Snagged (3 page)

But in the meantime his fellow maintenance worker Richie Blossom had been hanging around the place, setting up a little research lab, tinkering with the machines, up to his usual business of trying to invent something useless. But when Barney peered in the window that night and watched Richie fiddling with scraps of fabric, he just got a feeling that this time it might be different.

Barney’s curiosity was piqued. He knew that if he knocked on the door, Richie wouldn’t tell him what he was doing. So he went home and searched through all his maintenance uniforms, which he sentimentally kept heaped in the corner of his closet, and found what he hoped might be there. A key to the side door of the panty-hose factory.

The next night he waited outside until Richie had left, gave him fifteen minutes in case he had forgotten something, then let himself in. Armed with his flashlight, he started looking around.

The old picnic table where they had gulped their coffee during their strictly observed five-minute breaks hadn’t been moved; Richie was obviously using it as the command station for his project. Barney couldn’t count the number of times he’d ended up with a burned tongue as he rushed to swallow the black brew that was passed off as coffee.

The gray time clock attached to the wall was still there, clicking away. Barney went over and gave it a punch, remembering all the misery it had brought him. “There,” he smirked. “I didn’t forget to punch in.”

Stacks of cheap paper with a printed message, the kind that people force on you when you’re running down the block late for an appointment, were lined up on the table. Barney picked one up, and with the glow of his flashlight began to read Richie’s literature on his new invention. “One size fits all! Superior-quality hosiery that will not run or snag. You can’t afford to pass up this offer!!” Give me a break, Barney thought. I wonder if he sat around all day suffering from writer’s block as he tried to think that stuff up, or if those catchy phrases came to him naturally.

If you’re going to try and sell something as unbelievable as run-proof panty hose, Barney mused, you better get someone like me, a born salesman, someone who could sell ice to the Eskimos, to do it for you. I’ll write your ad, I’ll even act it. Barney always thought he would have been a great salesman, but his mother said that one Willy Loman in the family was more than enough and urged him to get into the maintenance workers’ union when he had the chance. May she rest in peace, the poor soul.

Barney leaned over and shuffled through the papers. Photocopies of handwritten letters to various hosiery companies asking them for a few minutes of their time were scattered on the table. It doesn’t look like he’s had to start a file for responses, Barney thought. It’d probably be easier to get an audience with the Pope.

As he straightened up, he scanned the room with his flashlight, and started to walk toward the machines. Before Barney knew what was happening, he tripped over a cardboard box and fell to the floor, his flashlight cracking in the process, tiny pieces of its glass arranging themselves on the floor of the factory. Sharp pain stung his knee and shin. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn! Damn! Damn!” he repeated faster and faster into the sudden darkness as he rolled on his back, cradling his knee to his chest while he rubbed his shin. With his flailing arm he accidentally brushed the side of the cardboard box and grabbed it to steady himself. And then he felt it. And forgot his pain. A jumble of the smoothest, silkiest material skimming his fingertips.

Barney grunted as he lifted his back off the floor and arranged himself Indian-style, with his feet tucked underneath him, then greedily dipped his hands into the mound of luxurious fabric that turned out to be a couple of dozen pairs of panty hose. This must be the stuff, Barney thought. Richie’s latest. Knowing that Richie had never been too organized, he helped himself to a few pairs, hoping that they wouldn’t be missed. I’ll get these home and test these out myself, see if they’re what Richie claims they are.

He did.

As far as he could tell, they were.

Run-proof.

Snag-proof.

Which had led him to the Calla-Lily Hosiery Company, whose owner had hired Barney’s nephew to do yard work. The only other hosiery company besides the defunct “Hose for the Religious” headquartered in the Miami area. That had been a month ago, and now Barney was waiting to meet with Ruth Craddock for the results of their lab tests.

“Mr. Freize, Ms. Craddock is going to be a little while longer,” the receptionist reported to Barney, stirring him out of his thoughts. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” The request did not sound as if it were coming from an eager-to-please waitress.

How about a life-insurance policy in case I die in this room? Barney thought, but what came out of his mouth was “Light and sweet.”

D
OWN THE HALL Ruth Craddock sat at the head of the gleaming conference table, panting in exasperation. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts smeared with orange lipstick was positioned to her right. She constantly flicked her ever-present cigarette in its general direction, only occasionally hitting the mark. Crushed cans of Coke littered the table. Her ranting speech was interrupted only for deep drags, tornadolike inhales that puckered her weathered cheeks and looked as though they had the force to leave major tar and nicotine deposits in her little toes. Exhales were followed by a swig of soda.

“We are going to get screwed!” she opined in her raspy voice. “We have got to buy the formula for that panty hose or else we’ll be out of business! If someone else gets it first, then we may as well put out a sign that says
GONE FISHING
!”

The eight members of the board seated on either side blanched and shook their heads. They were all older men who had been with Calla-Lily since the early days and were called together now for the first emergency meeting since jeans started to replace skirts in the sixties as the fashion of choice, sending business into a tailspin. Women wanted to be liberated, and one thing they definitely wanted to be liberated from was garters. Garters that dug into the flesh on the backs of their thighs when they were seated, causing pain and leaving indentations. But garters held up stockings, Calla-Lily’s bread and butter. That’s when the idea of panty hose caught on, thank God, and kept women from adopting jeans or the dreaded pantsuit as permanent replacements for skirts and dresses.

Bra manufacturers had also gone through a worrisome period when their pretty laced cups were being used to fuel bonfires. Fortunately for them, most women realized you can’t fight nature and the laws of gravity, and the bra business has held up since then, so to speak.

“I’m telling you,” Ruth continued after another drag and swig, “we have got to buy out that Blossom guy before somebody else does. His Birdie Panty Hose is not to be believed. It’s comfortable, sexy, can be made in all different colors and, worst of all . . .”

The board members braced themselves.

“
IT DOESN’T RUN OR SNAG
!”

“But madam,” Leonard White, a distinguished octo-genarian, began. “Five million dollars is an awful lot of money, and we don’t want it to compete with our other lines.”

Ruth slammed her fist on the table, causing the ashes to fly around like the fake snow in a watery Christmas-scene paperweight. “What, are you crazy? Who’s competing? These panty hose will never see the light of day. Remember our motto: ’Repeat Business.’ We buy the formula, own the patent, and then put it away for safekeeping. Over my dead body will a panty hose be marketed that doesn’t run. As for the five million dollars, we figured he could get a lot more than that if it goes to auction. We want to offer him a figure he’ll take right away. It’ll cost us a lot more than that if someone else gets their hands on it.”

White, the only brave one in the group, cleared his throat. “But can we be sure it’s so durable? You’ve only had them for a month.”

Ruth narrowed her beady eyes and tossed back her shoulder-length brown hair. “I wore them for a week straight, and went down to wash them in the Laundromat’s battered machines every night. Beach towels get chewed up in those things. The next morning when I put them on it was like they were fresh out of the wrapper. Then I gave them to the lab to test. Every test so far has come out positive. Irving is supposed to give us an update at this meeting, WHERE IS HE?”

The door at the back of the room opened and Irving Franklin, a thin, bespectacled man in his early fifties, wearing a white lab coat with a pair of black panty hose draped over his arm, stepped inside. Irving had been with Calla-Lily since the start of his career as an engineer and had seen them through the transition from stockings to panty hose and all the other crises in between, including the year of the fishnets. “Hello, Ruth. I’m here now.” There was no trace of nervousness in his manner. He was the one employee Ruth couldn’t bully, and she knew it.

“Talk to us, please,” Ruth urged. “I’ve been trying to tell them . . .”

Irving walked to the opposite end of the conference table and reverentially laid the panty hose in front of him. He took off his glasses, pulled a tissue out of his pocket and began to clean them, holding each glass inside his mouth and giving it a good “hahhhhhh,” before returning them to the bridge of his nose. The board members fidgeted in their seats and Ruth finally exploded.

“Irving, would you please hurry up!”

Irving stared at her.

Ruth slunk back in her seat.

“I have completed most of the tests,” Irving began. “It seems to me we have a breakthrough. I liken this to the discovery of nylon, which of course revolutionized the stocking, for the most part replacing the use of delicate silk. I can’t swear, but they seem to be perfect. I even gave them my own personal test.”

“What was that?” an up-till-now silent board member croaked in a barely audible voice.

“I lent them to my mother-in-law. She hasn’t been to the chiropodist in years.”

Murmurs rippled through the boardroom, many of whose members knew firsthand the importance of monthly visits to the foot clinic.

“My mother-in-law wore these for three days, which is an endurance test equivalent to any of us competing in a triathlon,” Irving pontificated as he walked around the room, “and not even breaking a sweat.”

More murmurs.

“These panty hose survived so well that my thirteen-year-old daughter, who weighs about one hundred pounds less than her grandmother, was able to borrow them for a teen dance and not worry about bagginess. These things snap right back into shape. Yes, I must say that these are the first ’one size fits all’ that don’t look cheap.”

“I told you!” Ruth yelled. “We’ve got to buy them before they do to us what nylon did to the silkworm— put it out of a job—”

“However,” Irving interrupted, “people’s bodies react differently. There’s one more endurance test we are now conducting on the pink pair, and our results will not be in until Saturday.”

“Saturday!” Ruth screamed. “The panty-hose convention is this weekend. We’ve got to make a move before Blossom presents them to our competitors. Or, worse yet, peddles them to someone who isn’t even in the business, who will put up the money to manufacture them and make a big killing all at once.”

“We can’t do that until we have the approval of the other board members,” Leonard White offered, “and some of them are on vacation. Others are flying in late Friday night.”

Ruth crushed another soda can in her hands. “Then we’ll have our meeting at the crack of dawn on Saturday . . .”

Several members of the board thought longingly of their golf clubs, which would now go untouched this Saturday morning.

“If we have to, we’ll sit here and wait for Irving’s results, and then we’ll vote. Remember, everyone, we are lucky to be the only company that has the inside scoop on these panty hose. No one else bothered to check them out, probably thought it was some crackpot writing a dopey letter to them.” Ruth took a final puff on the little beige stub that was threatening to burn her fingers. “Blossom is planning his fashion show at the convention Saturday afternoon. We’ve got to get to him before then.” She got up and stalked out of the room as the board members gathered around the panty hose in awe.

“I’d a been a lot happier if we had stuck to garters,” one was heard to mumble.

W
ILL EVERYONE PLEASE sit down and be quiet?” Richie Blossom urged his fellow tenants of the Fourth Quarter old folks’ home. “We have a lot to discuss and not much time left.”

“I’ve been thinking that for the past twenty years,” Sam Joggins called out. And then, as everyone expected, went on, “They call this place the Fourth Quarter. I feel like I’m living in Overtime.” He slapped his thigh and looked around to see who would laugh this time.

Flo Tides, the social director of the Fourth Quarter, handed Sam a glass of Gatorade in a plastic cup. “Eb would roll in his grave halfway to China if he heard you. That was his joke.” Flo continued around the room, handing out the liquid refreshment. Her late husband, Eb, had always been an organizer, and he used to say that the best way to make sure people get to a meeting is to lure them with food and drink. She had met him at a church social fifty years ago, and when they were introduced they both knew they had found the right match. Eb and Flo. And that’s what they did together for forty-eight years thereafter.

The twenty-seven people who lived at the Fourth Quarter didn’t need to be lured to this meeting by the promise of Gatorade and sprinkled cookies, however, as there was serious business to be discussed. They were in danger of losing their home, the place they had retired to, the place where many of them had found companionship after the death of a spouse. Last year they had purchased an option on the property and that option was about to expire. They had to come up with the money to exercise their option and buy the property outright, but it had to be done by Monday. There was another buyer interested, who already had an offer on the table. And if they gave up their option before the weekend, everyone at the Fourth Quarter would get a bonus check of $10,000.