Rita Bailey’s voice, which was shriller than a police siren, had no trouble infiltrating my bedroom despite the fact she was an entire floor below me. I scowled at my ceiling. I didn’t want to hear about Lana Green’s affair, Jenny Orin’s worsening psoriasis, or the Tyler kids’ lice scandal. But the volume of the old lady’s voice left me with no other option. I would have to suffer it either way, and, given the depressing messiness of my bedroom coupled with my desire to eat breakfast at some point, I decided to face her head-on and get the most unpleasant part of my day over with.
I rolled out of bed, crawling between crumpled jeans and inside-out T-shirts to fish out a partially obscured bra. Springing to my feet and swiveling around without touching anything — because sometimes I liked to make a game of it — I swooped a pair of denim shorts off the ground and pulled them on before settling on a white tank top and my favorite pair of Converse. After putting on some moisturizer and pulling my hair into a messy braid, I crept downstairs, steeling myself for what I was about to hurtle into, coffee-less and overtired.
Rita Bailey, an old, portly woman with cropped white hair and pinched, shrunken features, hunched over the kitchen table, sipping her coffee in an outrageous pink pantsuit. Beside her, my mother was politely enduring her company, offering a tight smile and a robotic head nod at appropriate times. She had even cleared part of the table, which was usually buried beneath stray sewing projects and piles of fabric samples. Now confined to just one square foot of space, they balanced precariously against the wall, threatening to topple over them.
When we lived in a spacious four-bedroom house on Shrewsbury Avenue, my mother had two whole rooms dedicated to containing the explosions of materials needed for her dressmaking, but here, her works-in-progress always seemed to spill from room to room, following us around our cramped home in every shade and pattern imaginable. Yards of Chantilly and ivory lace stretched along armchairs, jostling for space beneath mannequins in short summer dresses and rich evening gowns. On several scarring occasions since we’d moved here a year and a half ago, I had woken up screaming at the sight of a half-finished dummy bride perched in the corner of my room, or a denim dress that should never see the light of day.
It wasn’t that my mother didn’t have some sort of system in place, it’s just that no one but her could ever figure it out. She was probably the most organized disorganized dressmaker in all of Chicago, and I think she liked it that way. Mrs. Bailey, who was staring narrowed-eyed at the teetering pile of fabrics across the table, evidently did not.
I swept into the kitchen, pulling her attention away before her frown became so intense it broke her face. “Good morning, Mrs. Bailey.” That wasn’t so bad.
She refixed her stare on me. “Good morning, Persephone.”
I winced. It had been a while since I had heard my name in its hideous entirety and, unsurprisingly, nothing had changed — it still sucked. But the way the old lady said it always seemed to make it worse, drawling over the vowel sounds like she was talking to a five-year-old child — Purr-seph-an-eeeee.
“I prefer Sophie,” I replied with a level of exasperation that usually accompanied the topic.
“But Persephone is so much nicer.”
“Well no one calls me that.” It wasn’t my name and she knew it. It was just a symbol of my mother’s fleeting obsession with Greek mythology, which had, rather unfortunately, coincided with the time I was born. Thankfully, my father had given up on the mouthful within the first year of my birth. It didn’t take him long to think of “Sophie” as a passable alternative — the name I suspect he wanted all along and one that rendered me eternally grateful to him for two reasons: 1. that I didn’t have to go through life with a barely spellable relic for a name, and 2. that he didn’t nickname me “Persy” instead. When my mother conceded defeat, I became “Sophie” for good. Plain, simple, and pronounceable.
“How do you even know to call me that anyway?” I added as an afterthought. For all the times Mrs. Bailey had intentionally wrongly addressed me, I had never thought to ask her how she had discovered one of my best-kept secrets. Then again, she was the first person to discover the location of our new house when we moved, despite the fact we had actively tried to hide it from her, and it was nearly an hour’s walk from Shrewsbury Avenue. Maybe she was clairvoyant after all.
“I saw it on a letter once.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember.” She sounded affronted by the question. “It may have fallen out of your mailbox.”