Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

“Esther?” Myrle said. Her voice was muffled. Her back to me still.

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Phsst,” I said. My feet ached, a pulsing in my fingertips. Myrle sniffled, but I didn’t have anything more to give her. The windows shook and the storm flashed. I had never seen so much coming from a light through our window, as if the world had turned or we ourselves had, the whole place moving every little inch, and no one knew why or when it would stop.

It was another month before Myrle wrote a second letter. She wrote one every week after that. In the morning, she left them on her desk or tucked them in the pocket of my coat. I carried the letters off, swearing to send them. Father , they’d been addressed, or Nan, Lee. Even Agnes. We’re sorry to have left , or Tell Father, we’re sorry. Then she stopped saying sorry and all she wrote about was home. It’s never so nice as home , she wrote. And always a wind. It’s never clean. There’s a lake , she wrote , bigger than all our acres put together, but I’ve only seen it once . I left for the shop at half after six every morning, leaving Myrle to Mrs. Keyes, and dropped the letters in the garbage. Better to let her believe the letters were going out. Better to keep her busy, and me, I could read every single one and know more about my sister than I could ever guess.

“Just give me the money,” she said once. Two months, and we’d never heard a word.

“Don’t you trust me?” I asked.

Her face was pinched, her mouth tight. But those eyes of hers, they pulled on me like water did. “If you gave me some money, I could take them myself.”

I stood at the door, Myrle sitting at her desk. She had that pencil in her hand, but she wasn’t writing a thing. “You don’t, do you?” I said. “You don’t trust me.”

She wouldn’t look at me.

I opened the door, the voices of the other girls in the hall. Who could say it’d make one difference if I sent those letters? If anyone at home even cared? I grabbed my coat, swung the door wide, ready to slam it shut. I yelled at her, “It’s not my fault no one writes you back.”

The next morning, Myrle’s desk was clean as a plate. Not a sheet of paper. Not a pencil in the well. I brushed my fingers across the surface and all I felt was grain. Inside the pocket of my coat, only lint. I walked to work with Charlotte and when we came to that garbage bin, I steered us away.

“Preston had a date last night, couldn’t you tell?” Charlotte said. “He left at seven sharp, even changed his shirt. Who do you think she was?”

In the shop, Charlotte sat next to me at the machines with her mouth still running, her chair inches from mine. That girl with her elbows and knees, she was gone my second week, and I never got her name. But sitting next to Charlotte, that was something. Charlotte was an old hand. She talked a mile our first hour, never got caught. She had three years or more on most of us, from a boondock kind of town where everyone she’d ever known was buried or run off or too dumb for either one. She left when she was little older than Myrle, and she didn’t care if no one married her or kept her in a kitchen, or so she said. She had a cigarette between her lips soon as she walked out the door, wore trousers more than not in winter. The smokes gave her the hips of a girl, and every other week her red hair seemed a different shade.

“What’s up with you?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Charlotte parroted. “Liar.”

My needle stuck. I stopped the machine and pulled the strip. Ten cents fine that would be. Another cent for every word if Charlotte kept on running, even if I tried not to listen.

“She didn’t write a letter,” I said.

Charlotte sighed. “So what? They never write back.”

“Maybe they would.”

“Maybe she’s tired of it.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. All that. attention.”

I bit my lip, my machine roaring.

“Come on, Esther, you know what I’m talking about. Everyone in that house of yours always following her around, watching, as if she was some kind of dolly they could dress up. Maybe she’s figured she doesn’t want it anymore.”

“What do you know?”

“Myrle and me, we talk.”

“I’ve never heard you talk about that.”

“We talk a lot when you’re not there.”

I’m always there . But not when Charlotte got off first from shift, because of the old hand she was. Not when she woke up early and helped Myrle in the kitchen. All the time they spent together, without their thinking of me. An odd pair, with Charlotte tall and bright, hard as nails, and Myrle nothing next to her but a pale leaf. The two of them, whispering over plates on the other side of that swinging door. That time opened under me like a dark hole.

“Cheer up.” Charlotte elbowed me and I almost lost a stitch. “There’ll be a raise, did you hear? The union got them for us. Ten percent.”

Another fine if I’d lost that stitch. Another if I couldn’t keep my mind from letters. Myrle must have her reasons, but I couldn’t think. A raise, that might give us enough for a pound of sugar every month, coffee even, the extra in a sock for safekeeping under the bed. I wiped my forehead and started again.

“I’ll tell you more at noon break,” Charlotte said. “Just forty minutes.”

I ducked my head. Break I might have to miss to catch up. Besides, I wasn’t keen to climb those flights for a piece of bread. I was sweated right through. “The elevator,” Preston said, “it’s not for factory girls.”

Factory girls. The way Preston said it, the name seemed a trick. Nothing a nice girl would try to be. And after that first day, I’d never seen the inside of that elevator. It made me dizzy, all its cables and strings. Preston as he loomed, his arm reaching over me to press the button. The man smelled strong as metal. Something that made a person want to take a bite. Esther’s got work in the garments , Myrle had written once. Save Sundays, I never see her in the daytimes. Myrle’s empty desk and now Preston in my head. That’s where my daytimes went. Preston, in his office on the first floor, thinking about ten percent. I hated him at my back with his big hands watching us. But I hated it even more when he wasn’t there.

Charlotte dropped back to her machine, half a sandwich in a napkin. Somehow break had come and went, my foot on the pedal still. She snuck the sandwich onto my table, covered it with scrap. All that attention , she’d said. Who didn’t want that? And Myrle, she’d never seemed to mind it before. I gave Charlotte a smile thin enough it wouldn’t bring foremen, but enough to tell her how empty my stomach was. I could eat that sandwich in the stall when they unlocked the doors for bathroom break, two hours off.

“After the last bell,” Charlotte whispered. I could just hear her over the room’s buzz. “Everyone’s been asked to line up at the office. We have to get there in a hurry or we’ll be waiting in that line for hours.”

I frowned though my hands never stopped.

“Don’t be so worried,” she said. “It’s the raise. They want to make a big show of it, give it out by hand.”

“Number 57!” the foreman called. Charlotte snapped straight, her fingers fast. She seemed to work four pieces at once. The foreman circled our line and stood behind our chairs, watching our hands. Girls said he’d be good for a ring, but that ring would be small, his fingers no more than buttons and his ears wide as a chipmunks. I didn’t want a man as hard as that. I eyed the sandwich hidden under that scrap, but didn’t drop a stitch. “A pretty penny it’ll be, right, girls?” the foreman said. Charlotte gave me a wink. A sandwich in the factory, that could cost us plenty. Still the man walked away, humming. I guessed even foremen got a raise after the seven o’clock bell.