by Janet Beard
She could have nothing to do with the other roommate, Lizbeth, however. It was such a horrible coincidence. She’d recognized the girl as soon as they met; Lizbeth had lived a town over from Cici growing up, and she remembered her from summer revivals. Lizbeth had never let on that she recognized Cici, so it was quite possible she didn’t remember. Still, it made Cici nervous; she’d told everyone she met here that she was from Nashville, and Lizbeth might figure out the truth. Cici tried to stay away from her and always treated her coldly. She felt bad about this, but it couldn’t be helped. Besides, everyone over in Lewis County was trash. Luckily, Lizbeth didn’t spend much time in the dorm. Cici usually had the room all to herself when she got home from work. Today, though, June was there, eagerly waiting for her, like a little dog.
“Hi, Cici!” June called out as she came through the door. “I’m so glad you’re home. I’ve been dying to talk to someone all day!”
Cici began peeling off her boots. “The work’s pretty boring, huh?”
“I thought I was going to lose my mind! What do you do to make the time go by?”
“I don’t know,” said Cici as she sat down on the bed. “Think about what I’m going to do when I get off work, I guess.”
“Do you want to go get some dinner?” June asked.
“Yes, just give me a minute to put myself together.”
Cici had put a small mirror on the wall over the dresser the girls shared. She went to it now and examined her face to determine what needed to be done. Powder, definitely; the wintry weather was turning her face red. A bit of eye shadow, but not too much; she wanted to look polished, not garish. And lipstick, always.
June was chatty all through dinner. She talked about her family back on their farm and all the mud and dust in town and how many choices there were in the cafeteria. She ate as she talked, wolfing down macaroni and cheese. Cici was surprised to see such a skinny girl eat so much. Some girls are just lucky, she supposed; though really, June was too thin, scrawny, like a tomboy, and she had hardly any bust. Cici was lucky in that department. She had a full bosom, a tiny waist, and long, long legs.
When they finished eating, Cici suggested they go bowling. June giggled. “I’ve never been bowling!”
“Oh, June, that’s so cute! You’re such a sweet country girl.” Of course Cici had never been bowling before she moved to Nashville either.
All the way to the bowling alley, June kept talking. “So do you work at the same kind of machine as me, turning the knobs and watching the meters?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, you get used to it.”
“Do you ever wonder what the machines are doing?”
“June, it’s not safe to talk about that kind of thing!” Cici looked around to make sure no one could hear them.
“No one’s around. Don’t you wonder?”
“No! And you shouldn’t wonder either.”
Finally June was quiet.
The bowling alley was crowded, and Cici looked for boys they could play against. Bowling was an excellent chance to show off your figure while acting helpless—troubled by the heavy ball, confused by the score pad. Of course June really was troubled and confused by it all. She looked a bit stunned by the noise and commotion. Cici went first and showed her how to hold the ball. But June’s first attempt wound up in the gutter—and her second, third, and fourth. She was getting discouraged and Cici was getting bored when a group of four soldiers took the lane beside them.
June sent her fifth ball immediately into the gutter and trudged back to try again. Cici saw the boys looking over at them. June plopped the ball right into the gutter again and gave Cici a miserable look. Cici went to the front of the lane and stood up straight with the ball in front of her, chest forward, head high. She didn’t have to turn around to know that at least one of the soldiers was taking a good look. Gracefully pulling her arm back, she released the ball. Five pins went down. As Cici waited for her ball, she told June, “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it. It just takes practice, is all.” Then she scored a spare.
June clapped for her politely, then got up to face failure once again. As she walked forward, Cici turned around toward the soldiers, who were still setting up and lacing their shoes. “Say,” she said loudly, and all four of them turned. “I don’t suppose any of you could help my friend? It’s her first time bowling, and I think she needs a good lesson.”
They all scrambled to speak at once. “I could show her!” “I’ve been bowling for years.” “Anything for you, gorgeous.”
Cici smiled graciously. “Why don’t we all play together?” she asked. By the time June came back to sit down, their game was over, and Cici had moved into the boys’ lane.
Two of the boys were demonstrating their bowling technique to June, while the other two were staring at Cici. “Poor thing,” she said, watching her friend, and in a loud whisper continued, “she just lost her fella overseas.” She hoped this would quickly circulate through all four soldiers, while she made up her mind which one to go after. The two boys nodded solemnly and gave June sympathetic looks when she came back to sit down again.
By the end of the evening, June had learned to bowl, and Cici had made a date for Saturday night with the best-looking soldier of the group.
***
JUNE HAD AN alarm clock, but her eyes flipped open automatically anyway at 6:29. She blinked in the darkness. She’d been dreaming about work, the meters and the dials. But there was something else in her dream that gave her an uneasy feeling. She tried to recapture the images before she was too awake to remember. She’d been in Y-12 on her stool, turning the knobs, but someone else had been there, too. Ronnie. It came back to her in a flash, and she wished she hadn’t remembered after all. Ronnie had been alive and talking to her, trying to distract her from her work, teasing her like he always did.
Ronnie was gone, she thought. How far gone? she questioned the darkness around her. Gone, echoed the dark corners of the room. He is dead, and you didn’t love him, and she knew then that this thought had lodged in her brain and would come up again and again for the rest of the day.
The problem with the work was the monotony. She tried to force her thoughts in positive directions, but it was a struggle with no distractions, nothing to focus on. She tried to plan a birthday present for her mother or imagine a radio drama in her mind. A wealthy New York socialite on a pleasure safari in darkest Africa is separated from her much older husband and the rest of her party save for the rough and worldly adventurer who’s been leading them through the jungle. How were they separated? Perhaps a lion attacked their camp in the night. She saw blood and bones, ripped shreds of clothing, and winced, not wishing such a gruesome fate on the socialite’s dull but kind husband. Maybe a tribe of cannibals captured the lady and the adventurer, though of course he would arrange for their escape in no time. Coming up with details helped kill the time. On the evening of the capture, the socialite would be wearing a smart khaki suit, with a wide collar and pleated skirt. She was an icy blonde with blue eyes. The adventurer was dark, of course, strong and wild-eyed. Clark Gable. The radio drama now a cinema spectacular. The cannibals were dancing and chanting around the two of them, who had been tied to a tree. But Clark had already managed to undo the knots in the ropes binding their hands.
Then it was lunchtime, and June let the blessed respite of conversation, giggling, and gossip wash over her. By evening, the socialite and Clark Gable would be making love on a steamer bound for New York, the husband having conveniently succumbed to an unidentified tropical disease as they’d made their way through the jungle. (Much more humane than death as a lion’s dinner, June thought.)
By June’s fourth week at work, she barely registered the meters at all. She kept her eyes on them constantly and somehow her mind identified where they were pointing, but it had become subconscious; turning the knobs, an automatic reflex. She got into a routine; the first few hours would be interminably long and she’d alternate between making up grand s
tories of adventure and counting the minutes, happily marking the hours as they passed, eagerly calculating when she had made it halfway to lunch, two-thirds of the way to the end of the day. Lunch would refresh her spirits, and every day when she left, she’d feel a great surge of relief, as well as the smaller, dull dread of having to do it all again tomorrow.
Not that it was always boring. Occasionally the machines would start going haywire, the meters flipping back and forth wildly. Her mind would snap back into focus, her daydreams ending abruptly, and she’d have to devote herself to keeping the controls steady. Sometimes this lasted for hours.
They had been told not to wear hairpins, and on June’s third day, it became obvious why. One girl had forgotten, and when she sat down at her cubicle, the pins actually flew out of her hair. She began screaming, and Miss Collins rushed over and told her to hush. “Everyone, get to work,” she growled as the girl whimpered.
A thought occurred to June that day—magnets. Her mother had a jewelry box with a magnetic lid, and June had played with it as a child. The way the lid grabbed a needle from her fingers was not unlike how the machine yanked out the girl’s hairpin. It was like they were dealing with giant magnets.
In less hectic moments, it was a struggle not only to keep her thoughts in line but sometimes just to stay awake. She frequently let Cici talk her into staying out too late at dances and could never sleep quite through the night in their little dorm room. If the sounds of the other girls didn’t keep her awake, the sounds of the town would. Some nights she could hear construction noises off in the distance, and every night she could hear the roller rink, which was just next door. Since people worked around the clock, everything in Oak Ridge was open twenty-four hours, including the roller rink. As she stared at the meters after a sleepless night, her eyelids would feel heavy and begin to drop over her eyes. She would open them as wide as she could and stare straight ahead until they started drooping again. At all costs, she had to avoid letting her head nod. If Miss Collins saw that, she’d be in hot water for sure.
But as the days passed, work became more bearable. Time didn’t seem to drag as much the more time went by. The girls became less shy around each other, and before and after work they talked and laughed like old friends. Most of them were local girls like June, and this was their first time away from home. Sally, a plump redhead with rosy cheeks, was stationed at the next cubicle down from June, and they usually sat together at lunch. It was a casual friendship; Sally loved to laugh and gossip. Before June had even figured out who the other girls were, Sally was already filling her in on their backgrounds and love lives. When it came to her own love life, Sally was shy, and June suspected that she’d never had a boyfriend.
The girls ignored the training talk they’d been given in the bullpen and flirted whenever a male was present. There were usually engineers and scientists in the lunchroom, and though they kept to their own tables, the more outgoing girls always found a way to strike up conversations. June and Sally stayed in the corner, far away from the action and free to observe. June was developing a deep respect for Cici’s talents as she watched these less skilled young ladies bat their eyes and giggle in such an obvious way. Cici somehow never looked like she was the one pursuing a conversation; even if June knew Cici’d had her eye on a fellow, she always made it seem like he was the one seeking her out. Compared to her, the girls at work overdid it and looked desperate. Not that the men seemed to mind. For the most part, they delighted in the female attention.
“Afternoon, Dr. Thomas,” Mary Lee, one of the worst of the flirts, would say to the same tall engineer every day at lunch. Her smile showed off badly crooked teeth, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“How are you today, Mary Lee?”
“Not too bad, I reckon. You save me a spot over there?”
Every day he saved her a spot, and she slid beside him on the end of a table filled with his colleagues. They watched her with bemused smiles, nudging one another, chuckling. “Ooh, I’m getting awful thirsty!” Mary Lee said one day. “Can I have a sip of your Coca-Cola?”
Dr. Thomas slid the bottle over to her. She leaned over the table, pursed her lips on the straw, and sucked in an over-the-top way, so that her cheeks became hollow. When she removed her mouth, the straw was painted in bloodred lipstick.
June watched from the line. She walked quickly past their table with her tray to find Sally, and as she did, she noticed for the first time that Dr. Thomas was wearing a wedding ring.
Not all men responded to the likes of Mary Lee. Some of the older married men kept to themselves, away from the girls. One man in particular always ate alone, the same dark-haired scientist June had noticed on her first day. She often saw him in the corridors or the lunchroom and had overheard someone call him Dr. Cantor. He seemed important, or maybe it just looked that way because of how he always ate alone, apart from his nudging, chuckling colleagues. No girls ever bothered flirting with him, though he was handsome in a thin, disheveled way. But something in his demeanor signaled that he was too serious for flirting, and they would only be wasting their time. June would watch him eat a tuna sandwich, quickly with determination, as though, like someone out of a propaganda poster, he couldn’t wait to get back to his work. He must be very smart and well educated. She wondered if he had a girlfriend and where he was from. What did a man like him do when his shift was over? Surely he didn’t go bowling or to the roller rink. It was even hard to imagine someone so somber at the cinema, but then again, everyone went to the pictures, didn’t they? What would it be like to run into him outside of the cavernous factory? He would never speak to her. Why would a man like that ever speak to her? Why was she even thinking about it?
Even though work was getting better, come the end of her shift, June was always ready to leave. Her main objective when she was outside of Y-12 was to try to forget about the place until the next day, and her favorite method of forgetting was the movies. She had been to the cinema only a handful of times as a child; the fact that she could go whenever she wanted in Oak Ridge was thrilling. As soon as a new picture arrived at the cinema, June had to see it. Even when the movie wasn’t very good, she was happy to be there. She loved everything about the experience. A big marquee over the theater read: RIDGE THEATRE: PERFECT PICTURES FOR PARTICULAR PEOPLE. She would settle into the velvet seats and enveloping darkness and get lost in the flicker of images on the screen, the beautiful stars in their beautiful gowns, the dancing or shooting, depending on whether it was a musical or a Western. Most of all, she loved not having to think about dials, meters, war, or Ronnie.
Cici didn’t share June’s enthusiasm for the cinema. She preferred dances, bowling, roller skating—any activity which could be combined with flirting. June didn’t mind; she liked to be alone at the movies. Besides, most nights she accompanied Cici anyway, except for when her roommate had dates. June liked the dances more than she had expected. There was a heady excitement to being in a room with so many young people, listening to fast-paced swing music. Cici was always fun, full of energy, jitterbugging, bringing over boys. They were always nice to June but clearly more interested in Cici. But June’s feelings weren’t hurt; it was a relief to not have to worry about flirting, which she didn’t know how to do anyway. Occasionally a boy would ask her to dance, and she found it wasn’t as scary as she’d initially thought. Most of them would lead her along, spinning her once in a while, smiling when she went off in the wrong direction, and she always wound up laughing. Besides, the music was so infectious that she couldn’t help but move in time to the rhythm. Almost every evening was occupied by such parties or movies, and June enjoyed the constant motion of it.
Cici had a strict regimen for attending dances, which she tried to teach to June. It was essential, she said, to bring a nice pair of shoes to change into out of your boots once you got to the dance. June still had only one pair of shoes and was planning to spend her first paycheck on desperately needed boots to contend with the Oak Ridge mud. Cici,
meanwhile, confided that she had saved up two weeks’ worth of salary to purchase her collection of makeup, perfume, nail polish, and curlers. She would spend a good fifteen minutes applying makeup before she went out, which June found incredible, since Cici was so naturally good-looking. She said as much to Cici one evening, and her roommate laughed. “You may think I’m beautiful, but this takes work.”
The bulk of Cici’s admirers were soldiers stationed here in Oak Ridge, so there was no fear of them having to go overseas, at least for the time being. Cici didn’t seem to spend much time with any one of them; she was always searching for someone better. The only one so far who had made an impression on June was a soldier named Bob. He’d brought Cici a Hershey bar when he took her out, which she later gave two-thirds of to June, because she said she didn’t want to lose her figure. June devoured the chocolate, which only soldiers could get their hands on these days, and thought to herself that if she were Cici, she’d seriously consider marrying the man.
Other than going to the movies or dances with Cici, June spent most of her free time in lines. The lines that stretched along the boardwalks at Williams Drug Store and the A&P were more like huge human chains, the likes of which she had never seen before. Of course, once you got in the store, there was no guarantee that they would have what you wanted to buy. Because of the rationing, Oak Ridge couldn’t keep enough products for its booming population. June then had to stand in another line to drop off her laundry, which Cici warned her would take a week to get back. June would rather have just done her own laundry, but she would have to use the sink in the dormitory bathroom, which was tiny. Besides, there was another line of girls waiting to use it. The cafeterias had lines, too, especially when shifts changed, and everyone in town headed for supper at the same time. Cici complained about the food, but June was in awe of the different choices she could have every night of the week. She’d never eaten spaghetti before, and delighted in twirling the strands around her fork and slurping down the red sauce.