Dear Kate:
I haven't wrote you for a long time, cause I know you will be sore at what I am going to tell you, and I was afraid you would tell some of the old crowd where I was, and they would queer me in some way. I have been doing housework, Kate. Yes, I can see you throw a fit as you read it, but it will tell you one reason why I have not been able to send you any money the last two months. I had been dancing steady for a long time and I got dead tired of the crowd. The bum faces and the cheap girls and the dirty restaurants and the fresh waiters got on my nerves and it even spoiled my work. Mrs. Smith has been after me for a long time to leave it. She just talks to me and talks to me every time I go over there. I got half sick and went over to Lake Rest for a couple of weeks, and I used to lie at nights up in my room a hearing the sounds and a feeling the quiet, and in some way it made me hate the sidewalks and the hot dusty streets and the dance halls and the nights when I was up till morning and the days when I was a feeling like a boiled owl. I talked it all over with Mrs. Smith and she didn't want me to do clerking, cause I would still have to live in a room, and it is the people in the rooming houses she is dead sore at. She wants me to do something that will take me away from the crowd. Then she asked me if I would be willing to do house work. I told her I would be willing to try scrubbing, that sometimes it seemed that any old thing was better than what I have been doing for the last seven years. But I told her I didn't know nothing about housework, as I don't remember ever having been in a real house except hers. I lived in furnished rooms all my life but I was willing to learn and it seems to me if you are only willing to try, you can learn anything. I stayed with her two weeks, and she showed me how to cook potatoes, to fix meat, and I think the first day I made an apple pie all by myself, I nearly bust with pride. Why, Kate, there is a joy in just making something. To take some apples and some flour and butter and lard and to fix it all yourself, then take it out of the oven crisp and hot and have some one say, "Ain't that fine"! Why, you feel you have really done something. It must be like when an artist paints a great picture. I had made something, something that is a part of me. The last week I was there, she let me get all the meals, and if I ever marry a man, I would want to do all the cooking myself. I don't think there could be any bigger happiness for a woman who really loved her man, than to see him eat the food that she had fixed with her own hands, and if I could hear a man of mine say, "Pass me them biscuits, Nan," or "You sure can make good gravey," well—I would have all that is coming to me. I learned to set a table and how to put the right knives and the right forks in the right places, and I always put a bowl of flowers in the middle. Sometimes they was yellow nasturcheons, and I would mix them in with leaves and put them in a big yellow bowl and they would make the food taste better just to look at them. Often the babies and me would go out in the fields and get great arms full of daisies and I would put them in with some pretty ferns we had around the house, or else I would gather red poppies, and wheat and it would make it look as if all out-doors was a growing on the table.
Mrs. Smith showed me how to make a bed just right, and to dust and sweep, to iron the clothes and to do all the things that women must know if they keep a house clean. But finally she said she thought I would do, and one day she went over town to a friend of hers that lives up in the Bronx. What she told her I don't know, but anyway I got a job and I went over to my room and packed my things, and I have been here two months. It was hard at first, as I didn't know how to manage, and couldn't make my head save my legs. But I got along somehow, although at night I used to be so dead tired that two or three times I cried myself to sleep. The woman ain't as nice as Mrs. Smith, she is kind of suspicious of me, and watches me a lot, and she feels I ought to know more than I do and tells me to do things without telling me how. But I am going to stick it out. The main trouble is that it is devilish lonesome. At night after I get the dishes done, there ain't no place to go except a little room which looks out on a courtyard, and there is nothing to do and nobody to talk to, and I set by myself trying to think things all over. Sometimes I think I am a fool to work like a dog a whole week and only get six dollars for it, and then again I remember all Mrs. Smith said to me, and the nice letters she writes me telling me to be brave and that I am doing the square thing. My afternoons off I don't take, because I don't want to see the old crowd, and I don't know no one else. Every two weeks I have been over to see Billy, but it costs quite a lot, and after I pay $3.50 a week for his board, I ain't what you call a J.D. Rockefeller. I used always to take the kid some little thing, but now it has to be so darned little you can't see it. The woman next door has got a baby, and she knits things for it, and I asked the woman I worked for if she would ask the woman to learn me how to knit. She was awful nice about it, and I bought a lot of white yarn, and nights up in my room I made Billy and Paul each a jacket, and now I am making them some mittens, so when it gets cold they can wear them when they play outside. Next week after I get my pay, I am going to get some of that grey pusey yarn and make them each a cap.
One night I got so blue I almost died, and I went downtown to see Irene who is back from St. Louis. I had an awful good time, a lot of fellows and girls come into Irene's room, and I sent one of the boys out for some oysters and showed them some fine stunts I could do with the chafing dish. They was crazy to know where I was and what I was doing but I wouldn't tell them, as I knowed they wouldn't understand. I suppose there is something wrong in me somewhere, but it seemed awful nice to see all the crowd again, and hear them talk and laugh and even the old cigarette smoke smelled good. There didn't one of them seem to have any trouble nor have to work hard, and I thought of how they could sleep in the morning, and how I would have to get up when my old alarm clock went off at half past six. For a minute I thought I wouldn't go back, then I thought of Mrs. Smith and how bad she would feel if I didn't stick, so I said, "Oh, me for my little room," and I left the crowd at half past ten, sort of the middle of the day for most of them. But I ain't been unhappy, though I didn't know there was so little money in the world. Why, it seems funny not to be able to buy anything at all. When you look in the shop windows and see all the fluffy petticoats and the pretty collars and the silk stockings and the fancy shoes, and you know you can't buy one of them, it makes you feel sore all over. Why, I think every body ought to take their hat off to a pretty girl who is pegging along on six or eight a week, and who wants pretty things just the same as all women do and who knows all she has got to do is to give a little nod to get them, I say, them is the people that ought to have a statue up on that hall of fame on the Hudson.
I had to buy two maid's dresses when I come here, plain black with little white collars and cuffs, and in the afternoon the woman makes me wear a dinkey little cap on my head which makes my hair look curlier than ever though I brush it down as best I can. Callers kind of looked surprised when they see me first, I guess cause I am kind of thin now and my eyes sort of fill my face.
Billy is looking fine. He is most as big as Paul and he has learned a lot of things. Mr. Smith takes the kids with him in the woods and Billy knows the names of trees and plants and can tell the Robin's call from the Blue Bird's whistle. Mrs. Smith reads little stories to the children and they know their ABC's already, and by the time Billy is ten, he will have lots more book-learning than I have now.
Now don't write me a rotten letter, Kate, and don't put any of the gang on to try to queer me nor to try and come and talk to me, cause house work ain't no joke for a person who ain't never done nothing, and sometimes I feel all in and something told me at the wrong time, might make me throw the whole thing up. And I don't want to. I want to make good if it is only at housework, and if I can, I am going to stick to it till there's skating down below.
Nan.
