Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [76]
“I knew they were bad. I didn’t know they were the worst,” she says, lighting the burner with a match.
“How long has your husband been in the mill?”
“Since February.”
“He used to be a salesman, he said.”
“Yes.”
“Got laid off?”
“Something like that.” He watches her take lard and flour from the cabinet. She measures them and sifts the flour into a bowl and then drops a teaspoon of ice water into the mixture.
“What are you making?” he asks.
“A pie. Strawberry-rhubarb.”
“Sounds good.”
“What do you do at the mill?” she asks, mixing the dough.
“I’m a loom fixer,” he says, leaning against the lip of the sink so that he can see her face.
“What’s that?”
“I fix looms.”
She laughs, tilting her head back a bit. She has a long white neck, a squarish jaw.
“Can I help?” he asks.
She thinks a minute. “Would you mind cutting some strawberries?”
“Not at all.”
“They’re in the icebox,” she says. “Just slice them.”
He feels somewhat better having a task, though now it is more difficult to talk to the woman, and so for a while he just washes the strawberries and cuts them, and he feels all thumbs at this simple task. “You didn’t know about that Copiograph machine and the typewriter, did you?” he asks after a time.
For a moment, she doesn’t answer.
“No,” she says finally.
“I could see it on your face.” He puts the sliced strawberries back into their little wooden box.
“You must be good at reading faces,” she says.
“Have to be,” he says, looking at hers. He turns away and dries his hands on the dish towel.
“I think I’ll go give your husband a hand,” he says.
Honora
The front room hums with the sort of activity it has not seen in years, not, perhaps, since the unwed mothers sat in lively groups, drinking tea (Honora imagines them knitting baby garments) and occasionally glancing out to sea.
Prevent Hunger in Ely Falls, she types. Her fingers are a blur over the familiar keys, the enamel ovals in their silver rings. She has not lost her dexterity, not since the days when she was recording Sexton’s sales pitch in the paneled rooms of banks. In the corner, her husband’s arm is making repetitive round pumps at the Copiograph machine. As each copy is shunted out, he inspects the sheet and then sets it aside on a makeshift table fashioned the night before from a door he took off its hinges and laid over two sawhorses he found in the cellar. He has dressed in his best gabardine trousers (his Sunday-go-to-meeting trousers, Harold might have said) and a shirt kept for special occasions (though there have been precious few special occasions since Christmas). Honora, when she glances up, thinks that it has been some time since she has seen her husband with this much snap.
Dread poverty threatens thousands of Ely Falls workers, she types as the man named Mironson dictates the words from a sheet of paper in his hands. He brushes a long hank of hair from his forehead. He is a small, almost delicate man, his mouth, with its pronounced bow, nearly that of a woman, and so at odds, Honora thinks, with his professed calling as a union organizer — as if a priest had come calling in overalls, or an artist had on a clerical collar. At the opposite end of the room, Quillen McDermott, in blue shirtsleeves, is collating and stapling a newsletter. The boy, Alphonse, is bundling batches of leaflets together with string. Vivian, in crisp white linen pants and a blouse, is holding a copy of the newsletter and pacing.
“You can’t be serious,” Vivian says to no one in particular, exhaling a long plume of blue smoke. “You can’t print this drivel.”
McDermott and Mironson glance up at her.
“Listen to this,” she says, hooting to the room at large. “In the industrial depression you did take a noble part / And ungrumbling shared the leanness of the floundering textile mart.”
McDermott gives a small chuckle, and even Mironson seems abashed. “It was a strike song in New Bedford,” he says.
“I can’t even say the words, never mind sing them,” Vivian says. “And textile mart?”
Mironson brushes his hair off his face again. “The idea