I Went Down (NaNoWriMo Read-Along)

11 Emmy Jane

Every day in Delta Mouth was a whirl of activity, of people and clothing and dancing and singing. It was more singing than Emmy Jane had ever done in her life, and her family had gathered around the parlor most evenings to sing together. It had always been a fine amusement for them, and now it was an amusement for every man in Delta Mouth, or so it seemed. Minnie’s was not open on most evenings; it was open every evening. Men came and sat down at the tables to eat Helen’s bread along with whatever else the big woman had cooked that evening. And while they ate, they drank, and watched the girls dance.

Jimmy Primrose had not returned, but there were other men who wanted to see one or the other of the chorus girls up close.

“Don’t worry,” Luessa had said when one of the waiters had come to tell her that someone was asking for her. “If anything happens, you just scream and Harlan throws them out if the louse isn’t too ashamed to sit it out in front of everyone else who knows he tried to grab you.”

And if she was going to be famous, it made sense that the men would want to see her. After all, she had wanted to see Lily Lilt, to be close to her, to know what it was like to be a woman whose presence made a man like Jimmy Primrose smile when he was battling for his life and his city. Helen had taken her aside to tell her that Jimmy Primrose was precisely the sort of dangerous man she had warned Emmy Jane about when she first arrived, but was he any more dangerous than the rest of the city? And with his connection to Lily Lilt, he must be connected to other musicians, and even to the people who made their records and made them famous from Ibai to Pelago, and perhaps even as far as Aviva.

Emmy Jane lifted the little perfume bottle and held it up in front of the mirror. She had looked at it a hundred times before, to marvel that someone had thought to make a simple container into such a fanciful shape. She had another bottle of perfume now, that another man had given her, and a vase of flowers which she was still keeping in her room, though they had begun to wilt a little.

She heard the band beginning to warm up and set down the bottle. Enough lollygagging. Where was Luessa? She dabbed a tiny amount of the perfume on her wrists and neck and went to find her friend.

Luessa was in the room she shared with Pearline, staring into the mirror as she carefully arranged her own hair.

“Lu,” Emmy Jane said, “will you go over the song with me one more time?”

“I’ve written a new one for you,” Luessa said. She hummed a few bars, getting the tune she wanted to use sorted out in her head. Then she sang,

“Emmy Jane

Never takes anything plain

She drinks only champagne

But the men never complain

Of the financial strain

Of entertaining Emmy Jane.”

“Is that going to be in the show?” Emmy Jane sat down on Luessa’s bed.

“Would you like it to be?” Luessa twisted a hank of hair and pinned it up in a loop against the side of her head. “I think Cal is going to have the band learn one of my songs when we change up the show next time.”

Luessa was always making little songs and rhymes, but when she sat down and put her mind to writing something longer, it came out as nice as any of the songs that the band’s front man wrote for his musicians to play. “Which one?” Emmy Jane asked.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll write a new one.”

“You should write one about the fog. It’s always so foggy here.”