Half broke horses: a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls

Scott.”
    Minnie turned on her heel, and as we walked off, she told me, “When they get high-handed, all you have to do is remind yourself that they’re just hired help.”
    AFTER I’D BEEN IN Chicago for almost two years, I came home from work on a July evening to find one of my other roommates laying out Minnie’s only good dress on her bed.
    Minnie, she said, had been at the bottling plant where she worked when her long black hair got caught in the machinery. She was pulled into these massive grinding gears. It was over before anyone nearby even had time to think.
    Minnie was supposed to wear her hair up in a kerchief, but she was so proud of those thick, shiny Irish tresses—they made every man in Chicago want to flirt with her—that she couldn’t resist the temptation to let them down. Her body was so badly mangled that they had to have a closed-coffin funeral.
    I loved that girl, and as I sat through the service, all I could think was that if I’d been there, maybe I could have rescued her. I kept imagining myself chopping her hair off, pulling her back, and hugging her as we sobbed happily, realizing how close she’d come to a gruesome death.
    But I also knew that even if I’d been right there—and somehow happened to have had a pair of scissors in my hands—I wouldn’t have had time to save her once her hair got tangled up in the machine. When something like that happens, one moment you’re talking to the person, and then you blink and the next moment she’s dead.
    Minnie had spent a lot of time planning her future. She had been saving her money and was confident she’d marry a good man, buy a little house in Oak Park, and raise a boisterous brood of green-eyed kids. But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.
    There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.
    * * *
    I didn’t expect to like my new short hair, but I did. It took almost no time to wash and dry, and I didn’t have to fuss with curling irons, hairpins, and bows. I went around the boardinghouse with the scissors, trying to talk the other girls into cutting their hair, pointing out that even if they didn’t work in a factory, the world today was filled with all manner of machinery—with wheels and cogs and turbines—that their hair could get caught up in. Long curls were a thing of the past. For us modern women, short-cropped hair was the way to go.
    Indeed, with my new haircut, I felt I looked the model of the Chicago flapper. Men took more notice of me, and one Sunday while I was walking along the lakefront, a broad-shouldered fellow in a seersucker suit and a straw boater struck up a conversation. His name was Ted Conover, and he’d been a boxer but now worked as a vacuum-cleaner salesman for the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. “Get a foot in the door, toss in some dirt, and they gotta let you demonstrate your product,” he said with a chuckle.
    I knew from the start that Ted was a bit of a huckster. Even so, I liked his moxie. He had quick gray eyes and a lumpy nose—a souvenir from his boxing days. He also had a ruddy-faced vitality and, as Minnie would have put it, the gift of gab. He bought me a snow cone from a street vendor, and we sat on a bench by a pink marble fountain with frolicking copper sea horses. He told me about growing up in South Boston, catching rides on the backs of trolley cars, stealing pickles from the pickle man’s wagon, and learning to throw a knockdown punch in street fights with the dagos. He loved his own jokes so much that he’d start laughing halfway through them, and you’d start laughing, too, even though you hadn’t heard the punch line yet.
    Maybe it was