Back at the factory for another shift, Trudy found herself thinking about her father and how little she knew about him. She knew that his first name was Darren, but her mother refused to tell her his last name. She never understood why Claire protected him, why she wasn’t furious about being left alone with two kids. Trudy struggled to understand why, in fact, Claire still pined for him two decades later. “I’d have him back,” she would say, with that soft look on her face. That soft, crumbling, injured expression that was on her face most of the time. It was infuriating.
Trudy was pushing pillowcases through the machine, dropping them into the bin in a trance. She wondered what Darren was doing now, if he had kids with his actual wife. If they all got up every morning, went to school and work, came home and had dinner together in complete ignorance of his other offspring. She wondered if these imaginary kids were somehow better than Tammy and her. If they were finishing high school, playing sports, saving themselves for marriage or whatever. Probably. She wondered if it could possibly be true that Darren had loved Claire. That, as Claire claimed, he had loved Trudy and Tammy but had to do the right thing and go home. Coward. He was a coward, and her mother was, too. Trudy would have followed him home, toddlers in tow.
Or so she thought.
She liked to think of herself as tough, as a trailblazer, but maybe she was just a pushover like Claire. Look at her now, taking care of Tammy’s kid, working nights in the same shitty factory as her mother and every other loser in this town. It wasn’t as if she was setting the world on fire.
An empty serger spool hit Trudy in the back of the head and she flinched, pulling the pillowcase she was sewing to the side, the seam veering off the edge of the fabric. “Look alive, Johnson!” Trudy turned around to see Jeannie Burns leaning back in her chair, laughing along with the other hyenas in the fluorescent light of the sewing room. “You think you’re good, don’t you, Trudy?”
Here we go, thought Trudy. How was it possible for someone with absolutely nothing to do with your life to have such strong feelings about you? It had always been this way. Since they were little kids. Jeannie hated Trudy. Was it jealousy or just sport? Who knew? But it was time to shut it down. “Shut up, Jeannie.”
The other women turned back to their machines. Pretended to focus on their work.
“Not sure why you think you’re so great, Trudy. Slut for a mother, slut for a sister.”
Trudy lifted the foot on her machine, pulled the pillowcase out and cut the threads, reached for the seam ripper, and started to tear the seam out.
“You pretend to be so pure, Trudy, too stuck-up for guys around here. But I heard otherwise. I heard Jimmy Munro had you under the bleachers when you were fourteen. Said he couldn’t fight you off.”
“In his dreams.”
“More like a nightmare, if you ask me. He said you were like an octopus, hands everywhere. So desperate.”
Trudy threw the botched pillowcase on the floor. She got up from her chair and walked toward Jeannie’s station, not sure what she was going to do when she got there. Though Jeannie looked startled, she got up from her chair and braced herself. She stood tall, pressing her fists against her thighs. But Trudy could see them trembling. The radio, turned to the usual American station, was playing “Da Doo Ron Ron” by The Crystals. Trudy grabbed Jeannie’s wrist and twisted her arm behind her back. She put her other hand on her throat, pushed her thumb and forefinger into either side of her neck.
“You’re right, I am like a fucking octopus, Jeannie. See? And what are you like?” Trudy drove her knee into the back of Jeannie’s knees, so that she collapsed forward onto the ground, kneeling. “What are you like, Jeannie? Tell me.” Trudy was kneeling behind her on the hard cement floor, twisting her arm just a little further behind her back before releasing her. Shoving her forward onto the ground. “Nothing. That’s what you are.” Trudy dusted herself off and walked back to her machine. “And tell that fucking retard, Jimmy, to keep his mouth shut.”
Trudy’s hands shook as she fed another pillowcase into the machine and lowered the needle into the fabric. The air vibrated around her.
Da-doo-ron-ron-ron, Da-doo-ron-ron.