Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell Read Free Book Online Page B

myself a task I’d put off until then as unimportant: the bundling up of hundreds of magazines for the paper-and-rags man who collected them for paper mills.
    Long after she sold the sewing machine business, Mumma had continued her subscriptions to
McCall’s
and
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
and, of course, she had saved every issue, “just in case.” For a whole day, I stacked them and tied them up with string, but I often paused to gaze at the Palmolive advertisements on the back covers. There, the soap’s green tint was lent a foreign glamor by a slender olive-skinned girl who sat beneath palm trees and beckoned the customer toward starlit pyramids.
    Another Ohio winter lowered the skies; for days at a time, noon was as dark as dusk. During the holidays, I passed many a long empty evening reading Douglas’s mission diaries about Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, or paging through Lillie’s scrapbooks of their travels. The idea of sun and desert heat began to make a compelling case as Rosie and I took our short, cold walks. Rosie loved the snow and would tunnel through it after chipmunks, digging with relentless determination until the ice balls between her toes made movement impossible and she had to be carried inside. I tried to emulate her energetic pleasure in the season but felt increasingly adrift as silent nights became dismal days.
    You may be wondering why I didn’t go back to my job in the Cleveland school district. Well, at the end of the war, women had achieved the suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t carry with it the right to make a living. There were so many demobilized soldiers needing work that we ladies were often summarily dismissed from employment. With plenty of money and no family of my own to support, I could not bring myself to protest when I was replaced by a returning veteran. Even so, I missed my students and my colleagues.
    Rosie was not my sole companion in those days, although she was the only one of flesh and blood. In the years after the Great War and the Great Influenza, many of us were visited by apparitions, and I saw—or, rather, heard—my share of spirits. There was no one alive to find fault with my dress or hairstyle or habits, but Mumma seemed to look over my shoulder whenever I stood before a mirror to brush my hair or put on a battered hat. Of course, in those days, I didn’t believe in superstitious nonsense like ghosts and ghouls or hauntings, but I could hear Mumma’s voice so clearly!
What will people think? Land sake, Agnes! I never let a daughter of mine leave the house looking as slovenly as you do now.
    In all times and in all places, a teacher’s salary has required fiscal discipline. When I was working, my tastes had inclined toward books, not clothing. I could have afforded more now, but for me the acquisition of a new dress had always been less an amusing indulgence than a depressing chore. When I began teaching, women’s clothing was made to measure, tightly fitted around unbending corsets that wordlessly proclaimed:
This is decidedly not a loose woman.
The styles of that era celebrated an ampleness I did not possess, though Mumma did her best for me. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh, gathering ankle-length skirts into high fabric waistbands to hint at shapely hips I did not have. “What am I going to do with you?” she’d mutter as she created abundantly pleated bodices to enhance what nature had begrudged. It was unrewarding work for her, and I hated every moment.
    Then the war came on, and suddenly it was patriotic to conserve fabric more nobly used to clothe our boys in uniform. Skirts crept toward the knees. Pleats disappeared. Hats became smaller, with none of the elaborate wire structure that earlier millinery had required and armament factories now requisitioned. Mumma was scandalized by the new styles and would have none of them. I simply waited the war out, wearing what I had, but Lillie enjoyed the changes. She had a real knack for fashion. A