Pasadena, 1901

No one could tell me a thing. Eighteen years old, I had goals as clear in my mind as fence posts—although fence posts were exactly what I wanted never to think about again. Yearning could undo a person, so I shut my mind tight against memories that shimmered like heat mirages—tricks of light and wind. I did not let myself think of old times, old voices, a life left blinking in surprise when I stepped onto a train and escaped. Pa used to say that since we weren't rich in cash or land, we were rich in common sense. I used it, and got out of Kansas.

And truly, leaving behind the wind and the blank heat and the depthless prairie was easy. Slipping away from Jack, my husband—God knows, easier still. The difficulty came after I arrived in Los Angeles, only stopping there because I couldn't go any farther.

Like the other girls who poured into the downtown Arcade Station from Missouri and Texas and Ohio, I found work as a shop girl, bringing home six dollars a week. Four of those dollars allowed me a room in a gas-lit firetrap, sticky with heat and loud as a switching yard, where many of the lodgers were single women whose doors opened directly to the street. They passed me in the corridor without speaking, the greasy cotton of their wrappers swishing unpleasantly. Sometimes they grinned when I drew back.

If I lived on oranges and tap water, I could save six dollars a month. Six dollars wasn't enough to buy me a fine pair of shoes, much less a decent address. I looked in bleak hatred at Levant's, the dim department store where I stood every day, selling gloves and collars. The customers who populated my imagination with such bright elegance did not come to a dark downtown street where the garbage and horse droppings were banked at the curb. The ladies did not care to bring their custom to a store without display counters or electric lights. The ladies shopped where they lived: in Pasadena.

I knew nothing about Pasadena, but the other shoppies talked about it, especially on the weekends, when we drank beer and were apt to say things. Streets in Pasadena were boulevards, expanses forty feet across. On either side, mansions spread out behind trellises and fountains with statues. "It's filled with money," my friend Josephine said, as if the point required plain statement. "That's where money goes to live."

We were sitting at a dance hall, half-shouting over the noise and our beers. The room, a big wooden shell with only a rough platform for the ragtime orchestra but an enormous dance floor filled with jiggling dancers, was ripe with the smell of damp, eager bodies. Josephine's sister Mabel was sitting on the lap of a fellow whose name we were never told, and a girl named Mathilda kept getting up and sitting down, getting up and sitting down. She banged into the small table and beer was slopping everywhere, but no one complained. When a fellow with a wide moustache came over and asked me where I lived, I said, "Pasadena."

"No, you don't." He grinned.

"I do, though. Go there and look for me."

"I'm looking at you now. And I don't want to stop looking."

Then the other girls hooted, all right. "There's your Two-Dollar Bill," Mabel said. What right had she, sprawled on her fellow's lap? Anybody could see how she was hoping that night would end. She was bound to be disappointed; already the fellow was looking for a way to dislodge her. To my boy with the moustache I said, "Prove to me you're a gentleman."

"Can't do 'er. Sorry."

"Then prove to me I shouldn't call the cops on you."

"Here?" He gestured at the unpainted wood walls, the shirt-sleeve orchestra at the far end, the dance floor jammed with tipsy, roaring couples. Like everything else in my life now, the racket—you couldn't...