Read Online The Book Borrower by Alice Mattison - Free Book Online

was planned for the following week. The trolley company refused to negotiate and I don’t think the workers wanted to negotiate, either. By now it was late December. Jessie appeared at our apartment one evening. She said she’d come to collect any warm clothes she might have left behind when she moved out. Probably she also came to make my parents and me feel bad. She’d just been left, once again, by William Platz, and she needed to share her misery. My parents were predictably panic-stricken over her sheared head, which Jessie had probably forgotten entirely by then. No doubt she came to scare them with plans to shoot the presi-dent of the trolley company, and instead she had to defend her haircut. Sarah cried, and demanded to know just how it had been done and where. At an Italian barber’s, it turned out.
    â€œWeren’t they rude?”
    â€œNo, they were perfectly nice.” Glancing at Jessie’s face, I knew they had been rude.
    Sarah ran her hands over her twisted braids as if to make sure she still had them. We’d been interrupted cleaning up after dinner. Jessie insisted she had already eaten, but when Sarah fixed a plate for her she didn’t refuse it. After we washed the dishes, Sarah and I followed Jessie into the bed-room. I made Jessie take a jacket of mine I insisted was too short for me. Sarah watched from the bed.
    â€œGoosie,” she said abruptly, watching Jessie try on the jacket and smooth her hands over her hips, “you don’t believe in free love, do you?”
    â€œWhat makes you ask that?” Of course Sarah thought Jessie was a virgin.
    â€œDon’t women who cut their hair believe in free love?”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with free love?” said Jessie wickedly.
    â€œDon’t you want to be married and have babies?” said Sarah. “Miriam’s friend Edith says free love will destroy the American family.”
    â€œOh, Sarah, don’t listen to idiots,” Jessie said. She swept her hand across my dresser, as if sweeping idiots off it, and all my little bottles of scent and toilet water fell down. One broke. Jessie bent to pick up the whole bottles, putting her hand among the broken pieces of glass, while I ran for a rag.
    â€œYou’ll cut yourself.”
    â€œMy hide is tough,” said Jessie, “but I’m going to stink of this stuff.”
    She shook her big hands. Sarah reached to smell first one hand and then the other, laughing, and in her gesture I caught a glimpse of womanhood. She seemed indulgent, but she wouldn’t stop arguing. “Goosie, if you could meet these new friends, you’d see that you don’t have to be so angry. You don’t have to change everything American. We’re Europeans. We don’t know how they do things here.”
    â€œYou were born here, Sarah,” Jessie said. “You can figure these things out as well as I can.”
    â€œI think Edith’s father knows better than you, Jessie.”
    â€œEdith’s father! Isn’t he the owner of Livingston Brass? Where workers lose their jobs if they relieve themselves more than once a day?”
    â€œJessie!”
    â€œLook, Sarah, the trolley men are losing a quarter of their wages. What would happen to you if Papa’s wages were cut that much?”
    â€œI’d leave school and get a job,” said Sarah stalwartly.
    â€œThat’s no answer.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know what I’d do,” Sarah said. She’d un-pinned her braids and was twisting them around her fingers. “But you don’t know either, Goosie. Mr. Livingston is a kind man, in a kind family. They invited us to come back for Edith’s little brother’s birthday.”
    â€œLet them start thinking about some other little brothers, over near the river.”
    â€œGoosie, Goosie.”
    â€œOh, stop calling me that!” Jessie walked out of the bed-room, clutching the jacket, and