The women on the lines were getting tired too. I could tell by the way they pulled the boxes off onto the slide. There was a jerky impatience in their motions that hadn’t been there a few hours before. Awareness of the fact that the sift was coming to an end had brought them out of the comforting lull of monotony without freeing them. When we got into the final hour – when the end was clearly at hand – we would feel our fatigue less. The shift’s seventh hour was the hardest.
Is this why Dave says I am too old? Because I saw this world before I went to college?
The light outside is pretty bright now, bright enough to dim the lights in here. Morning, out there.
That stupid sociology course I had taken, dividing America into classes: upper, middle, lower, and subdividing each of them into upper, middle, lower. “America doesn’t have classes,” I had said. My books had taught me that class was a European concept, and in America everybody is equal, everybody can get ahead. But when the teacher had passed out an anonymous questionnaire asking, among other things, what class we had been born into and what class we expected to die in, I had filled it in like everyone else.
She told us later that most students said they started “lower middle” and expected to end “upper middle.” I had said “upper lower” and “lower upper.” They wanted mobility? I’d give them mobility. But even as I filled in the questionnaire, I knew that the possible answers were too simple to be meaningful.
Farmers, for example, never had much money, but could anybody seriously compare a farmer to a wage earner? Farmers were labor and management in one. They weren’t the masters of their own fates (given the vagaries of weather, markets, shippers and governments), but they didn’t punch time cards, and they didn’t have to obey other people. Could you really consider my father “upper lower class” merely because he didn’t see $5,000 in any given year?
Plus, one thing the Catholic schools did was teach middle-class values, manners and habits. Could a product of the Catholic schools be considered upper lower class?
My mother’s father, my dead grandfather, the painter and Republican politician, and his staunchly Republican family, not a Democrat in the lot until John F. Kennedy lured me over. Did any of this fit with “upper lower”?
But if I was a product of the middle class, what was I doing in a glass factory? Why was I different from all my friends and classmates at college? I could see, now, that if I was going to fit in, it would require conscious mimicry. Maybe going to GWU had stretched me farther than I had realized. Segal certainly wasn’t spending his summer throwing boxes.
Here came my relief. The eight o’clock shift had just punched in. I nodded to him – someone else I didn’t know – and made my way down to the punch clock, behind a long line of people who had been less absorbed in their inner world, more aware of the ticking of the clock. The line moved as quickly as people could punch their cards. When you’re paid by the hour and are docked for being a minute late going in, you don’t give them an extra minute on the other end.
I had made note of the slot where I had left my card., knowing better than to slow down the line fumbling. I plucked it out as I came opposite the “in” rack, hit the clock, heard the bell of freedom, and put the card in a slot in the “out” rack. Then I was among the knots of workers headed up the driveway toward the gate, blinking a bit in the morning sunshine.
One down.