Rebecca couldn’t sleep. Her mind swam with the possibilities of what might have occurred had the conversation gone the other way. Married? She couldn’t imagine it. Not yet. Still, she had agreed to the wedding, and only delayed it a year and a half. Perhaps there would be another time to convince her father to postpone for longer.
After an hour of tossing in bed, listening to Ida snoring beside her, Rebecca needed to relieve herself. She hated when this happened. If she had only had to urinate, she could have used the chamber pot, but her stomach was twisted and jumping. The pit toilets were down in the yard behind the tenement, and all the residents from three buildings used four stalls.
Rebecca got up and lit a candle, which she took with her into the stairwell. She heard noises as she reached the bottom flight. As she approached the back door, she could make out the sound of men talking. Opening the back door and stepping outside, her nostrils were assaulted with the terrible odour of human feces.
The toilets always stank, but this was worse. The structures that usually covered the pits had been lined up at the back of the yard, and four men stood down in the uncovered holes.
Night-soilers.
They had shovelled most of the contents into crates placed on the ground. Rebecca had never seen the men do their work; she had only heard stories. It was no wonder that they waited until the fall to do this. In spite of the cold, the stench was nauseating.
One man caught sight of her staring.
“Coming in here with us, missy?” he chuckled.
The others started laughing.
“See you got a candle there. Now all’s we need is some wine, boys, don’t we? Too bad we finished it all earlier. Don’t matter none, come on down in here, we’ll find another way to warm ourselves up!”
The men hooted and laughed and grabbed at their loins. The one who had spoken to her climbed out of the pit and started wiping his boots with a rag.
Rebecca jumped back inside the door and shot up the stairs. Her candle blew out on the first flight. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard someone come in behind her. She put the candle inside her sleeve and ignored the wax scalding her wrist as she grabbed hold of the banister and pulled herself up. The stairs creaked a flight below. The man was following. Faster and faster, she threw her body forward, pulling her legs up beneath her with great strides, clearing two stairs at a time.
As she ran up the last flight, she could hear him getting closer. She grabbed the top of the banister and used her momentum to fling herself around the corner. Her leg muscles screamed. She reached the apartment and slipped inside, shutting the door behind her. She pressed her back against the wall and tried not to make any noise. She didn’t want to wake anyone up. She fought back tears and stifled her gasps for air. She heard the man breathing on the other side of the door. After a few seconds, she heard him chuckle, and then his footsteps retreated down the hall.
She went into her room and shut the door. Ida stirred awake.
“What’s wrong, Rebecca?” she mumbled.
“Nothing, go back to sleep.”
Ida turned over and pulled the covers over her head.
Rebecca knew now that there would be no falling asleep, even though she no longer needed to use the toilet. She lit her candle again, got an ink bottle, a pen, and a dirty cloth from the dresser, and set them all down beside the bed. She sat down on the floor beside them and leaned back against the bed frame. Reaching behind herself, her fingers searched out a hardcover book under the bed and drew it out. Her friend Hattie had given it to her over a month ago for her birthday, but she had never opened it.
She dipped the pen into the bottle and blotted the excess ink on the cloth. Opening the brown cover and turning to the first page, she steadied her hand and, with utmost care, began her first entry.
Chapter Three
Today was Tuesday, and that usually meant an extra heavy workload. Rebecca sewed leaning into her machine, struggling to focus on her work. She looked up and squinted to see the clock on the wall across from her and then began to pump more vigorously with her foot. She was behind. Straight lines, she told her herself, it was important to concentrate on the straight lines. Keeping her fingertips as close to the guide as she dared, she watched the needle flying up and down, so quickly it was a blur. But the chug-chug of the wheel and the hazy grey of its swirling spokes soon lulled her back into a reverie.
A high-pitched scream came from across the floor and jolted her back to attention. Stopping her wheel, she swivelled in her chair to look. The room was long and wide, with fifteen rows, and she could just make out her friend Elsie standing up, ten aisles over by the windows, waving her arms. It was difficult to see her clearly at first, not so much because of the distance as the sun’s glare, casting her body in shadow.
Elsie shouted for a foreman to come. Rebecca’s eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw that a woman beside Elsie, it looked like Gertie Reznikoff, had one hand pressed flat on the sewing table, the other clutching at Elsie’s hair. Because her hand was so close to the guide, it looked like she had a finger trapped under the needle. The row where her friends sat erupted into chaos. Elsie extracted Gertie’s hand from her hair and put it on her forearm. She grabbed a piece of material and pressed it down against the trapped finger.
She called again, this time for Lev Sklawer, the floor supervisor, but Rebecca saw that he was near her side of the floor trying to make his way over to them. Many of the workers stood up from their chairs and watched, as Elsie shouted for everyone to be quiet. The noise slowly died down to a low hum, and people waited for her next move.
Then Rebecca heard her friend speak, calmly and steadily.
“Gertie, honey. Take a deep breath. I’m gonna turn the wheel at the count of three and pull out the needle. Be a brave girl now, okay?”
Gertie was now crying in a series of short sobs that were cut off when she ran out of air, followed by a gasp, a staccato of whimpers, and then another sob.
Elsie had her hand on Gertie’s arm. “Okay, honey, are you ready?”
Gertie nodded, her eyes closed, her face red and pinched.
“One, two. . .” Elsie turned the crank in a sudden movement, and Gertie screamed.
Gertie grasped her freed finger in her other hand, squeezing it tight, and rocked back and forth in her chair. Lev motioned to one of the foremen, who came and carried Gertie off into a room at the back.
Elsie crumpled back down into her chair, and Rebecca could see her other friend, Dora, crouching down to comfort her. Thank God for Elsie; Gertie had been lucky to be sitting next to her. From where she sat, it looked like Dora was now helping her to fix her hair. Together they drew it up and pinned it into her usual pompadour. Dora took a piece of excess cloth and mopped Elsie’s brow. Elsie had a stout, round face, and when she took the cloth to mop the back of her neck, Rebecca noticed that it was unusually long for someone so short.
It was a good thing that Elsie was always so coolheaded and sensible, and not like one of the flighty girls in the adjacent row. She looked for solutions to whatever troubles came her way, no matter how terrible. The world was a horrible place, Elsie claimed, but there was no point in waiting around with your head up your tuchus, or up in the clouds, when there was usually something to be done to make things a little less bad. That was Elsie — so pragmatic it was depressing.
A murmur rippled through the crowd and eventually reached Rebecca’s table. One of the women across from her received the whispered news and leaned across the table to share it with Rebecca.
“The needle go straight through that bone.” She wagged her index finger. “They will take it off,” she said. Her curled lips conveyed both revulsion and disapproval. Which was the more dominant emotion, or what exactly she disapproved of, Rebecca couldn’t tell.
“Poor