Repeal

Rosa Morales heard the news on the radio in the kitchen of the Golden Hotel, standing over a pot of beans with a wooden spoon in her hand and the evening service an hour away. The Twenty-first Amendment had been ratified. National Prohibition was over. It was December 5, 1933, a Tuesday, and the country was allowed to drink again.

The cook beside her, an older man named Davis who had worked the line for twenty years, set down his knife and said, “Well.” That was all he said. He picked up the knife and went back to the onions.

Rosa was thirty-four. She had been in Reno for twelve years now, working kitchens since the month she arrived. The divorce ranches first, out past the edge of town, cooking for wealthy women from the East Coast who were waiting for their six weeks to pass. Then the hotel kitchens, which paid less but ran year-round, which was what mattered when you were sending money to your mother in Lovelock and to a sister in Sacramento who had three children and a husband who could not find work.

She had watched Prohibition the way most people in Reno had watched it, which was from the side. Nevada had gone dry in 1918, a year before the rest of the country, but the enforcement had always been loose. The speakeasies on the alleys off Virginia Street operated with a kind of public privacy, everyone knowing what happened behind the unmarked doors and no one pressing the matter too far. By 1923, the state had repealed its own prohibition law, though the federal statute still held. Reno existed in a space between legal and not, the same space it had always occupied.

Rosa did not drink. Her father had been a drinking man, and she had learned early what that meant for a family. But she understood that the liquor economy was the economy she lived in, that the hotels and the restaurants and the clubs that employed her drew their life from the willingness of people to come to Reno and spend money on things they could not get at home.

The kitchen was hot. It was always hot. The stove ran from five in the morning until midnight, and the air carried grease and steam and the smell of whatever was on the menu, which tonight was roast beef and potatoes and the beans that Rosa had been stirring when the news came through.

She thought about her mother, who was sixty-three now and living alone in the small house in Lovelock. Her mother had come to Nevada from Mexico in 1905, crossing at El Paso with Rosa’s father and two suitcases and a story about work in the mines that turned out to be half true. The mines had hired her father. They had also broken his back, literally, in a cave-in in 1914. He had spent the remaining years of his life on the porch of that house, watching the trains go by, his spine fused at an angle that made sitting painful and standing worse. He died in 1921, the same year Rosa left for Reno.

The evening service started at six. Rosa plated beans and carved beef and ladled gravy and moved in the rhythm that kitchen work required, the rhythm that was not thought but motion, the body doing what it had been trained to do while the mind went elsewhere.

After the dinner rush, around eight, she stepped out the back door of the hotel into the alley. Virginia Street was louder than usual. She could hear shouting and music and the particular sound of celebration, which is different from ordinary noise in its pitch and its insistence. People were drinking in the street. Not because they had not been drinking before, but because tonight the pretense was unnecessary. Tonight it was legal. Tonight you could hold a glass in the open air and toast to whatever you wanted and no one could arrest you for it, though no one had been arresting anyone for it in years.

A man walked past the alley carrying a bottle of champagne. He saw Rosa standing in the doorway in her kitchen whites and raised the bottle toward her. She nodded and went back inside.

The kitchen was quieter now. The dishwasher, a boy of nineteen named Eddie, was running water over the plates. Davis had left for the night. Rosa began the closing work, covering the remaining food, wiping down the counters, checking the stove.

She had been cooking professionally for twelve years. She had started at a divorce ranch south of town, cooking for wealthy women from the East Coast. The owner had hired her on the strength of a single meal, a chicken mole she had learned from her mother, the recipe traveling north across the border and then across the desert and finally into the kitchen of a ranch house where women from Connecticut ate it and asked for more. From the ranch she had moved to the Riverside Hotel, then to the Golden, where she had been for three years. Each kitchen was the same in the ways that mattered. The heat. The plates going out and coming back. The feeling at the end of a shift of having accomplished something that would need to be accomplished again tomorrow.

Rosa finished the closing and hung her apron on the hook by the door. She walked out through the lobby, where two men were laughing loudly about something, and out onto Virginia Street. The arch was glowing at the intersection. The bars were full and the doors were open and the sound of the town was bigger than usual, swollen with the particular energy of permission.

She walked south toward her room on Second Street. She passed the Bank Club, which was blazing with light, and the smaller clubs that lined the block, and the druggist that was closed for the night, and the dress shop that she had walked past a hundred times without entering, because the dresses in the window were not for women who worked in kitchens.

The night air was cold and dry. December in the high desert. She could see her breath. She pulled her coat tighter and walked faster and did not stop to celebrate, because for Rosa the day had been what every day was, which was work, and the work would continue tomorrow regardless of what the Constitution said about liquor.

In her room she sat on the bed and counted the money in the envelope she kept in the drawer. Forty-two dollars. Enough to send twenty to her mother and keep the rest for rent and food. She put the envelope back and turned off the light and lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of the town celebrating the end of something that had never quite been enforced and the beginning of something that had never quite been interrupted.

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