At the factory, men let her alone, usually. Knowing she was married. Seeing she gave no signals to welcome their interest. She never met their eyes. What thoughts they might have of her, she did not consider.
Yet: the week before she had had to confront a smirking asshole who was always passing close behind her as she stood at the assembly line, a man who eyed her up-and-down to embarrass her, she’d told him to leave her alone God damn she would complain to the foreman but in the midst of the rush of words she had suddenly swallowed and her voice choked and the smirking asshole just grinned at her. Mmmm baby! I like you.
Yet she would not quit the factory. Damned if she would quit.
Since March she’d been working at Niagara Tubing. Assembly line, unskilled labor. Still the factories paid better than most other jobs for women-waitress, cleaning woman, salesclerk. You had no need to smile at customers, to be “nice.” The work was only just temporary she’d told her friend Rita, who also worked on the line at Niagara Tubing, and Rita had laughed saying sure, Niagara Tubing was just temporary for her, too. “Going on seven years.”
This foreshortened horizon, it made you anxious because you couldn’t plot an escape route. Into underbrush? There were briars, wild rose, tangles of poison ivy. Into the trees? And out of sight of the towpath, where anything might happen?
The bridge at the Poor Farm Road was at least a mile away. How many minutes, she couldn’t estimate: twenty? And she could not run. She wondered what would happen during those twenty minutes.
The canal surface rippled like the hide of a great slumbering beast whose head you could not see. Only its length, stretching to the horizon.
Except there was no horizon ahead, really. The canal faded into a shadowy haze in the distance. Like train tracks where your eyes trick you into thinking that the tracks narrow, shrink in upon themselves and disappear as if running out of the present time and into a future you can’t see.
Hide your weakness. Can’t remain a child forever.
She was hardly a child. She was a married woman, a mother. She had a job at Niagara Fiber Tubing in Chautauqua Falls, New York.
She was not a minor dependent upon the charity of adults. She was not a ward of the county living in Milburn. The gravedigger’s daughter to be pitied.
These were boom times in American industry, post-war. So you were told. So it seemed. Factories working to capacity in Chautauqua Falls as in other cities and towns in upstate New York where the largest and most prosperous city was Buffalo. All day long the sky of the Chautauqua Valley was streaked with two kinds of cloud: the natural, horizontal clouds and the vertical columnar clouds of factory smoke. Distinctive hues they were, rising from identical smokestacks. Always you could recognize the steely-powder rubbery-smelling smoke erupting upward from Niagara Fiber Tubing.
At work she wore her long thick hair coiled in loose braids around her head, covered with a head scarf. Yet when she brushed it out it smelled of the factory anyway. Her hair that had been beautiful glossy black, gypsy-hair Tignor called it, was becoming dry and brittle and corroded like iron. She was only twenty-three and already she was discovering gray hairs! And her fingers were calloused, her nails discolored, though she wore work gloves on the job. The heavy safety goggles left a pale imprint on her face and dents on the sides of her nose.
She was a married woman, why was this happening to her!
Tignor had been crazy for her once. She didn’t want to think that time had passed.
He had not liked her pregnant. Belly swollen big and tight as a drum. Pale blue veins visible in her flesh looking as if they might burst. Her ankles, feet swollen. Her breath short. The heat of her skin that was a strange sexual heat, a fever that repelled a man.
She was tall, five feet eight. She weighed about 115 pounds. Pregnant with Niley, she’d weighed 140. Strong as a horse Tignor had said of her.
The man behind her would be led to think Rebecca was a tough woman, she thought. The kind of woman to fight back.
She wondered if he knew her, in some way. And so maybe he knew she was living alone with her son. Living in an old remote farmhouse in the country. But if he knew these facts, he might also know that Rebecca’s son was watched during weekdays by a neighbor; and if Rebecca was late picking him up, if Rebecca failed to appear, Mrs. Meltzer would guess that something had happened to her.
But how long a time would pass, before Mrs. Meltzer called the police?
The Meltzers were not likely to call the police if they could avoid it. Any more than Tignor would call the police. What they would do is go out looking for you. And not finding you, they’d decide what to do next.
How long this would require: maybe hours.
If she’d brought the bread knife from home. That morning. The towpath was a desolate place. If Tignor knew, his wife walking along the canal like a tramp. Sometimes there were derelicts hanging out in the railroad yard. Solitary fishermen at the bridge over the canal. Solitary men.
If the canal wasn’t so beautiful, she wouldn’t be drawn to it. In the morning the sky was likely to be clear and so the surface of the canal appeared clear. When the sky was heavy and leaden with clouds, the surface of the canal appeared opaque. Like you could walk on it.
How deep the canal was exactly, Rebecca didn’t know. But it was deep. Over a man’s head. Twenty feet? Couldn’t hope to save yourself by wading out. The banks were steep, you’d have to lift yourself soaking wet out of the water by the sheer strength of your arms and if somebody was kicking at you, you were doomed.
She was a strong swimmer! Though since Niles, Jr. she had not swum. She feared discovering that her body had lost its girlish buoyancy, its youth. Ignominiously she would sink like a rock. She feared that truth-telling you confront in water over your head exerting your arms and legs to keep afloat.
She turned abruptly and saw: the man in the panama hat, at about the same distance behind her. He wasn’t trying to catch up with her, at least. But he did seem to be following her. And watching her.
“You! Better leave me alone.”
Rebecca’s voice was sharp, high-pitched. It didn’t sound like her own voice at all.
She turned back, and walked faster. Had he actually smiled? Was he smiling at her?
A smile can be taunting. A smile like her own, deceased father’s smile. Mock-eager. Mock-tender.
“Bastard. You have no right…”
Rebecca remembered now, she’d seen this man the previous day.
At the time she’d taken little notice. She’d been leaving the factory at the end of her shift, 5 P.M., with a crowd of other workers. If she’d noticed the man in the panama hat, she’d have had no reason to suppose he was interested in her.
Today, his following her, might be random. He couldn’t know her name-could he?
Her mind worked swiftly, desperately. It was possible that the stranger had simply chosen a woman to follow at random. He’d been in the vicinity of the factory as a hunter awaits prey, alert to any possibility. Or, what was equally plausible: he had been waiting for someone else but she had not turned up or, if she had, it wasn’t practical for him to follow her at that time.
Her heart beat in fury. Yet she was frightened.
“My husband will kill you…”
She didn’t want to think that this man might know Tignor. That he had a score to settle with Tignor. One of those guys that think they know me.