At first she and Bess talked mostly about the work. Hanna explained everything: how the dress they were making was a sample, and how it needed to be well sewn and beautiful so that people would see it and order dresses for themselves. If there were enough orders, Hanna would be able to keep Bess on for the summer.

“You’ll need a dressing room,” Bess said.

“I thought Papa could put up a curtain rod across that corner”—Hanna pointed—“and I’ll hang some pretty fabric, and that could make a dressing room.”

“What else? Oh, a mirror!” Bess exclaimed.

Hanna kept her face still, but inwardly she winced. Bess did not know, of course, about Papa’s refusal to even discuss the purchase of a mirror, and Hanna had not thought of a way to change his mind.

On the wall of the upstairs landing was a round mirror the size of a saucer. Papa used it for shaving, Hanna to do her hair. Sometimes she took it down from the wall and held it at a different angle, but she could see only a small part of herself at a time. At night, with darkness beyond the windows, her image was reflected in the glass as far down as her knees, but without clarity or true color. There was no way to see what she looked like head to toe.

She didn’t want to think about mirrors any longer, so she changed the subject. “Do you know what I really want? It won’t be anytime soon, but someday I’d like to have a sewing machine.”

Bess’s face lit up with amazement. “A sewing machine? I’ve seen pictures in the newspaper! Do you know how to run one?”

Hanna nodded. “I do,” she said. “But we haven’t had a machine since we left Los Angeles. Three years now.”

Mama had tried to work after she got sick, but it was impossible for her to do the fine tasks of sewing with her body jolted by coughs every few minutes. Papa hired a young white woman named Mary to help out. Mary became the shop’s seamstress and worked there for more than six years, until she left to get married. When Hanna was ten years old, Mary taught her to use the sewing machine. Hanna had wanted to learn sooner, but her legs hadn’t been long enough to reach the treadle.

“It seems like it would be so exciting, to sew on a machine,” Bess said.

Hanna laughed. “I don’t know about exciting,” she said, “but it’s certainly a lot faster than hand sewing. And some things like pleating or tucking are much easier on the machine. But you still have to do all the finishing work by hand. Including buttonholes.” She spat out the last word as if it tasted bad.