“Why don’t you come over sometime and I’ll play you my songs. I only live five minutes away.”
And that’s how it started. I was curious not only about her songs but about the way she lived. That green-eyed gaze of hers offered some deep connection. I thought she might be into women, but she hadn’t said anything so far. Some greater power had taken me over, as if I couldn’t make choices where Karen was concerned. I wanted so much to go home with her right then.
One day she told me, “I’m not getting along with my friend anymore. Her drinking is really bugging me.” She checked my face. “We’ve been together almost five years now.” I realized she was coming out to me—the “friend” euphemism.
“I just broke up with a girlfriend who started getting involved with someone else,” I shared. We both smiled, happy to confirm our mutual suspicions. She didn’t know how much I needed her then, how much I needed to feel important to her.
I lived about forty minutes away from the plant, and sometimes stayed with my friend Anna at her house on the way to Newark, partly because I couldn’t make it all the way home and partly because she was such a dear and so willing to take care of me in the mornings. Her girlfriend worked days, and Anna worked the afternoon shift. I loved waking up in their quiet spare room with the bookshelves piled high and the sewing machine and ironing board unfolded in the middle of the room. At two in the afternoon I still had time to visit with Anna for an hour before she left for her job at the Newark Airport. She talked to me and fixed me breakfast no matter how grumpy I was.
My own apartment was lonely and bare in comparison. My friends had quit calling me because they didn’t know when I would be sleeping. The job was wrecking my life and I was still pissed about my ex cheating on me. Anna listened to my harangues and offered compassion. I told her about my feelings for Karen and that she had a girlfriend who drank. She warned me to be careful. Then I stopped mentioning Karen. It was embarrassing.
After Anna left I’d take a shower, slowly get my things together, and make my way down the Garden State Parkway to that grinding pit. I’d walk across the machine-gunning plant floor toward the ladies’ room and my locker. More lids were spewing forth from the great stamping machines, pallet upon pallet of them taken away to be stored awaiting shipment. Where were they all going? The place never shut down—twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, even the day a snowstorm shut most of the area down for business and closed schools. I felt nauseous just thinking about it—Budweiser can lids!
One morning at the last break, Karen announced to me wearily, “Linda never came to pick me up yesterday morning. She overslept.”
I asked how she got home. “Dave gave me a ride.” Dave was a forklift driver. “I just hope it won’t happen again. I’m tired of this.” She shook her head and looked down.
“Well, I’ll give you a ride this morning if she doesn’t show.”
“Great, Sonja! I’d really appreciate that.” Her face lit up. I was glad I could bring out her smile. “And you know you can stay awhile. I’ll play you some of my songs. Would you like that?”
“Sure!”
“You know you can stay over anytime you want.” She was on a roll. “I know you have a place you can stay at with your friends but you could stay with us too sometimes.”
My body was weak and tired, so was my mouth. “I just hate driving all the way back home. It’s so lonely to go to sleep during the day in my apartment, wake up exhausted, and then turn around and drive back to this hellhole. I’d love to stay with you sometime.”
Her eyes embraced me warmly, and she reached out and touched my arm.
What would Shakespeare think of all this? I was working on “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea” at my station, my tired soul recalling the images and cadences:
I didn’t feel very strong. My pull toward Karen, who already had a partner, came from weakness and pain. Nothing good could come of all this Karen stuff, Anna was right.
One night as Karen and I were sitting on the couch in the ladies’ room, we heard one of the guys complaining outside the door as it opened. “How come we don’t have a couch? What is this, discrimination?”
“It’s because we have periods,” Bessie yelled. “And shut your mouth!”
“Aw, those weak little girls need a couch to put up their little feet,” whined another tech.
In walked Connie and Bessie with disgusted looks on their faces. Their machines had shut down and they were taking a break. Usually there were never more than two of us in there at a time. Bessie was a fun-loving large black woman whose rich laugh could cheer anyone up. “What’s going on here? You two look so serious,” she said in a loud voice. The noise made us all talk louder than normal because we got used to yelling in people’s plugged ears above the din on the plant floor.
Connie was already at her locker. “Hi, girls!” she said as she stretched her arm up to the top shelf for her well-worn paper bag containing a pint of whiskey that kept her going all night. She took a long swig from the bottle she somberly called her cough medicine. Her dark skin was drawn and even darker around her eyes. Connie and Bessie were so different from each other, but they were the best of friends. They were the only two black women working at the plant.
Karen stood up. “I better get back out there and see if my machine is running again. Charlie shut it down just to give me a break. He’s covering for me. Isn’t that nice of him?” We all agreed he was the nicest of all the techs. I moved over on the couch to let Connie and Bessie sit down and rest their weary feet, but Bessie didn’t want to sit. She was wound up. She danced and mimicked our motions at our stations. “Don’t we look like fools out there?” I jumped up to join her. We jerked our hands from side to side loading those bags, swishing our hips, then wiping our brows. It looked like a line dance. We all burst out laughing.
Feeling the blues one day, I trudged over to Bessie’s machine while a tech was adjusting mine. I wanted some of her cheerfulness to rub off on me.
“What could you be depressed about? You shouldn’t have any worries. You don’t even have a family.” Then she said, “I love life,” with such gusto that her voice lifted clear above the rattling can tops. But Bessie’s life hadn’t been easy. She even had a big long scar on her arm from when some man cut her with a knife. “I had to protect my kids,” she told me once. Her joking and upbeat attitude were survival mechanisms.
The red light at my station nagged at me. I still felt down as I plodded back to my machine.
Later that night I passed Karen’s station. She was stooped over, her shoulders sloping too much for a twenty-two-year-old. I so wanted to hold her and assure her everything would be all right. I moved closer to her ear. We all did this, but I hated it when that gross foreman, Jack, did it. He took the opportunity to lean against my body. Ugh! I always moved away fast.
At a respectful distance, I yelled into Karen’s ear, “I want to listen to your songs. Maybe I’ll stay over today.” Suddenly I had a déjà vu and wondered if I had already said this to her in the restroom. Was I repeating myself? My mind wasn’t functioning right.
She backed off and smiled at me. “Great! Only two and a half hours to go!”
Leaving the plant in the morning was a terrific feeling. We all walked out in a huge wave. Dave was behind me. “Get outta my way, I have a date with a pillow,” he said, smiling for the first time all night. Karen and I waited awhile in the parking lot, but Linda never showed. I tried to cheer Karen up as we drove to her apartment complex, which was farther down the road from the factory, but she looked sad and preoccupied. My mother’s face came to me—how glum she looked when she and my father weren’t speaking to each other after a fight.