When Justine heard the grinding noise of a heavy factory door opening, she panicked.
Not Charles. Don’t let it be Charles on his way out here. Not now.
She almost laughed when she realized that she had been wishing the exact opposite thing just a few moments before.
Justine was crouched on the pavement, her coveralls open to the waist on the very day she’d decided to leave off the blouse she usually wore under them, because she was tired of sweating through two layers of fabric. Today, there was nothing between her torso and the coveralls’ blue canvas but her bra. A cool breeze tickled the skin of her chest and belly as she yanked the mysterious screen out of its frame. The pocketknife and wrench she’d used to bust its frame clattered to the ground, forgotten. She had less than a minute before the person who opened the factory door reached the trash pen and opened its gate.
It was imperative that she hide the screen. She bent it in half lengthwise, stopping just short of creasing it, because it would be self-defeating to obliterate its message while she was trying to save it. Then she held it up to the front of her body.
Yep. It would fit.
Steady footsteps grew closer, and she knew that somebody else with a crate full of trash was coming fast. Or maybe it was the person who had punched the holes in this screen. It could even be Charles, looking for her, and she was at grave risk of him finding her squatting on the ground, half-dressed.
Grateful that she was flat-chested enough that nobody would notice a change in her shape, Justine clasped the bent screen flat against her abdomen and started to button.
By the time she reached the third button from the top, she wasn’t sure the coveralls were going to close. The clomping sound of boots on pavement grew louder and closer. Mashing the screen harder against her body, she felt its jagged edges gouge her tender skin, but she kept pulling. Turning her back to the gate to gain one more second before an interloper caught her exposing herself in the trash pen, she yanked one more time and got the next button through its buttonhole. The top one was a lost cause, but maybe people would just think she was trying to be alluring.
Straightening up carefully, because every last raw edge of the piece of screening was digging into her flesh, she scooped up her knife and wrench. Hurrying, she shoved them into their respective pockets and faced the gate with a bright smile. Justine hoped the smile said, “Hi! Good to see you among the garbage. I have absolutely no ulterior motive for loitering here!”
A beefy face crowned by a bright red brush of close-cropped hair appeared at the opening gate. “Hey, Justine,” Martin said. He stood outside the trash pen holding a wooden crate piled high with scrap metal that easily outweighed the load she’d just dumped by a factor of three.
His voice was several decibels softer than his usual bellow. Martin always spoke to Justine this way, and Georgette said it was because he liked her.
“Hey, Martin,” she said. She wished he were Charles, but she was also glad he wasn’t, since she was moving like a woman wearing an awkward grid of metal wire pressed against her chest.
Martin didn’t seem to notice. He hurried to dump his trash and toss the empty crate on the pile where it belonged. Then he stopped lumbering around like a nervous bear and said, again, “Hey, Justine.”
He reached out a hand like a bear paw and cupped her elbow with it, gently. Then they walked together back to the factory door, and they did it slowly, because Martin wanted to tell Justine how pretty she was.
***
Stepping back inside the factory building after being in the cool, quiet outdoors was like being dropped into a steel barrel being pounded by a million hammers. The air around Justine was full of sounds, all of them percussive or grinding or sharp or all three, and it smelled like diesel exhaust and bearing grease. How was it that she stopped noticing the din and the smells every day after a quarter-hour on the job? She spent her workdays breathing fumes and surrounded by jolting noise, having casual conversations at the top of her lungs for hours on end, and this situation was just…normal. Could human beings truly get used to anything?
For the few minutes before adaptation set in, she would hear the racket, so Justine took a second as she and Martin entered the plant to listen to sledgehammers pounding sheet metal into shape. She heard circular saws shrieking their way through plywood. Cranes whined in the background. Overlaying it all was the sound of human voices trying to be heard in the ruckus. The factory was so loud that Martin had stopped trying to talk to Justine the second they stepped through the door, and she was embarrassed to realize that she was relieved.
She found it much easier to talk to Charles. He had interests and he was willing to talk about them. Some of them were the same as hers, books and music. Some of them—football, for instance—weren’t, but he was interesting when he talked about them. He also seemed to like movies, and she thought it was altogether possible that he was gearing up to ask her to see one with him. Or she had thought so until he didn’t show up to help her with her trash dumping.
Martin, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have much to say to Justine other than, “You’re pretty.” These were words that she hadn’t heard a lot, so she wouldn’t have thought that it was so easy to get tired of hearing them.
They walked a few steps into the plant in silence, then Martin stopped walking. He looked like a man who had no talent for conversation but who nevertheless still wanted to say something. He grabbed her hand and tugged it, signaling that he’d like to step back outside.
As they passed back through the door, he leaned down and yelled in her ear. “Will you get in trouble if we stay out here for five minutes and just…you know…talk?”
This was a new development. Maybe he really did have things to say to her and he’d just been saving them up. She shook her head and said, “No, I won’t get in trouble, as long as I’m just a few minutes late. I’m not sure Sonny can actually tell time.” Then she followed him back outside, wondering if maybe she liked this man after all. It was a shock to realize how deeply she desired a man in her life who wanted to talk to her.
Martin closed the door behind him, then leaned up against it and crossed his arms. Justine could be oblivious, but she knew why he’d chosen that spot to lean on. Nobody could come out the door and interrupt them without him having at least a split second of warning.
Without looking at her, Martin started to speak. “I’m glad to be working here because I like being able to eat, but I don’t like working here. You know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Justine said, wondering if she was supposed to say more than that.
“I just—I just don’t know if this is the way I’m supposed to spend my time. I mean—” Finally, he looked at her and, for the first time, she noticed the fine lines beneath his freckles and wondered how old Martin was. There had to be a reason he wasn’t off fighting the war, so maybe he was too old to serve, but how old was that? She had no idea.
The harsh sun lit Martin’s lines and creases and golden-red eyelashes, and she used the moment to study his face. She hoped that this would help her understand what he was trying to say. And why he was saying it to her.
He tried again. “We only get seventy years. Eighty, if we’re lucky. Maybe ninety, but I’ve seen ninety-year-olds. I’m not sure I wanna say that living to be ninety is a lucky thing.”
Justine still wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say, so she said the only thing she could think of. “I wish my parents had gotten more years than they did.”
“Exactly,” he said, and now she saw a light in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “If your parents could come back, how would they spend their time? Working? Or enjoying life? Mr. Higgins doesn’t pay better wages than everybody else because he loves us and wants us to be happy. He pays us what it takes to make himself richer every day, and he doesn’t pay us a cent more. That’s what you call capitalism, and capitalists stand on the backs of people like you and me.”
So Martin had been going to political meetings. Or reading. Justine had underestimated him.
She had some thoughts about her answer to his question about how her parents would spend their time if they could have more of it, but she could see that he wasn’t finished. Martin wasn’t a talker, but he was apparently more of a thinker than she’d believed.
The words came out of him like an explosion. “Why should I spend my time on this earth cleaning up after people who are building machines to blow other people up? I don’t even know those people. Maybe they’re not evil. Maybe the newspaper people and the radio people are just telling me things to make me hate people I don’t even know. How could I tell if they were?”
He stopped to breathe and to give her an intense look she didn’t understand. Then the torrent of words resumed.
“Why shouldn’t I spend my time doing things that make me happy, and to hell with everything else? Don’t you think your parents would have rather spent the time they had enjoying it? Instead, I bet your father went off to work every livelong day and then came home to cut the grass. And I bet your mother spent her life cleaning things that just got dirty again. They were dirty again a day after she left this earth. Am I right?”
Her father hadn’t come home to mow the grass since she was twelve, because Justine had taken over the job, but this was not pertinent to Martin’s question. And she did know the answer to this question.
“My parents loved their work. They would have done it for free. After I was born, my mother did do it for free. They thought the work was important, but they didn’t think that it was the only thing that was important. They told me, and I believed them, that they also loved our time together at home, including the housecleaning and the yard work. Even after she lost her sight, my mother took a lot of pride in keeping our home comfortable and clean. Having fun is great, but people who can’t enjoy doing the everyday things aren’t ever going to be happy.”
His glance was sharp as he looked at her, and this made Martin look nothing like the affable lunk that he pretended to be. And his lunkishness was a pretense. Justine was sure of it now, but she didn’t know why he would pretend to be something he wasn’t. She did know that glimpsing the depths of the man beneath the pretense intrigued her. It attracted her, and this was a surprise to Justine.
“But this job?” he asked. “You’re happy being a cog in a wheel? When you’re on your deathbed, are you really going to say, ‘I never saw the pyramids or a volcano, but I riveted together some bombs and they killed enough people to make somebody else’s soldiers stop killing ours?”
Justine wanted to tell him about her cousin Fred in the South Pacific. She wanted to tell him about her parents’ friends who had written letters about the rise of the Nazis and then fell silent, leaving her mother weeping over their empty mailbox. She wanted to explain that her job was important, but she was stuck on the words “cog in a wheel.” And on the word “bomb.”
No. She didn’t want to be a cog in a wheel. She certainly didn’t want to blow people to bits. And, yes, she wanted to see the pyramids.
All she could say was, “I want…I don’t know what I want.”
Rather than press his point, he changed the subject and Justine was grateful.
“What did your father do for a living?”
“My parents were physicists. If Mama and Papa had lived, maybe their work would have finished the war already.”
“But what about this work here? What about the things we do for our paycheck?”
Justine pushed away the image of the laboratory where she’d imagined spending her working life. She shut out thoughts of finishing her workdays with enough energy for…for anything, really. Escaping her life as it was with somebody who wanted to see the pyramids sounded better than she would have expected.
Martin repeated his question. “But what about this work? Is there any way it will ever give you a life that will make you happy?”
Justine was too young to know that she didn’t have to answer a question just because someone asked it of her, so she answered him. She gave him an answer that she wasn’t sure she believed any longer.
“I guess I’m saying that there will be time for fun when the war is over. Right now, I’m happy to be doing my part to help the world make sense again.”
He nodded as if she’d given him the secret answer to everything.
“But is there any rule against fun?” he asked. “I mean, as long as you wait until you’ve done all the saving-the-world stuff a girl can manage in a day?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Then come dancing with me tonight,” he said.
Justine tried to remember her mother’s advice that she shouldn’t make herself available to a man on short notice, but it was very hard to say no to Martin, who had suddenly decided that he knew how to talk and that he liked doing it. He told her about the dance club where they could kick up their heels. He told her all about the hot band from somewhere out west that would only be playing one night. He made sure she knew that the bartender had a source for fine liquor, not the harsh stuff that wartime had forced on most drinking establishments.
Justine wasn’t sure that she wanted to go alone to a nightclub on the first date with this man she barely knew, but she didn’t know how to say so. She wasn’t sure if Martin could tell that this was bothering her, or whether he was taking a lucky shot in the dark, but she was ridiculously relieved when he gave her an odd, close look and said, “Would it sound more like fun if I talked to Jerry? Maybe see if he wants to ask Georgette? We could make it a double date.”
The words “Oh, yes, that sounds like a lot of fun,” came out all in a rush. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“That’ll be sweet,” he said. “Don’t you live somewhere near the St. Charles plant? That’s the bus I see you riding. The club opens at ten, but it’s a little bit of a walk from there. I’ll pick you up at nine thirty. Put your glad rags on, ’cause it’s a swanky place. You’re so serious, like somebody that needs a real good time. I’m gonna show you one.”
Then he looked her up and down, taking in the carbon dust caked on every visible square inch of skin, and said, “I think you’re gonna need a little time to get ready. Tell me where you live, and I’ll be there to pick you up at ten.”
Only when she’d given him her address did he stop leaning on the door that stood between the two of them and every human being for miles around.
***
Martin watched Justine pass through the door that separated the Carbon Division from the rest of the plant, and he thought, “You, my dear, were not made for this place. You’re not going to last long here. Not long at all.”
Then he went back to the kind of chore that filled his days, moving boxes from one part of the plant to another.