on Thirty-eighth and Broadway, scanning the bustling eatery for Enza.
Enza and Laura were regulars at the Automat, centrally located in midtown, convenient for most of the random jobs they’d been picking up through leads, tips, and advertisements in the paper.
“It’s brutal out there.” Laura sat down next to Enza, peeling off her gloves and coat. “It’s freezing. Nice new year so far. Nineteen seventeen, the year of the tundra.”
“Anything from the agency?” Enza asked. The girls had registered with Renee M. Dandrow Associates before Christmas, looking for work.
“How do you feel about scullery work?”
“When you taught me English, you never once said the word scullery.”
Laura laughed. “I didn’t teach you old English. Scullery is kitchen work. Not rolling dough and making soup, but the rough stuff. Scrubbing pots, mopping, that sort of thing.”
“I can do that,” Enza said.
“Good, because we’re booked to work through the weekend at a private home on Carnegie Hill on the Upper East Side.” Laura spread the newspaper want ads on the table.
“What are they paying?”
“Fifty cents per shift,” Laura replied. “And we’re lucky it came through, since rent is due on Friday. You want to split a slice of pie? That’s always in the budget.”
“Would you like coffee with it?”
“Please,” Laura said without taking her eyes off the newspaper.
The scent of chicory, cinnamon, and cocoa gave the bright, shiny eatery a feeling of home. The coffee was a nickel, the pie was ten cents, and the girls left full. There were no waitresses at the Automat, which was self-serve.
Enza paid for the pie and coffee, scooped up four nickels from the bin, and placed two in the glass slot outside the serving wall. The serving wall was filled with single portions of everything from macaroni and cheese to a single black-and-white-iced cookie. The customer chose his portion, dropped the nickels in, and took the serving out himself. She grabbed two forks, took them with the pie over to their table, and returned to pour the coffee. The white ceramic cups and saucers with their gay green borders always managed to lift her spirits. She balanced the cups on saucers, black for Laura, with cream in her own.
“We’re doing fine, Enza,” Laura said when Enza served her coffee. “We’ve got a room at the Y, and we’re working.”
Enza was worried that she wouldn’t be able to send money home if they didn’t get permanent jobs. “Any sewing jobs?”
“I have a feeling Marcia Guzzi is going to come through at Matera Tailoring.”
“And I put our names in at Samantha Gabriela Brown,” Enza said. “They make children’s clothes.”
“Yeah, but they don’t pay. We can’t do day shifts for fifty cents. And they don’t give piecework until you’ve been there six months.”
“Maybe we could talk to the desk manager at the Y and get the room fee down,” Enza said.
“I know the Y isn’t plush, but it’s better than the basement on Adams Street. Or my four-to-a-room bedroom in Jersey.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Enza said softly.
“We’re wait-listed at the good boardinghouses—something will come through. Let’s look at this as an adventure instead of a chore. All of it. Being poor, looking for work, being scared, and going hungry is all part of the adventure. We’ve never been scullery, and now we have the opportunity. This will be educational. We’ll turn hell into swell.” Laura laughed.
Enza and Laura left the Y in midtown, bundled in scarves, gloves, coats, and wool cloche hats pulled low, and headed up Fifth Avenue on foot.
The mansions on Fifth Avenue looked like a row of top hats, as the kerosene streetlamps lit by the doormen threw shadows on their facades. Enza and Laura walked in and out of the pools of light under the entrance awnings, feeling a blast of warmth from the small portable coal ovens positioned to keep the wealthy warm as they walked through the polished brass entrance doors and into the motorcars waiting to take them out on the town.
Enza and Laura observed the shift change in the mansions, as black maids left through the service entrance and the night staff entered, replacing them. Irish maids made their way east to the el train for their commute home. The wind was bitterly cold, whistling through the city blocks, creating errant gusts that hit Enza and Laura like the crack of a whip as they crossed the streets.
Enza and Laura found 7 East Ninety-first Street easily. Lit from within, the Italian Renaissance mansion dazzled as torches lit the street, throwing