The City Girl

The City Girl

Snap! Snap! Snap!

Bony fingers sliced through Clara’s reverie. She didn’t have to look up to know whose body possessed those claws. Although only in her thirties, Agnes’ hands defied her age. The enamel of her fingernails showed thick, yellowed and rippled from years of vitamin and iron deficiencies. Her thin, translucent skin stretched taught, obscene and white over her knuckles, making Clara’s stomach turn sickly at the sight of them. Her knuckles protruded so prominently they made you think they were going to pop out of her thin skin like a broken bone might. She prayed to Mother Mary that her hands wouldn’t look like Agnes’ at such a young age.

“Daydreaming again, Clara, are we?” Agnes spat, patronizingly.

Agnes took her job as shift supervisor far too seriously.

“Give a little power to someone and it goes to their head,” that’s what her father always told them.

Clara’s eyes were downcast. She couldn’t lift them from the floor to look at Agnes. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the little hole knotted out of the hardwood. Not after she had finally found it again.

She had spotted the hole last Monday, during the early afternoon hours, when she had been on sweeping detail. Clara was often on sweeping detail. Agnes didn’t trust her to wrap. She only allowed her a station when the other girls were in a pinch. She was the wrapping department’s last resort.

Clara’s gaze stayed glued to the floor. The hole was no larger than an Indian Head nickel. She wondered what she would find if she stuck the tip her finger in the hole. Would there be a pile of dust? A rotting raisin or peanut? Maybe a mouse lived under the floorboards and used the hole as gateway to explore at night when the wrapping department was still and void of humans.

Clara wouldn’t blame a mouse for being afraid of humans. Humans could be such wretched creatures. So cruel and unkind.

She heard Agnes’ breathing. Clara hated that she had such refined hearing. Even with the enormous fan blades orbiting overhead and the rustle of the girls furiously wrapping squares of waxed paper around their lumps of buttery, hardened caramel, she could still hear the nasally drift of Agnes’ breath being expelled from her nostrils. That grating snort that accompanied each discharge of air. It disgusted her to know that she was so close to Agnes. So close that she could hear Agnes’ involuntary, crude bodily noises. It made Agnes seem vulnerable. Clara did not want to think about Agnes being vulnerable. She did not want to think about Agnes at all.

She wasn’t sure if she should answer her or not. She slowly lifted her eyes from her little mouse haven in the floor, a trace of guilt lacing her expression. Clara took in Agnes’ stormy gray eyes in. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

No matter, Agnes cut her attempt to offer any explanation off.

“That’s the third time today I’ve caught you sleeping on the job,” she fumed accusingly. Nostrils flaring.

Clara’s eyes immediately dropped to the floor in weak concession. She wanted to find the little hole again. She swept her eyes right, then left across the hardwood, but they could focus on nothing, making out only the general brown and orange hues underneath her. 

She could feel her hands grow damp as she shifted the wooden broom handle she held in her hands ever so slightly.

Agnes snapped her fingers rudely once more in front of her face, causing Clara’s eyes to jolt upward. Agnes took one step toward Clara, closing the gap between them. Clara felt an involuntary urge to shrink backward, to create more space between them. She could feel Agnes’ hot, rank breath hit her face. Her stomach churned in disgust.

Tuna. Clara thought disgustedly. Agnes must have eaten tinned tuna for lunch.

Clara despised fish. She had been forced to eat bottom feeders, bullheads and carp, nearly every week during the spring and summer months. Her family smoked as many of the slimy creatures as they could to supply them with sustenance during the winter months. Just the smell of fish made Clara physically ill. That was country life for you. Here in the city, choice was possible, as long as you had the money to make choice a reality.

Agnes’ impatient exhale crossed the divide and hit Clara in the nostrils once more. She nearly swayed from the stench of it. If the smell of her revolting breath didn’t get her, the heat would.

Her underarms grew slick with perspiration. Even with the fans going, it was pushing the mid-eighties. Too many bodies in the wrapping room only served to exacerbate the poor conditions. Clara felt faint. Her heavy woolen dress, linen apron and puffed cupcake cap added to the sweltering, claustrophobic atmosphere.

The gigantic fan blades overhead whirred, sweeping their massive fins in circles near the ceiling. Shadows moved across the walls, giving the room a feeling that one was on a demented carousel ride. The fans’ efforts were in vain. No cool movement of air was felt down here, on the hell that was the assembly floor.

Agnes huffed disagreeably.

“Maybe I need to speak more slowly. I know that you country girls aren’t as sharp as some of our city hires,” Agnes quipped insultingly.

Clara felt the heat snake up her neck like English Ivy on a brick wall, creeping up to her cheeks, making her face flush pink, then red.

Her peripheral vision caught a few of the candy wrappers looking at them. No warmth or pity crossed their faces. Clara was seen by most at the H. L. Garner Confectionary Company to be the odd duck, the country girl, backwards, trash.

Agnes pointed her index finger at Clara once more, butting Clara’s chest with the tip of her thick, jaundiced, fingernail. Clara winced, feeling the sharpness of her fingertip through her linen apron and wool top. Her legs shook ever so slightly. Agnes’ physical proximity to her own body was intolerable to Clara. The tip of her fingernail digging into her chest felt like a violation. The heat only added to Clara’s suffering. She could feel the collection of heat, sweat and fog form between her skull and brain. Clara felt a hectic rush to step back from Agnes, to create immediate space between their bodies. She felt her breath start to quicken. Clara tried to tell herself that it would be over soon. 

“This is your last warning for the day, Country Clara,” she sneered, “you’d better have the entire floor swept in the next ten minutes. Sophie’s done at 3:00 today. You stay till 5:00. You’re covering her wrapping station. And you had better make sure you move quickly. If I catch even a single melted caramel, it’s coming out of your pay. Do you understand?”

Clara lurched back, ever so slightly, as a drop of Agnes’ spittle landed on her right cheek. How she wished she could lift her hand to her face and wipe the drop off. It made her skin crawl to think that Agnes’ tuna spit was her.

“Ten minutes,” Agnes repeated.

Clara blinked, her hands gripped the broom handle fiercely.

“What are you still standing her for? Move!” Agnes cried waving her arms at Clara like she was a mangy mutt she wanted to kick across a dirty alleyway.

Clara began to move the broom across the floor. The girls wrapping the candy near her, turned their backs and set their eyes to their work, ignoring Clara once again.

She had been so excited to leave the country for city life. To live in a boarding house with other girls her age and work in a candy factory downtown had been a dream come true for Clara. No more killing and plucking chickens, cleaning fish, putting up pork and fish in the salt shack, drawing water from the well, slopping the hogs, gathering eggs from mean mother hens, that wanted nothing more than peck your eyes out.

Most of all, she had wanted to escape the people. She had nightmares most nights. Terrible ones that gave her hot flashes, followed by cold chills. She had been reprimanded to the house mother twice by her roommates. She knew she talked in her sleep. The way things were going, Clara worried that she wouldn’t have a job or a room to board at before the week was up.

She knew she couldn’t go back home. She wouldn’t. She needed to find a way to make this job work, until something else came along.

She looked around at the girls, fingers flying, wrapping confection after confection, twisting the little flares at the ends of the wrapped candy. None had offered her a single look of kindness. None had befriended her since she started working here. No one had even tried. It all felt cruel, so very cruel.

As she finished sweeping the floor, she thought about her imaginary friend, the mouse. She felt sorry for her imaginary friend the mouse. Humans were horrible examples of humanity. If they wouldn’t think twice about transgressing against each other, they wouldn’t bat an eye at killing a mouse. Still, a mouse had a fighting chance. It could run, hide and go unnoticed by the human eye. Clara, could not. Clara was running out of places to go.