I called a local dairy and asked whether there were any openings for milkmen. I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm. I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life. I’d gone to Rutgers partly because it had a renowned department of dairy science. I’d taken one mini-course in how to judge dairy cattle and learned the differences between Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, and Brown Swiss cows. “We’ve never had a lady drive a milk truck, but there’s no reason not,” a man said, and he agreed to let me come in and talk. The plant was all gleaming stainless steel, heated milk undercut with a bracing whiff of ammonia. It was the first time I could be completely honest in a job interview. I didn’t have any experience, but I was sincerely interested in the dairy industry.
On a frigid morning in February, I went along with a milkman on a route in Fairview, a suburb west of Cleveland. The milk truck had two sets of pedals, one with the standard three for a stick shift, for driving sitting down when you were going long distances, and the other for driving standing up, when you were hopping between houses. This second set had just two pedals: the clutch and the brake were combined in one. When you needed to slow down or shift gears, your left foot squeezed down through the clutch to the brake on one pedal, and you had to lift your right foot off the accelerator and balance on one heel.
The route was available, and they gave me the job. A generous friend lent me her car for a crash course in how to drive a stick shift. The foreman who was training me noticed that I handled the truck better standing up than sitting down. The seat was designed to fold up and swing around to the side, where it could be stowed out of the way. All that folding and swinging had loosened it up, so when I turned the steering wheel the seat swung in the opposite direction, and I would find myself facing out the side instead of in the direction the truck was going, as if I were on some disorienting amusement-park ride. At the foreman’s suggestion, I was driving back to the plant standing up, on Brookpark Road, out near the airport. I went through an underpass, on the far side of which was a traffic light, and I was almost under it when I saw that it was red, so I had to slam on the brake and try to steer while gripping the steering wheel and balancing on one heel, and I lost control. The truck crashed into a concrete barrier. The foreman was thrown into the ice-cream freezer, and I landed on the floor. He was OK. I was bruised and humiliated. The plant had its own tow truck and mechanic, and I rode back with the mechanic, wanting to bum one of his unfiltered Camels. The foreman got blamed, because the boss said he shouldn’t have had me driving standing up, and I got another chance.
I had some really nice customers—there was a couple who bought only a pint of half-and-half once a week for their coffee—and I had some deadbeats, the kind of people who knew that if they ever paid their bill in full you’d drop them. There was a man who rehabilitated coin changers, those contraptions with barrels for quarters, nickels, pennies, and dimes; we wore them on our belts. The houses had milk chutes, or boxes beside the door, or you put the milk between the storm door and the inside door, and shouted “Milkman!” I wasn’t a man, but I didn’t like the word “lady”—it seemed not feminist—so I wouldn’t holler “Milklady!” and “milkmaid” was a little too fanciful. I settled for “milkwoman,” which was a bit too anatomically correct and made me sound like a wet nurse. I muffled the last syllables.
I had half a mind to stay in Cleveland and try to marry the boss’s son (he raised beef cattle), but I gave up the milk route to accept a fellowship at the University of Vermont, where I had applied, too late, the year before. While pursuing a master’s degree in English, I kept up my interest in the dairy industry—UVM had an agricultural school and a famous ice-cream program. I even learned to milk cows, though they were university cows (Holsteins—big producers). My first job once the academic life had worn me down was packaging mozzarella on the night shift in a cheese factory. A team of women, wearing white rubber aprons, yellow rubber gloves, green rubber boots, and hairnets, pulled bricks of mozzarella out of vats of cold salt water, labeled them, bagged them, sealed the bags, boxed the cheese, and stacked the boxes. I had a secret yen to operate the forklift truck. The Popeye-style muscles I developed in my forearms atrophied soon after I moved to New York. Sometimes, on the sides of trucks making deliveries to pizzerias, I still recognize the logos of cheese wholesalers—Vesuvio, Cremona, in red, white, and green—whose labels we slapped onto loaves of mozzarella in Vermont. I don’t suppose that I will ever belong to the Brotherhood of Teamsters again (though I maintain my chauffeur’s license) or have calluses on my palms from handling a stainless-steel carrier full of half-gallon milk cartons.
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