The jobs grew stranger, but the work was not hard. A week ago, Orla followed the address on a torn strip of ivory paper to a music hall near the Cosmopolitan. She paused at the ladies’ entrance of the new hotel to admire the dresses, whose slim sleeves piped from puffed shoulders. The women and older girls pressed toward drinks that had been honored with proper names and would be paid for by men who had taken southbound trains from cities Orla would never see.
At her own destination, a girl opened a side door and handed her a cloth to drape as a Grecian dress, together with a crown of leaves fashioned from plaster of Paris. The other girl, tall and dark, showed Orla a photograph of a painting: two girls glowing white under soft light, their eyes downcast, their faces angelic, as though their ankles were not chained to a marble post.
“Like them.” The taller girl demonstrated how they would shape their bodies and angle their heads in imitation. “Only leave your stockings on and hold very still so no trouble comes.”
Orla understood that bare legs meant police, and that to be in motion was indecent while to hold still was not. That’s how the law had recently been set.
After she and the taller girl posed on stage behind a large wooden frame, a blue-hatted man with shaking hands dropped sturdy coins into her palm.
A man from the audience—his face handsome and his shoes too clean to have arrived by foot—handed Orla an iris and asked to meet the next day near the old shot tower. After he was gone, she wished that she had suggested a more respectable place. Perhaps the man was from far away and did not know that thieves now swarmed the tower’s base and tourists no longer ascended for city views. For a moment, she let herself think she might one day see a northern city after all.
When the man found Orla near the tower, standing in a patch of March sun, he held her elbow and then her hand. His grip was shocking, for she had never been touched by a man other than her father, in care, or her brothers, in play.
He guided her down St. Joseph and around the factory where lightbulbs were now made, where her brothers hoped to hire on now that streetcar livery work was all but gone. The foundries and iron works lining Foucher buzzed and clanged. The noise confused her as the man’s thick mouth approached her face. She dropped his hand and ran, thinking that the running made her look foolish but might be necessary all the same.
At home that night, listening to the sleeping sounds of her father and brothers across the room, she understood that what divided her from respectability was the quality of poverty.
Today she follows a torn address to a photography studio in a building that used to sell dry goods. There is another girl, this one petite and red-haired. Behind a lacquered screen, they don white boudoir clothes over white stockings and pose at a table set with small crystal glasses.
Behind his tripod and box, the photographer instructs them to smile as though they are good friends and one of them has said a silly thing. After his light flares twice, he reappears from his small, curtained world to say that one of them should stand on her chair and hold out her leg as though dancing. To Orla’s sizable relief, the small girl jumps up and flips her gown for a kick.
For the third image, they settle supine on the floor next to a wine bottle that was empty before they arrived. The photographer arranges their legs, pushing the gowns to the tops of their knees. He moves Orla’s arm to the side as though she has thrown it there. No longer shocked to be touched, she lies as though inebriated while she is photographed for the amusement of people who own stereoscopes, a device that she has seen but never looked through.
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Elise Blackwell is the author of five novels, including Hunger and The Lower Quarter. Her short stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Witness, the Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her sixth novel, The Forgetting Curve, is forthcoming.