Uprising

  “Do you like to dance?” he asked.

  “Do I look like the kind of girl who has time to dance?” Yetta snapped back, unfolding herself from the chair. She crossed her arms self-consciously, covering the worn spots on her skirt. Then she changed her mind and put her hands on her hips, her fingers all but pointing to the threadbare places. “Do I look like I have the money for the kind of dresses girls need for dancing? I send all my money back to my family in Russia. Anyhow, I’m busy taking English lessons at night.”

  “I take English lessons too,” Jacob said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, but mine don’t meet on Saturday nights. I thought . . . maybe you would go dancing with me then.”

  Yetta looked across the factory floor to the row of windows that lined the walls, facing Greene Street. The windows were open, letting in a gentle April breeze. Even in New York City, April smelled of flowers budding and leaves unfurling and green things springing back to life. The breeze had been teasing Yetta all day, calling her away from her machine, calling her to something that she desperately longed for but couldn’t have defined or described.

  Maybe it was dancing.

  “We could practice our English together,” Jacob said.

  Yetta jerked her attention back to Jacob, just another arrogant cutter even if he did have those maddeningly handsome curls and honey-colored eyes. The thought of practicing English while dancing made Yetta think of Rahel helping her husband in his store. It made her think of their mother selling eggs and cheese to supply their father’s religious texts, but never buying anything for herself.

  It made her think that Jacob wanted to dance with her for all the wrong reasons.

  “No, thank you,” Yetta said, with great dignity. She held her head high as she walked past him. She deliberately went to the Washington Place door, the nearest one, forgetting that it was locked. Something else the strike should have changed, she thought. She had to thread her way back through the maze of tables and baskets and stacked shirtwaist parts, and then wait in line for the elevator. Although she was very careful not to watch—or, not to watch in a way that anyone could tell—she was aware of how Jacob walked back to his table, how he scraped scraps of fabric into the huge bin underneath, how he kicked the bin and slapped his hand against the table.

  What is wrong with me? Yetta wondered. Would it have killed me to say yes?

  When she got down to Greene Street, Bella and Jane were waiting for her, giggling.

  “We’re picking out a law student for Jane to marry someday,” Bella said, laughing. “How about that one?”

  The boy she pointed to had chestnut hair—Yetta thought he might be the same one who’d asked her about the strike, way back in October.

  “Better that you should be picking out law students to help us with the union,” Yetta snapped.

  The chestnut-haired boy was brushing past her.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said boldly, tugging on his sleeve. “Are you a law student?”

  “Uh, y-yes,” he said, startled. This was not the same student Yetta had talked to before. This one didn’t seem nearly so sure of himself, and he was walking alone, not with a pack of friends. He looked from Yetta to Bella to Jane, and back to Yetta. “Charles Livingston, at your service.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” Jane said, automatically, as if that response was required.

  “I’m Yetta, and this is Bella and Jane,” Yetta said. “Are you aware that there is a great injustice going on right next door to your law school? At the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the owners agreed to certain conditions at the end of our strike, and I believe every single one of those conditions has now been violated. It’s as if the strike never happened. Aren’t there any laws to help us?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Charles said. “I’m just a first-year. I’d have to ask my professors.” He hesitated. “I do know, when your strike was going on, they said American laws were designed to protect business owners, not workers.” He recited the last part as though from memory. “They asked us if we thought that was fair.”

  “And do you?” Yetta asked.

  Charles shrugged.

  “What do I know? I’m only a first-year. I’m only eighteen years old.”

  “I’m only sixteen,” Yetta said, “and I know. I know because I’ve lived it. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

  “Well, then you could vote—oops, sorry. Forgot I was talking to a girl. You could tell your husband or boyfriend to vote—”

  “Forget it!” Yetta said, stalking away.

  Bella and Jane caught up with her a few moments later.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Bella said, giggling. “Just going up to a man like that, a total stranger, and talking to him—”

  “Talking? That was haranguing! That was lecturing! That was incredible!” Jane snorted. “Though I must say, you probably just ruined my chances of ever marrying that law student!”

  Yetta whirled on her friends.

  “Why would you want to marry somebody who doesn’t even know what he thinks about injustice?” she asked.

  “I suppose he’d be awfully malleable,” Jane said thoughtfully. “You could just convince him to think the way you do. You probably could tell him how to vote.”

  “But what if I want to vote all by myself? Cast my own ballot?” Yetta asked. “Stand on my own two feet? It’s like . . . dancing. Why does the man always get to lead?” She stamped her feet, because that wasn’t what she was trying to say. “Why is the whole world stacked in favor of rich Christian men when God made me a poor Jewish girl?”

  “Maybe God thinks you’re up to the challenge,” Jane said quietly.

  “Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck are Jewish too,” Bella pointed out. “So that’s not—ooh, wait. Dancing. Don’t tell me . . . that cutter actually asked you to a dance, didn’t he? You’re going, aren’t you? You can borrow a hat from Sadie across the hall, and—”

  “Never mind!” Yetta said, stomping away from them.

  “I thought you promised not to be grumpy anymore!” Jane called after her.

  Yetta pretended not to notice.

  Fueled by indignation, she got back to the tenement building far ahead of Bella and Jane. The sidewalks were crowded, as usual, so Yetta was practically inside the front door before she noticed the woman standing nearby.

  “Yetta!” a familiar voice called out.

  It was Rahel, leaning against the railing. She reached out and gathered Yetta into her arms. Yetta almost gave in, almost let herself relax into her older sister’s hug. Rahel had gained weight as a grocer’s wife; she was very solid now. It would be such a relief for Yetta to spill everything to Rahel, to tell her about Jacob inviting her to dance and about feeling confused and about the way the April breeze seemed so determined to lure her away from her machine. Maybe Rahel would even quote something their mother used to say: Men ken nisht tantsn af tsvey khasenes af eyn mol You cannot dance at two weddings at the same time. Meaning, maybe Yetta was right to turn Jacob down. He was a distraction. Except, that saying was about weddings, and weddings were a sore subject between Yetta and Rahel. Yetta had barely danced at all at Rahel’s wedding. She’d mostly sat there, in stony silence.

  Now Yetta held herself stiff and pulled away.

  “It’s been so long since you came to the store,” Rahel complained.

  “There’s another store, closer,” Yetta said, deliberately misunderstanding. She knew Rahel wasn’t just trying to drum up business. “You remember what it’s like. When you work all day at the sewing machine, you don’t want to walk an extra block or two to get groceries.”

  Rahel frowned and tilted her head to the side, regarding her sister sadly.

  “Let’s go sit on the fire escape,” she said. “Just you and me. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Did you hear me invite you in? Yetta wanted to say, but that would have been too rude. Rahel led the way up the stairs and through the apartment. She pulled a m
attress out onto the fire escape to sit on, and soon they were both outside again, three stories above the street, their backs propped against the wall, the breeze teasing at their hair.

  Rahel turned to Yetta, her eyes gleaming, and said, “I’m going to have a baby. We’re going to have a baby. Samuel and me. You’re going to be an aunt.”

  Of course. That was how these things happened. First the wedding, then a baby. Still, Yetta felt like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. A baby. Another way for Rahel to be different from Yetta.

  “Mazel tov,” Yetta said, weakly.

  Rahel stared out over the street.

  “Please tell me you’re happy for me,” she said quietly.

  “Didn’t I say mazel tov?” Yetta asked. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “You didn’t sound like you meant it.”

  Yetta shrugged.

  “It’s just . . . this happened fast, didn’t it?” She picked at the threadbare patch on her skirt. “I thought you wanted to save money to bring our family over from Russia.”

  “The baby won’t be here until January,” Rahel said. “We’re still saving money.”

  “But babies are expensive,” Yetta said. “They need clothes and food, and more clothes because they grow so fast. . . . You’ll have this whole new family and maybe you won’t care anymore about Mother and Father.” Or me, she wanted to say, but that would sound so childish and selfish.

  “Yetta, I already have a whole new family, ever since I married Samuel,” Rahel said. “That doesn’t change anything about Mother and Father.” She brushed hair back from her eyes and squinted out over the street, with its peddlers hawking wares and women buying food and children squeezing in one last moment of playtime before they went home to do their chores. One huge mass of living, breathing, teeming humanity. “I—I never told you,” she said. “In the pogrom, in Bialystok ... I saw people burned alive. I saw people lighting other people on fire. This one girl—she might have been you or me. One minute, she was just standing there, in the window of her house. The next minute, she was covered in flames. A human torch. Gone in a flash.”

  This was the wrong story for a lovely April afternoon when Yetta had been invited to dance. Yetta clenched her teeth together and squeezed her eyes shut, shutting out the street scenes and the fire escape and the sight of Rahel’s intense eyes. But she could still feel Rahel gripping her hand. She could still hear Rahel’s voice.

  “After I saw that, I thought I would never have a normal life again,” Rahel whispered. “I had nightmares. Remember when that tenement building burned in the next block? That brought all the nightmares back again. I never thought I could get married and have a baby and—and be happy . . .”

  Yetta pulled her hand from Rahel’s grasp. She opened her eyes again.

  “How could you want to have a normal life in a world where people set other people on fire?” Yetta murmured. “In a world where policemen beat up shirtwaist girls? How can that not make you want to change the world?”

  Rahel leaned her head close to Yetta’s.

  “What was I supposed to do?” she asked. “Complain to the Czar? Go to Washington and yell at President Taft? I’m a girl. Maybe having a baby is the best thing I can do. To bring some happiness into this sad world . . .”

  Yetta jerked away from Rahel, because she didn’t want Rahel to see that she was shaking. She slid back in through the window. The tenement seemed so dim after the fire escape. The door opened, Bella and Jane bursting into the kitchen and crying out, “Yetta? Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m in here,” Yetta called, trying to hold her voice steady. “Rahel’s going to have a baby.”

  And then Bella and Jane were clustering around, saying all the things Yetta should have said: “Such good news!” “How wonderful!” Bella’s eyes shone with joy and she hugged Rahel the way Yetta should have.

  These are my friends, Yetta wanted to tell Rahel. Closer than family. Can you give me credit for their congratulations, for their happiness on your behalf? Can you see that I wish I could react the way they do—so kindly, so unselfishly? It is just that I myself have too many wishes, all tangled together like long hair in a spring breeze . . .

  She saw the sorrow and regret in her sister’s eyes. She saw it, and did nothing.

  Yetta, Bella, and Jane had become very skilled at digging newspapers and magazines out of the trash, so they could bring them home for reading lessons. Jane always read them first, to see what would work best for Bella, who could now pick out small words like “cat” and “rat,” or for Yetta, who could puzzle out how to pronounce just about any word but had no idea what sentences like “A commission has been formed to make a recommendation regarding these circumstances” could possibly mean.

  Sometimes, if Jane found an interesting story, she’d read it out loud for all of them. They’d been captivated for several nights by a romance tale in a Ladies’ Home Journal, only to discover that the last page was missing.

  “That’s it?” Jane cried, staring in dismay at the ragged edges of the torn-out page. “That’s all we get?”

  “Oh, you know what was going to happen,” Bella said comfortingly. “Serena was going to marry Mr. Godfrey, and they were going to live happily ever after.” Her eyes glowed in the lamplight. “I love stories like that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe Serena convinced Mr. Godfrey to use part of his fortune to set up a union shirtwaist shop,” Yetta said. “And everyone bought his shirtwaists and all the evil shirtwaist factory owners who abused their workers went out of business and—”

  Bella hit Yetta in the face with a pillow.

  “Not now,” she said. “I’m trying to imagine how they would have described the final kiss. Maybe, ‘He turned his smoldering eyes to her and . . .’”

  Yetta had pretended all along that she wasn’t really that interested in the story, but she took the magazine from Jane and flipped through it, just to make sure that the missing page wasn’t in there somewhere.

  “Nobody’s eyes smolder in real life,” she complained.

  “Yours do when you talk about the union,” Jane pointed out.

  “Really?” Yetta stood up and looked in their sliver of mirror, but it was too dark to see anything but shadows. She sat back down on the bed. “It doesn’t do any good. Any time I bring up the union at work, the other girls say, Yes, and I’ve still got debts from the strike,’ or ‘What use is it?’ And there are so many new girls straight off the boat who don’t even know what a union is.”

  “That was us, not so long ago, and we went out on strike. We fought for the union,” Bella said.

  “We lost,” Yetta said.

  “Next time, you’ll win,” Jane said. “People are still recovering. These things take time.”

  But Yetta was already recovered. Her cough was gone. Her greatest affliction now was the restless longing that so often threatened to overwhelm her. Sometimes, sitting at her sewing machine, the feeling of wanting to hop a train west or stand up on a table or throw a sewing machine out the window came over her so strongly that she was afraid she’d actually do it. Any one of those things, or all three in succession, one after the other.

  Bella gave her friend a hug, as if she could sense Yetta’s distress. Jane turned her attention to a newspaper, one only slightly stained with pickle juice.

  “Maybe I can find a good story in—oh, wait! Take a look at this!” She pointed to a small story at the bottom of a page. Yetta squinted at it in the dim light.

  “S-suff-rage puh-rad-de,” she began, sounding out the words.

  “Very good. There’s going to be a suffrage parade here in New York City, just like the ones they’ve had in London. . . . Oh, we should go! May twenty-first—that’s Saturday!”

  “Saturday,” Bella said. “Work. Remember?”

  “Oh, right,” Jane said, collapsing the newspaper in her lap. “I forgot.”

  Yetta sprang up from the bed and paced in the narrow space between it and
the chairs.

  “No, no—we should be able to do this,” she said. “It’s the slow season, remember? Lots of times they send us home with no work, anyhow. So you just tell Mr. Carlotti and I’ll tell Mr. Kline, we can only work a half day Saturday.”

  “They’ll dock our pay,” Bella said.

  “They’ll probably dock our pay anyway,” Yetta said. “We haven’t gotten full wages in weeks.”

  “They’ll fire us.”

  Yetta stumbled a little in her pacing. She righted herself, planted her feet firmly.

  “Then we’ll get another job,” she said. “Listen, it’s not so much to ask, to go to a parade on a Saturday afternoon just once in our lives, to call out our support for suffrage. In Yiddish, there’s a saying, ‘Beser tsu shtarbn shteyendik vi tsu lehn af dikni.’ It means, uh, ‘Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.’ I don’t know about you, but I can’t live on my knees, always hunkered down, always worried about everything. And that’s why I’m going to that parade, whether anyone else goes or not.”

  She expected Bella and Jane to make some sort of joke to lighten the mood, to give themselves a way out—maybe something like, “You think we could die at this suffrage parade? Then, no thanks!”

  But they both nodded solemnly.

  “I’m going,” Bella said.

  Yetta turned to Jane. She shrugged.

  “I don’t always know when Mrs. Blanck wants me to take the girls, but—I’ll do my best.”

  Saturday afternoon, sneaking out at lunchtime, Yetta and Bella felt like prison escapees. Mr. Kline and Mr. Carlotti had lectured them about taking their jobs seriously, about how many other girls would be happy for the work, about how they were lucky to have jobs at all, this time of year. But they never actually forbade them to go.

  “We could do this anytime we wanted,” Yetta said, as the elevator zoomed down to the ground.

  Bella was counting her pay for the week. It didn’t take her very long.

  “Not if we want to keep eating,” she said grimly.