them she couldn’t do this, she’d made a mistake and couldn’t come
back, she was sorry sorry sorry. She would write a letter maybe. But
meanwhile there was no way to turn back, she could only follow the
yellow band with the others pressing behind her; she went down a
strange-smelling hall to Physical Examinations. Just looking in at the
door into the room, where screens had been set up to roughly divide
the men from the women, she felt shamed and exposed and wondered
why she’d ever thought she was brave enough to do this. What you
imagine something is going to be like before you jump into it is never
what it will be, it’s just the feeling you have at the time, made into a
picture, like that picture of the three women looking into the sky and
the future.
She had a chest X-ray, the remarkably ugly and bewigged nurse
pushing Connie into place before the glass of the machine and pulling
her arms back, as though she meant to handcuff her; then she took
Connie’s blood pressure and murmured through a list of questions so
fast Connie hardly had time to think of an answer. The nurse did the
things they always did at physicals without explanation, learning facts
they wouldn’t or didn’t have time to divulge. Nothing so bad as to keep
her from working here: her form was stamped and the stamp signed
across by the nurse, who capped her pen and was eyeing the next in
224 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
line even as she handed the sheet to Connie to add to the others she had
been given.
After that she was herded into a group cut out from the mass of
applicants and sent with them into a room full of benches, where they
were each seated before a big square magnifying glass in a frame. A tin
box of tiny gears was under the glass. A man at the center of the room
in a gray cloth coat waited till they were all seated, then started talking
loudly and distinctly, telling them what they were to do. It was a
Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test. You were to Pick Up a Single
Pinion with Thumb and Forefinger. Turn the Pinion Clockwise between
the Two Fingers. Look to See if the Teeth of the Pinion are All of the
Same Width. When you have Assessed the Pinion, place it either in the
Left Box, Accepted, or the Right Box, Rejected. Work as Fast and
Accurately as you Can. You have Five Minutes. He lifted his finger,
pressed a button on the big watch he held, and said Begin. Just then a
woman next to Connie piped up: Were the airplanes really going to use
these little things if we-all accept them? The man smiled and laughed
and said Goodness no, it was just a test, there were good ones and bad
ones in the box and you just try to tell which are which, and everybody
laughed a little and he raised his finger again and said Begin.
Connie picked up one of the little things with thumb and forefinger.
It took a moment to adjust her vision to the hugely enlarged fingertips
she saw, their uncared-for nails, she’d meant to give herself a manicure,
and the toothed wheel; she moved it back and forth until it came clear.
But as soon as it did she saw that one of the teeth was wider, or had a
slight burr or something on it. She put it in the right box, and picked
up another. Around her she was aware of the voices of the other appli-
cants, complaining or marveling at the task, laughing when they
dropped or fumbled the pinions, but almost immediately all the noise
sank away and she picked up the pinions one after another; for a
moment she doubted herself—would she really see a difference, and
was it a big enough difference? But she felt the differences so dis-
tinctly—she always knew when she saw one—that she decided just to
trust herself. Before the five minutes were up she had emptied her box,
sorted left and right, and the man glanced up from his watch at her
doubtfully or with a little smile that seemed to say Oh you think so?
Then he said Stop. They were each to leave the proper form (pink) next
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 225
to their work, which would be returned to them later. Then they were
sent out a farther door as another group came in behind.
It was time for lunch.
She wasn’t the only one whose husband had worked here, though almost
all the ones who spoke up said their husbands had been drafted or
joined up, and that was the reason they applied. One said her husband
would kill her if he found out. She needed the money, she said, and
when no one responded to that, shrugged one shoulder and went back
to her sandwich. Connie wanted to ask her more, since she had no idea
what Bunce would think about her taking a job, though whenever she
thought about telling him, or him finding out, a kind of dread came up
under her heart. But he’d have to understand. He was a good man;
everybody who knew him said so. And when that dread arose there
was Adolph too, as in one of those dreams where you leave your child
for a minute to do something, and that leads to something else, and
you remember the kid finally but by then the whole world’s changed
and there’s no way to get back to him.
She was thinking those things when her shoulder was touched, and
she leapt slightly—it was easy to startle her, Bunce liked that about her,
and was pleased that he knew it. The man behind her, stepping back at
her response, was the one in the gray cloth coat who had given them
the Manual Dexterity and Visual Acuity Test.
“Mind if I see your card?” he said.
She stood, picked up the pile of colored papers small and large she’d
been collecting all day, and began looking through them. The man saw
what he wanted and neatly two-fingered it out of the pile, looked at it
back and front. “Mrs. Constance Wrobleski.” He compared the card
to the pink sheet he had.
“Yes.” She had a sudden thought that he had discerned she wanted
to get out without signing up for a job, and was here to send her home.
No, how dumb.
“I wanted to ask,” he said. “Have you ever done any work like this
before? I mean like the little job you did there?” He pointed his head in
the direction of the test room.
“Um no,” Connie said.
226 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“I don’t mean a job, but for instance anything like retouching
photos, or similar?”
Connie said nothing, not even sure what that was. She was getting
a little restive at having to answer No to questions about what she
could do or had done.
“Ever do fine needlework?”
“No. Never.”
The man looked again at the sheet in his hand. “Well, I must say
you have remarkable visual acuity. You scored near a hundred percent
on that task. And you did it in near record time.”
He looked up now and gave her a big smile, as though he had been
conscious all along that he was being unsettling but that the joke was
over. “Really?” she said.
“Yes.” He grinned more broadly. “You surprise yourself?”
“Well I don’t know. I mean I didn’t think.”
“All right, well listen now. We’d here like to encourage you to come
and take another test or so. We think somebody like you could be of
some real service. The tests’ll take an hour or so, not more.”
Connie regarded him in amazement, and said nothing.
“It might mean a better pay rate,” the man said, as though in confi-
dence.
“Okay,” Connie said.
“You finished up your lunch?”
She looked back at the deflated bag, and at the women at the table,
who had all turned to her, like the faces of girls at school when one of