The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [146]
“I suppose there had been talk of my future before the baby was born, but that was suspended, too. Everything hung still, frozen like vapor in the winter air. I was nearly fifteen, when he was born, and many of my classmates had already left school to take work in the factories along the outlet. It wasn’t uncommon in those days, you have to understand, for people to leave school. Almost everyone did. I didn’t know a single girl who went to college. They were needed on the farms or to help earn money. Or they fell in love and got married.
“So that summer after Joseph was born I took a job in the knitting factory downtown, partly to get out of the house. It was as if I’d disappeared from the face of the earth, anyway. At least that’s how I felt. I was young still, so maybe I was just envious. I tried hard to be useful, certainly, to please them. But when he was born I felt like an old doll, set aside. That factory is long gone now, of course, but it used to sit on the outlet across from the glass insulator factory. I remember because I could look out the big windows, across the water, and see all those people working at their machines like I was working on mine, and I wondered if they were bored, like me, and if they had dreams of other lives, the way I did. I couldn’t look long, though. I couldn’t be distracted from my own machine. It would be costly to make a mistake and even dangerous. My first day Mrs. Tadley got a finger caught in her knitting machine and there was blood everywhere, and then there was a meeting to warn us not to do the same. She had ruined five sweaters’ worth of yarn.
“My machine made socks. It was shaped in a circle and the needles all around it flashed so quickly my eyes couldn’t follow them. The sock came out from below and I cut it free, passed it to the right so the next person could sew the toe and send it on. At first it took all my attention to fit my rhythm to the swift pace of the machine, but later my hands moved almost by themselves, so I could look around a little. There was Sally Zimmerman in the next seat, head bent, running one sock after another through the machine to seal the toes, and beyond us were the windows and light filtering in through the clattering noise and the filaments of dust and fabric that filled the air. At night I’d brush my teeth and spit out blue threads. My ears and my nose gathered lint, as well.
“The days were long and I worked every day but Sunday. I’d walk the few blocks home so tired I could barely move my feet, and fall into bed. Later that summer, we moved to the lake house.
“This is what caused all the trouble, in the end.
“I was so tired, you see. Just asleep on my feet, most of the time. But I always got up and tried to help around the house. Sometimes I’d go out and sit by the lake in the sun and listen to the waves and maybe fall asleep.
“One afternoon Cora had to go out, and she came to the dock and told me to listen for the baby and get him up if he cried, she would be home within two hours. The sun was warm and I’d dozed off, I suppose, for I woke up hearing his cries, thin and small, floating over the lawn. He was teething, and fussy, and so I got him a bottle and changed him and brought him outside, where Cora had a play area set up under the willow tree, right near the water. Is it still there, I wonder, that tree? It is? Those low branches swept over the lawn and the leaves were also so beautiful, but such a mess when they fell. He liked to sit there and play, passing toys from one hand to the other, and after half an hour or so he’d slump over