Working With the Working Woman Part 2

So then, back that first day Lena asked, "Where'd ya work last?"

"Didn't work in a factory before."

"'Ain't ya?"

"No, I 'ain't." (Gulp.) "I took care of kids."

"Gee! but they was fresh."

"You said it!"

"Lena!" hollers Ida. "Get ta work and don't talk so much!" Whereat Lena gives me another poke in my cold ribs and departs. And Tessie and I pack "a.s.sorteds": four different chocolates in the bottom of each box, four still different ones in the top-about three hundred and fifty boxes on our table. We puff and labor on the top layer and Ida breezes along. "My Gawd! Look at that! Where's your cardboards?"

Tessie and I look woebegone at one another. Cardboards? Cardboards?

Ida glues her Eyetalian eye on Lena down the line. "Lena, you fool, didn't you tell these here girls about cardboards?... My Gawd! My Gawd!" says Ida. Whereat she dives into our belabored boxes and grabs those ached-over chocolates and hurls them in a pile. "Get all them top ones out. Put in cardboards. Put 'em all in again." Tessie and I almost could have wept. By that time it is about 4. We are all feet, feet, FEET. First I try standing on one foot to let the other think I might really, after all, be sitting down. Then I stand on it and give the other a delusion. Then try standing on the sides, the toes, the heels. FEET! "Ach! Mein Gott!" moans Tessie. "To-morrow I go look for a job in a biscuit factory."

"Leave me know if you get a sit-down one."

And in that state-FEET-Ida makes us pack over the whole top layer in three hundred and fifty boxes. Curses on Lena and her "dopes." Or curses on me that I could so suddenly invent such picturesque love affairs that Lena forgot all about cardboards.

About then my locker key falls through a hole in my waist pocket and on to the floor and out of sight. In the end it takes a broom handle poked about diligently under the bottom shelf of our table to make a recovery. Before the key appear chocolates of many shapes and sizes, long reposing in oblivion under the weighty table. The thrifty Spanish woman behind me gathers up all the unsquashed ones and packs them.

"Mus' be lots of chocolates under these 'ere tables, eh?" she notes wisely and with knit brows. As if to say that, were she boss, she'd poke with a broom under each and every bottom shelf and fill many a box.

At least my feet get a moment's rest while I am down on my hands and knees among the debris from under the tables.

By five o'clock Tessie thinks she'll throw up her job then and there.

"Ach! Ach! My feet!" she moans. I secretly plan to kill the next person who gives me a box of chocolate candy.

Surely it is almost 6.

Five minutes after 5.

The bell has forgotten to ring. It must be 7.

Quarter after 5.

Now for sure and certain it is midnight.

Half-past 5.

My earrings begin to hurt. You can take off earrings. But FEET-

Tessie says she's eaten too many candies; her stomach does her pain.

Her feet aren't so hurting now her _magen_ is so bad. I couldn't eat another chocolate for five dollars, but my stomach refused to feel in any way that takes my mind in the least off my feet.

Eternity has pa.s.sed on. It must be beyond the Judgment Day itself.

Ten minutes to 6.

When the bell does ring I am beyond feeling any emotion. There is no part of me with which to feel emotion. I am all feet, and feet either do not feel at all or feel all weary unto death. During the summer I had played one match in a tennis tournament 7-5, 5-7, 13-11. I had thought I was ready to drop dead after that. It was mere knitting in the parlor compared to how I felt after standing at that table in that candy factory from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., with a bit of a half-hour's sitting at noon.

Somehow you could manage to endure it all if it were not for the crowning agony of all-standing up on the Subway going home. I am no aggressive feminist, and I am no old-fas.h.i.+oned clinging vine, but I surely do hate, hate, hate every man in that Subway who sits back in comfort (and most of them look as if they had been sitting all day) while I and my feet stand up. When in my utter anguish I find myself swaying with the jerks and twists of the express in front of a person with a Vand.y.k.e beard reading _The Gospel According to St. John_, I long with all the energy left in me (I still have some in my arms) to grab that book out of his hands, fling it in his face, and hiss, "Hypocrite!" at him. I do not believe I ever knew what it was really and honestly to hate a person before. If it had been the _Police Gazette_ I could have borne up under it. But _The Gospel According to St. John_-my Gawd!

Thus ends my first factory day. It is small comfort to calculate I stepped on more chocolates in those nine hours than I usually eat in a year. To be sure, it was something new on the line of life's experiences. If that man in front of me were only a chocolate with soft insides and I could squash him flat! Yes, there was enough energy in my feet for that. To get my heel square above him and then _stamp_-ugh! the sinner! He continues reading _The Gospel According to St. John_, nor so much as looks up to receive my last departing glare as I drag myself off at 116th Street.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, the next morning my feet feel as if they had never been stood on before. What if we do have to stand up in the Subway all the way down? Who minds standing in the Subway? And then stand in the jammed and elbowing cross-town car. Who cares? And how we do walk up those factory steps as if we owned the world! The chestiness of us as we take our key off left-hand hook 1075, ring up under the clock (twenty minutes early we are) and hang up on No. 1075 right; but it seems you are late if you are not ten minutes early. It is the little tricks like that you get wise about.

I saunter over to the elevator with a jam of colored girls-the majority of the girls in that factory were colored. I call out, "Third, please." Oh, glory be! Why were we ever born? That elevator man turns around and pierces me with his eye as though I were the man with the Vand.y.k.e beard in the Subway, and he, the elevator man, were I. "_Third_ floor did ya say? And since when does the elevator lift ya to the _third_ floor? If ya want the sixth floor ya can ride.

_Third_ floor! My Gawd! _Third_ floor!" And on and on he mutters and up and up I go, all the proud feelings of owning the world stripped from me-exposed before the mult.i.tudes as an ignoramus who didn't know any better than to ride in the elevator when she was bound only for the third floor. "_Third_ floor," continues muttering the elevator man. At last there is no one left in the elevator but the muttering man and me. "Well," I falter, chewing weakly on my Black Jack, "What shall I do, then?"

"I'll leave ya off at the third this time, but don't ya try this trick again."

"Again? Goodness! You don't think I'd make this mistake twice, do you?"

"_Twice?_" he bellows. "_Twice?_ Didn't I have this all out with ya yesterday mornin'?"

"Goodness, no!" I try to a.s.sure him, but he is putting me off at third and calling after me: "Don't I know I did tell ya all this yesterday mornin'? And don't ya forget it next time, neither." It must be awful to be that man's wife. But I love him compared to the Vand.y.k.e beard in the Subway reading _The Gospel According to St. John_.

Everybody is squatting about on scant corners and ledges waiting for the eight o'clock bell. I squat next the thrifty Spanish lady, whereat she immediately begins telling me the story of her life.

"You married?" she asks. No. "Well don' you do it," says the fat and mussy Espaniole, as the girls called her. "I marry man-five years, all right. One morning I say, 'I go to church-you go too?' He say 'No, I stay home.' I go church. I come home. I fin' him got young girl there. I say, 'You clear out my house, you your young girl!' Out he go, she go. 'Bout one year 'go he say he come back. I say no you don'.

He beg me, beg me come home. I say no, no, no. He write me letter, letter, letter. I say no, no, no. Bymby I say alright, you come live my house don't you _touch_ me, hear? Don' you _touch_ me. He live one room, I live one room. He no touch me. Two weeks 'go he die. Take all my money, put him in cemetery. I have buy me black waist, black skirt.

I got no money more. I want move from that house-no want live that house no more-give me bad dreams. I got no money move. Got son thirteen. He t'ink me fool have man around like that. I no care. See he sen's letter, letter, letter. Now I got no money. I have work." The bell rings. We s.h.i.+ver ourselves into the ice box.

No Tessie across the table. Instead a strange, unkempt female who sticks it out half an hour, announces she has the chills in her feet, and departs. Her place is taken by a slightly less disheveled young woman who claims she'd packed candy before where they had seats and she thought she'd go back. They paid two dollars less a week, but it was worth two dollars to sit down. How she packs! The sloppiest work I ever saw. It outrages my soul. The thrill of new pride I have when Ida gets through swearing at her and turns to me.

"Keep your eye on this girl, will ya? Gee! she packs like a fright!"

And to the newcomer: "You watch that girl across the table" (me, she means-me!) "and do the way she does."

No first section I ever got in economics gave me such joy.

But, ah! the first feeling of industrial bitterness creeps in. Here is a girl getting fourteen dollars a week. Tessie was promised fourteen dollars a week. I packed faster, better, than either of them for thirteen dollars. I would have fourteen dollars, too, or know the reason why. Ida fussed and scolded over the new girls all day. The sweetness of her entire neglect of me!

By that noon my feet hardly hurt at all. I sit in a quiet corner to eat rye-bread sandwiches brought from home, gambling on whom I will draw for luncheon company. Six colored girls sit down at my table. A good part of the time they spend growling on the subject of overtime.

I am too new to know what it is all about.

The lunch room is a bare, whitewashed, huge affair, with uplifting advice on the walls here and there. "Any fool can take a chance; it takes brains to be careful," and such like. One got me all upset: "America is courteous to its women. Gentlemen will, therefore, please remove their hats in this room." That Vand.y.k.e beard in the Subway!

By 4.30 again I think my feet will be the death of me. That last hour and a half! Louie, the general errand boy of our packing room, brushes by our table with some trays and knocks about six of my carefully packed boxes on the floor. "You Louie!" I holler, and I long to have acquired the facility to call lightly after him, as anyone else would have done, "Say, you go to h.e.l.l!" Instead, mustering all the reserve force I can, the best showing I am able to make is, "You Louie! Go off and die!" I almost hold my own-468 boxes of "a.s.sorteds" do I pack.

And again the anguis.h.i.+ng stand in the Subway. I hate men-hate them. I just hope every one of them gets greeted by a nagging wife when he arrives home. Hope she nags all evening.... If enough of those wives really did do enough nagging, would the men thereupon stay downtown for dinner and make room in the Subway for folk who had been standing, except for one hour, from 7.15 A.M.? At last I see a silver lining to the dark cloud of marital unfelicity....

Lillian of the bright-pink boudoir cap engaged me in conversation this morning. Lillian is around the Indian summer of life-as to years, but not atmosphere. Lillian has seen better days. Makes sure you know it.

Never did a lick of work in her life. At that she makes a noise with her upper lip the way a body does in southern Oregon when he uses a toothpick after a large meal. "No, sir, never did a lick." Lillian says "did" and not "done." Practically no encouragement is needed for Lillian to continue. "After my husband died I blew in all the money he left me in two years. Since then I have been packing chocolates." How long ago was that?

"Five years."