Elizabeth Bear - Karen Memory

You aint gonna like what I have to tell you, but Im gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and Im one of the girls what works in the Htel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. Htel has a little hat over the o like that. Its French, so Beatrice tells me.

Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say its Madame Damnables Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they dont care if your sewing machines got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.

Which aint to say we aint got a sewing machine. Weve got two, an old-style one with a black cast-iron body and a shiny chrome wheel, and one of the new steel-geared brass ones that run on water pressure, such that you stand inside of and move with your whole body, and it does the cutting and stitching and steam pressing, too.

Them two machines sit out in a corner of the parlor as kind of a joke.

I can use the old-fashioned one I learned to sew, I mean really sew pretty good after Mama died and Miss Francina is teaching me to use the new one to do fancywork, though it kind of scares me. And it fits her, so its big as your grandpas trousers on me. But the thing is, nobody in Rapid City sells the kind of dresses we parlor girls need, so its make our own patterned after fashion dolls from Paris and London and New York or its pay a ladies tailor two-thirds your wage for something you dont like as well.

But as you can imagine, a house full of ladies like this goes through a lot of frocks and a lot of mending. So it pays to know how to sew both ways, so to speak.

Really pays. Miss Francina and me, we charge less than the ladies tailors. And its easier to do fittings when you live with the girls. And every penny I make goes into the knotted sock in my room for when I get too old for sewing. I have a plan, see.

The richest bit is that the city and the tailors cant complain, can they, when were paying our sewing machine tax and our guild and union dues, too. Sure, fifty dollard be a years wages back in Hay Camp for a real seamstress and here in Rapid City itll barely buy you a dozen of eggs, a shot of whiskey, and a couple pair of those new blue jeans that Mr. Strauss is manufacturing. But here in Rapid City a girl can pay fifty dollar a week and still have enough left over to live on and put a little away besides, even after the houses cut.

You want to work for a house, if youre working. I mean working sewing. Because Madam Damnable is a battleship and she runs the Htel Mon Cherie tight, but nobody hits her girls, and weve got an Ancient and Honorable Guild of Seamstresses and nobodys going to make us do anything we really dont want to unless its by paying us so much well consider it in spite of. Not like in the cheap cribs down in the mud beside the pier with the locked doors and no fireplaces, where they keep the Chinese and the Indian girls the sailors use. Those girls, if theyre lucky, they work two to a room so they can keep an eye on each other for safety and they got a slicker to throw over the bottom sheet so the tricks spurs and mud dont ruin it.

Ive never been down there, but Ive been up along the pier, and you cant hear the girls except once in a while when one goes crazy, crying and screaming. All you can hear up there is the sailors cursing and the dog teams barking in the kennels like they know theyre going to be loaded on those deep-keel ships and sent up north to Alaska to probably freeze in the snow and die along with some eastern idiot whos heard theres gold. Sometimes girls go north, too theres supposed to be good money from the men in the gold camps but I aint known but one who made it away again ever.

That was Madame Damnable, and when she came back she had enough to set herself up in business and keep her seamstresses dry and clean. She was also missing half her right foot from gangrene, and five or six teeth from scurvy, so I guess its up to you to decide if you think that was worth it to her.

She seems pretty happy, and she walks all right with a cane, but it aint half-hard for her to get up and down the ladders to street level.

So anyway, about them ladders. Madame Damnables is in the deep part of town, and they aint yet finished raising the streets here. What I mean is when they started building up the roads a while back so the sea wouldnt flood the downtown every spring tide they couldnt very well close down all the shopping and all the sewing so they built these big old masonry walls and started filling in the streets between them up to the top level with just any old thing they had to throw in there. Theres dead horses down there, dead men for all I know. Street signs and old couches and broke-up wagons and such.

They left the sidewalks down here where they had been, and the front doors to the shops and such, so on each block theres this passage between the walls of the street and the walls of the buildings. And since horses cant climb ladders and wagons cant fly, they didnt connect the blocks. Well, I guess they could of built tunnels, but its bad enough down there on the walkways at night as it is now and worth your life to go out without a couple of good big lantern bearers with a stout cudgel apiece.

At Madame Damnables, weve got Crispin, whos our doorman and a freed or maybe a runaway slave and about as big as a house. Hes the only man allowed to live in the hotel, as he doesnt care for humping with women. He hardly talks and hes real calm and quiet, but you never feel not safe with him standing right behind you, even when youre strong-arming out a drunk or a deadbeat. Especially if Miss Francina is standing on the other side.

So all over downtown, from one block to the next youve got to climb a ladder in your hoopskirts and corset and bustle that aint no small thing even if youve got two good feet in your boots to stand on and in our part of town thats thirty-two feet from down on the walk up to street level.

When the water tables high, the walks still flood out, of course. Bet you guessed that without me.

They filled up the streets at the top of town first, because the rich folk live there, Colonel Marsh who owns the lumber mill and Dyer Stone thats Obadiah, but nobody call him that whos the mayor, and such. And Skid Road they didnt fill in at all, because they needed it steep on account of the logs, so theres staircases up from it to the new streets, where the new streets are finished and sometimes where they aint. The better neighborhoods got steam lifts, too, all brass and shiny, so the rich ladies aint got to show their bloomers to the whole world climbing ladders. Nobody cares if a soiled dove shows off her underthings, I guess, as long as the underthings are clean.

Up there some places the fill was only eight feet and theyve got the new sidewalks finished over top of the old already. What they did there was use deck prisms meant for ships, green and blue from the glass factory up by the river as gives Rapid City its name, set in metal gratings so that when theres light the light can shine on down.

Down here well get wood plank, I expect, and like it. And then Madame Damnable will just keep those ruby lamps by the front door burning all the time.

The red light looks nice on the gilt, anyway.

* * *

Our business mostly aint sailors but gold camp men coming or going to Anchorage, which is about the stupidest thing you ever could get to naming a harbor. I mean, why not just call it Harbor, like it was the only one ever? So we get late nights, sure, but our trades more late afternoon to say two or four, more like a saloon than like those poor girls down under the docks who work all night, five dollar a poke, when the neap tide keeps the ships locked in. Which means most nights cept Fridays and Saturdays by 3:00 A.M. were down in the dining room while Miss Bethel and Connie serves us supper. Theyre the barkeep and the cook. They dont work the parlor, but Connie feeds us better than wed get at home and Miss Bethel, she keeps a sharp eye on the patrons.