City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online

seemed to register that I’d spoken.
    Olive said, “Peg, why don’t you have Vivian enroll at the Katharine Gibbs School, where she can learn how to type?”
    Peg, Gladys, and Celia all groaned as one.
    “Olive is always trying to get us girls to enroll at Katharine Gibbs so we can learn how to type,” Gladys explained. She shuddered in dramatic horror, as though learning howto type were something akin to busting up rocks in a prisoner-of-war camp.
    “Katharine Gibbs turns out employable young women,” Olive said. “A young woman ought to be employable.”
    “I can’t type, and I’m employable!” Gladys said. “Heck, I’m already employed ! I’m employed by you !”
    Olive said, “A showgirl is never quite employed, Gladys. A showgirl is a person who may—at times— be in possessionof a job. It’s not the same thing. Yours is not a reliable field of work. A secretary, by contrast, can always find employment.”
    “I’m not just a showgirl,” said Gladys, with miffed pride. “I’m a dance captain . A dance captain can always find employment. Anyhow, if I run out of money, I’ll just get married.”
    “Never learn to type, kiddo,” Peg said to me. “And if you do learn to type, never tellanybody that you can type, or they’ll make you do it forever. Never learn shorthand, either. It’ll be the death of you. Once they put a steno pad in a woman’s hand, it never comes out.”
    Suddenly the gorgeous creature on the other side of the room spoke, for the first time since we’d come upstairs. “You said you can sew?” Celia asked.
    Once again, that low, throaty voice took me by surprise. Also,she had her eyes on me now, which I found a bit intimidating. I don’t want to overuse the word “smoldering” when I talk about Celia, but there’s no way around it: she was the kind of woman who smoldered even when she wasn’t intentionally trying to smolder. Holding that smoldering gaze was uncomfortable for me, so I just nodded, and said in the safer direction of Peg, “Yes. I can sew. GrandmotherMorris taught me how.”
    “What sort of stuff do you make?” Celia asked.
    “Well, I made this dress.”
    Gladys screamed, “ You made that dress? ”
    Both Gladys and Roland rushed at me the way girls always rushedat me when they found out that I’d made my own dress. In a flash, the two of them were picking at my outfit, like two gorgeous little monkeys.
    “You did this ?” Gladys said.
    “Even the trim ?”Roland asked.
    I wanted to say, “This is nothing!”—because truly, compared to what I could do, this little frock, cunning though it appeared, was nothing. But I didn’t want to sound cocky. So instead I said, “I make everything I wear.”
    Celia spoke again, from across the room: “Can you make costumes?”
    “I suppose so. It would depend on the costume, but I’m sure I could.”
    The showgirl stood upand asked, “Could you make something like this?” She let her robe drop to the floor, revealing the costume beneath it.
    (I know that sounds dramatic, to say that she “let her robe drop,” but Celia was the kind of girl who didn’t just take her clothes off like any other mortal woman; she always let them drop .)
    Her figure was astonishing, but as for the costume, it was basic—a little two-piecemetallic number, something like a bathing suit. It was the sort of thing that was designed to look better from fifty feet away than up close. It had tight, high-waisted shorts decorated in splashy sequins, and a bra that was decked out in a gaudy arrangement of beads and feathers. It looked good on her, but that’s only because a hospital gown would have looked good on her. I thought it could havefit her better, to be honest. The shoulder straps were all wrong.
    “I could make that,” I said. “The beading would take me awhile, but that’s just busywork. The rest of it is straightforward.” Then I had a flash of inspiration, like a flare shot up in a night sky: “Say, if you have