Buttered Side Down | Page 4

in the newspapers knows that. There was something heroic in
the sight of Gertie brushing her hair one hundred strokes before going
to bed at night. Only a woman could understand her doing it.

Gertie clerked downtown on State Street, in a gents' glove department.
A gents' glove department requires careful dressing on the part of its
clerks, and the manager, in selecting them, is particular about choosing
"lookers," with especial attention to figure, hair, and finger nails. Gertie
was a looker. Providence had taken care of that. But you cannot leave
your hair and finger nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a
bristle brush and an orangewood stick.
Now clerking, as Gertie would tell you, is fierce on the feet. And when
your feet are tired you are tired all over. Gertie's feet were tired every
night. About eight-thirty she longed to peel off her clothes, drop them
in a heap on the floor, and tumble, unbrushed, unwashed, unmanicured,
into bed. She never did it.
Things had been particularly trying to-night. After washing out three
handkerchiefs and pasting them with practised hand over the mirror,
Gertie had taken off her shoes and discovered a hole the size of a silver
quarter in the heel of her left stocking. Gertie had a country-bred horror
of holey stockings. She darned the hole, yawning, her aching feet
pressed against the smooth, cool leg of the iron bed. That done, she had
had the colossal courage to wash her face, slap cold cream on it, and
push back the cuticle around her nails.
Seated huddled on the side of her thin little iron bed, Gertie was
brushing her hair bravely, counting the strokes somewhere in her
sub-conscious mind and thinking busily all the while of something else.
Her brush rose, fell, swept downward, rose, fell, rhythmically.
"Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety -- Oh, darn it! What's
the use!" cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the room with a
crack.
She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the brush blurred in
with the faded red roses on the carpet. When she found it doing that she
got up, wadded her hair viciously into a hard bun in the back instead of
braiding it carefully as usual, crossed the room (it wasn't much of a
trip), picked up the brush, and stood looking down at it, her under lip
caught between her teeth. That is the humiliating part of losing your

temper and throwing things. You have to come down to picking them
up, anyway.
Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the bureau,
fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin, turned out the
gas and crawled into bed.
Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake. She lay
there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into the darkness.
At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one unused to
boarding-house rules. Gertie liked him for that. At the head of the stairs
he stopped whistling and came softly into his own third floor back just
next to Gertie's. Gertie liked him for that, too.
The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the Nottingham
curtain district, long before the advent of Mis' Buck. That thrifty lady,
on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy partition to be run up,
slicing the room in twain and doubling its rental.
Lying there Gertie could hear the Kid Next Door moving about getting
ready for bed and humming "Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of
Its Own" very lightly, under his breath. He polished his shoes briskly,
and Gertie smiled there in the darkness of her own room in sympathy.
Poor kid, he had his beauty struggles, too.
Gertie had never seen the Kid Next Door, although he had come four
months ago. But she knew he wasn't a grouch, because he alternately
whistled and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the morning. She had
also discovered that his bed must run along the same wall against
which her bed was pushed. Gertie told herself that there was something
almost immodest about being able to hear him breathing as he slept. He
had tumbled into bed with a little grunt of weariness.
Gertie lay there another hour, staring into the darkness. Then she began
to cry softly, lying on her face with her head between her arms. The
cold cream and the salt tears mingled and formed a slippery paste.
Gertie wept on because she couldn't help it. The longer she wept the

more difficult her sobs became, until finally they bordered on the
hysterical. They filled her lungs until they ached and reached her throat
with a force that jerked her head back.
"Rap-rap-rap!" sounded sharply from