John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'So what are we doing tomorrow night?' Debra asked, sighing.

Homer watched a dog gnaw at his side-view mirror.

'Well, I was going to see Candy-she's home from Camden,' Homer said. 'I haven't seen her on a weekend all fall, and Wally did ask me to look after her.'

'You're going to see her without Wally?' Debra asked.

'Right,' Homer said. The van was so snub-nosed that the dogs could hurl themselves directly against the {429} windshield without having to clamber over the hood. A big dog's paws raked one of the windshield wipers away from the windshield, releasing it with a crack; it looked bent; it wouldn't quite touch the surface of the glass anymore.

'You're going to see her alone,' Debra said.

'Or with her dad,' Homer said.

'Sure,' said Debra Pettigrew, getting out of the van. She left the door open a little too long. A dog with the spade-shaped head of a Doberman charged the open door; it was half in the van, its heavy chest heaving against the passenger-side seat, its frosty muzzle drooling on the gearshift box, when Debra grabbed it by the ear and yanked it back, yelping, out of the van.

'So long,' said Homer Wells softly-after the door had slammed, after he had wiped the dog's frothy slobber off the gearshift knob.

He drove by Kendall's Lobster Pound twice, but there was nothing to tell him whether Candy was home. On the weekends when she came home, she took the train; then Ray drove her back, on Sunday. I'll call her tomorrow-Saturday-Homer thought.

When Candy said that she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer had no objections. 'I always wanted to see him,' he said. Bath, after all, was less than an hour away.

On the bridge across the Kennebec River, they could see several big ships in the water and several more in dry dock; the Bath shipyards were sprawled along the shore-a rhythmic hammering and other metal sounds audible even on a Saturday. They were much too early for the movie. They were looking for an Italian restaurant that Ray had told them about-if it was still there; Raymond Kendall hadn't been in Bath in years.

In 194-, especially to an outsider, the city seemed dominated by the shipyards, and by the ships that stood taller than the shipyard buildings, and by the bridge that spanned the Kennebec River. Bath was a workingman's {430} town, as Melony soon discovered.

She found a job in the shipyards and began her winter employment on an assembly line, working with other women-and with an occasional, handicapped man- on the second floor of a factory specializing in movable parts. The movable part to which Melony would devote her energies for the first month of her employment was a hexagonal-shaped sprocket that looked like half a ham, split open lengthwise; Melony did not know the whereabouts of the assembly line that dealt with the other half of the ham. The sprocket arrived on the conveyor belt in front of her, pausing there for exactly forty-five seconds before it was moved on and replaced by a new sprocket. The joint of the sprocket was packed with grease; you could stick your finger in the grease, past the second knuckle. The job was to insert six ball bearings into the grease-packed joint; you pushed each ball bearing into the grease until you felt it hit the bottom; all six fit perfectly. The trick was to get only one hand greasy; a clean hand had an easier time handling the clean ball bearings, which were the size of marbles. The other part of the job was making sure that the six ball bearings were perfect- perfectly round, perfectly smooth; no dents, no jagged metal scraps stuck to them. The odds were that one out of every two hundred ball bearings had something wrong with it; at the end of the day, you turned in the bad ball bearings. If you had a day with no bad ball bearings, the foreman told you that you weren't looking each ball bearing over carefully enough.

You could sit or stand, and Melony tried both positions, alternating them through the day. The belt was too high to make sitting comfortable and too low to make standing any better. Your back hurt in one place when you stood and in another place when you sat. Not only did Melony not know who did what, where, to the other half of the sprocket; she also didn't know what the sprocket was for. What's more, she didn't care. After two weeks, she had the routine down pat: {431}! between twenty-six and twenty-eight seconds to insert the ball bearings and never more than ten seconds to pick six perfect ball bearings. She learned to keep a nest of ball bearings in her lap (when she sat) and in an ashtray (she didn't srnoke) when she stood; that way she always had a ball bearing handy in case she dropped one. She had a twelve-to-fourteen-second rest between sprockets, during which time she could look at the person on her left and at the person on her right, and shut her eyes and count to three or sometimes five. She observed that there were two styles of labor on the line. Some of the workers picked their six perfect ball bearings immediately upon finishing a sprocket; the others waited for the new sprocket to arrive first. Melony found faults with both styles.

The woman next to Melony put it this way: 'Some of us are pickers, some are stickers,' she said.

'I'm not either, or I'm both,' Melony said.

'Well, I think you'll have an easier time of it, dearie, if you make up your mind,' the woman said. Her name was Doris. She had three children; one side of her face was still pretty, but the other was marred by a mole with whiskers in it. In the twelve or fourteen seconds that Doris had between sprockets, she smoked.

On the other side of Melony was an elderly man in a wheelchair. His problem was that he could not pick up the ball bearings that he dropped, and some of them got caught in his lap blanket or in the wheelchair apparatus, which caused him to rattle when he wheeled himself off for his coffee break or for lunch. His name was Walter.

Three or four times a day, Walter would shout, 'Fucking ball bearings!'

Some days, when someone was sick, the assembly line was reassembled and Melony was not pinned between Walter and Doris. Sometimes she got to be next to Troy, who was blind. He felt the ball bearings for perfection and daintily poked them into the thick and unseen grease. He was a little older than Melony; but he had {432} always worked in the shipyards; he'd been blinded in a welding accident, and the shipyards owed him a job for life.

'At least I've got security,' he would say, three or four times a day.

Some days Melony was put next to a girl about her age, a feisty little chick called Lorna.

There's worse jobs,' Lorna said one day.

'Name one,' said Melony.

'Blowing bulldogs,' Lorna said.

'I don't know about that,' Melony said. 'I'll bet every bulldog is different.'

'Then how come every man is the same?' Lorna asked.

Melony decided that she liked Lorna.

Lorna had been married when she was seventeen-'to an older man,' she'd said-but it hadn't worked out. He was a garage mechanic, 'about twenty-one,' Lorna said. 'He just married me 'cause I was the first person he slept with,' Lorna told Melony.

Melony told Lorna that she'd been separated from her boyfriend by 'a rich girl who came between us'; Lorna agreed that this was 'the worst.'

'But I figure one of two things has happened,' Melony said. 'Either he still hasn't fucked her, because she hasn't let him, and so he's figured out what he's missing. Or else she's let him fuck her-in which case, he's figured out what he's missing.'

'Ha! That's right,' Lorna said. She appeared to like Melony.

'I got some friends,' she told Melony. 'We eat pizza, go

to movies, you know.' Melony nodded; she had done

none of those things. Lorna was as thin as Melony was

thick, she showed as much bone as Melony showed flesh;