She grabbed her time card and stuck it in the clock. The money wasn’t good-it wasn’t as if she were a man, after all-but, with it and her monthly allotment from George’s pay, she managed well enough.
“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said as she hurried toward the machine that stuck bright labels on cans of mackerel.
“Good morning, Mr. Winter,” she answered. He nodded and limped on past her: as a young man, he’d taken a bullet in the leg during the Second Mexican War.
A couple of minutes later, Isabella Antonelli took her place on the machine next to Sylvia’s. She wore black; her husband had been killed fighting in Quebec. She nodded shyly to Sylvia, set down her dinner pail, and made sure her machine was in good working order.
With a rumble of motors and several discordant squeals of fan belts, the line started moving. Sylvia had to pull three levers, taking steps between them, to bring bare, bright cans into her machine, squirt paste on them, and affix the labels-which made the mackerel whose flesh went into the cans look remarkably like tuna. Being a fisherman’s wife, she knew what a lie that was. People who bought the cans in Ohio or Nebraska wouldn’t, though.
Some days, stepping and pulling levers could be mesmerizing, so that half the morning would slip by while Sylvia hardly noticed any time passing. This was one of those mornings. The only time she got jolted out of her routine was when her paste reservoir ran dry and she had to refill it from the big bucket of paste under the machine before she could put on more labels.
As it did sometimes, the lunch whistle startled her, jerking her out of the world in which she was almost as mechanical as the machine she tended. The line groaned to a stop. Sylvia shook herself, as she might have done coming out of the bathtub at the end of the hall in her apartment building. She looked around. There was her dinner pail, of black-painted sheet metal like the one a riveter might have carried to the Boston Navy Yard.
Isabella Antonelli’s dinner pail might have been identical to her own. The two women sat on a bench near a wheezing steam radiator. Sylvia had a ham sandwich in her dinner pail, leftovers from the night before. Isabella Antonelli had a tightly covered bowl that also looked to hold leftovers: long noodles that looked like worms, smothered in tomato sauce. She brought them to the factory about three days out of five. Sylvia thought they were disgusting, though she’d never said so for fear of hurting her friend’s feelings.
Mr. Winter limped by, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was carrying his own dinner pail, looking for a place to sit down. His eyes lingered on Isabella as he walked past. “You can go with him, if you’d like,” Sylvia said.
“I will sit with you today,” the Italian woman said. She smiled, which made her look younger and not so tired. “He should not take me too much for granted, don’t you think?”
She and the foreman-a widower for years-had been lovers for a couple of months. They were discreet about it, both at the factory and with their own families. Winter had aimed a few speculative remarks at Sylvia since she’d started working at the canning plant; she was just as well pleased to see him attached to someone else. To his credit, he hadn’t aimed any of those remarks at her since taking up with Isabella.
Sylvia said, “Anybody who takes anybody else for granted is a fool.”
She didn’t realize with how much bitterness she’d freighted the remark till Isabella Antonelli, a worried look on her face, asked, “But all is well with your Giorgio, yes?”
“He’s well, yes,” Sylvia replied, which was by no means a complete answer. Isabella obviously realized it wasn’t a complete answer. She also obviously realized it was all the answer she would get. The rest of the half-hour lunch passed in uneasy silence.
For once, Sylvia was glad to go back to her machine, to lose herself in the routine of pulling and stepping, pulling and stepping, of watching cans bright with their tinning go into the machine and cans gaudy with their labels stream out. The machine asked no questions she would sooner not have answered. The machine asked no questions at all.
As she had at the lunch whistle, Sylvia started when the quitting whistle screamed. It was dark when she clocked out and walked to the trolley stop, but not quite so dark as it had been earlier in the year. Twilight lingered in the west, a harbinger of spring ahead. It was the only harbinger of spring she could find; the wind cut like a knife.
She had to stand almost all the way back to the stop by her apartment building. Except for lunch, she’d been standing since she got to the plant. Now that she’d returned from that mechanistic world, she felt how tired she was. Her legs didn’t want to hold her up any more. When she finally did get to sit down, she nearly fell asleep before the streetcar got to her stop. She’d done that once, and walked back more than a mile. This time, she didn’t, but getting up and getting off the trolley were more mind over matter than anything else.
She checked her mailbox in the entrance hall to the apartment building. No letter from George, which meant he hadn’t come to port as of a few days before, which meant he hadn’t had the chance to get into trouble in a port. He might have got into trouble on the sea, but that was a different sort of trouble, and one over which she worried in a different sort of way.
Circulars from the Coal Board, the Scrap Metal Collection Agency, the Ration Board, the Victory Over Waste Committee, and the War Savings and Tax Board helped fill the mailbox. So did one from an agency new to her, the Paper Conservation Authority, which informed her in the portentous bureaucratic tones of any government outfit that paper was an important war resource and should not be wasted.
“Then why do I get so much worthless paper every day?” she muttered, tossing the multicolored sheets into the battered wastebasket there. The answer to that was only too clear: “Because one board writes this and none of the others read it, that’s why.”
She went upstairs to reclaim her children from Brigid Coneval, who, after her husband was conscripted, had decided to take in the children of other women who got jobs in factories instead of getting a factory job herself. Each flight of stairs seemed to have twice as many as the one before, and each step twice as high.
When she came out into the hallway, she walked down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s flat to get George, Jr., and Mary Jane and take them back to her own apartment, where she would make supper and let them play till they were ready for bed-or, more likely, till she was ready for bed and managed to persuade them that they should lie down, too.
They were getting harder to persuade. George, Jr., was six now, heading toward seven, and Mary Jane nearly four. Sylvia needed more sleep these days, while they needed less. It hardly seemed fair.
With so many children in Brigid Coneval’s flat, shrieks and cries as Sylvia came up were the order of the day. But the shrieks and cries that Sylvia heard now did not come from the throats of children. Fear shot through her, sharp as if she’d seized a live electric wire. She had to will herself to knock, and then had to knock twice to make anyone inside notice her.
The woman who opened the door was not Brigid Coneval, though she looked very much like her. Seeing Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane came running up and embraced her. Above them, Sylvia asked the question she dreaded, the question that had to be asked: “Is she-? Is it-?”
“It is that.” The woman, doubtless Brigid’s sister, had a brogue like hers, too. “Less than an hour ago, the telegram came. Down in Virginia he was, poor man, and never coming back from there again.”
“That’s dreadful. I’m so sorry,” Sylvia said, feeling the inadequacy of words. She knew what Brigid Coneval was feeling. She’d twice thought George lost, once when his fishing boat was captured by a Confederate commerce raider and once when his river monitor was blown out of the water. The only thing that had saved him then was that he hadn’t been aboard, but on the riverbank, drunk and about to lie down with a colored strumpet.