“See what I mean?”
Joan shrugged.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Connie said, “but even if I am you have to admit that Jamie was closer to you and to Gail than to Claude. I mean, Gail practically raised her from the day she was born.”
“I always thought that was so unfair,” Joan said. “Women today have all this maternity leave, and bonding leave, and extra sick pay, and we had nothing. I wanted to stay home with Jamie, but with the way Claude was at work, I didn’t dare. I was working at Schimmel’s then, so no work, no money. When Jamie was three weeks old and we had nothing left in the bank, I dropped her off at Gail’s and right back in I went.”
“Remember when Claude couldn’t figure out how to put Jamie’s diaper on?”
“Or when he finally learned how to put it on, but then got so interested in a ball game that he didn’t change her? I come home from working overtime and Jamie’s screaming bloody murder. He’s sitting there watching t.v. and says ‘I think something’s wrong with the baby. I fed her two bottles, so she can’t be hungry.’ I pick her up and she’s dripping —she wet herself right through the diaper. After that I said Gail gets her from the time I hand her over until the time I take her back. Gail was a nurse you know. Before she met Jackie.”
“I never knew she worked.”
“She didn’t,” Joan said. “After she was married, that is. Jackie wouldn’t allow it. Gail went along, but I think she was bored to death sitting home all day. It’s too bad, because Gail always seemed so good at everything she did.”
“You’d think some of that would’ve rubbed off on Claude,” Connie said.
Joan smiled. “I know. It’s funny, more of it rubbed off on Jamie. Taking care of Jamie really brought the life back into Gail.”
A breeze rustled the pine branches far overhead. A chipmunk sniffed around the base of the firepit.
Connie sat up in her chair. Her face lit up. “Hey, I always meant to ask you: did you sleep with Claude after he got bit by the fleas?”
“No way! He was gross. He had welts all over him.”
“Could you tell the welts from the zits?”
The two sisters howled. As the laughter gave way and trickled to giggles, Connie looked up at the sun breaking through the clouds.
“What was it about Claude that did it for you?”
Joan twisted her head an inch as her eyebrows shot up. She looked at her sister, who continued to gaze into the sky, then relaxed her eyebrows and stared at the patio floor. She put an elbow on her knee and rested her chin in her palm.
“I don’t know,” Joan said. “You had Lou, and Teddy, geez he was only sixteen or so but he had girls climbing all over him. Mom and dad always made such a fuss about things you did, you were so grown up they said, and about things Teddy did, he was always so cute the way he’d roll his eyes when they’d ask him and his girlfriend to ham it up for the camera, but me, they never looked twice at anything I did. Claude paid attention to me. Back then he’d ask me how I felt about all sorts of things, and it was nice. We talked about everything. He was an only child and didn’t have anyone to talk to, and I really didn’t have anyone to talk to either, so it worked out. Mom and dad never liked Claude, but in a lot of ways he was there for me when they weren’t. We just kind of came together, and we’ve been together ever since.”
Connie looked over, nodded and smiled. She sipped her coffee.
“Oops,” Joan said. “Here they come.”
“What’s for lunch?” Jamie said as she bounded barefoot onto the patio.
“Let’s put on some hot dogs and burgers,” her mother said.
They cooked the food and ate it, and Claude and Jamie went to play mini-golf, and Joan and Connie chatted the afternoon away.
At 4:00, Claude and Jamie returned, and announced they were going fishing. However, when Claude looked for his net, he realized he’d forgotten it, and couldn’t find another net among the junk in the storage area behind the big yellow wall. He and Jamie hopped in the Buick again and drove to town to buy a new one.
Upon their return, Joan had a dinner of steak, potato chips, and salad waiting for them. They ate on the built-in picnic table on the patio, and when they were done Claude gathered his fishing gear, set the rowboat into the water, and hooked up the small outboard motor.
“We’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said to Joan.
Jamie donned her lifejacket and floppy fishing hat and climbed aboard. Claude started the motor, and the pair putted off to the most remote part of the lake, not far from where it was fed by a narrow river.
“How’s this?” Claude said.
“Looks great.”
Claude cut the motor, and he and his daughter tossed their lines into the lake.
Chapter 9
The water was cool where it also was dark. Buzzing sounds made the brighter water fearful to swim, and one couldn’t ever completely relax there, but the brighter water also contained food, so if one wanted a full stomach one endured the hazards —real or perceived —and swam toward the light.
May fly season was at its peak. Most of the time the tiny bugs were rare to encounter, but for brief stretches after the ice cleared a banquet of the flies materialized on top of the lake. Once drowned, they were too small to sink very deep, and in death rolled slowly beneath the surface until they were spotted and eaten.
Now that spawning season had passed, eating was the only thing left. This wasn’t the ocean, where sailfish leapt and porpoises frolicked in the wakes of giant liners. It wasn’t even a large lake, which might have bona fide schools. Here, there was no socializing or parrying rivals for territory, just eating. Whatever other activity existed, the dominant function remained the pursuit and capture of food.
This day food was sparse. The buzzing pervaded everything, loudly, from all directions. Sharp jets of water pierced the depths, knocking all in its path momentarily askew. Only as the bright water began to darken did the jets and buzzing subside, and only then did fish scouring the lake bottom raise their eyes upward in search of a soggy piece of bread or an insect in the final spasms of life.
What intrigue, then, when a large trout caught what appeared to be the death dance of a bright, colorful bug. The trout circled. The insect darted away, then floated motionless. The trout approached, and when the moment of critical nearness arrived, it dashed forward, swallowed the bug, and with a series of powerful tail strokes fled the scene.
It was indeed a big bug, very filling, with a long tail that was difficult to swallow. As it had done countless times after capturing a good meal, the trout meandered at a satisfied pace.
Without notice, the world the trout had come to know, the actions natural to a lake trout and the expected effects of those actions, changed dramatically. Although no predator could be seen, or heard, or the tiny waves of its mammalled feet felt, the trout was under attack. The bug with the tail that couldn’t be swallowed was biting the trout’s stomach, biting it hard, and trying to rip the stomach back through the fish’s mouth.
Strokes that once propelled the fish forward now did not. Survival by escape—the only response to danger the trout had ever practiced —became, instead, survival by any means. Though still restrained from moving freely by the long tail, the fish turned and swam in the opposite direction.
It worked for a moment, but after a few yards, the predator attacked again. The trout pointed itself toward the lake floor and with exaggerated full-body contortions strove to break loose of its tormentor, but after a gut-wrenching bite to its innards, the fish found itself pointed, and moving, toward the bright water. Unable to swim backward, and unwilling to swim toward the surface, the fish flailed for freedom.
A blast of unfamiliar sensations halted the flailing. Intense light blinded the trout. Its gills strained to breathe and it was overcome by uncomfortable heat. Everything began to spin. A shrill noise rose and retreated, and rose again, and something hard struck the fish on its side.
With all its ene
rgy the trout flapped and bucked and twisted. A gill landed in water —though not much water —and the fish stopped writhing for a moment. A large spot of black, as big as the trout itself, emerged from the brightness and pressed the fish out of its natural shape.
Escape failed, and now hope for survival was fading too. In the water, the trout knew how to catch food, and how to spawn, and how to avoid bigger fish. In this environment, it knew no defense. A great power, impossible to understand, had thrust the trout into a place so different, and so painful, that the exhausted fish simply submitted, and no longer struggled to live the life it had always known.
The pressing eased and the bug took another hard bite. Suddenly, the coolness of the lake slapped the trout’s body. The shock of the slap caused the fish to swallow—at last—the tail of the bug. The ability to breathe, and to see, returned. As the trout pulled water through its gills, it flipped a side fin, and the move propelled it in the expected direction. It tried a second time, with the same result. For a few seconds the fish attempted small movements only, but then, full of oxygen, restored of vision, and once again mobile, the trout darted as fast as it could to the crisp, dark, familiar water at the bottom of the lake.
#
As the sun began to dip behind the trees, mosquitoes joined the black flies and Claude and Jamie decided to head back while there was still plenty of light. When they rounded a bend in lake and saw the great yellow wall in the distance, Claude turned a knob and the motor stalled.
“Let’s row from here,” he said.
Jamie agreed. As she slid from the front seat to the middle, she wrestled the oar from the floor of the boat and set it in the lock. When Claude had done the same on the other side, they both leaned forward, dipped their oars in the water, and stroked. They set a casual pace.
Within a half hour, they approached their dock. They were pleased with the time they made, especially since they hadn’t really exerted themselves.
“Says something about that Chinese motor, don’t it?” Claude said.
Claude caught the dock, and Jamie climbed out. She took the poles, nets, and boxes from the front of the boat, and when she finished provided an arm to help her father step out. She then took the rope and led the empty boat along the dock to the shore. There, Claude grabbed the back end of the small aluminum craft and dragged it onto the shore. He rolled the boat over, so the propeller blades wouldn’t touch the ground, and set it down.
Claude and Jamie headed up the cement stairs to the porch, where Joan and Connie had retreated to avoid mosquitoes.
“Catch anything?” Joan said with a smile as Claude and Jamie entered.
“Daddy caught a big trout. It swallowed his fly, and daddy wanted to slice him open to get it, but I asked him not to, so he cut the line and set him free. I had a couple nibbles, but didn’t catch anything.”
“Oh well,” Joan said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”
“’Tis indeed,” Claude said.
#
Sunday it rained hard. Jamie broke out the board games, and the four spent the afternoon rolling dice and playing cards and listening to music on the radio. At night they took in a movie.
When Monday brought no relief from the rain, the Amognes packed early. Jamie and Connie took quick baths in the lake, while Joan opted for washing her hair in the sink and Claude skipped cleansing altogether. After the traditional Memorial Day lobster dinner, they tidied up, gave the toilet a scrub, and drove home.
Chapter 10
Evolution, and evolution alone, explained the Rhode Island Electric bargaining table, for from that table emerged odd creatures, with bizarre features difficult to describe, with broader purposes about which a bystander could only speculate, yet which nonetheless fit the common ground union and management, each struggling to protect its niche, had come to share. Each side had what it had. To get something new, it had to offer something in return, even if the request alone made perfect business sense, even if the return something was of dubious value to the company at large, even if one offering or the other had to be twisted to comical proportions to become acceptable.
Rhode Island Electric’s three bonus programs were borne of this process. The first, the earnings goal, made the most sense. Each year, the company set three profit levels and five targets in areas it deemed important: safety, attendance, customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and percentage of jobs completed on schedule. Depending on the location and the job, goals could be measured individually, by district, or both. The Capital District’s jobs-on-schedule goal, for instance, was met if the district completed assignments on schedule 94 percent of the time during the contract year. However, an employee with a perfect job completion record automatically made the goal, even if his district didn’t, while an employee with a completion rate lower than 85 percent automatically missed the goal, even if his district made it. Other goals had similar measurement criteria. The higher the earnings level, and the more goals made, the higher the bonus.
The second bonus, the guaranteed lump sum, came from the Jackie Amognes era, people remembered, though nobody seemed to recall what the union had given up to get it. Among union ranks, nobody cared, since the only criteria for earning the bonus was to be a member of the UUW on July 17, the first day of the new contract year.
The third bonus, the performance based bonus, was the newest, negotiated in the Jim Shepard era. The notion of the guaranteed lump sum never sat well with Rhode Island politicians, who scoffed at the idea of paying employees a percentage of money they hadn’t yet earned for doing nothing more than remaining alive. In the industry, too, pay-for-performance schemes remained a popular trend at the time, so in management’s pre-negotiation strategy sessions, top brass pounded away at the need to link employee bonuses to on-the-job results. Over the objections of a handful of younger executives who contended the union would never buy it, top brass prevailed, and management resolved to win a performance based bonus clause in the next contract.
On the first day of negotiations, that resolve crunched like a katydid under a Cadillac’s wheels. Even the stern men from the UUW’s national headquarters laughed at that one. The union did not want money linked to performance—not then, not now, not ever —and did not want to give management any tool it could use to ratchet up on-the-job expectations, however slowly, in coming years. But management shrugged off the initial embarrassment and kept fighting. Top brass wanted a pay-for-performance bonus, and the negotiation team knew it could not emerge from the table without one.
As July 17 drew nearer and progress on a new agreement remained stalled, pressure on management’s negotiation team to come up with a spin for its performance based bonus proposal increased. At last it emerged from caucus and reprimanded the union leaders for failing to recognize the true value of the proposed program: improved communication. The company’s intent, it said, had never been to micromanage production, but to increase the amount of communication employees had with direct supervisors, which both sides agreed was abysmal. The union listened. But any program, the UUW insisted, must rank all jobs on equal footing. It must factor out the specific duties of each position, and, as a result, must rate employees in general categories like teamwork and reliability. It must forbid supervisors from stating anything in quantified terms, and from discussing any actual performance measure, such as the number of streetlights an individual set compared to the department average or the number of meters an employee missed reading over the course of the contract year. Management’s negotiators claimed the program was to be mainly an exercise in communication, and in the final wording of the contract the union held them to it.
On July 17 that year, Rhode Island Electric president Harrington Munson made the cover of the state’s daily newspaper. “The linking of bonuses to individual performance in our new contract,” the story quoted Munson as saying, “is a landmark achievement, one unprecedented in the utility industry across the nation. We are proud to be, once again, a proactive leader on the cutting edge of ne
w ways to increase efficiency, and are pleased that we will continue to deliver to our loyal customers the highest quality service for the best possible price.” For a month Munson traveled the country, briefing other executives about his company’s accomplishment, meeting with senators, patting backs, shaking hands, and getting himself on the cover of every trade magazine money could buy.
A year later, management considered begging out of the performance appraisal process altogether. The entire process turned into an administrative nightmare. The union balked at the language defining the categories. Supervisors argued with the people trying to train them. The forms that tracked employee achievement confused everyone and were filled out wrong about a third of the time. Worse, the amount of face time between employees and supervisors that first year increased only by the amount of time it took the supervisor to read the appraisal to the worker. And nobody at the negotiation table had recognized the conflict between the new appraisal process and the already-existing positive discipline policy: giving an employee the lowest grade on the appraisal could only be justified if the employee already had a positive discipline warning, and that was hard to do. Worse, positive discipline only had three categories, but the appraisal had seven: dependability, teamwork, work practices, compliance, work precision, work completeness, and awareness of costs. To give an employee an overall rating of “did not meet expectations,” a supervisor had to document, for all practical purposes, that the individual was unemployable. In fact, in the seven years the appraisal process had been in place, only one person received a “did not meet expectations” rating, and even that came with an asterisk: when the supervisor tried to find the employee to give him the appraisal, he learned the fellow had quit four days earlier.
“I hate the whole thing,” Schulke told anyone who’d listen. “It creates a shitload of paperwork, you can’t discuss anyone’s actual performance, and even Claude Amognes can pass, so it serves no purpose except to give more free money to the union.”
The Jig of the Union Loller Page 8
