Part 4

"You said it!"

"Say, got more 'n one dope?" asks Lena, hopefully. Meanwhile she sets out, with my aid, row after row of dinky little deep boxes.

"Say now," say I to Lena, "and what would a girl be doin' with jus' one dope?"

"You said it!" says Lena.

At which follows a discussion on dopes, ending by Lena's promising never to vamp my dope if I won't vamp hers.

"Where'd ya work last?" asks Lena.

One thing the first day taught me. If you want to act the part and feel the part, earrings and gum help, but if there is one thing you are more conscious of than all else, it is such proper English as you possess--which compared to Boston is not much, but compared to Lena and Ida and Mary and Louise and Susie and Annie is painfully flawless. Chew hard as ever you can, if you tell Fannie, "There aren't any more plantations," it echoes and re-echoes and shrieks at you from the four sides of Christendom. But holler, "Fannie, there ain't no more plantations!" and it is like the gentle purring of a home cat by comparison. Funny how it is easier to say "My Gawd!" and "Where t' hell's Ida!" than "I 'ain't got none." Any way round, you never do get over being conscious of your grammar. If it is correct, it is lonesome as the first robin. If it is properly awful, there are those school-teacher upbringers. I am just wondering if one might not be dining with the head of the university philosophy department and his academic guests some night and hear one's voice uttering down a suddenly silent table, "She ain't livin' at that address no more." Utterly abashed, one's then natural exclamation on the stillness would be, "My Gawd!" Whereat the hostess would busily engage her end of the table in anguished conversation, giving her husband one look, which, translated into Lena's language, would say, "What t' hell did we ask her for, anyhow?"

Is one to write of factory life as one finds it, or expurgated? I can hear the upbringers cry "expurgated"! Yet the way the girls talked was one of the phases of the life which set the stamp of difference on it all. What an infinitesimal portion of the population write our books! What a small proportion ever read them! How much of the nation's talking is done by the people who never get into print! The proportion who read and write books, especially the female folk, live and die in the belief that it is the worst sort of bad taste, putting it mildly, to use the name of the Creator in vain, or mention hell for any purpose whatsoever. Yet suddenly, overnight, you find yourself in a group who would snap their fingers at such notions. Sweet-faced, curly-headed Annie wants another box of caramels. Elizabeth Witherspoon would call, "Fannie, would you be so kind as to bring me another box of caramels?" Annie, without stopping her work or so much as looking up, raises her voice and calls down the room--and in her heart she is the same exactly as Elizabeth W.--"Fannie, you bum, bring me a box of car'mels or I'll knock the hell clean out o' ya."

According to Elizabeth's notions Fannie should answer her, "One moment, Miss Elizabeth; I'm busy just now." What Fannie (with her soul as pure as drifted snow) does call back to Annie is, "My Gawd! Keep your mouth shut. 'Ain't you got sense enough to see I'm busy!"

Annie could holler a hundred times, and she does, that she'd knock the hell out of Fannie, and God would love her every bit as much as he would love Miss Elizabeth Witherspoon, who has been taught otherwise and never said hell in her life, not even in a dark closet. Fannie and all the other Fannies and Idas and Louisas, say, "My Gawd!" as Miss Elizabeth says "You don't say!" and it is all one to the Heavenly Father. Therefore, gentle reader, it must be all one to you. There is not the slightest shade of disrespect in Annie's or Fannie's hearts as they shower their profanity on creation in general. There is not the slightest shade in mind as I write of them.

So then, back that first day Lena asked, "Where'd ya work last?"

"Didn't work in a factory before."

"'Ain't ya?"

"No, I 'ain't." (Gulp.) "I took care of kids."

"Gee! but they was fresh."

"You said it!"

"Lena!" hollers Ida. "Get ta work and don't talk so much!" Whereat Lena gives me another poke in my cold ribs and departs. And Tessie and I pack "assorteds": four different chocolates in the bottom of each box, four still different ones in the top--about three hundred and fifty boxes on our table. We puff and labor on the top layer and Ida breezes along. "My Gawd! Look at that! Where's your cardboards?"

Tessie and I look woebegone at one another. Cardboards? Cardboards?

Ida glues her Eyetalian eye on Lena down the line. "Lena, you fool, didn't you tell these here girls about cardboards?... My Gawd! My Gawd!" says Ida. Whereat she dives into our belabored boxes and grabs those ached-over chocolates and hurls them in a pile. "Get all them top ones out. Put in cardboards. Put 'em all in again." Tessie and I almost could have wept. By that time it is about 4. We are all feet, feet, FEET. First I try standing on one foot to let the other think I might really, after all, be sitting down. Then I stand on it and give the other a delusion. Then try standing on the sides, the toes, the heels. FEET! "Ach! Mein Gott!" moans Tessie. "To-morrow I go look for a job in a biscuit factory."

"Leave me know if you get a sit-down one."

And in that state--FEET--Ida makes us pack over the whole top layer in three hundred and fifty boxes. Curses on Lena and her "dopes." Or curses on me that I could so suddenly invent such picturesque love affairs that Lena forgot all about cardboards.

About then my locker key falls through a hole in my waist pocket and on to the floor and out of sight. In the end it takes a broom handle poked about diligently under the bottom shelf of our table to make a recovery. Before the key appear chocolates of many shapes and sizes, long reposing in oblivion under the weighty table. The thrifty Spanish woman behind me gathers up all the unsquashed ones and packs them. "Mus' be lots of chocolates under these 'ere tables, eh?" she notes wisely and with knit brows. As if to say that, were she boss, she'd poke with a broom under each and every bottom shelf and fill many a box.

At least my feet get a moment's rest while I am down on my hands and knees among the debris from under the tables.

By five o'clock Tessie thinks she'll throw up her job then and there. "Ach! Ach! My feet!" she moans. I secretly plan to kill the next person who gives me a box of chocolate candy.

Surely it is almost 6.

Five minutes after 5.

The bell has forgotten to ring. It must be 7.

Quarter after 5.