“You fast?” he shouted. I nodded. “Not afraid to work?” He wrote something on a dirty yellow legal pad clipped to a dirty clipboard. Everything was dirty in that place—the floor, the walls, Eddy’s fingernails, the windows, his desk.
Oh, I should qualify that. The women who worked there—they sparkled. They dressed like gypsies or dancers, with big hoop earrings, and scarves over their hair, and swirly skirts and bright blouses.
Anyway, Eddy gave me a shove and pointed me toward Florry on number-ten machine. Florry was English, she was redheaded, she was about my mother’s age, and she was a great woman. I found her sitting like a queen in front of her machine, her back straight as a ruler. I stood and watched her for a moment. Her hands moved so beautifully, so fast, she was so perfectly coordinated with the machine that I knew I’d never be able to compare.
I tapped her on the shoulder and yelled that Eddy had sent me. “New girl?” she said. “Watch, now.”
From a basket near her left foot she took a handful of mica fragments, dropped them on the machine counter, slipped one golden brown chip under the machine arm, and pressed a lever with her other foot. The huge heavy arm came down—WHANG! It was the sound of those machine arms, fifty of them, coming down second after second that filled the air with such a thick, deafening din.
The arm came down on the mica and a round disc with a serrated edge was stamped out. Florry moved the mica, down came the arm—she did that again and once more. Got four cuts out of that one piece. A little like cutting cookie dough. Only with cookie dough, if you press the cutter too close to the edge and don’t make a perfect round, you can still bake the cookie. Here, you could keep only the perfect cuts, which were then pushed down a chute in back of the machine. The pieces you messed up went into a scrap basket. And you didn’t make any money on them.
“That’s it,” Florry mouthed to me, after showing me the procedure a couple more times. “Go to it.” She nodded to the empty machine next to hers.
I sat down on the iron stool, turned on the power, and watched the belt slipping around the arm. I was terrified as I slid the first piece of yellow mica under the arm and pressed the lever foot. WHANG! I had good reason to be scared. You could lose your fingers, with no trouble at all, to that arm. In fact, there were several three and four-fingered women working in the building.
WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! My foot slipped and I punched the mica three times without moving it around. I’d ruined the piece. I looked around, afraid Eddy was watching. He was! My face burned, my hands were damp. Oh, I was sweating. Those first hours I must have lost five pounds just from anxiety.
At noon a whistle shrilled and the machines shut down. My head felt numb in the silence. Then the quiet was broken again, but this time by the more pleasant sounds of fifty women laughing and talking, rushing toward the time clock.
Florry caught my arm and pulled me into the mass of women carrying sweaters, newspapers, lunch bags, and Thermoses. “Come along, girl! Did you bring your lunch? Hurry now, luv. We don’t have that much time. Twenty minutes.”
As it turned out, more than enough for me. The moment Florry led me into the “lunchroom,” I lost my appetite. Flaking vomit-green walls. Scabby-looking linoleum underfoot. And then the dandiest feature of the ‘ladies’ lounge”—a flimsy, shoulder-high partition separating those eating lunch from those using the row of toilet stalls.
The room was packed. Women leaned against the walls, squeezed onto a cracked brown leather couch and a couple of chairs, squatted on the floor, and sat in each other’s laps.
“Girls!” I noticed how everyone stopped talking to listen to Florry. “This is Zelda, the new girl on number nine.”
“Hi, Zelda, welcome to the zoo.”
“Zelda, cute name!”
“Think you’re going to like it here?”
The calls and shouts came from all over. I smiled. “Hi! I guess it’s going to be fun working here.”
You should have heard them then. Catcalls, hoots, laughter, groans.
A toilet flushed and I asked Florry if you could eat outside. “Certainly, luv.”
“Don’t do it,” someone said. “It makes you koo-koo.”
“Aww, she’ll go koo-koo just working here.”
“You wanna try the prison yard, honey, you try it. It’s great, ha ha.”
“Whatsa matter? You don’t like our ladies’ lounge? This place is just like home, ain’t it, girls?”
I smiled from one to the other. I didn’t have them sorted out yet into names to go with faces.
“She’s cute,” someone said about me, “but she don’t look old enough to even have her working papers.” This made me blush. My round baby face was always embarrassing me.
“You got a boyfriend, Zelda?” That was Carmella, a skinny imp with a cloud of dark hair and eyes that danced mischievously behind thick lenses. She and I got friendly, but that day I just didn’t know what to say when she went on, “Your boyfriend do you yet?” I blushed even harder.
“Aww, leave the nice baby alone.” Then a loud happy laugh. And that was how I first picked Adelina out of the crowd. She was a little soft-looking woman with huge dark popping eyes. A sweetiepie. Her husband had left her, she was raising four kids alone, she’d lost a home to fire and one child to polio, but she had the biggest, freshest, loudest, happiest laugh I can ever remember hearing. When Adelina laughed—and all sorts of things struck her funny—it was irresistible.
It seemed I’d hardly found a corner of a chair to sit on, had hardly begun talking to Adelina and Carmella, when the whistle blew. Everyone rushed for the door, scrambling to be first at the time clock. “You get docked half an hour if you’re more than five minutes late,” Florry explained, pulling me along by the arm. “Hurry!”
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! That was the pace of life in MIF. Wake up in the morning and hurry to work! Rush that mica through the machine! Got to make the rate! Hurry to the lunchroom! Hurry back! Get to work!
Every night I was exhausted, aching. I’d never worked like this in my life. My parents watched me and said little. I think, now, that they were just waiting for me to get over my romantic ideas about the glories of factory life.
As for Eric—couldn’t have been more pleased! He was in his element, educating me, lecturing, pointing out to me that I had a unique opportunity. “These are the most downtrodden workers, Zelda. The unorganized. They are the most grossly exploited. You can help them understand that they can take their destinies into their own hands. They need to be organized.”
I didn’t disagree about that, but I didn’t think I could educate anyone in that shop to anything. As for “downtrodden,” that just made me laugh. Carmella? Adelina? Florry? Downtrodden? They worked twice as fast as I did, twice as hard, and they could still sing, scream jokes to each other, and notice every man who came into the shop.
Machines were always breaking down. “Number twenny-three down,” someone would yell. A mechanic came running, and the bawdy remarks flew through the air.
“Oh, lord, he’s so sweet,” Carmella caroled.
“Do you think he’s taken?” From another side of the room.
“Come here and see me, honey. I’m sure something’s wrong with my machine that you can fix.”
And I just listened, laughing, blushing. They dubbed me “the baby.” Why not? I was so naive. After working two weeks, my first paycheck thrilled me. “Look at all this money,” I said to Carmella. “This is great.”
“Ain’t nothing great but loving,” Carmella assured me, as if I were about twenty years younger than she was, instead of only two.
In fact, on Friday, when pay envelopes were opened, there was gloom in the lunchroom. Friday was the worst day of the week. Friday was when people found out if they made their piecework rate.
Here’s how that worked. A price was put on each little piece stamped out on the press. It might be an eighth of a cent if the die, the pattern, was tiny, or as much as a penny if the die was large. The smalle
st dies paid the least because you could get the most cuts from a single piece of mica. So, the theory was, it was an advantage. Whip that piece around, get eight cuts, and make that penny just as fast as someone with a large penny die.
But, in fact, the eighth of a cent or the quarter of a cent was earned only on good cuts. And how you got good cuts depended on lots of things. To begin with—pray for Eddy to deliver you a load of mica neither too thick nor too brittle. Pray for your machine not to break down. Pray you could keep that machine WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! WHANGING! as fast as it could go. Never think about the fingers that had been lost to the machine. Never slack off. And, on a good day, you might make as much as a dollar and a half an hour. If you could do that every day, then there’d be sixty dollars in the pay packet. That was a lot of money. A powerful lot of money! Everyone was always trying for the big sixty. But only a few of Eddy’s pets ever made it.
For every good day when an operator made that kind of money, there were the other days when she made forty or fifty cents an hour. And on Friday, gloomy Friday, nearly everyone ended with a little more or a little less than forty dollars for forty hours of work.
A month passed. I was learning. No longer so glowing about facing that punch press every day. Amazed, abashed, to learn that Adelina had worked there for ten years, Carmella for four, Florry for five. And had no idea of ever working anywhere else.
“Well, well? Are you talking to them about the union?” Eric prodded me.
I mumbled something. He had such a—such a false idea of what I could do. What could I do? I was green, I was raw, I didn’t know half what anyone else in that place knew about what it meant to work, to be underpaid, and still hold up your head.
Then, in a manner I could never have foreseen, I did have something to do with changing things in MIF. It was totally accidental.
I remember, one day, Carmella’s asking me if Eddy had been bothering me. Well, he did hang around my machine a lot, but I thought he was just checking my work.
Carmella linked arms with me. “Watch out for him, he’s got roaming hands.”
“Oh, I can take care of myself,” I said quickly. I certainly felt like a big well-fed horse next to skinny Carm:
She laughed at me. She knew me better than I knew me. “If he tries anything, you just tell him—” And she chopped her right hand into the crook of her left elbow.
A few nights later I showed Eric the arm salute, proud of everything I was learning, of my independence, of my new swaggering style—gypsy skirts, bright scarves around my hair, and big hoop earrings. I’d had my ears pierced. Carmella had done it in the lunchroom. Put an ice cube on my earlobe, held it there for a moment, then punched a needle through the lobe and left a silk thread in the hole.
“You’ve changed,” Eric said. Did he sound a bit miffed? “I never thought you’d do it, you know. Go into the factory that way. And—” He looked at me, almost helplessly. “And everything.”
“I know. You thought I was too bourgeois.” I stuck out my tongue, like Angie, the new bride that everyone teased. And I gave him the arm salute again.
“You’re really getting sassy,” he said.
Sure I was! It was the influence of my new friends, my new world. I felt as if my parents had been keeping a secret from me all these years. I’d always felt sorry for them, having to go to work in a factory every day. But now it turned out they must have been having fun, too.
One night Eric and I parked. We talked about the shop first—that was “business”—then got into our inevitable hassle over how far we were going to “go.” “You’re still so backward,” he said at last, giving up. He frowned handsomely, smoking and looking out the window.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t see much of you anymore, either,” he complained.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m so tired at night.” Why did I keep saying to him that I was sorry? Sorry I couldn’t make love. Sorry I wasn’t on call. Sorry I was so ignorant. Sorry I hadn’t already converted everyone in MIF to union thoughts. I made up my mind that before I said “sorry” once more to Eric, I’d sooner cut out my tongue.
So there we sat, Eric sulking, me silent. I kept staring at his wonderful Viking profile. It didn’t seem to matter so much, anymore, that he was so attractive. The truth was, I realized, I thought more about the women I worked with than I did about him. And then I surprised myself again by thinking that I loved my shop friends more, much more, than Eric. Now that was a revolutionary thought. Don’t forget, the general idea then was that the company of any man (not even to speak of an exceptional one like Eric) was infinitely preferable to the company of any woman, no matter how interesting or lively. Oh, yeah? [Laughs] Wanna bet?
Well, a few days later, I was a little slow leaving my machine at lunchtime. I was mulling over Eric and where we were headed. Before I knew it, the room had emptied, Eddy loomed up, and yes, indeed, he did have roaming hands. I know it’s a cliché, but my heart was pounding so hard with shock, I really thought it was going to break through my chest. I don’t know if I said anything to him, pushed him away, or just ran for my life.
The next thing I remember is bursting into the lunchroom, and little fat Mary Margaret, with her mouth full of food, saying, “Look at Zelda, look at Zelda, her face is all red.”
Everyone stopped talking and looked at me.
“What happened, baby?” Adelina asked me in her husky voice.
“Eddy—” I gulped. All I could get out was his name. Didn’t want to cry, but the tears flowed anyway.
“Eddy, huh!” Carmella patted my back.
Everyone seemed to know without another word what it meant.
“Gee, don’t cry,” Mary Margaret said, “we all been felt up when we didn’t wanna be.”
That made me cry harder. And, with that, Angie, our bride, put her apron over her face and started to cry, too! It seemed that the day before, when she was at her machine, Eddy had put his hand up her skirt.
“Men! They’re all alike,” Adelina said hoarsely. “But that Eddy is a real dog,” she added.
“He’s got no right,” Angie bawled. “I didn’t give him the right.”
“Girls!” Florry sat up straight. “It’s a bloody shame when kids like Angie and Zelda can’t do a day’s work without being molested.” Her voice rose over Angie’s bawling. “We don’t belong to Eddy. We don’t belong to the company. Just because we work here, break our backs for pennies—!”
“Ain’t it the truth,” someone sighed.
Florry’s head snapped around. “Isn’t it bloody disgusting what we work for? Isn’t it bloody disgusting that we have to eat in this little pokehole?”
There were murmurs around the room. Agreement or disagreement? I couldn’t tell. My tears had dried up.
Florry stood up, put her hands on hips, and turned to look at each and every woman. When she had our attention, she said slowly, “Let’s do something for ourselves, for once. Stick together, for once.”
“What can we do?” a voice bleated.
Just then the whistle blew. There was the usual stirring, women standing, smoothing their hair, crumpling lunch bags. “Girls!” Florry raised her voice. “Why don’t we sit right here until bloody Eddy bloody promises to keep his hands to himself!”
“You mean not go back to our machines?” Mary Margaret squeaked. “Not go back to work?”
“That’s what I mean.”
For a moment the room went quiet with shock. Then came the protests, a hubbub of sound. “We can’t do that!” “They’ll fire us.” “I need my job.”
“Fire us?” Florry sniffed scornfully. “There are thirty bloody three of us here! They’re not going to fire thirty-three operators. Girls, do we or don’t we have backbone?”
Someone crunched an apple. A toilet flushed. And everyone looked at everyone else. Then the door burst open. Not even a knock, and Eddy was inside, pulling at his greasy hair, screaming. “What the hell is going on? You girls know
what time it is?” He showed his yellow teeth in a snarl. “Get back to work!”
Carmella jumped up, crossing her matchstick arms, skinny elbows sticking out. “Why don’t you keep your paws to yourself,” she screeched. “We know what you did to Zelda and Angie.”
“Shut up, you! Now, haul ass back to them machines, or you’re all fired.” He grabbed Carmella, who was half his size, and started dragging her toward the door. That was a mistake. Adelina rushed to Carmella’s rescue. Then Florry. In another moment Eddy was surrounded by women screaming at him and dragging poor Carm away. A wonder her arms weren’t broken.
“You creep!” I could hear Adelina’s husky voice over everyone else’s. “You Jack the Ripper!” Her eyes were nearly popping out of her head. “You dirty old thing.” Then the clincher. “What’samatter, brother, you can’t get it at home?” And she gave one of her loud, joyous laughs.
Eddy turned brick-red. “I give you five minutes,” he yelled over the pandemonium, “or the whole bunch of you is out on the sidewalk.” He slammed out.
Well, then the silence. Like they say, you could have cut it with a knife. Adelina collapsed into a chair with a deep, sad sigh. After a bit she said, “Well, we had our fun, so now let’s forget it. You girls know I got to support my kids. I can’t afford to lose my job. None of us can.”
Three or four women slipped out. There was a general stir. Carmella nursed her bruised arm. “Girls,” Florry said quietly, “if we give in now, Eddy will be worse than ever. He’ll know we’re scared of him. I’m ready to sit. Is anyone else?”
Silence again. And again everyone looked at everyone else. Waiting for the other person to make the first move one way or the other, to say the first word. Then, of all people, little fat Mary Margaret, looking half scared to death, stood up, said, “I’ll do it!” and collapsed back into her seat, pudgy hands clasped at her heart.
We all stared at Mary Margaret, who, up till that moment, had made her chief claim to fame on eating three bananas every day for lunch. Adelina whistled through her teeth. Carmella gave a raucous laugh. “Hey! I ain’t gonna be shamed by Mary. I’ll stay, too.” She swaggered over to the couch.
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