The week before Christmas I fell off my stool at work, hitting my head against the brick half-wall that separated us from the cutters, and getting a mild concussion. I was in the hospital when Ginger brought me a telegram from my sister saying that my father had had another severe stroke. It was Christmas Eve. I signed myself out of the hospital and caught a train for New York City.
I had not seen any member of my family for a year and a half.
The next few weeks were a haze of headache, and other people’s emotions swirling around me. I went back to work after Christmas, commuting to and from New York City to visit my father in the hospital. Sometimes Ginger came with me after work.
The fog was heavy and chilling over the streets of Stamford the night my father died. No cars moved. I walked two miles to the station to catch the 9:30 train to New York. Ginger walked with me as far as Crispus Attucks. I was terrified I was going to trip on a curbstone, the fog was so thick. The streetlights glowed faintly like distant moons. The streets were empty and eerily quiet, as if the whole world had died, not only my father in that dim oxygenated room on the terminal ward of the Medical Center in New York.
During the week after my father’s death, I stayed at my mother’s house. Most of the time she was sedated against her frenzied and awful grief, and Helen and I handled the flow of people passing through the house. Phyllis was married and expecting her second child in two weeks, and could only attend the funeral. She lent me a dark grey coat to wear to the church.
During the week, I fought hard to remind myself that I was now a stranger in this house. But it did give me a new perspective on my mother. There had only been one human being whom she had ever entertained upon the earth as her equal; this was my father, and now he was dead. I saw the desolate loneliness that this exclusiveness had won her, and against which she only occasionally closed her hawk-grey eyes. But she looked through me and my sisters as if we were glass.
I saw my mother’s pain, and her blindness, and her strength, and for the first time I began to see her as separate from me, and I began to feel free of her.
My sister Helen withdrew into her flippant shell for protection, and endlessly played a record which she had just gotten on the phonograph in the parlor. Day and night, over and over, for seven days:
I get the blues when we dance
I get the blues in advance
For I know you’ll be gone
and I’ll be here all alone
So I get the blues in advance.
Some get the blues from a song
Some when love has come and gone
You don’t know how I cry
When you tell me goodbye…
Returning to Stamford after the funeral, I realized that I needed to be even further away from New York. I decided to make as much money as I could and go to Mexico as soon as possible.
To that end and because Cora invited me, I gave up my room on Mill River Road with its creaky bed, and moved my belongings into the sunporch on Walker Road. The ten dollars a week room and board was less than what I was spending for both before. Cora said the extra cash was a help to her already strained budget, and besides, I was eating her out of house and home anyway.
Ginger told me that a new girl, Ada, had been hired to run my machine at the plant. When I returned, since I was a member of the union, I was given another job. I was moved on to an X-ray machine in the reading room, where the finished electronic crystals were fine-read according to strength of charge, then racked for packing.
Although this job paid the same $1.10 an hour, all the jobs in the RR were preferable and sought after. The room was in the middle of the floor, enclosed by glass panels, and the fierce sensory assaults of the rest of the plant were somewhat muted.
We sat at our machines in a circle, facing outward, our backs to each other to discourage talking. There were six commercial X-ray machines and a desk in the middle for Rose, our forewoman. We were never long away from her watchful eye.
But working in the RR meant there was a chance to make piecework bonus.
Each reader obtained her crystals from the washing cage in boxes of two hundred. Taking them back to our machines, we inserted the tiny, ¾-inch squares of wafer-thin rock one by one into the throat of the X-ray machine, twirled the dial until the needle jumped to its highest point, powered by the tiny X-ray beam flashed across the crystal, snatched it off the mount, racked it in the proper slot, and then shot another crystal into the machine. With concentration and dexterity, the average amount one could read in a day was one thousand crystals.
By not taking the time to flip down the protective shield that kept the X ray from hitting our fingers, we could increase that number to about eleven hundred. Any crystals over twelve hundred read in one day were paid for as piecework, at the rate of $2.50 a hundred. Some of the women who had been at Keystone for years had perfected the motions and moved so swiftly that they were able to make from five to ten dollars some weeks in bonus. For most of them, the tips of their fingers were permanently darkened from exposure to X ray. Before I finally left Keystone Electronics, there were dark marks on my fingers also, that only gradually faded.
After each crystal was read, it was flipped out of the machine and rapidly slipped into one of five slots in a rack that sat to the side of each of our machines. From these racks, periodically, a runner from the packing department would collect the crystals of whatever category was needed for the packers. Since it was not possible to keep track of the crystals after they were read, a tally was kept at the washing cage of how many boxes of crystals were taken daily by each reader. It was upon this count that our bonuses were based.
Throughout the day, Rose came by each machine regularly and spot-checked crystals from each of our racks, checking to make sure that no one racked unread crystals, or rushed through crystals with incorrect readings in order to raise our counts and make bonus.
The first two weeks I worked in the RR I talked to no one, raced my readings every day, never flipped the shield, and made three dollars in bonus. I decided I would have to reassess the situation. Ginger and I talked about it one night.
“You’d better slow down a little at work. The word’s going out you’re an eager beaver, brown-nosing Rose.”
I was offended. “I’m not ass-kissing, I’m trying to make some money. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Don’t you know those rates are set high like that so nobody can beat them? If you break your ass to read so many, you’re going to show up the other girls, and before you know it they’re going to raise the day rate again, figuring if you can do it so can everybody. And that just makes everybody look bad. They’re never going to let you make any money in that place. All the books you read and you don’t know that yet?” Ginger rolled over and tapped the book I was reading on my pillow.
But I was determined. I knew I could not take Keystone Electronics for much longer, and I knew I needed some money put aside before I left. Where would I go when I got back to New York? Where would I live until I got a job? And how long would I have to look for work? And on the horizon like a dim star, was my hope of going to Mexico. I had to make some money.
Ginger and Ada, her new workmate, went to the movies more and more often now that I was living at the Thurmans’, and I was determined not to care. But my sixth sense told me I had to get away, and soon.
My daily rate of crystals began to increase steadily. Rose came by more and more often to my machine, but could find nothing wrong with my crystals, nor their slotting. She even went so far as to ask me to turn out my jeans pockets one evening. I was outraged, but complied. By the next payday, I had made an additional thirty dollars in bonus money for two weeks. That was almost as much as my weekly wages. It became the talk of the RR women.
“How does she manage to do all those?”
“Just wait and see. She’s going to burn her fingers off before she’s through.” The women lowered their voices as I came back from the cage with a fresh box of crystals. But Ada, who had stopped by for a brief chat, did not care whether or not I heard her parting words.
“I don’t know what she’s doing with them crystals, but I bet she’s not reading them!”
She was right. I could not even tell Ginger how I was managing to pull down such high bonuses, although she often asked. The truth was, I would slip crystals into my socks every time I went to the bathroom. Once inside the toilet stall, I chewed them up with my strong teeth and flushed the little shards of rock down the commode. I could take care of between fifty and a hundred crystals a day in that manner, taking a handful from each box I signed out.
I knew Ginger was hurt by my silence, and by what she saw as my disloyalty to the other RR women. I was angered by the feeling of persistent guilt that her words aroused in me, but I could say nothing. I could also say nothing about the increasing time she and Ada spent together.
I longed for a chance to be alone, to enjoy the privacy that was not possible once I started to share the sunporch on Walker Road. I hated the amount of time I spent thinking about Ginger and Ada. I began to feel more and more desperate to get out of Stamford, and my bonuses went up.
One day in the beginning of March, I saw Rose talking to Bernie, the plant’s efficiency expert, and looking after me speculatively as I came out of the john. I knew my days at Keystone were numbered. That week I made forty dollars in bonuses.
On Friday, Rose told me that the plant was cutting back readers and they were going to have to let me go. Since I was a member of the union, they gave me two weeks severance pay, so I would leave immediately and not make a fuss. Even though it was what I wanted to happen, I still cried a little on the way home. “Nobody likes to be fired,” Ginger said and held my hand.
Cora was sorry to lose the extra income. Ginger said she’d miss me, but I could tell she was also secretly relieved, as she confided to me months later. I made plans to return to New York City.