it was,” I defended myself. Then I remembered that I was a hired girl and added, “Miss.”

“Don’t call me
Miss,
” said Mirele. “We’re not very formal here, in case you haven’t noticed. I want you to call me Mimi. That’s what my friends call me.”

“Malka calls you Mirele.”

“That’s Yiddish. We all know a little Yiddish, because of Malka bringing up Papa, but Yiddish is vulgar, Mama says. She prefers
Hochdeutsch.
That means High German. My real name is Miriam, but I like Mimi better. I’m like the girl in the opera.” She put down her toast, clasped her hands, and sang in a small, true voice. “
‘I call myself Mimi!’
Have you ever been to the opera?”

“No, but I’m going to, someday. And a Russian ballet, too.”

“I’ll call you Janet, because we’re almost the same age,” she said. She took a wolfish bite of toast. “Mmmm.” Then she began to gobble.

While she ate her toast, I took the opportunity to look at her. Nobody looks her best when she’s chewing, and I tried to take that into account, but even if you subtracted the chewing, Mirele Rosenbach was no beauty. She was small and nimble and wore her frilly clothes beautifully. But she had freckles, and her features weren’t regular. The lower part of her face came forward in a way that reminded me of a monkey. Her mouth was wide, and her little white teeth were crooked. Though her hair was curly, it was a disorganized kind of curly that made her look windblown.

And yet, if she wasn’t pretty,
she
didn’t know it. She spoke and walked and moved her hands as if she were bewitchingly pretty. And for some reason, it was hard to take your eyes off her. I guess a novel would have said it was the
play
of her features. She was lively; she was animated; her lips curved with mischief, and her small eyes sparkled.

I wonder if my features ever play. I bet they don’t.

I waited for her to finish her toast so that I could carry the tray downstairs. She set down her milk glass and said, “You do your hair too tight. It makes your ears stick out.”

I agreed with her. The new hairpins are good; my knot of hair no longer lurches or tumbles down. But those little caps aren’t becoming, and my ears look funny sticking out below.

“It’s not really your ears,” Mirele said, with belated tact. “They’re all right. It’s the way you do your hair. I’ll show you.” She slid out of bed and went to fetch her brush and comb. “Sit down. I love doing hair. I’m good at it. It won’t take a minute, and you’ll look ever so much better.”

I thought of Malka downstairs, but the temptation was too great. I sat down and let Mirele — Mimi — pluck off my cap. Never for a moment did I doubt that she would be better at arranging hair than I was. Skillfully she brushed and puffed and coiled. In a matter of seconds, my hair was a burnished crown, and my ears looked smaller.

“That’s better,” Mimi said judiciously. “You need to grab the hair like a rope, and let your hand slide up, down . . . twist, puff, and pin. It makes all the difference, having your hair nice. You have good eyes and a pretty complexion and your bruises are fading. I think your father is just terrible. I complain about Papa, but he would never, never strike me. He never even spanked me when I was little.”

“Then why do you complain?” I shouldn’t have asked, but it was hard for me to remember that I was the hired girl when Mimi didn’t seem to.

“Because he wants me to study all the time — and I de-
test
reading. It makes my head ache. Even during the summer, when I ought to have some peace, he makes me read.” She went to her desk and picked up a stack of books. “Papa gave me these before he left. He told me I had to read one of them.
Little Women
and
Black Beauty
and
Huckleberry Finn.
They’re all dreadfully long, and
Huckleberry Finn
isn’t even written in proper English. He left me arithmetic, too.” She held up a much-smeared page of sums. “Geography and spelling, and German and Hebrew — Hebrew’s impossible; I’ll never be able to learn it. Did your papa make you learn such awful stuff ?”

“No,” I said regretfully, “my father didn’t want me to learn anything.”

“How heavenly!” breathed Mimi. “When Papa comes tonight, he’ll want me to show him my arithmetic and tell him about one of those books. He’ll be so disappointed in me! I can’t bear it. That’s why I pretended to be sick. He can’t be cross if I’m sick, and if I’m left alone, I can do some of these stupid sums.”

“Will he believe you’re really sick? Malka knew you weren’t.”

“Malka thinks I’m spoiled,” Mimi said, which is just what Malka does think. “She says each of us is more spoiled than the last. I’m the youngest, so I’m the worst. Anna and Solly are good, and me and David are bad. Though Solly might be in trouble with Papa, too.”

“Why?” I asked rashly. I shouldn’t have gossiped, but it seemed as though the little minx would tell me everything, and I did so want to know.

“Because Papa expects him to learn the business at the store, but all Solly wants to do is to study Talmud. Solly hasn’t told him. He doesn’t want to disappoint Papa. None of us do. That’s how Papa
is.
Papa’s very Reform, and it isn’t Reform to study Talmud. Papa says there’s wisdom in it, but there’s also a lot of medieval superstition —”

“What’s Talmud?”

“It’s writings about the Torah —” She looked at me with her head on one side. “You don’t know what the Torah is, do you?”

I admitted that I didn’t.

“It’s all right,” she said kindly. “Maisie Phillips didn’t know either, and she’s my second-best friend. She’s a Gentile, too. The Torah’s the five books of Moses.” She counted them on her fingers. “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers. About a thousand rabbis decided to write everything they could think of about the Torah, and that’s Talmud. There are forty-two volumes of it. And Solly wants to study it. He
loves
it. And Nora Himmelrich — that’s the other thing he loves.”

I echoed, “Nora Himmelrich?” My mind was awhirl. I’d never thought of Mr. Solomon being in love.

“He’s dead stuck on her,” said Mimi. “She’s very pretty and very rich, but I don’t think she’ll have him. If he took over the store, that would be one thing. But I don’t think she’ll marry him if he’s nothing but a scholar.”

I thought that was sad. I’d never heard the phrase “dead stuck on” before, but I guessed what it meant, even though I didn’t think it was a very poetic way of putting things. “Doesn’t she love him?”

Mimi shrugged. “With her looks, she could marry anybody. Of course, Solly’s nice,” she added quickly, “though my other brother — David — has more
go
in him. I’m never getting married, myself.”

“Neither am I,” I said. I wasn’t thinking; it just came out.

She gazed at me with interest. “Won’t you, though? I’m the only girl I know who doesn’t want to get married. It’s not that I don’t like men — well, of course, they’re only boys now, because I’m twelve. Mama says I’m too young to think about boys. But if I were really too young, I wouldn’t think about them, would I? It’s interesting to see if I can make them notice me, and the funny thing is, I
can.
Lotty Lewisohn and Maisie Phillips are heaps better looking than I am, but the boys like me better. I think I’ll be a belle when I’m grown up. I’ll let the men take me to dances and send flowers and all that. But nothing else. I won’t marry them.”