Grace and Grit (6 page)

As one of the younger women at GE, I tended to keep to myself. The older, more experienced women worked the upper end of
the conveyor belt. Down at my end of the line, we put the finishing touches on the tubes made for televisions and radios. All the women dressed in white uniforms, so we could spot any debris that might corrupt the tubes.

Operating the foot pedal, I welded together two threadlike filaments. With hundreds of tubes coming down the line, no one had time to talk. You could only go to the restroom during a break. At first, I felt like that episode of
I Love Lucy
where she’s working in the chocolate factory and the belt speeds up so fast she has to stuff her mouth and hat and brassiere with chocolate drops. We couldn’t stuff our bras with scrap material, but before we left the plant, management would rifle through the aspirin and lipstick in our purses, looking for pieces of scrap.

At first, my foot hammered the pedal too hard and I generated too much scrap. Even after I got the hang of it, the machine would get too hot, scorching the filament. But I learned to block out my surroundings and focus on lightly tapping the pedal. There was nothing I could do about the machine’s temperature.

We were paid by the piece and given a bonus after we made a certain number of tubes. When we exceeded the production numbers, we were quickly broken up, our synchronicity scattered, so that we wouldn’t have to be paid extra. But when it came to the men there, often the women worked against themselves, acting as ridiculous as schoolgirls. I was glad I was married and not caught up in all that nonsense.

One supervisor had a bad habit of choosing one woman at a time to pick on. When he came around to picking at me, I got so frustrated that I actually started looking for another job, interviewing at Sears and the nearby hospital. When I realized I could make $40 a week somewhere else, or hang in there and keep making $150, I decided to tough it out. I refused to be run off. So I kept earning my paycheck, saving for a new dining room suite we’d put on layaway.

A
FTER ABOUT
a year of working, Charles, who had joined the National Guard, was stationed at Fort Belvoir right outside Washington, D.C., for six months. I wanted to take a week off to go see him. At my age now, I know six months isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, but back then I missed Charles so much it felt like a part of me had been amputated. When I put in my request, the foreman said no. We usually got vacation time in July, when the plant shut down, or around Christmas, when production slowed, so my union representative said there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I told the foreman I was going anyway and he’d see me the following week. I really expected to be fired, but I knew I could find a job somewhere else, with more responsibility and better treatment, just less pay. I was willing to take that risk.

The night my father drove Sandra and me to the Atlanta airport, I almost didn’t make it onto the plane. I’d convinced Sandra to go with me, since her husband was stationed there as well. We scrimped and saved for our plane tickets and took the cheapest flight, the red-eye. Sandra balked at the sight of the plane. I didn’t want to climb those steps into the plane’s tiny door any more than she did, but she announced that she was staying home. I said, “Oh, no. You are going with me,” and dragged her onto the plane.

Things only got worse when we arrived. It occurred to me as we zipped past Fort Belvoir on the Greyhound bus that something was wrong. Charles had told me to catch the bus to the base, but I’d never seen a city bus. In my mind, the word
bus
meant Trailways or Greyhound. I jumped out of my seat and told the driver we needed to turn around. He said, “Lady, you’re on the wrong bus. We’re not stopping, so you might as well sit down.”

I stepped down closer to him and heard myself say in my best Edna imitation, “Listen, you have to stop this bus right now.” By
then, the base was miles behind us. The passengers became quiet, peering over the tops of the headrests. He stopped the bus.

Dressed in skirts and heels, with cars and trucks whizzing by us, Sandra and I lugged our suitcases across the six-lane highway. I found a pay phone at a gas station and called a cab. I’d never been so happy to see Charles in all my life. That week we never left the base. I’d spent all my sightseeing money on cab fare, which cost more than my plane ticket.

The next Monday morning when I showed up at work, my supervisor didn’t say a word. Back on the line, as I singed the two tiny threads together and tapped my foot pedal ever so slightly, I replayed telling him I’d be back in a week, feeling the satisfaction of speaking up, of having choices. After I returned from visiting Charles, my supervisor never picked on me again.

T
WO YEARS
later, since I’d been the last one to be hired, I was the first one to go when GE went into layoff mode. Shortly afterward, I found out I was pregnant. Even though I wanted to look for a new job, Charles and I had always planned on having two kids, so it also felt natural to focus on building our family. I settled in at home, cooking, gardening, and tending to our new daughter, Vickie. It turned out that my mother was right. Home economics came in handy after all.

She may not have come to my wedding, but every day my mother, dressed in a man’s jumpsuit, appeared on my doorstep. Charles begged me to ask her if she could please stay home a couple of days a week so we could have the house to ourselves. I was grateful for the fact that she slung that soiled pile of cloth diapers through the wringer washer on the porch daily. Nursing Vickie, I’d watch her through the window as she unpinned the frozen diapers off the clothesline, her hands stiff and red with cold.

I was also grateful for how she doted on her granddaughter. It reminded me of how she took to Uncle Howard’s two boys, Billy
and Buddy. When I was young, the boys, still toddlers, lived with us for several months. She rocked and loved those boys like I’d never seen. After their mother moved away with them, my mother grieved. Watching her care for Vickie, I knew she and Vickie would have the close relationship she and I never could.

Three years after Vickie was born, Phillip came along. His birth was the first time I made headlines, when the
Anniston Star
read,
JACKSONVILLE WOMAN BEATS THE STORK
. As we sped to the hospital in the middle of the night, escorted by the policeman who’d stopped us for speeding, we had no idea that the strange screeching sound we heard was Vickie’s poor cat, who’d been asleep on the engine—after that, he didn’t stick around much longer. Seconds after Charles dropped me off at the emergency room—he hadn’t even parked the car—I delivered Phillip.

Nothing I’d known had prepared me for motherhood, and as Vickie and Phillip grew I was scared not to go to the doctor at the slightest hint of sickness. Uncle Howard used to say that Papa killed my grandmother Lillie when she had cancer. Spending all his money on liquor, Papa neglected to take her to the doctor. He also crippled his son Leonard when he refused to get Leonard’s broken leg set. Like the cat sleeping on our warm engine, one day Leonard just took a notion and disappeared. So any time of day or night, if the children showed a sign of a fever or ear infection, I hauled them to the doctor, Edna sitting in the backseat of my car soothing the sick child in her lap.

E
VEN THOUGH
I read Dr. Spock religiously, as a young mother I was overwhelmed by the fatigue and rawness of my emotions, spinning from tears to frustration in a second. And Phillip, allergic to everything he ate and even his baby blanket and sheets, cried through each night of his first two years. He never slept, despite the soy formula I had shipped on a Trailways bus and delivered to Crow Drugs each week.

Throughout the night, I’d sit in the wooden rocking chair in his room, holding him in my arms. Otherwise, he screamed. Mute with exhaustion, I felt especially vulnerable, as tender as the soft spot on his newborn head. When Charles left for work in the morning, I listened to his car crank up and envisioned eighteen-wheeler trucks smashing into him on the way to work. Then I’d follow my imagined tragic scenario to a vision of me, alone, trying to raise Vickie and Phillip.

Many mornings I brought myself back to reality by admiring the beautiful straw flowers and zinnias outside my bedroom window. One of the first things I’d done when Charles and I settled in that spring of my senior year was plant a flower garden. Mama never did grow anything you couldn’t pick and eat. Planting my annual seeds was comfort I’d chosen a different path. One particular morning after rocking Phillip all night, gazing beyond my blooming flowers, I was struck by the familiar sight of fields I’d known as a child. I closed my eyes and continued to rock Phillip. The truth of the matter was that I was living the same life as my mother.

—M
ARGE
P
IERCY

E
ACH TIME
I took Vickie and Phillip to the doctor or went to see my own doctor, Dr. Stout, Charles said, “You’re just hunting for somewhere to go.” I didn’t look forward to doctor visits, but I was glad to get out of the house. During the last visit to Dr. Stout’s office, when he couldn’t find anything wrong with my shoulder and knee, both of which had been hurting, he’d commented, “You’re perfectly fine. You just seem a little tired.” I shrugged. He pressed, asking if everything at home was okay. I smiled. Of course it was.

Dr. Stout patted my hand, concerned. “Well, I know it’s not the children. They look fine.” Holding my hand, he continued. “What about Charles? How’s his job?”

I told him that Charles worked as a license inspector for the county. I pulled my hand from his clasp and grabbed Phillip, now about to start school, to stop him from spinning the stool next to the examining table. Dr. Stout started to write something on a piece of white paper, then stopped and took off his round spectacles. Deep grooves cut across the sides of his face from the tight
glasses. He wiped the lens with a white handkerchief he took from in his pocket. Placing his glasses back on his face, he commented as he finished writing, “In my experience, if it’s not job troubles, then it’s one of two things.” Finally, I was going to get an answer. “You’re dealing with either an alcoholic or a religious fanatic.”

I shook my head. I’d never thought of Charles as a fanatic about anything, except maybe his coin collection. “No, Charles doesn’t drink. He’s a deacon in our church.” I didn’t say anything else. Neither did Dr. Stout; he simply handed me the piece of paper. I could barely read his scribble. It was a prescription for an antidepressant.

When the door closed behind Dr. Stout, I crumpled up the paper and threw it into the trash can. I couldn’t afford the prescription, and Charles wouldn’t hear of me taking it anyway.

D
R
. S
TOUT
was right; everything wasn’t fine. I thought about the real answers to his questions on the way home. The only place I went besides the grocery store was the Baptist church. If Charles had his way, we’d have gone to church every day; as it was, we were there at least four times a week. I didn’t know how or when it had happened, but my world had become too small. I still spoke to Sandra some over the phone, and we had dinner with Charles’s family or mine every Sunday, but during these dinners I felt like I was repeating the same conversation. I sometimes worried I’d never experience that sense of wonder you feel meeting a new friend or traveling to a new place for the first time. I was afraid the major milestones of my life, marriage and childbirth, were past. Was it foolish to hope I still had something exciting ahead of me, something even important, that I could have a life of my own?

I had told Dr. Stout that Charles was a license inspector; what I hadn’t explained was the fact that Charles and I had struggled for years to make ends meet. After the GE plant closed, Charles worked part-time at Railway Express Agency. He took the weekend shift that no one else wanted until his supervisor realized how
reliable he was and offered him a full-time job. Ten years later the company was sold to Greyhound, so he’d found work as a license inspector, traveling to businesses throughout Calhoun County to verify that the owners were up-to-date with their annual fees. He also checked the status of people’s mobile-home licenses. I worried about his safety—especially after his windshield was shot out. Now the sheriff accompanied him when he issued citations.