guess maybe those boys just couldn’t wait to get into the fight.
“Why is John back?” Janie asks.
“He’s home on leave to say good-bye. He finished his training. He’ll be shipping out soon to be a flight navigator on an airplane.”
“Well, he looked awfully dreamy in his dress uniform.”
Janie looks away. I know she’s trying to fix that picture of John in her mind so she doesn’t forget it. It’s early June 1942, and the war has been going on for six months. Our little town hasn’t lost a single boy yet. We’re all hoping John won’t be the first. I try to picture my lanky cousin, who loves comic books and funny radio shows, doing anything as serious as helping fly a plane. When he arrived home the other day, he took his new silver wings off his uniform and pinned them on my blouse and said, “Helen, if you were a boy, you could get a pair of these for yourself.” I wasn’t sure if I wished I was a boy or not.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Janie asks.
“John. I’m wondering if he ever worries about getting killed. You’ve seen the newsreels, what it looks like when a plane gets hit. How it spins down toward the earth trailing a line of smoke behind it. Don’t you think that’d be an awful way to die? Such a long way down.”
“You shouldn’t think things like that,” Janie snaps.
She’s right, of course, but how can I help it? I wonder if John thinks those thoughts. If he worries about dying. He doesn’t seem to. He seems excited to leave, like this is all one big adventure. But that’s just John. Everything is a game to him, and he always wins at games.
I take Janie’s hand and squeeze it. “Don’t worry. John was the toughest kid in school and the smartest. He can take care of himself.” When I say it, I really believe it. I can see by the look in Janie’s hazel-yellow eyes that she’s trying to believe it too.
The sun is coming up and its rays are working their way through the dirty window. The humidity is rising, and it’s getting stuffy in the train. The woman across from us has her chin tilted up and is fanning her neck with a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal. I wish I’d thought to bring a magazine too. Then I get an idea that takes my mind off the heat. “Hey, Janie, maybe you should write to John.”
Her face brightens. “Should I?”
“Sure.”
“It could be like in the movies. I could be the girl he dreams about back home.”
“Oh nausea,” I say, which starts us both giggling. The skinny man next to us tosses us a disapproving glance, then tips his head back and closes his eyes, pretending we’re not there. We lean into each other and laugh even harder as the train rattles on toward Peru.
2 - Westclox
I love the Westclox factory. It’s not like other factories, at least not from the front. It’s much prettier, with its three stories of dark red brick and decorative iron work and its Big Ben clock above the main entrance. The factory has been around since the 1880s, and nearly everyone in the Illinois Valley knows someone who works at Westclox. They live in LaSalle or Peru or drive in from the smaller towns. Or like Janie and me, they take the bus or the train. My own grandmother worked for a year at Westclox when she was younger, though she doesn’t talk about it much.
“It was just something I did for the extra money,” she says.
Like Grandpa, Grandma’s always known her place, and her place is at home. I don’t share that feeling, though. I like the excited rush of the traffic on 5th Street as we walk up to the factory’s double doors, the crush of hundreds of men and women arriving for work, the chunk-chunk sound of timecards punching in. I even like the slam of all those metal locker doors where folks store their wraps and lunches. It’s the sound of people heading off to work.
After we put our things in our lockers, Janie moves on upstairs. She’s assigned to a different department than I am. At least for now. I’m replacing a woman who’s taking some time off to care for her daughter’s new baby. I’ll be at this spot for a few weeks, if not the whole summer.
I make my way down a long hall and into a cavernous room filled with rows of long tables that make up the assembly lines. The other women, all of them older than me, take their seats up and down the line. Betty is to my left and Martha to my right. Rita sits across from me, and she is the only one I smile at. Martha and Betty have made it clear they don’t like me. It appears they don’t like anyone but each other. I figure if I pay them no mind, maybe they’ll leave me alone.
But it’s not me they’re after today, it’s Rita. I know this as soon as they make a comment about the dark circles under her eyes and start to tease her.
“You’re looking a bit over-tired today, Rita,” Betty says. “Don’t you know a bride’s supposed to look her best?”
“What’s the matter, Rita? Did you stay up all night worrying your fiancé won’t show up for the wedding?” Martha asks.
It’s a cruel joke. Rita’s fiancé joined the navy in the spring. They’re supposed to get married next week when he’s home on furlough, and Rita has been spending all her free time getting ready for the wedding. That’s the reason she looks so tired. Betty and Martha know that, but they keep teasing her just the same.
I pull my stool up close to my drill press and wait for the first timing device to make its way down the line to me. Someday soon that device will be fixed to a bomb and will travel halfway round the world to do its job against the Nazis or the Japs. I think about that often as I take the pieces shaped like little wooden tops off the moving belt and fix them on the peg of my drill. I pull the handle and bring down the drill bit in exactly the right place for the hole, then I raise the bit, remove the timing device, and put it back on the belt, where it moves on down to Betty. I’ll do this all day and I won’t mind a bit, even when it gets so hot my blouse sticks to my back and not even the large, heavy fans keep us cool anymore. It makes me proud to think I’m doing my part to help us win the war. I don’t have silver wings like John, but I have my Westclox badge.
I’m working as hard as I can, though I can only be as fast as the women before and after me, and those are Martha and Betty. They are both in their thirties or forties and have been at Westclox forever. Martha is small in stature, but she makes up for it by talking louder than she needs to and waving her arms so she takes up more space. Betty is younger than Martha, but she looks older. Her brown hair is streaked with grey, and there are deep lines around her eyes. My mother calls those “laugh lines,” and Betty does laugh a lot, but mostly at other people. She favors polka-dots. Nearly every dress she owns has a polka-dot pattern. Betty and Martha were nice to me when I started here last week, but that quickly changed.
“This company runs on quotas,” Martha said.
“You know what that means?” Betty asked.
“Not exactly.”
“It means the supervisors of each division look at how many pieces are produced in a certain day, and that’s how they decide how many we should get done every day.”
“So people like you who try to work too fast can raise the quota, which means the rest of us will have to work faster too,” Betty said.
“And that’s not something we want, is it?” Martha asked.
I wasn’t sure at first how to answer. I thought maybe she was kidding. Why wouldn’t anyone want to do the best job they could, I wondered? But she didn’t leave me wondering for long.
“Slow. . . down,” she warned, bringing her pinched face in close to mine.
I did slow down too. For the rest of the day anyway. Then I got angry. It was wrong for them to be slowing down war work and wrong for them to be trying to scare me. I considered talking to Mother about it, but I didn’t want her calling my supervisor. Grandpa George always says it’s best to ignore bullies, so that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do—ignore Martha and Betty. They don’t talk to me much anymore, but they make it obvious they mean to distract me any way they can.
At the moment, though, they are focused on Rita.
Martha raises her voice above the whines and
rattles of the fans and machinery. “Say, Betty,” she says. “You know about sailors, right?”
“Oh sure. My cousin married herself one of those. Once a man gets a taste for the sea, he never comes home.”
“So I’ve heard,” Martha says, waving her arm in Rita’s direction. “‘Course that might not be the way with Rita’s fella. Maybe he will come back. That is if the Japs don’t get him first.”
Rita shoves her stool back so hard it topples over, and she rushes off crying. The line stops almost immediately, which is exactly what Martha and Betty wanted. Another woman goes after Rita. Betty chuckles, and I feel a heat rising in me that has nothing to do with the temperature. But I don’t say anything. I just fiddle with a loose button on my blouse. I feel bad for Rita, of course, but not bad enough to draw attention to myself. I’m not proud of that, but until I figure out how to sort this whole thing out, I’m better off laying low. Martha and Betty are my mother’s age, and even if I wanted to confront them, I wouldn’t know how. I glance around for our foreman, Mr. Mueller, but he’s nowhere in sight. He’s never where he’s supposed to be. So I fiddle with my button some more and wish the line would just start moving again so I can do my job.
Rita isn’t gone for long. She pulls herself together quickly and gets back to her seat. Martha throws her arms up in resignation, and Betty mutters under