Another few women left. Florry, like an avenging redheaded goddess, once again looked eye-to-eye with each woman. I could feel the tension, the nervousness, in the air, like strings being drawn across my skin. Were we going to stay? Or were we going to give in to Eddy?
Reve Fernmaker, a big motherly woman, tucked her gray hair back into its bun and cleared her throat. Heads swiveled. “Well,” Reve said comfortably, “I need my job, too.” She smoothed her apron. “But—I’m for staying.”
A deep sigh seemed to pass around the room, from woman to woman. Without another word of discussion everyone settled down. “What now?” Francie said. She was a pretty girl with a little cupid’s-bow mouth. Wore a whole lot of makeup, and supported herself and her boyfriend with her job at MIF and yodeling on weekends in bars. “What happens now?”
The same question we all had.
What happened was that fifteen minutes later Eddy was back. “Move, you pigs! Get to them machines!”
My God, I’ve never seen anyone so furious in my life. I thought he’d have a stroke on the spot. His face was boiling, twice its normal size. “Move!” He was screaming, out of control.
“We ain’t moving,” Adelina said. “We want some changes around here.”
“We—ain’t—moving!” Francie, the yodeler, chanted it, softly clapping her hands. And everyone took it up.
“We ain’t moving! We ain’t moving! We ain’t moving!” We pounded our feet on the floor. “We ain’t moving!”
We sat in the lunchroom all afternoon, talking and singing. Francie yodeled for us, did her nightclub act, and we all applauded, stamped, and whistled. I remember we sang popular songs, too, especially “Riders in the Sky.” Everyone was singing that one, that year. It was Vaughn Monroe’s big hit.
And every time Eddy stuck his head in the door and screamed at us pigs to get back to them machines, we laughed in his face. I remember Carmella saying, “How come we dopes didn’t ever do this sooner?”
One time when Eddy came in, Reve, the motherly one, went nose to nose with him and said very quietly, “And don’t you call us ‘girls’ in that tone of voice, mister. We are women. We are grown-up women, and we demand some respect.” It was a wonderful moment. I still get chills down my back, remembering.
Around four o’clock the company supervisor appeared. One of the big shots and quite a different person from Eddy. A handsome, silvery-haired man wearing a sweater and a tie. Very relaxed, easy, sympathetic. He listened to the complaints Florry listed, nodding, giving warm, fatherly looks. Florry spoke about the rates, Eddy’s roaming hands, and the ugliness of our lunchroom.
“I don’t blame you ladies for being upset,” he said. He made promises. A new lunchroom, longer lunch hour, and as for Eddy, he said flatly, “You won’t have any trouble with him, again.”
When he left, we all did, too. We thought we had won. Eddy watched us go, stood there, saying nothing, his hands in his pockets. After all the exhilaration, all the emotion, the singing and shouting, we left quietly, arms around each other. I felt wonderful—powerful, maybe, for the first time in my life.
The very next day, the lunchroom was painted a sunny yellow. Two days later three new chairs appeared. “You see what happens when we stick together,” Florry said. And Carmella said, “Ain’t it the truth!” Then, on Friday, when we got our pay packets, Eddy told Adelina, Carmella, Florry, and me not to bother coming back. Fired. All of us, fired for being troublemakers.
Everyone watched us leave. Everyone knew about the firings. That was the point—to scare all the other women into being “good” again. Florry was just sick about how we’d been taken in by the company supervisor. “That bloody smooth-talking bloody man!” Adelina was pretty upset, too, afraid she wouldn’t find another job.
Well, all of us managed to find work. We kept in touch the next few months. I went to work in a box factory, putting together cardboard boxes. [Laughs] Someone has to do that, you know. And then I had a job sewing baseballs and, for a short while, I worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. It was never the same as working in MIF, though. Never the same as working with Florry, Carmella, and Adelina.
By the time fall rolled around, I was ready to go back to school. And I did. And—you know how these things are—I didn’t forget my friends, but now our lives were so different.
Well, over winter vacation I was home, and I ran into Mary Margaret. We went into a White Tower and had hamburgers, and she told me that right after the firings there’d been talk about getting in the union. But it died down when the company promised to review the piecework rate, to increase paid holidays, and give ten days a year sick leave.
In fact, though, it was all talk. Nothing had changed. Everything was back to “normal.” Except now, a lot of women were for the union—they realized that without a union they had no power whatsoever. But no one dared come out in the open and say this. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs.
After that I didn’t hear anything for a couple more years. Then the strangest coincidence—the same month I graduated from college my mother sent me news that there had been (for the second time) an NLRB election in the plant, and this time the union had won. I burst into tears. I remember exactly how I felt, what I thought. At last! At last. A victory for the girls.
So, that’s pretty much the end of the story. Oh, one other point I was thinking about as I was telling you all this. You notice how we called ourselves and each other “girls”? And remember when Reve Fernmaker stood up to Eddy and told him we were women? I don’t think there’s really any contradiction there.
We didn’t say “sisters” then, the way some women do today. But I think calling each other “girls” was a kind of substitute for that. Sometimes it was ironic. Sometimes affectionate. But, always, there was all the difference in the world between the way we said it to one another, and the way Eddy or any other man said it to us.
Well, that really is the end of my story. Unless you want to know about Eric and me. That’s history, too, isn’t it? Even if, of a lesser kind. What happened was—we just saw less and less of each other. No longer found each other so interesting. I wonder if Eric even remembers me anymore. I can just see him wrinkling his handsome brow and saying, “Zelda Sagan? Zelda Sagan? Hmm.…” [Laughs] Of course I’ve never forgotten him. But not for his darling handsome face. Oh, no. What I’ve never forgotten is that except for Eric, I would never have known Carmella, Adelina, and Florry.
Amelia Earhart, Where Are You When I Need You?
Of course I had heard my parents talking about my crazy aunt, nearly always in whispers behind closed doors. Aunt Clare was my mother’s sister and she was peculiar. Once, she’d gone to the drugstore wearing nothing but a raincoat and clogs. Another time she’d invited people to a party, then locked them out, yelling at them to go away and stop bothering her.
Clare lived alone in another city, and about once a month, my mother (her only relative, as Clare was my only relative, aside from my parents)—my mother phoned her. I would hear my mother say, “Clare?” in a special rising, extra-bright voice. “How are you?” “Do you need anything? … Money, or …”
Then she would listen for a long time, saying, “Uh huh … well … yes …” And, finally, she would say, “Don’t forget, if you need anything, Paul and I are right here.” And she would hang up the phone and fall into a chair with a sigh, saying, “Ah, well …”
I sensed my mother’s mingled shame and sorrow over her sister, but I had very little curiosity. Never having seen Clare—except when I was an infant, which I couldn’t remember—she didn’t seem real to me. If I felt anything about her, it was a sort of shallow pride. In exactly the same way I might announce to a friend that my father had a real World War II German pistol, or that my mother, a language teacher, was sometimes asked to interpret Spanish in court, I would say, “I have a crazy aunt.” Top that if you can.
Then one summer my father needed an operation that had to be performed at a famous clinic in Kansas. My
mother was going with him and, for lack of any other place, I would board with my aunt for the three weeks my parents were to be gone.
Everything was arranged swiftly. Time was important for my father and so my parents saw me off on the bus to my aunt’s on the same day they flew to Kansas. “You’ll be all right, darling?” my mother said.
I hung out the window, nodding, feeling a little numb. This would be my first real separation from my parents.
“Don’t forget to practice your clarinet,” my mother urged. I nodded again. My parents were both teachers and we lived a calm, ordered life. They had spoken to me about keeping to a schedule (go to bed on time, rise at a reasonable hour), being responsible (wash your dishes, don’t make work for your Aunt Clare), and doing such things as writing them regularly and practicing the clarinet an hour every day.
The bus started. “Good-bye.” I stretched out my hand, still not able to believe in my father’s illness. He was so large, so robust, so healthy-looking with his square tortoiseshell glasses and his firm paunch beneath a green shirt. He waved to me—they both did, my mother throwing kisses—until the bus turned the corner.
My aunt met me at the bus station. Had she had a large sign on her chest with her name, CRAZY CLARE, painted on it, I would not have recognized her any more swiftly. As I stepped into the smoky station and looked around at the crowds milling between the doors, I saw her at once. A long-faced woman wearing a full orange skirt made of some crinkly papery material and a pink T-shirt with red letters: BURNING BUSH BANK CELEBRATES. On her feet, sneakers and white ankle socks. I stood frozen, clutching my suitcase, but she had spotted me.
“Phoebe? You look just like Sally.” I nodded mutely, and followed her out into the street. “It’s not a long walk. Do you mind?” I walked next to her, but not quite, a half-step behind, as if I really weren’t with her. She moved along briskly. I kept stealing glances. Her eyes were huge and dark, and her hair, with an astounding energy of its own, sprang out in sharp crackling curls all over her head. She had two or three combs stuck in here and there, but none seemed to have the least effect in keeping her hair tamed.
It was her eyes I kept returning to, somehow unlike the eyes of any adult I knew. They were full of a shimmering, moving light, and at the same time were so deeply black that I, at once, remembered a moment, long ago, when I had gazed into the long, secret depths of a well. I must have been very small. I remembered the beating of my heart as I stared into the thick, dark waters, and then my mother’s hands lifting me up, taking me away from the danger.
Clare lived in the attic apartment of an old wooden building on Greene Street. We went up three flights of roofed-over outside steps, past other people’s back porches. To my surprise, the apartment—three very small rooms—was furnished in a decorous, almost timid manner: a worn couch and two chairs facing each other in a perfect little square, the bed made up with a wrinkleless tufted spread, the Formica kitchen table holding only a red plastic napkin holder and a pair of glass salt and pepper shakers. I suppose I had thought I would step into some wild Halloween disorder.
“Are you hungry?” Clare said. We had hardly spoken on the walk from the bus station. “I bet you’re hungry.”
I shook my head and put down my suitcase and clarinet. My mother had packed me a lunch, but sheer terror of what lay ahead had destroyed my appetite.
“Well, then,” she said, sitting up very straight across from me at the kitchen table. “So you’re Phoebe, my baby niece.”
“Yes,” I said miserably. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It seemed impossible that I would find anything to ever say until the long, long three weeks of my stay were over.
I watched Clare carefully, waiting for her to make her craziness known. I sat on the edge of the chair, only my toes meeting the floor, ready for flight. I expected anything: At any moment might she not spring up and whirl around the room screeching in a language no one had ever heard? Or, eyes glittering, leap at me with the knife she had taken up to slice into a hunk of cheese?
“Umm, good,” she said, patting her belly. “Want some?”
Cautiously, I ate a bit of the cheese (afraid to keep saying no) and when, in a while, she said maybe I should go to bed, the trip must have been tiring, I rose with relief, my knees limp. Yes, she was right, I was exhausted.
Lying in the unfamiliar bed, clutching a sneaker as a weapon, and listening to the unfamiliar noises of the street far below, I longed with a hot, excruciating ache in my chest for my own room with its shelves full of books and model planes, its soft shaggy yellow rug, and the poster of Amelia Earhart in her flier’s cap, on the wall opposite my bed, where I could see her clear, brave flier’s eyes the moment I woke up.
I had often told myself to be brave like Amelia. Whenever something difficult faced me—a test, a dentist’s appointment, a fight with a friend—I whispered my secret words. Amelia Earhart … Amelia Earhart … In the last year or so I had become aware that, while I lived with my parents in a kind of calm sea of love and safety, the world at large was a different affair, a boiling ocean with scummy, white-capped waves. Still, it had had nothing to do with me. Until now. Suddenly, it seemed, I had been dumped into that ocean. Sink or swim.
I planned to stay awake and alert all night. No knowing what a crazy person would do. At every sound the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. Floors groaned, the walls rustled, and outside my room I heard Clare walking and muttering to herself. My hand was rigid on the sneaker. I still held it when I woke in the morning.
I lay in bed for a while, listening. The quiet disturbed me as much as the sounds of the night before. Tiptoeing, I cracked open the door and peeked into the kitchen. No Clare. My heart pounding, I shuffled silently across the cool linoleum to the living room. No Clare. She was gone. Or was she? I stared at a closed closet door. Was she hiding inside? That would certainly be a crazy thing to do.
Wiping my hands on my pajamas, I called, “Clare? Aunt Clare?” I knocked on the door. “Hiii!” I said in an extra-friendly way. “I’m up. You in there?” I waited a moment, then gripped the knob. “I’m going to open the door now,” I said in a loud, bright voice. “Okay? I’m going to open it. Ready or not,” I called coyly, and yanked the door open.
Hangers clanked in the draft. A raincoat and a hooded sweat shirt nodded peacefully. On the floor high rubber boots, red sneakers, and two pairs of scuffed oxfords were lined up in precise rows. An umbrella leaned against the wall.
Clare was definitely gone. But suddenly I had another disturbing idea. What if she had locked me in? I rushed to the front door. It was locked! I yanked at it, my hands slippery on the knob. Then, after a moment of panic and hard breathing, I saw a key on a nail. A little round tag attached to it said PHOEBE. I put it into the keyhole and unlocked the door. The hall was dim, the staircase shadowy. Was someone breathing quietly out there? Quickly, I locked myself in again.
“At least I know you’re not hiding in here, Aunt Clare,” I said. The sound of my own voice comforted me. “I’m hungry,” I said out loud, going into the kitchen. “What do you have to eat?”
Not much. A chunk of stale bologna, last night’s cheese, two black, overripe bananas that went to mush in my hands when I peeled them, a box of crackers, and a pot of cold congealed oatmeal. Well, I was hungry enough to eat anything, but crazy people stories were crackling in my head: razor blades in Halloween apples, poisoned milk, mice in soup.
I tackled one of the black bananas, broke the soft fruit into mushy chunks and, after smelling it, ate it cautiously with little motions of teeth and tongue, probing for poison, for splinters of metal. I finished off the second banana, then ate the crackers, pawing them out of the box and washing them down with water.
I brushed my teeth, dressed, made the bed, and wrote my parents a letter about how much fun the bus trip had been. “Aunt Clare is very—” I paused, then wrote “—unusual and interesting. This morning for breakfast I had sliced bananas and all the Ritz crackers I
could eat, two of my favorite things!” I wrote large and filled an entire page, putting in lots of exclamation points so they’d know I was happy, and not worry.
I played my clarinet for a while; at home my father always put his hands over his ears when I hit a bad note, and groaned loudly.
I drifted around the apartment, breathing heavily. Not even noon yet. The air inside was dim, stuffy. Dust danced in the windows. Drifting past the tiny kitchen window, I saw a boy in red shorts down below in the backyard. He squatted, grabbed a set of barbells, and lifted. Squinting my eyes, I imagined I could see the sheen of sweat on his bare smooth chest. He had long legs.
“Yum yum, cutesy legs,” I said. It was strange watching him and knowing he didn’t know he was being watched. Once a girl friend and I had screamed at a strange boy, “You are sexy and adorable!” Then we had run away, laughing and gasping and hitting each other on the arms.
I was lying on the bed, wishing I were someplace else, when I heard noises in the hall. I sat up, grabbed a sneaker, then a book. My heart shoved up into my throat. Scuffling noises at the door. Door opening. Voices—one loud and nasty, one high and ironic. I slid my legs off the bed. Lock myself in? Confront them? Throw the book at one intruder and hit the other in the belly with my sneaker? Gulping, clutching sneaker and book, I shuffled toward the kitchen.
My aunt appeared, holding a grocery bag and talking to herself. “Just do that over again, will you, dear?” (The loud, nasty voice.) “Do it over? Why certainly, madam. Anything you say, madam.” (The high ironic voice.) “I hate to ask you this, dear …” “Oh, I know how you hate to ask me anything. You’re every inch consideration.” Over the top of the grocery bag her face worked: she scowled, twisted her lips, flared her nostrils scornfully. Expressions flashed, one after the other, like storm clouds across the sky.
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