Elizabeth Bear - Karen Memory

The johns like to think they’re getting treated fancy by the fancy women. I just like to eat. And if a little extra bit of molasses sort of smudged over onto the salmon, there wasn’t much finer eating from here to China, in my mind.

Connie left me alone to chew in peace and went back to chopping onions for supper. She kept her nails short and clean white. Her hands were medium sized, too, and clever-quick as anything. Tendons played across the backs like the strings inside a grand piano. Like the spine of her knife as it rose and fell.

She’s got a gadget that’s supposed to do a lot of those things for you, but she don’t hardly need it. You’ve never seen an onion diced so fine.

I was just clutching my coffee mug and watching her, blinking like a satiated cat, when Miss Lizzie stomped in wearing her street boots and a scowl. Her face was all pinched up around her spectacles like she meant to hold them in place by frowning, and her shoulders rode up to her ears. I could hear the piano wire tendons in her clockwork hand clicking as she made a fist with it — and Miss Lizzie ain’t the sort to show her emotions that way. She’s enough of a lady to make Miss Bethel proud.

I was on my feet in a second, the warmth and comfort of that coffee mug forgotten. My mouth opened, but Miss Lizzie stopped the words coming out with a look. Not a mean look. Just a Miss Lizzie look. One that didn’t brook no messing about. “They’re fine, Karen,” she said, like she could read my thoughts.

I wouldn’t put it past her.

I sat back down, slowly. Connie slid my empty plate away. “Pie, Karen honey?”

I shook my head as she handed Miss Lizzie a mug of coffee all her own. I took mine with cream and sugar; Miss Lizzie drank hers black as a cowpuncher and I bet she would of boiled it over eggshells if it wouldn’t of made Connie blanch.

I did sort of want pie, but I didn’t need it, if you know what I mean, and I wanted to hear whatever Miss Lizzie was working herself up to venting. Seamstresses get to have a good sense of when people want to talk, and if something’s eating them, and even just what sort of people they are. And that hunch in Miss Lizzie’s shoulders said that whatever was eating her was about the size and temperament of a grizzly bear.

She hooked a chair out with one boot — abrupt, but she always is — and thumped into it. She blew across the coffee, pushing lazy coils of steam into a streamer, and slurped the hot edge of the mug. “Picketers,” she said.

“I heard them,” I answered. I picked my coffee up, too, because talking goes easier if the other person sees you doing what they’re doing. “The Women’s Christian Anti-Prostitution and Soiled Dove Rescue League?”

“God no,” she said. “It’s the Democrats. On the street right over our heads, more’s the pity. Just where anybody who wanted to pay us a friendly afternoon visit would have to walk through, and be spotted and recognized.”

“We’re closed anyway,” Connie said, putting a sandwich on a plate in front of her. Ham, pickles, and sea beans, it looked like. On one of Connie’s hard rolls.

I filched a sea bean. It crunched between my teeth, briny and grassy and good.

Miss Lizzie fixed me with a look, but she didn’t mean nothing by it. She took a bite of her sandwich, chewed, drank coffee, and said, “We won’t be closed all night. The glazier just got here. And guess what mayoral candidate those Democrats are supporting?”

Connie shook her head. “Not Dyer Stone, I take it?”

I hid a smile behind my hand, because we wasn’t supposed to know about Mayor Stone’s occasional visits. Anyway, he was a Republican — the party of Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes.

“Peter Bantle,” Miss Lizzie spat, and crunched into her sandwich vindictively.

Since we was closed and since it weren’t raining, after I just about licked my plate Connie took advantage of my gratitude to send me to the market. I wanted to check on Priya — and Merry Lee, sure, but really mostly Priya, and I wasn’t sure if I liked myself more or less for being honest enough to admit it — but Miss Lizzie got that line between her eyebrows and told me that neither girl was to be disturbed before midnight at the earliest. When I, of course, would probably be hard at work stargazing. Or ceiling gazing, since you can’t see much in the way of stars through plaster, or Rapid City’s constant fog and clouds.

So Connie claimed I needed a distraction and put a pile of net bags in my hand and sent me off to the market with Miss Francina to shop for supper. Even though it was sunny — albeit already getting on toward evening, this late in the year — I hooked an umbrella on to my arm. I was wise to the ways of Rapid City. We had accounts with some of the merchants, but Miss Bethel — who kept the books — signed me out a fistful of paper dollars. I’d heard some in the old Confederacy wouldn’t touch the hundred-dollar notes with their portraits of Abraham Lincoln, but given gold rush prices all up and down the waterfront I was happy to fold up a couple and shove them in my button pocket. She also handed me a pile of pennies and trimes and cartwheels, for making change with.

Miss Francina and I walked along beside the cart, to stretch our legs and because it was more pleasant than jouncing. The road was fair enough dry — I skipped over a few stinking puddles — and all around on the horizon the mountains were out in every direction, looming up out of blue distance like genies standing in their smoke.

The Bayview Market is two lies in just one name — Rapid City has a Sound, not a Bay, though what the dictionary difference is I couldn’t be the one to tell you, and you can’t see the water from it anyhow on account of the shipworks dry docks — but it is just about hard enough by to smell the sea, and it’s about my favorite place on earth, barring my own private bedroom. It’s a long redwood building the size of those dry docks, up on stilts and with the doors guarded by wooden stairways on account of maybe flooding, what with where it sits. Redwood stands up to a soaking, anyway, and it was built long before the street-raising plan went into effect. Now it’s just eight feet up from the road instead of thirty, even if the road isn’t quite finished yet.

You used to be able to row to it when it flooded. Now there’s talk of putting in stone steps, the better for folk to fall down ’em and split their heads when the granite slicks up in winter. Still, it’s full one end to the other with market stalls. There’s hothouse flowers in January, and oranges from China and alligator pears from Mexico, and the freshest seafood you ever tasted in your life. Scallops as big as your hand, that you cut and eat like a filet steak. Oysters by the gross and by the dozen, plain briny honest fare for whores and tradesmen alike. Agate-red salmon and agate-green lobsters that turn a whole different, brighter red when you boil them. Saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, peppercorns. Sea salt in great soft, sticky flakes. Cheese from as far away as Vermont and France. Blackberry wine and good brown local ale. Fresh-baked bread, coffee beans like green pearls, tea that’s come from as far away as Priya did. Anything you have ever eaten or wanted to eat, basically, and a slew of other things besides — baskets, cloth, Singer sewing machines right out of the Sears catalog. Even made-up clothes for the prospectors heading north who didn’t bring nobody to sew a thing for them. Really sew, I mean, though I suppose most wives know a bit about the other kind of sewing, too.

I could spend a week walking the sawdust-strewn planks of that place, nibbling samples of sardines and candied salmon. So it’s a good thing Connie sent me with a list, because otherwise I might wind up bewildered and wandering the aisles until I wasted away to a haint. (There is more than a few stories that the Bayview is haunted. Mostly I think they’re jokes. Mostly.)