Perhaps it was the soft thrash of wings against the walls of her belly that made Ella think further of birds, and she considered how her thin, gnarled hands reminded her of a bird’s feet. She placed her palms on her knees, watched her knuckles rise like knobby mountains, saw her veins roll beneath her skin like blue worms that had died but never withered away. What was left of her fingernails were thick and broken, and it was laughable to imagine that someone like Ella would ever spend the time it would take to use a tiny brush to color such ugly things.
She resisted the urge to lift these awful hands to her face and allow those fingers to feel what waited there: the sunken, wide-set, dark eyes; the grim mouth that she imagined as always frowning because she did not believe she had ever smiled at herself when looking into a mirror, and she had only seen one photograph of herself in her lifetime, and she was certain that she was not smiling then. She recalled the photograph of a younger version of herself taken more than ten years ago; she and John and baby Lilly posing for a traveling photographer inside the post office down in Cowpens, South Carolina. John with his arm thrown around Ella’s shoulder, his face and eyes lit with the exaltation of the gloriously drunk, Lilly crying in her arms, what Ella knew to be her own much younger face blurred in movement as it turned toward Lilly’s cries at the exact moment of the camera’s looking. John had purchased the photo, folded it, and kept it in a cigar box that rattled with loose change and the quiet rustle of paper money when and if they had it. Ella had removed the photograph and gazed upon it from time to time over the years, but never to look at her own face. She’d only wanted to see the face of her firstborn, the girl who was now a tough, independent young lady who mothered her little sister and brothers more than Ella had the time or the chance or the energy to. John had left her—left them all, for that matter—over a year ago, and Ella assumed that he’d taken the cigar box with him because Lord knows he’d taken all that money, but the only thing that Ella missed now was the photograph.
She looked over at the young secretary where she sat reading. No, Ella wasn’t pretty, not like that girl. Pretty took the will to be so and the money to do it and the time to see to it and the sleep to maintain it, and Ella didn’t have any of those things. The woman lowered the book to turn a page. Her eye caught Ella’s. The girl’s gaze shifted toward the closed door of Goldberg’s brother’s office.
“It won’t be much longer,” the girl said. She didn’t look back at Ella. Instead she returned her eyes to her book, but Ella nodded her head yes anyway. She sat and listened as the girl turned pages and laughed softly, cleared her throat, yawned, laughed again. Ella closed her eyes and tuned her ears to the goings-on behind Goldberg’s brother’s closed door, but she couldn’t hear a thing.
Her shift had just started, and she’d only been at work for a few minutes when the foreman, whose name was Tommy Dobbins, sent her down to Goldberg’s brother’s office. He’d put his fingers in his mouth and whistled until she looked up and spied him several rows over from the spinners she’d been tending. He’d pointed at her and crooked his finger and mouthed the words “Come here.”
Ella walked down the line away from Dobbins while she stared at the dozens of white strands of yarn where they coiled around the spools, her eyes searching for a break or a weak spot that would require her to twist the broken ends together before the strand could continue on to the bobbin. From there the doffers would come behind her and remove the full bobbins and replace them with empty spindles. After that, spoolers would combine several strands into yarn. If a strand broke on Ella’s spinners, then the tension failed, which meant the hank clock wouldn’t register any output, which meant Ella’s pay was docked for any amount of time the little dial on the hank refused to tick. She needed to keep the dials moving, and any interruption, even if it was the shift supervisor himself, ran the risk of cutting into her pay. And that was how she spent twelve hours a night, six nights a week: eyeing hundreds of strands of yarn at the same time while worrying about the tiny hands of a clock that dictated whether and how much her children would eat.
She came around the far end of the line and checked the strands on the other side on her way to where Dobbins leaned against the railing at the top of the rickety wooden stairs. She stopped in front of him and waited for him to explain why he’d called her away from the frenzy of the spinning machines, but Dobbins just rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger, and then he looked down at a pocket watch he wore on a leather strap. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad-shouldered, and although he was only forty years old his red hair had long ago faded almost completely to gray. He closed the watch and slipped it into his pocket.
“Goldberg’s brother wants to talk to you,” he said.
Everyone knew there were two brothers, two Goldbergs, but the smaller and slighter of the two was the one who came into work each day, the one who signed their paychecks, the one most likely to call them into his office and chastise them or promote them or fire them altogether. This man had always been known as Goldberg’s brother; the other, more mysterious brother, simply as Goldberg.
“Can it wait?” Ella asked. “I don’t get a break for another six hours. It’s going to set me back on the hank if I come off the line.”
Dobbins looked over Ella’s shoulder at the other workers. “Dinah and Molly can tend your spinners.”
“Dinah and Molly can’t run all them machines,” Ella said. “This stretch-out makes it so we can’t even keep track of our own. It’s going to set all of us back.”
“Don’t matter,” Dobbins said. “Go on down. He don’t like to stay late on Saturday nights. He’s got a family to go home to.”
“So do I,” Ella said, “and this is going to set me back.”
“Don’t matter,” Dobbins said again. “Go on. He’s waiting for you.”
“I’ll tell him you told me to come off the line,” Ella said. “Wasn’t my idea.”
“Go on down,” Dobbins said.
Ella wanted to crane her neck and look toward the far end of the floor, where Violet worked along with the rest of the colored spinners, but she didn’t want Dobbins to ask her any questions about who she was looking at. She wondered if Violet was watching her now.
She walked down the first flight of stairs to the landing, Dobbins’s footsteps falling hard behind hers. She gained the landing and turned to follow the next flight of stairs, and as she did she looked up toward the second floor and saw Violet’s face peering over the railing. There were other faces too—the rest of them white—but Violet’s was the only face she saw. Dobbins’s eyes must have followed hers to the second floor because all the faces disappeared at the same time.
She reached the bottom floor where the opening room led toward the loading ramp. The air here was warm and soft, clean. A bird flashed through her line of vision like something that had been thrown from one side of the world to the other. Dobbins stood beside her, removed his watch from his pocket, and looked down at it again. He sighed.