This one may be as finished as it’ll get. By the time of the main story, Ezra is a tailor with his own shop. I wanted to explore how that came to pass. Turns out his older sister Thea is a real mastermind.
I fell a little in love with pushy plotty Thea here…
There’s been a lot of Ezra dealing with his gender in these so far. It’s far from the only thing he’s got going on but it was the first thing I had questions about–how he understands it, how it affected his perspective and relationships growing up.
Tags & warnings: Trans character using birth name and pronouns
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“You’re growing up,” Ma and Da kept saying in various tones from misty approval to terror.
Myrtle would rather not, thanks.
She had breasts, these days. She didn’t mind them exactly. But she hated how people looked at them. The way seeing them seemed to make them expect things from her. Expect her to be a certain way. Like a lady. Oh, she was starting to hate that word. Every time, she wanted to bundle a shawl over them and shout, “You don’t get to fucking decide for me!”
Read more: Covenant Ficlet: The Tailor ShopBecoming a lady. Becoming a woman. She couldn’t put into words how that made her want to scream and fight. The way it felt like a cage waiting for her.
Being a woman meant…things. Marriage, for one. Which included a whole pile of under-things that she hated, separately and together. Finding a man. That sounded nice, except what if she picked a bad one? What if she couldn’t get a good one? Everybody knew about Mr. Yeagle and how he beat Mrs. Yeagle. And Mr. Phelps. And Mr. Harnett, and…
And then there was being a housewife, which seemed to involve pretty much never going anywhere or doing anything fun except bridge and church bake sales. Myrtle didn’t object to keeping a house. But she had problems with giving up her whole fucking life for it.
She wanted kids, oh did she. But for every woman she knew, they seemed to be a chain around her neck.
Ladies didn’t say ‘fuck.’
There seemed to be a lot of shit that wasn’t ladylike.
Maybe if Myrtle did enough of it they’d stop expecting her to be a lady.
Which was how it came about that she decided to get a job.
“You’re not a real smart girl,” Thea said to her admiringly. “But you got a certain cunning.”
Myrtle ran all her ideas by Thea, because Thea was a real smart girl. Thea wanted to go to college, was just trying to figure how to afford it.
“Not a job, though,” Thea kept going. “No no, what you need is a career.”
Myrtle stared at her, trying to decide whether to be baffled or unimpressed. Sometimes Thea was a bit too smart. “What the hell’s the difference?”
“A career is something that sticks with you. A job’s something you get, see, and then maybe stop having. But if you got a career, then if you lose one job, then you can get another doing the same thing.”
Well. That sounded pretty good. “Okay. Then how do I start?”
“You get a job,” Thea declared, infuriatingly.
“What would I do without you, sis,” Myrtle growled at her through gritted teeth.
But Thea did help. She might be a know-it-all but she was a good sister. She came bundling into the house one snowy day in late November, threw off all her coats and mittens, and nearly crashed up to Myrtle. “Mr. Hortzwald is looking for an apprentice.”
“The tailor?” Myrtle put down her darning and squinted up at her.
“Yeah, Myrtle, the tailor!” Too excited to suppress it, Thea grabbed her shirt sleeve and yanked. Myrtle slapped at her hand, growling about tearing the cloth. “You can tail! Better’n any boy in town. And you’re more responsible too. You could help run a business! Myrtle, you gotta talk to him. Get him to teach you! He wants to retire one day. When he’s ready, you could get the whole shop!”
And so began The Campaign. That was what Thea liked to call it. She liked chess.
From November through April the two of them hounded Mr. Holtzman. They recruited their ma to hound him—to her deep bewilderment.
“What would you do with a seamstress shop?”
“Be a seamstress, Ma,” Thea replied, barely managing to keep her tone polite and suppress her eye roll. “Myrtle’s great at it. Why shouldn’t she be able to support herself? She’ll never have to depend on anybody!”
I don’t have a huge load of cuss-words and gasps urged from me with this one but I’ll tell you what it did get out of me:
I was smiling and humming throughout this one. Just the tickled sort of glee from seeing how Thea and Ezra jive.
AREN’T THEY ADORABLE? I love these sibs.
They’ve got a good relationship with their older brother Amos too, but I think the two of them are two gremlin peas in a pod. 😀
A choice I deliberately made for them as characters is that they’re very driven, active people. Both The and Ezra are the kind of people who’ll throw their weight into chasing what they want and commit to it if they want it badly enough, even if they have to move a couple of mountains.
Which…is what drives Ezra into attempting murder later on. He’s lost everything he WANTED, all that he hoped for. So what he’s got left is visiting retribution on the person who took away almost everything good in his world. (Thea lives. Thea and her kid, and a couple of Amos’s. And if Ezra can’t move mountains for anything he wants for himself, he’ll tear them out by the roots for his nieces and nephews.)
And that really is the heart of what I felt I needed to get at for him, for the main story. The specific flavor and nature of what’s driving him, and how it’s not just that he’s being a fool–though he is, to some degree, and so is Thea, for urging him to it. But he’s also a force, with the kind of “you won’t get to the people standing behind me” motivation that can make a person do the impossible and the unthinkable.