Stocking-Board Educationby Darlene Frank The man’s garage was a small, dark pit crammed with rows of hosiery-making machines that looked like tall pumps and gave out steady whooshing, banging sounds. The air was heavy with the smell of oil. Bins of white, undyed nylon stockings crowded the corners; stray nylons lay here and there like torn-off sleeves. A woman my mother’s age worked at a sewing machine, facing a wall. Next to a dingy, opaque window stood a smooth, flat board that looked like a narrow ironing board. “How old is she?” the man shouted to my mother over the noise. He smelled of sweat and needed a shave. Mom had driven me to meet him in hopes he would hire me for the summer. His neighbor, a woman at our church, had told Mom he needed a worker. I’d just finished ninth grade. “Fifteen,” Mom shouted back. He waved his hand. “It does not matter. I am behind in my work. I need help right away.” His speech was thick with a German accent. Mom looked at me, shocked perhaps by this dark, shouting German and the grim aspect of the garage. But the look on her face said we were lucky to have found this job so easily, that it was almost too good to be true. “Seven-thirty to four o’clock. You can eat your lunch in my kitchen.” He gestured toward the door at the top of the stairs that led into his house. My summer looked dismal. • For years Mom had said to family and friends, “I can’t wait until my daughter is old enough to go to work. She can quit school and get a job to help pay the bills.” Old enough was sixteen, the legal working age in Pennsylvania, and I was always destined for the pants factory. “That’s where I worked until I was married. She can do the same thing,” Mom said. I didn’t believe she would make me leave school. My grandparents would have objected, the school guidance counselor would have stepped in, and I could not imagine what my rage might drive me to do. My parents didn’t seem to recognize that the only students dropping out of high school in the 1960s were pregnant girls. But like many Old Mennonites, Mom and Dad viewed schooling beyond the basics as unnecessary and with suspicion because it led to worldly desires and behavior. Mom had finished eighth grade, Dad tenth. This was all they expected of their five children. I’d been to the pants factory. When I was four years old, Mom took me a few times to visit the women she’d worked with. Rows of them sat at sewing machines, men’s pants heaped on their laps, machines whirring, their voices yipping over the noise. I didn’t mind these visits because I always came away with a bag of empty spools—tall cardboard cones, soft gray-brown, each one painted a shiny yellow or black at the tip. I liked the way the cones stacked and smelled, their dry, pebbled texture and glossy tips. I played with them until they turned to mush in the sandbox after a rain. But the factory itself didn’t interest me. And as a teenager I didn’t want to work there—sitting in a line, pedaling a machine, surrounded by endless chatter about casseroles and pregnancy. The idea repelled me. I had my own vision for the future: After graduating from school I would work at a job I liked, perhaps in an office. I would live in an apartment in town where I could walk down the sidewalks and admire the pale mannequins in dress shops, wander into Musselman’s linen store and breathe the clean, cottony scent of the sheets stacked on tables and shelves. I’d save money for college someday. But now, here we stood, in the hosiery mill. I would begin work the next morning. • I worked at the far end of the garage next to the dirty window. I sat at the stocking board and examined the nylon hose spit out by the machines. For eight hours a day I stretched white, undyed nylons one by one onto the narrow board, pulling each stocking tight and inspecting it for runs and snags, flipping the board to check both sides. Those with runs I discarded. Those with snags I repaired, coaxing the thread flat with a small metal tool until no sign of imperfection remained. Speed was important and I had stacks of new stockings to finish each hour. The German thumped around among the machines, hair askew, his beard a dark stubble. He was always in sight, and I could never slack off. He rushed back and forth, muttering to himself, carrying bundles of stockings to my board. He communicated only to shout orders. “Put them in the other bin!” “Throw those out!” I wondered where the stockings went after I finished with them and how they became the tanned nylons sold in stores, but I didn’t ask. I did not want to show the slightest interest in this line of work. I ate my bag lunch at his small kitchen table, savoring Mom’s baloney sandwiches and canned peaches little more than the work. Now and then the German joined me to eat his own lunch. We sat across from each other on the brown banquettes, not saying a word. He was maybe forty years old; he had lost his wife and lived with his teenage son. But if he felt lonely or noticed that a young girl shared the intimacy of his kitchen, he didn’t let on. I was hardly aware of it, either, my mind locked on the long afternoon that still remained of the day. The woman who worked at the sewing machine smiled at me, though it was too noisy to talk. Each time I looked at the clock on the wall over her head, it seemed only another ten minutes had passed. The place felt like a cage. I hated the noise, the smell, the oily film that clung to my skin long after I’d left for the day. In our house we took full baths only once a week, on Saturday night, so the best I could do to rid myself of the residue was take a washcloth to my face and arms at the bathroom sink. Each night I could smell the mill in my hair as I went to sleep. The work bored me beyond anything I had imagined. Stocking on, flip the board, stocking off. Stocking on, flip the board, stocking off. A slow, ticking death till the end of the day. Then relief, daylight, air. And come back tomorrow. • I was desperate for diversion from the stifling routine, and I found it—if only for a moment—in the man’s refrigerator. On the shelf where I stored my lunch, I’d noticed a bottle of whiskey. Mennonites didn’t drink, but I had seen whiskey in magazine ads. They showed glasses brimming with amber liquid, smooth and mysterious, cooled with ice cubes. I had long wanted to know what whiskey tasted like. One day I decided to sample it with my lunch. I took the bottle out of the refrigerator and half-filled the blue plastic cup from my thermos, then carefully set the bottle back in the same spot on the shelf so he wouldn’t notice it had been touched. I had learned, either from novels or from the ads, that you mixed whiskey with water. I filled the cup to the top with water from the tap, carried it to the table, and sat down to have whiskey with my lunch. I’d been raised on milk, shoofly pie, and fresh-picked garden vegetables, and it took only one sip to destroy all seductive pleasure I’d imagined of this drink. The taste of whiskey was so foreign, so unlike anything I’d ever put to my tongue, so shockingly bitter and revolting it stopped my thoughts. My mouth tasted like liniment. I hastily poured the brew down the sink, rinsed my cup, and retreated to my baloney sandwich. When the German came into the kitchen, I could still smell the whiskey. But the grease in his nostrils must have masked the smell of all else, because he didn’t say a word. He set his plate down across from me no differently from any other day. We ate in silence, me still shuddering from his bottle, he perhaps waiting for day’s end to get at it himself. • Thanks to the woman at the sewing machine, who’d reported the German to the Labor Department for hiring an underage teen, I was spared a return to the man’s garage the following summer. But, alas, hosiery mills seemed to find me. At the end of my sophomore year in high school, my parents got wind of another such “factory,” and the previous summer began to repeat. The Dublin mill was housed in a clean, spacious building well-lit with fluorescents and run by a large, tight-lipped woman with a doll’s face and her thin, bespectacled husband. She and I did the same mind-numbing task I’d done for the German. The machines were far enough from our stocking boards we could talk over the noise, but neither she nor her husband said much to me. As long as I showed up on time and worked my way through the stacks of nylons, they had no reason to. The job’s saving grace was the Sparks family. Within weeks of my starting work, the mill had been sold to a couple from North Carolina, who moved in and took over. Sparky was tall and tan; he moved like a cat among the machines—pulling, fixing, oiling, and adjusting—at ease and with pleasure. His wife, Zell, was a strong-boned, handsome woman with a generous smile. She examined stockings like I did. Both Zell and Sparky loved to talk and I liked their Southern drawl. They walked over to my stocking board to chat; they offered me sodas and a pillow for my chair. On our breaks they laughed and told stories, Sparky’s voice high and mellow, Zell’s husky and deep. Often they put an arm around my shoulders as they talked. A smooth haze of smoke from their cigarettes encircled our small group. Zell kept saying she wanted Jimmy, their son, to take me out on a date. She thought it would be really nice of him to do that because I was such a sweet girl. Jimmy was two or three years older than I and worked with his father at the machines. Tall, friendly, and cute, with freckles and sandy hair that was always a little mussed, he grinned at me from behind his thick glasses. I knew he was too cute to like me as a girlfriend, though, and wouldn’t want to date a Mennonite girl. And I had a boyfriend then, though I didn’t mention him. I didn’t want to disappoint Zell by saying I couldn’t go out with her son. • Summer ended and my bosses asked me to continue at the mill after school each day in the fall. Mom was pleased. I told no one at school about my factory job except my best friend and my boyfriend. I was in the academic track and concentrated on my studies. You didn’t need parental permission to say you were headed for college and, without knowing how I’d get there, I acted as though it would happen. The guidance counselor had proposed visiting my parents. “I’d like to encourage them to send you to college,” she said. “Let me come to your house and talk to them.” I vetoed her suggestion on the spot. An authority figure from the school in our living room, lobbying for an education my parents disapproved of and couldn’t afford would have sent shock waves through our household for months—just one more sign of my insubordination. “Please don’t,” I begged. “It will only make things worse.” • Though Sparky and Zell could not shield me from the monotony of the work, their soothing presence carried me through the weeks. I doubt they knew how empty the hours examining stockings felt. Diversions beckoned. Each day I eyed the bright green-and-white packs of Salem cigarettes scattered with the coffee cups and napkins on the lunch table. I wanted to try cigarettes, just like I’d wanted to try whiskey. I’d lingered over magazine ads—beautifully colored packages, men and women smoking together beside streams of cool water. I felt certain I would smoke as soon as I moved away from home. I planned to smoke Alpines because I liked the aqua-blue logo on the package. On a day when I knew my parents would be gone and I’d be alone for at least forty-five minutes, I took two cigarettes from the table and smuggled them home in my purse. Two seemed necessary because I was likely to want another after I’d smoked the first. That afternoon I took a wooden match from the box Dad kept in the kitchen cupboard and looked for a safe place to smoke on our property. I chose a spot on the south side of the garage, where the grass was green and not likely to ignite if a spark hit the ground. With the smooth, unlit cigarette in my mouth, I struck the match on the concrete wall of the garage. The noise and magnitude of the sudden flame made me nervous. I lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. My first taste of whiskey may have been a shock, but it had not hinted at the assault of the cigarette. Over previous weeks I’d held fresh cigarettes to my nose to get used to the smell and imagine how it would feel to smoke them. But this gradual acclimation had not prepared me for taking smoke into my lungs. The heat of the cigarette felt like a blow. The fire seemed in my throat and chest, not on the ground where I’d worried it might end up. Smoke flared from my mouth and nose as I coughed—incredulous that cigarettes tasted so unlike a cool breeze, angry that I had been so deceived, disappointed that my dream of smoking leisurely by a stream with a man had been destroyed in mere seconds. I crushed the cigarette, smuggled the evidence back to the mill, and threw it in the trash. • Zell got her wish: Jimmy asked me out. I felt guilty because I had a boyfriend, but I couldn’t turn Jimmy down. I was part of their family at the hosiery mill and he was taking me out as a gesture. I knew it wasn’t a real date. Over a hamburger at Red’s Diner, Jimmy stirred his lemonade and talked. Nothing about his manner revealed he thought I was awkward at conversation or that we were there for his mother’s sake. Sparky and Zell applauded when we walked in the door of their house afterward, and Jimmy’s two teenage sisters bounced into the entryway, fresh-faced and eager. “We’re so puh-leezed to meet you,” they gushed, coming close and cocking their heads to look at me. Their bright faces were even cuter than Jimmy’s. Their yellow curls swung as they spoke; they wore short shorts and blouses in bubblegum colors, their long blonde legs prancing like horses’. I’d never seen such girls, not even at school. They moved like twin images on a movie screen, vibrant and beautiful. They were everything I was not. As the four of us stood there in what seemed like a long, slow ribbon of time, I wished I could be them and live in their house, with their parents, forever. I must have seemed plain and shy to them, but they didn’t act a bit snobbish. They made me feel as though they were genuinely delighted to meet me. I almost believed them. • When the Sparks sold the mill in the spring and moved back to North Carolina, I felt devastated. I don’t remember the goodbyes, just the sudden absence of this special family. The job ended the day they left, and so did my future in hosiery mills. I vowed never to work in another factory or any place that felt so stifling or dreary. Yes, the mills had delivered a useful education, including a bittersweet end to naïve adolescence. But they also left a visceral memory. For years afterward, even long past college, whenever I walked past a dry cleaning plant, the smell drifting out to the sidewalk reminded me of the mills, and a flutter of nausea rose in my stomach. __________________ |