The Plain Girl

Maggie didn’t know why she went to work in the factory, really. It was right down the street from her parents’ house, they were hiring, and also, there seemed to be something stuck somewhere, a glittery ball-bearing rolling around in her gut.

And Daniel. Daniel was another ball-bearing.

Daniel, her boyfriend of a year and a half, in his first year at Harvard Business School, was seven years older than she, and he tried to get her to articulate why she went to work in a factory, as opposed to trying to do something with her degree, seek out the spotlight elsewhere. His eyes were withdrawn, baffled. He tried to be kind but Maggie had a snappy temper, which intimidated him. How could she explain to him that she did not obsess over “Why”; she did not assign the factory-job any meaning. It was just what she ended up doing. For now. Daniel was impatient for things to be settled. He never said so, but impatience exhaled off of him. There were moments when, looking at Daniel’s confused and worried face, Maggie felt for him. She really did. It couldn’t be easy.

Maggie slept on the pull-out couch in the den in her parents’ basement. Her childhood bedroom was being re-done into a guest room, no longer hers. She wandered through the house at all hours of the night, standing on the back porch, falling up into the night-sounds, trying to connect with the smells of nature, the sky crowded with stars, the pitch-black sway of trees in the wind. Nothing felt logical.

The basement. Random exercise bicycles, old Fisher Price toys, the flopping-over-sound of clean clothes in the drier. There was a den in the basement, with a dusty black and white television, built-in bookshelves overflowing with her father’s Latin textbooks from 1964 and fifty copies of Huck Finn for her mom’s classes, piles of scratchy old records, and a muffling deep-blue rug. The pull-out couch was scratchy hard wool, the air down there was moldy-damp, packasandra crowded at the windows, the furnace burst into roaring life in the middle of the night right beside her head.

To make it to the factory line by 6 am, her alarm was set to 5. Maggie’s best friend Constance got a job at the factory, too. Constance and Maggie were local Rhode Island girls, who had worked hard to rid themselves of the accent, who had chosen the big state school over more elite far-away institutions because the theatre department was a fine one, and also, it was kind of difficult to leave Rhode Island if you were born and bred. Constance didn’t live with her parents. Constance rented a windy little cabin down on the beach, where she drank wine, watched television, smoked cigarettes, read Margaret Atwood out-loud to her cat, and occasionally woke up with a crazy long-haired boy from Matunuck in her bed.

Constance had a car, and would come to pick Maggie up every morning, at 5:30. Maggie, hunched up on her parents couch in the night, waited, waited, still half-asleep. Numb. Headlights through the foggy black, tires crunching on the gravel. The passenger door was stuck closed, so Maggie had to hoist herself through the window. Constance’s eyes were pissed and sad. A cigarette dangled from her shiny red lips. Maggie wondered if her friend might have been born with a full-face of pancake makeup. Constance was never without it, even before dawn.

The air was chill. They both were depressed.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” snarled Constance. “Here we go.”

They stopped off at the coffee shop in bleak shuttered-up Peace Dale on their way to the factory. Nobody was awake in the “biggest little state in the Union”, except for Maggie, Constance, and the sluggish high school kids making the vats of coffee in the dawn. The shop’s fluorescent lights streamed across the rotary, cutting a beam through the darkness, making it look like a just-landed UFO. Owned by a fundamentalist Christian, the regulation Styrofoam cups were stamped with Bible verses. The red-lettered quotations jangled their nerves at such an obnoxiously early hour.

Jesus said ‘My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work. – John 4:34

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. 1 Peter 2:9

They turned blind eyes to the redemption offered, coffee going down like a narcotic.

Constance made wise-cracks about the two of them being like the two girls in Officer and a Gentleman.

“Hey, Lynette,” Constance would wearily sigh a greeting, as Maggie struggled grimly through the car window in the salt-aired dark.

Working in the factory put that movie into grim perspective, revealing it as escapist claptrap. No guy in officer whites would stroll through the machinery to sweep them away. And if one did, perchance, the other women on the line, obsessed with filling quotas, certainly would not drop what they were doing and start to clap and weep like appreciative seals, calling out, “Way to go, Maggie! Way to go!” Daniel couldn’t lift Maggie up in his arms anyway. Public displays kind of embarrassed her and she was too heavy. Also, the other women on the line were, in general, bitter bitches.

Constance worked in a dark echoey corner of the factory floor, worked in a team with Ericka, a pale girl with a mullet and eternal Megadeth T-shirts. Constance and Ericka became friends. In a grim survivalist kind of way. Ericka regaled Constance with tales of her chaotic Point Judith life. A kid she lost custody of, a wacko alcoholic lobster-fisherman boyfriend, drunken scenes on the Galilee wharfs. To Ericka, “partying” was a valid answer to the question, “So what were you up to all weekend?”

Maggie found no such comrade. She was stuck over on the crowded highly-competitive “line”, screwing the same wires into the same surge-protectors, and then passing it all on to the impatient woman to her right, a woman with fingers faster than a cyclone. Maggie’s brain blanked out for hours on end. It was very disorienting.

The women on the “line”, as far as Maggie could tell, were all married sex-mad lunatics.

“I had sex on a freakin’ SUBmarine once!” proclaimed Annie, looking around aggressively, making sure that everyone was duly impressed.

“Hell, that’s nothin’!” crowed Patti with an “i”. Patti with an “i”, in Maggie’s view, was a malevolent force, a tentacled frightening woman who brooked no opposition. On Maggie’s first day, Patti turned, slowly looked her up and down, and then went back to her work, without another word. Maggie tried to just stay out of her way, which was difficult, because Patti was eight months pregnant. Patti, fingers a blur over her board, called out to the rest of the cackling line, “Dave and I had sex in the bathroom at the Capitol Building up in Providence!”

Roars of laughter.

Maggie tried to fill her mind with pale milky light, she tried to call herself out of darkness like her coffee cup commanded, but the thought of Patti, lumberingly huge, having sex with her fat breathy husband at the Capitol Building was distinctly awful.

Maggie was a virgin. She didn’t believe in sex before marriage, and after listening to the line women’s ghoulish banter, day in, day out, she stopped believing in sex during marriage as well.