Folly (2 page)

“Listen here. I just don't want no trouble for Mary Lou,” Folly said. “You know, she seems cut out for gettin' herself into things.”

“Yes, but she's pretty smart about getting herself out of trouble too. Least she don't come crying to you most times. I bet she didn't go to that guidance counselor on account of wanting guidance.”

“Uhn't uh. Matter of fact if you ask me I think that counselor is a snoopy bitch. She'd probably like to have somethin' on Mary Lou. Said Mary Lou is a rebellious girl, that's what she told me.”

“What of it?” Martha said. “Ain't nothing wrong with that. I bet that counselor don't like any kid that don't run around with a runny nose and a whiny voice asking for guidance.” Martha shook her end of the sheet vigorously as she spoke. “That's a fine girl you got there. Reminds me of someone I know real well.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. I mean you. Remember when you ran around getting us all ready for presenting that petition to big Sam when they wanted to raise production to ninety? They tried to give you some guidance. Remember that? You saying, ‘Piss on them, they'll never get me outa here till I'm ready to go.'”

Folly tried to keep her mouth down to a flat line but the grin was there anyway. You could see it if you knew her as well as Martha did.

2.

Driving to work later, Folly said to Martha, “That sounds like a damn fool thing to say.”

“What?”

“That they wouldn't be gettin' me out until I was ready to go. You know as well as me, Martha, they could've scooped me up and dished me right out the door any time they damn well pleased.”

“Yes and no,” Martha said slowly.

“How you figure that?”

“Sure, they could, but . . . you had them scared. They don't expect anyone standing up to them. They bank on keeping us so damn busy and tired we won't even have the idea. And they figure they got us all scared to death we'll lose our jobs or get shuffled to a different machine if we don't keep up the production. Course, by and large we are . . . after all, how many places are there to work in Victory? Besides, they don't credit us with enough smarts to see that every time they pull off some trick to up production, they're making more money and we're still in the hole.”

“You can say that again.”

“Least we got them to hold production to eighty-five. That ain't much but it's better than ninety. We wouldn't have gotten that if you hadn't stood up to them and took them off guard. They don't expect any of us to have a backbone.”

They rode in silence for a while, Folly remembering her anger the day that Fartblossom had announced the plan to up production. They had taken the top workers, usually women who had been on the same machines the longest and had built the most efficiency into their movements; then they had calculated that everyone else would get paid on
the basis of ninety percent of their production. Women who didn't come near it would be working under the constant threat that they could be shifted somewhere else or down the road. No one would make more than minimum wage unless they beat the ninety. Folly's backbone had bristled rigid. In the lunch room she had found the women huddled in small groups, talking with panic about how they couldn't possibly make it. She had stood up and told them it was ridiculous, of course they couldn't make it, and the only thing to do was to tell Fartblossom that they knew it was ridiculous, and that they wouldn't even try. She had asked for help to say this. Emily, a tall, Black woman, a whiz at her sewing machine, quiet in her manner, had come over and sat down next to her and right then and there they had written up a petition and gotten all the signatures and had taken it to Fartblossom, and the factory had agreed to hold production to eighty-five.

“Any day now they're going to try to pull that again,” Folly said.

“You bet your sweet ass,” Martha agreed.

They drove into the parking lot. “I hope it ain't tonight,” Folly said.

“I reckon next time they'll try out some other shift first. Graveyard brings out the witch in us.”

“And then some.”

They stood in line waiting to punch the clock. There was a din of voices of people making greetings, razzing each other, joking and teasing. The folks headed out were waking up to vigor from the stupor of the last two hours of their shift. It often struck Folly this way at shift change—that those who were arriving had a certain amount of energy and enthusiasm about them. They had been away from the factory for the most possible hours. They had tried to sleep, to eat, to feed their children, to get some things done at home, and now, somewhat restored, they waited to punch in. The others moving toward their homes were beginning to hear distinct voices again instead of the hum. While their eyelids had wanted to droop and fall a few minutes before, their eyes now popped open and seemed to acquire a gleam in the place of vacancy. It was almost as if the departing shift stole the energy of the arriving shift as they passed each other at the clock. Most of the time people didn't look at each other one to one during this passing. They concentrated on moving up as smoothly as possible, preparing to aim their arms at the right slots for their cards. They weren't exactly in a line. More in clumps. Black and white clumps. About fifty-fifty now in this mill. Folly was concentrating on the simple act of moving forward in coordination with the crowd.

Effie's voice threw her off for a second. “My boy home?” she asked.

“His motorcycle's there.” Effie was Folly's other next door neighbor in the trailer park. Her son had been chasing after trouble for the past couple of years.

“Good. See ya later,” Effie said, flashing a smile at the fact that she was on her way out.

“Right,” Folly said, her arm poised, almost there.

Inside, Folly and Martha's machines were located next to each other. There were two rows of zipper machines, then the inseam line. Although they were close enough to reach across and touch, it was almost impossible to talk because of the concentration required in the sewing, and because of the constant level of the noise, which seemed to have made them all slightly hard of hearing. Often they dropped a conversation in the middle of a sentence when they reached their machines, then picked it up at the same place as they went out for first break. Folly had told Martha as they went in that she had gotten to read some more of
Agatha Webb,
which was the mystery Martha had loaned her. As they started out for the break Martha said, “What do you think of it?”

“Well, it's something else the way that girl, Amabel, is made out to be such a bitch. I hope she gets smart and just takes the money and runs . . . forget about that boy and marrying him and blackmailing him. I don't see why she's a bitch at all. She says straight out what she wants is to go forward . . . that how else can a poor girl like her get out of her position than to hook on to someone like him . . . and her a lot smarter too.”

“I hadn't thought about it that way,” Martha said. “She did seem kind of spooky standing out in the yard and knowing right where the blood was. You didn't finish yet, huh?”

“No.”

“Well, I don't want to spoil the end for you.”

“I'll try to finish tomorrow. You got more by this same author?”

“I got a couple more same time I got that one down at the rummage sale.”

“The one I really feel sorry for is Batsy,” Folly said. “Look at her. She gets it for nothing. She just happens to be cook for the lady that gets murdered, so she dies too.”

“You think we're supposed to think she's
bats
because her name is Batsy?”

“I don't know. Don't care either. She ain't bats in my book.”

Martha nodded agreement. “She's so shocked she has a heart attack.”

“I don't understand why her body was hanging halfway out the window. I'd think she'd have doubled up on the floor.”

“The idea was that she went to call for help.”

“Oh, yeah,” Folly said. “That's right.”

The rest of the night Folly kept thinking about poor Batsy. She could almost see her hanging from that window. It was a more likely fate of the poor than for that Amabel to pull off marrying into the fancy house she'd started off taking care of. In the end, Folly thought, that girl's going to get it good, no matter what else. Poor Amabel. You got it coming, honey. You ain't got much to lose, but you're going to lose it all. Then she'd have a second thought which was more like hope. There's got to be a way out and maybe this Amabel will find it. Maybe Mary Lou would find it. She hoped Mary Lou wouldn't start thinking about dropping out of school. Not that she'd gotten a whole lot out of her own experience in school. When she tried to think back and remember something she had learned, she couldn't come up with much. She could remember her English teacher standing up at the board and pointing with her pointer to various parts of a sentence that she had put slash marks through to show the clauses. The tap of the pointer on the board—the same idea over and over. Mrs. Penny would put up a sentence and chalk a big X over one word. For instance, if the sentence was—“When are you going to get yourself up and out of bed?”—she would X out the ‘get.' Only use ‘to get' if you could use ‘to obtain.' Folly could still hear the even admonition in her voice. She had learned it (some of the kids never had gotten it) even if she hadn't adopted it. But what good had it done her? I've got to be able to think, she thought, without all this obtaining. If Mary Lou could go to college, she'd keep her from starting at the mill. She had to get her to finish high school and keep her from messing around and getting pregnant.

The stitch of the zipperfoot was a straight line, but her mind zigzagged as she started on a new piece of work. If she could sew up the holes in their lives . . . . If she got Mary Lou to go to college, what about Skeeter? How could she afford it? There were community colleges now where the kids could work their own way. Skeeter was a good worker, but slower in school than his sister. She thought of him as having more chances for other ways out, right down to the most basic level. Such as, he could hitchhike out of town if he wanted to go somewhere else to look for work. Mary Lou thought she could too, but Folly didn't want her doing that. She worried about her. Mary Lou was her own life over again.

She remembered herself, at sixteen, walking home from school—tired, bored, slow. The sun hot, sweat smelling strong in her arm pits, her books heavy, her feet scuffing the dirt at the side of the road. She didn't want to go home. Her Ma worked the 3 to 11. She was the oldest, had to cook dinner. It wasn't a fair deal. Barney came along on his motor scooter and offered her a ride. He attached her books on the rack over the rear wheel. She had to sit right up close to his back and hold around his stomach with her arms. It was awkward with a skirt, but she managed. The wind blew on her sweaty arm pits. Barney's stomach was hard and tensed as he leaned forward to get up more speed. She felt excited. She felt she was being loved because he had encouraged her to hold her arms around him. He rode her to the drugstore and bought her a coke, and they hung out with the others there, which she had never done before. They all sat and talked of how boring it was in Victory. One of the kids would come in: “Hi, y'all. What's new?”

“Nothing.” NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING. The word echoed in the high ceilinged space. Barney said Victory reminded him of a turtle who got tired crossing the road and just stayed there, right where he'd get run over. “Dead,” he said. “This is Deadsville. I don't know why anybody would live his whole life here.”

“You going somewhere?” Folly had asked.

“You better believe it, baby,” Barney had answered, smiling with one side of his face and strutting his weight from one leg to the other. “Come on, let's ride.”

She had been glad to ride but sorry to leave the drugstore so soon. She had liked the idea of sitting slouched lazy in a booth, complaining of the nothingness in the atmosphere while surrounded by rows and rows of objects on the shelves. She wished she had nothing to do. No cooking. No babysitting.

Every day for a week Barney took her by the drugstore for a coke after school. They never talked about if that meant they were going steady or what. He rode her home and played with her sisters and brothers, acting the big dude, holding out promises for rides on his scooter someday. One afternoon he followed her into her room when she went to get something, and he closed the door and took her by the shoulders and planted his lips smack on hers and kissed her for a long time, working his tongue into her mouth. She had kissed other boys before but not like that. She had felt the excitement like riding up close to him on the motorcycle. Then he had wrapped one leg around behind her knee and pressed the back of it to make her collapse down on her
sister's bed, and she had pushed away from him, saying, “No, stop, Barney. We're messing up Junie's bed.”

The next afternoon he rode her out the dirt road across from the Victory Mill, and down in there a couple of miles, he parked the scooter and walked her in through the woods to the stream. He led her to a place where they were under some big pines and the ground was a spongy cover of pine needles. They stood there kissing the way they had in the bedroom only he had his arms around her and squeezed her intermittently, as if he were making orange juice. She felt hot, and she understood finally the jokes and stories she had heard about people getting hot. She had been pretty dumb about the whole thing. That was that. Barney had put down his windbreaker on the pine needles for her to lay on. He had felt her up under her blouse and under her bra. She had said no a couple of times, but he had said, “But I want you
so
much. I need you,” as if his whole life depended on what happened next. “Say yes, please, say yes,” he had said. She had never said yes but had felt her face flush. Felt red, hot, scared. He had lain on top of her and squeezed her some more, awkwardly, which had made her feel loved. Then he had unzipped his pants and taken out his swollen big thing, and holding her pinned with his legs, he had pulled her skirt up and her underpants down just far enough to get his penis stuck between her pants and her body, and then he had slid it back and forth while she had stayed still, trying to get used to the shock of all this and to fit his penis to all the words she'd heard like hot dog, wienie . . . and she was the bun.

Folly was suddenly aware of a presence, a pants leg in her peripheral vision. It was Fartblossom standing between her machine and Martha's, supervising. She did not look up. She made it appear that she was moving the material through her machine at a steady rate while she actually accelerated her activity in a gradual, calculated way so that he wouldn't know he had caught her at a drifting moment. Each time her eyes darted laterally, they landed on the light green of his polyester pants, a hole worn from carrying keys in his right front pocket. His wienie was on her eye level. She wished he'd move on so she could see Martha, and finally, he took one long stride, stopped between the next two machines. She and Martha caught each other's eyes—checked in.

Barney had pulled her pants the rest of the way down, pushed inside her. She had lost the hots at that, had gone cold, pale, still, while he pushed through—no longer kissing, no longer squeezing, just pushing, piercing, breaking. When he stopped she felt the pine needles poking at her rear. Who could have told her that this was going to change
her life, that she was giving up chances to be another Folly? She had not even thought of pregnancy. She would rather have been in the drugstore saying there was nothing to do in Victory.