“I know. I know,” said Betty, bitter that she’d imagined she’d be able to do what she wanted in the city, not what she had to. That it would be a place for a black sequined purse. Jacob had been to the city before her, he had been all the way to Europe, had seen London and Paris, the Ardennes. He had described standing on the deck of a troop transport watching the lights being turned on all over London, the whole city lighting up in sequence after the war was over, when it was safe for light. He had talked of the bridges in Paris, bridges made of stone instead of iron or wood. Streets paved with stone. She shook herself out of her reverie.

“Shouldn’t we rinse it out?”

“Not yet.”

“It burns. I can feel it burning.”

“You the one wanted curl. Wanted to look like me. I didn’t tell you to do it.”

“Yeah yeah.”

She had wanted it. A new look, a tight curl for job hunting. Something modern, something new. Now she just wanted to rip the curlers free and rinse the ammonia from her scalp.

“My girlfriend works in the kitchen,” Ester continued. “She just does the cookin. Ain’t gotta stare at no bedpans or wipe any asses at six in the mornin. Could try that.”

“That don’t sound so bad. Cookin ain’t so bad,” said Betty, gritting her teeth.

With an exploding head of hair, sweaty palms, and a hot face she walked the scant blocks to the hospital. She was ashamed at the thought of asking for work, for her it was only a step above outright begging. But she got hired, had been relieved when the questions of the food service manager were over and he let her concentrate on opening the cans of beets and draining the bloodred juice away.

She worked with a determined fury and when her tasks were completed she set out to scrape the grease from the range hood and dissolve the crusted dough from the wire beater of the Hobart mixer, until her co-workers made her slow down. “Christ, girl, you gonna make all us look bad you keep workin so hard.” She eased off and when her first check was waiting miraculously on the floor inside the door of her no-numbered house she stared at it, and turned it this way and that like a suspicious shopkeeper testing a twenty for counterfeit.

The transformation was sudden. She put away her work clothes and got dressed in her best hand-me-downs. She looked at the cheap wall clock and saw she had two hours before the girls would be home.