Grace and Grit (14 page)

During dance lessons, I glided across the floor with Hector learning the tango, while Sabrina, Hector’s wife, sat on a bench watching us. “Smile, Lilly, smile,” Sabrina repeated as she tapped her foot to the beat of the music. We spun across the shellacked floor, and I caught my somber expression in the mirror. I wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. For the first few months of dancing, I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror, feeling ridiculous, practicing how to smile. Until I met Hector, whenever I smiled, I unconsciously covered my mouth with my hand, ashamed of the unfamiliar feeling of joy.

After a while, when it came to dancing, I didn’t need Sabrina’s encouragement. I dreamed of becoming an accomplished dancer, of challenging myself and experiencing something new. I started competing on the weekends at showcases in Atlanta held at places like the Holiday Inn, places large enough to accommodate a ballroom and the hundreds of people who expected to be entertained. Before I participated in my first showcase, I asked Hector what we should wear, thinking jeans might be okay. “Honey, wear the best you’ve got. Better than even your Sunday best.” Polyester pant suits aside, that meant the dress I wore to Vickie’s wedding.

I’d shopped for that dress at my favorite family-owned discount store. I thought I’d found a fabulous dress until the woman helping me asked, “Now, how many daughters do you have?” Just one, I told her. “Well, then, dear, don’t you think you better go to the department store and find a special dress for yourself?” Somewhat embarrassed but grateful for her advice, I went to the regular department store and chose a burgundy dress etched with cranberry-colored satin. The dress, now carefully stored in my closet, would be perfect for the showcase.

The moment the music started, that first showcase transformed me from the drab, capable manager that had become my chosen identity into someone “footloose and fancy-free.” I couldn’t quit smiling. I felt a joyous release I’d never known, inspiring my performance and encouraging the audience’s enthusiasm for Hector and me. We continued to compete in showcases, and once I got so carried away that I flung my arm in a dramatic sweep, hitting Hector in the face and almost knocking him to the floor. We still placed first that day.

A
ROUND THE
time I started taking dance lessons, Eddie became one of my department foremen in final finish; it seemed the air around us was charged with static electricity when we interacted. He made me jittery, the vein under my left eye twitching slightly when we talked. Rumors of layoffs were circulating throughout the plant as well, and even of management positions possibly being cut, a first for the Gadsden operation. The uncontrollable fluctuations in the economy loomed like some infectious disease gone awry. Maybe someone would find a cure before it caught up with me and my family. Now that Vickie had found her footing in the world and Phillip, who’d also graduated from Jacksonville State University, was starting his real estate career, they, too, were susceptible to the unpredictable economic highs and lows.

Unfortunately, the talk was true, and I was let go with a good
number of other managers. The week I was laid off from Goodyear I walked into the dance studio greeted by a bouquet of balloons, one saying
YOU WILL BE SUCCESSFUL
. I wasn’t so sure.

In the past, layoffs had often been temporary, and most workers were eventually called back. In light of the increasing inflation, Goodyear organized a job-skills session at the company clubhouse, since such a large layoff was predicted. Sitting across the cardboard table from a woman dressed in a blue suit, I filled out a questionnaire about myself.

While she read it, I stared through the large bay of windows overlooking the golf course where Eddie and Jeff often played on the weekends, unsure how I was going to manage to find another job and unclear if I wanted to stay in manufacturing.

She asked me how my job at Goodyear was.

“Great,” I said.

“How well do you run your department?”

“Great.”

“Okay, can you tell me more about yourself and your family?”

“My family’s great.”

“I see,” she said, fiddling with the floppy tie around her neck, some strange version of a man’s necktie I supposed.

“How long has it been since your last job interview?”

“Pretty long,” I said trying to calculate the years.

“I see. Well, I think the place we need to start is how to answer a question when you’re being interviewed. The first thing is you need to say something else besides ‘great.’ The interviewer can’t get a sense of who you are with just a one-word response.”

I’d survived the last ten years by building a wall around my emotions and creating a mask to hide how I really felt. I hadn’t always been this way, so mistrustful and closed-off. Now I needed to open up for a prospective employer?

“Great,” I said.

B
EING LAID
off meant I was forced to slow down, and once I did, I slept more than I had in years. I’d had no idea how tired I really was from the long hours and all of the overtime. I’d also had no idea what disarray the house was in. Rumbling around in the back of my mind all those years I’d been working were the teetering piles of photo albums and scrapbooks I’d planned to start filling. I had bags of special stickers and colored paper. They sat next to the stacks of accumulated family photos and the children’s elementary school artwork and schoolwork. The clutter drove Charles crazy, but I wouldn’t let him throw anything away. He went behind me anyway, organizing the disorder. Sometimes he demanded that I get rid of the outdated catalogs and magazines. I’d follow behind him, snatching a few magazines from him.

“There are some good recipes in that magazine. You can’t throw that one out.”

“You can’t keep everything.” He’d grab the magazines back.

“What about your coin collection?” I’d fuss.

“That’s different. It’s worth something.”

“And you could fill the walls of every Cracker Barrel in America with all those rusty tools in your workshop.”

“That’s not the same either. Anyway, they’re in my toolshed. You don’t have to look at them.”

“I have to look at all the stuff you bring home and put in the garage. It doesn’t make sense. You get rid of my stuff just so you can have more room to bring home someone else’s trash.”

One time when Charles was still working at Railway Express Agency he actually brought home someone else’s wedding dress, which had been damaged in shipping. I often teased him about that, but he was proud of the fact. He’d point out that Vickie had played dress-up in it until she’d worn it out.

Instead of facing the layers of emotional debris collecting around my heart or the detritus scattered throughout my house, I threw myself into my job search. I updated my résumé and bought a copy of
What Color Is Your Parachute?
I also bought the book
Color Me Beautiful
, about how to dress according to whether you’re a fall, winter, summer, or spring—I was a spring. Reading in my job-hunting book that, for every $10,000 you earned, it took a month to find a job with a comparable salary kicked me into high gear, armed with the right color palette for my wardrobe, of course.

With my background in accounting, I gravitated to an opening for an Allstate agent to run the Jacksonville office. The Goodyear headhunter also informed me of another promising position for a manager at the Tyson chicken plant, so I called someone who’d worked at Goodyear with me but had also previously worked at both a chicken plant and an insurance agency. When I asked him about being an agent, he said that before he’d even deposited a commission check, he’d start worrying about how he was going to make another sale, to the point that he couldn’t sleep most nights. When you’re in sales, he explained, “You eat what you kill.” If I could help it, I didn’t want a job that created chronic worry about my income reliability and that sounded as unpredictable as walking barefoot on a sidewalk scattered with spiky brown gumballs from a sweet-gum tree.

With my resources limited, I knew I needed a steady paycheck. As part of the application process for Tyson, I’d even taken an industrial psychology test to see if I was suited for working as a manager in a poultry-processing plant. According to my profile, I was. I had also found out that the training for the Tyson job started several weeks earlier than Allstate’s training, and it seemed clear what I needed to do.

L
IKE AT
Goodyear, at Tyson I had to learn every job on the production line. The plant, which produced all of the chicken for every
McDonald’s east of the Mississippi, also packaged and shipped every part, except the feathers and the cackle, all over the world. The feet were a delicacy in China; the guts went into the process of making dog food; the flap over their bottom was supposedly used as a Japanese hors d’oeuvre; and the carcass was boiled for the tiny pieces of meat you find in your chicken noodle soup. My only problem was that the plant was located two hours south of Jacksonville in the small town of Ashland.

At first I made the long commute on the narrow, two-lane highway—until I skidded off the slick road in the fog. Shaken, I rented a small apartment in Ashland, a town with only one restaurant, the Dairy Queen. As someone remarked when I first moved there, “There are two things to do here: go fishing or watch the leaves fall.”

I’d drive down Monday morning, the backseat full of food Edna had fixed. Charles usually came down one night a week, and I’d drive home on the weekends. I was so tired at night during the week that it didn’t matter that I was alone because I went straight to bed after warming up leftovers and soaking in a long, hot bath.

Learning every job on the line meant learning how to hang chickens. In the hanging room, always darkened to trick the chickens into settling down for roosting, I stood, nauseous, next to an overcrowded bin of live chickens. I had to grab three at a time, flip them upside down, and hook their sharp feet onto the chains attached to a conveyor belt at about eye level. The stunned chickens often fought me, twisting and turning and agitating the rest of the group and scratching the devil out of my arms.

Another day, when I worked the killing room for the first time, I stood in my place in line on the far side of the sharp steel killing wheel. The entire time, my stomach was upset. To keep from being splattered in blood, I had my hair pulled tight in a hairnet under the plastic hat, and I sweated underneath the thick plastic raincoat I had to wear, drops of perspiration pooling under the folds of
my breasts. Hundreds of chickens hanging upside down, a ceaseless stream, moved toward me at an unnerving speed, their throats level with the rotating blade.

If the machine missed slitting a chicken’s throat, I gave the chicken hanging upside down a hard rake across its naked throat with my butcher knife. The very first time I did this, I looked across the room through the large plate-glass window. My eyes met those of the group of men who, having hedged their bets against me, had lined up outside the window to watch. Women comprised most of the workforce there, six hundred to a shift, but a woman in management was still an anomaly.

Covered in blood that clung like blobs of red jelly to my hat and raincoat, I put myself on automatic to finish the business the killing wheel missed. The men eventually bored of their sport and left. At the end of the shift, I stopped outside the window where the men had stood. I looked at the bloody floor where I’d been standing. I doubted the men here had any tricks worse than the men at Goodyear and thought to myself that they hadn’t bargained on the fact that I’d grown up on a farm and seen worse.

While at Tyson, I was in the studio dancing even more often. I competed in my first regional competition, in New Orleans, in early December, only several months after the layoff. During my first dance, as I sashayed across the floor, I got a thrill from the multilayered skirt that I would peel off after that dance to reveal a new outfit underneath. At the end of the judging, when the panelists announced that Hector and I had won first place, I held the heavy trophy I’d been awarded, an excitement and satisfaction I’d never felt before coursing through me.

I
F
I thought I had discovered joy through dancing, the excitement I felt when I saw Will, my first of three grandsons, born in March 1987, was unparalleled. That promising spring day was dampened
only by the fact that he was born a month premature. Holding his sweet little body for the first time and touching those tiny fingers tickling my hand, I made a promise to myself that I’d do a better job being present for my grandchildren than I had with my own children, and I would also do everything I could to help Vickie.

By the time Will was almost two, no matter what the doctors tried, they couldn’t knock out an infection that had cropped up in his lungs. They predicted he’d lose one of his lungs. Somehow Will had swallowed a peanut the wrong way and it had lodged itself in the soft membrane of his lungs, causing a bacterial infection. Vickie discovered it when he fell off the deck and broke his collarbone; the X-ray had shown a gooey mass as thick as peanut butter oozing across his lungs.