I was sixteen when my younger brother Stuart and I lost our parents. Our mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few days after losing control of the car on a stretch of icy road. And our father, who occupied the passenger seat, died instantly when the speeding vehicle flung itself into a guardrail on the side of the highway. They were just going to Walmart to buy a Christmas wreath and some popcorn.
After that, Stuart and I had to settle quickly into a new, smaller house in another city and a new school that wasn’t private like our old one. I also had to solve my urgent need to find a summer job. I wanted to put away college money and buy extra sandwich meat for Stuart, who was twelve at the time of the accident. He was a lanky assemblage of bones, but always hungry.
I hoped to attend Virginia Tech after graduation, so making tuition and book fees was going to be a challenge. Hospital bills and burials had cut deep into my family’s savings, especially the educational accounts.
Stuart and I would stay at our Uncle Simon’s in Southwestern Virginia, at least until other arrangements could be made, but he was stingy with cash and had no wife to smooth things over gracefully. For example, Uncle Simon had never allowed himself more than one pair of jeans and two pairs of dress pants for work, even though he was a CPA and had a fat bank account.
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He always said wives were too greedy, which is why he never wanted one, and probably his stinginess was why one never wanted him.
At least I was relieved to hear that Roanoke was a less expensive place than my hometown, Northern Virginia, and it had lots of factories that produced everything from eyeglasses to potato chips and sausages. I, therefore, became more than a little hopeful about finding something in the way of full-time, summer employment.
In fact, on the first day of June, I didn’t hesitate to make an appointment with the hiring manager at Diverse Product Vending, a company that furnished all kinds of food, PPE and feminine hygiene products to hotels and hospitals nationwide. Uncle Simon arranged for Stuart to go to Y.M.C.A. camp during the weekdays to keep him out of trouble.
After a brief interview and a display of my recent references, I quickly landed myself a position on the production line at Diverse. I was to start the following Monday morning at 7 am sharp.
“Rain or shine!” Mr. Dick Belcher, my supervisor, announced over the phone in a raspy voiced, near shout, as if half the workers habitually called in whenever it rained.
My first impression of Mr. Belcher was that he had fast tracked his way up in the business, being the methodical person that he was. The kind of precision bureaucrat who loved schedules and attempted to keep to them at any cost. I felt sure of this because I overheard him on a phone conversation with his area supervisor.
“Yes, Mr. Sinclair, summer bonuses are out of the question this year. Only forty per cent agreed to work twelve hour shifts. If some workers need to be punished for lack of loyalty, they’re all going to reap the consequences.”
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Belcher obviously wasn’t the touchy-feely sort, nor was he overly concerned with personal dilemmas. No, he was focused, completely focused on the task at hand, and that was production. I walked into his office one day when an older female employee came in sobbing because her mother had just died.
“That’s a shame, Shirleen,” Mr. Belcher said. “Let’s get back to work now, dear. It’ll get your mind off of things and you know we’ve got to make our weekly quotas.”
Monday morning was full of rain, and a cold rain too for early June. Still, I scurried along, boarding the bus a half hour ahead of my deadline, grateful that it wasn’t a beautiful day because it it were, I’d already chosen to confine myself for eight hours to the gray walls and florescent lights of a factory.
At exactly 6:55 am, I was handed a brown apron by a brassy haired woman who looked like she knew the ropes. I didn’t imagine that knowing the ropes was necessarily a personal compliment to the woman, but I was anxious to learn the job, so I would follow her lead.
The brassy blond, Amy-Dean Schoonover, had an innate queen-like, super/bossy quality. She lived for her smoke breaks but smashed her butts out quickly before most of the younger teenage workers hit the smoking block. Her own son had died of lung cancer, so she wanted to set a good example for others. She seemed aware of her role as a senior employee at the plant but her side life was likely complicated; too complicated to share.
Even though Amy-Dean had the look of someone who’d seen the rougher side of the tracks, I thought she would’ve been fairly attractive, but for the smoking wrinkles that hung slightly below the bottom rung of her painted lashes and circled her forehead like a brocade of small, sooty trenches.
Amy-Dean gave out the line assignments on Mondays.
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“Betsy, you’ll plop the mashed potatoes in their cups as they come by on the conveyor belt,” she said. “That’s about the easiest thing here ’cause ya can hardly miss, the way it’s all stuck together. Just keep up.”
“Elizabeth, please; not Betsy,” I said.
“Fine, Miss Prissy,” Amy-Dean barked, adding, “the peas and carrots are harder because you can easily spill some and if you do, you might have to say goodbye to your break to clean up the mess.”
I thanked Amy-Dean more profusely than I should have.
“Chill out, girl,” Amy-Dean said, indicating her superiority over me. Then she questioned my status. “You pregnant? she asked. “Or just beggin’ for punishment working in a rat hole like this?”
“No mam,” was all I could think to say. I adjusted my apron and took my place next to the belt.
“Turn it on, Jack!” Mr. Belcher yelled. “Turn the goddamn belt on! We got chuckwagons and peas to do by noon and there’s a run of feminine pads and tampons after lunch!”
I probably turned a shade of bubblegum pink; so rosy that Delbert, one of the guys on the line, laughed heartily and said he was calling me Rosie from then on. But I should have waited to get red in the face until after Delbert’s next comment.
“Any extra large pads on there today for Tandy?” he yelled.
I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out who Tandy was. A large, black lady at the end of the line struggled to lean over and take her left shoe off. Then she threw it past my head.
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“Delbert, you shit-faced son of a bitch!” Tandy shouted, aiming poorly at him.
“Sorry, Tandy, we’ve only got mediums today,” he chuckled.
“Okay, folks, back to work,” Mr. Belcher ordered. “You’re acting like a bunch of kiddies and we’ve got quota to make.”
“Tell that mothafucka to gimme me my shoe back, ’fore I bust his ass!” Tandy commanded.
“Oh, Tandy, do you wear tampons too, just in case?” Delbert asked, holding his gut bursting with laughter.
Mr. Belcher handed her the shoe with a look of half disappointment and half disgust.
“Ain’t my fuckin’ fault, Mr. B,” Tandy said. “He gots ’tata salad for brains.”
“That’s enough!” Mr. Belcher said.
Next thing anyone knew, Jack had turned on the belt switch to high and the chuckwagon containers were rolling down my way as fast as a pack of hungry cheetahs aiming for a warthog. Next, was the potatoes. Each cup had to be filled with a plop of the white mash before moving on for sealing. The whole process would take pretty close to an hour before a fifteen minute break. Then my team would deal with the feminine hygiene products, and later, the PPE.
Mr. Belcher insisted that Delbert go to the peas and carrots line to separate him from Tandy, but it wasn’t so far away that he’d be totally prohibited from running his mouth if he had a mind to. After a while he did have a mind to, but at least it was after the break.
Delbert ended up losing his break to clean up little scattered mountains of peas. He was a thin, middle age man with greasy hair the color of wet straw. He talked a lot about cars on the smoking block; yet, confessed that he didn’t own one. He was content with a red moped
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scooter for the time being because, as he said, he could feel the wind pushing against his back and if it wasn’t the wind, it was some foxy babe, or it was both the wind and the babe.
Immediately after break, came the sausage patties on Delbert’s line. They had to be slapped between two pieces of cornbread, but my line only had to wipe the soda cans down and get ready to face the napkins. The feminine napkins had to be neatly placed between two medium-sized tampons in their plastic trays.
Amy-Dean warned me to concentrate because this task was even harder than what had come before. “But hell, you probably make straight A’s in school,” she said. “So it’ll be a piece of cake for you.”
“I’ve done pretty well, but I’m not used to this yet,” I said.
“Oh, horse shit,” Amy-Dean said, ignoring me. “They done put Delbert back over here on the tampon team. Tandy won’t like that none.”
But Tandy didn’t seem to notice. She was basking in nostalgic memories of visiting her man over in Lynchburg. Then the woman beside her chimed in.
“Who’s that talking to Tandy?” I asked.
“That there is Emma,” Amy-Dean said. “She and Tandy like to blab a lot to pass the time.”
Emma was a green-haired woman who carried even more girth than Tandy, mostly in her waist. She resembled a giant pillow on toothpicks with legs that appeared too thin to hold up her torso.
“Yeah, I went to see my man over in Lynchburg Heights last week and I had to get good ’n clean, so I took me a nice old-fashioned douche,” Tandy bragged with a smile that could have made a winning ad for a romantic getaway.
“Yeah, Tandy,” Delbert said, giggling. “We heard what you use for your fancy douches!”
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“They got feminine wipes for that,” Amy-Dean said with a cocky grin.
“I ain’t ashamed,” Tandy said. “I use ’bout a cup of Clorox. That gets that thang nice an’ fresh!”
With that, the whole line howled and Delbert let out a piercing wolf whistle.
“You shut yo’ ole double shit face, Delbert!” Tandy shouted.
“Men jess cain’t understand,” Emma said. “A quick rag and a splash of Brut is all they needs.”
I glanced over at Tandy, hoping she had calmed herself, but she looked more riled up than ever.
“You wait, asshole,” she said. “Soon as this belt stop, I’ll meet you in the back room!”
Emma had gone on to a casual discussion of powdering and perfuming, but that didn’t seem to alter Tandy’s resolve to get vengeance on Delbert. As soon as the belt came to a halt, she took off galloping as fast as a heavy woman can go, toward the room in the back that was used as an extra office. Her feet looked like stuffed, canvas boats that were caving in at the sides.
I followed Amy-Dean, who was following Tandy. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the action. The ceiling and walls were made of cork board that seemed to bounce when Tandy entered the room, leading with her fist toward Delbert’s left cheek. She pounded the wooden desk first, instead of the greasy haired man’s chalk white face; a face that looked primed for violence, but still fearful. After all, his attacker had more than a hundred pounds on him.
“Sorry,” Delbert yelled, “but for God’s sake, you know I was just jokin’ around.”
Tandy backed off slowly with her hands out front, allowing her slowed inhalation to speak any words she might have had left in her mighty bosom.
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“Let’s go back to work, ya’ll,” Amy-Dean said. “It’s gettin’ close to quittin’ time.”
I tagged along behind Amy-Dean and a woman named Stephanie, headed for the bathroom. Stephanie, a dyed blond with rounded bangs and a mini skirt under her apron, said she had a date right after work.
While washing my hands, I watched Stephanie tease her hair like it was spun gold, and apply a dark shade of lipstick. Her lips were full and pretty but appeared almost detached from the rest of her pale face and light green eyes. Still, she was beautiful in her own way and guys were bound to look at her twice.
“You like this?” Stephanie asked. “Here, honey, I have a contour lip pencil in the bottom of my purse. You’ll start with that. Then you can outline your eyes with kohl.”
My parents had never allowed me to wear make-up. It had been frowned upon in my strict Catholic upbringing, but I nervously took the contour pencil, staring hard at my plain face in the mirror. I tried to trace a blood red border around my lips, but suddenly my hand slipped and the line spiked downward, making a grimace.
“Fuck!”