GLADYS GLOWS AT NIGHT
I am a thing the dark of night peels back from, a glowing number on the face of a clock—hooked like a two or a seven and always wiggly, as if I were painted with a scraggly brush.
I’m crooked and unsteady, things I never was in life. Not until the end when my hands began to shake, my hair got thin, and my teeth turned soft and loose. Not until I transformed into something awful.
There were girls who used to pray for that. I learned about them in Sunday school. They wanted to be nuns and saints instead of wives. They prayed for God to make them hideous and keep men away.
When they got tired of waiting, they did the work themselves.
They starved themselves until they lost the use of their legs, and their guts withered up behind their ribs. They mutilated their chests, hips, and rumps beyond recognition. Fasting Girls, people called them. Holy Anorexics.
That wasn’t me.
I didn’t want to be a saint. I wanted to smoke and drink coffee, sleep until noon, then go for walks in the park. I wanted to wear nice dresses with paste gem buttons down the backs. I wanted to curl my hair. I wanted to live.
To do that, a girl needs money, and for money a girl doesn’t have many options. There’s teaching, renting out dates, typing, and factories. For ease of entry, factories are best. The turnover is exceptional. There’s always one hiring and new girls never ask why.
They don’t have to. There are only a handful of reasons, all of which are tied in some way to men. Ingersoll wasn’t different, but the agent of the violence there ...
I never, in two-dozen lifetimes, could’ve imagined it.
***
I am a thing Mr. Gershwin mistakes for a streetlamp as he bisects 8th and Elm, leaving the factory. It looms behind him, a giant of darkened glass and steel. Inside are rows of workstations littered with brushes, all faintly glowing.
He doesn’t notice the glow, or at least pretends he doesn’t. He’s made a fortune from the gift of oversight. He leaves the real work to the girls, preferring to spend his days drinking in his office and making social calls. He approves campaigns and consorts with shift leaders, senators, military generals. All men. The upper floors of Ingersoll reek of them.
I can only remember speaking to Mr. Gershwin three times in life. The first was when I interviewed for the job. I read in the Sunday paper that Ingersoll needed new painters. A batch of girls had recently left. I didn’t think to ask why.
“You’ll like it here,” he told me from behind an antique desk that would’ve looked more at home in a library. “Best place for a girl to work these days. Great pay. Total independence.”
Total independence. What a dream, I remember thinking.
The second time was when I reported for my first shift. I came in heavily coated, cold through my thin dress and pantyhose, and followed him around the painting room. For a factory, it was quiet. I could hear the faint thrum of machinery somewhere, but the room our desks were in was pleasantly still.
The station I was assigned to looked out over Elm Street. It was a nice, sunny spot lit by huge windows. The two on either side were abandoned, but the cluster was near a group of old hats who chatted over the crackle of a desktop radio while they painted.
On top of my new station was a set of freshly washed, thin brushes; a mounted magnifying glass; a few watch- and clock-faces to practice on; and a deep dish of paint cut with radium. Ingersoll’s primary product, a modern marvel.
I’d seen radium watches before in mail-order catalogs and a few of town’s nicer storefronts. Most of the supply was being shipped to Europe but some were commercially available. It was fashionable for men to play soldier, and strapping on watches was the safest form of
dress up.
After being given my task and introduced to the neighbors, I began the competitive work of painting numbers. They had to be perfect, the others told me. Only the tightest lines would do.
One of them twirled her stained tool. “The trick is keeping your bristles stuck together.”
***
It doesn’t take Gershwin long to realize I’m not a streetlight. Streetlights don’t twitch like broken tails, and their glow is contained, mimicking tame candles and torches. My glow is wild; my whole, desiccated body burns.
He pauses several blocks back from where I wait, watching him through eyes that tint the world lemon-green. My eyes must look like zeroes painted on the end of a ten to him. He stiffens in belated recognition and dashes across the street.
He thinks this distance matters, that it protects him, and why shouldn’t he? This isn’t the first time I’ve waited for him on 8th Street. Thus far, it’s been a long and—for him—easy haunting. I’ve been patient. I’ve kept my distance. But I’m tired of waiting.
Glancing up often to make sure I haven’t moved, Mr. Gerswhin tightens his coat and takes anxious strides. The soles of his loafers are noisy on the sidewalk. It’s patched with ice, though snow has been swept from it several times. He doesn’t look where he’s going. He’s more concerned about me than slipping.
When he passes under a streetlight, I see his eyes. They’re bright and jittery, the fear in them clashing stubbornly with disbelief. His attention darts around, desperate to find proof that he’s imagining things. But there isn’t any. I’m no trick of winter moonlight.
He falters under the lamp at the corner of his street. Snow makes patterns like lace in his dark, coiffed hair. He’s squinting in my direction, struggling to both deny and believe in me.
My shriek glasses the night. He swears, stumbling back from it, and runs.
***
It was nothing at first. At least, that’s how it seemed. I felt nauseous and got headaches but that wasn’t unusual. I thought the headaches were from eyestrain and asked for a larger magnifying glass.
My shift leader didn’t put the request through. He suggested aspirin.
I took to keeping a bottle at my desk like the other girls. Their heads hurt too and so did their jaws and joints. Everyone kept something on them for the pain. When one of us was out, all we had to do was go trick-or-treating.
My favorite girl was Rosie. She was my age, formerly a typist. Our desks were close, and in the early days she was my helper. She’d come to Ingersoll from the library, which paid too little to cover her rent. She missed the books and warmth, but nothing beat factory compensation.
She liked the brushes too. Using them made her feel like an artist in a city more glamorous than ours. She taught me how to hold them: how to flick my wrist and make perfect zeroes; not to lock my elbows; to keep steady hands. She guided my first few strokes, and her fingers were so soft against my wrist that my own felt brutish.
Rosie smelled like freshly washed linen and peonies, the notes of her favorite department store perfume. She wore it daily, but never lipstick, because it ruined the brushes. I should give it up too, she had said.
You’ve got doll lips, Gladys! You don’t even need it.
When she gave me lessons in plastering the bristles, all I could see was her tongue, dexterous and sharp and perfectly pink. “Like cleaning butter off a knife,” she joked after slipping the dainty brush free of her lips. “Come on, you try.”
I repeated the motion, grimacing at the taste. I wanted to spit, but she gave me a smile so sweet that I couldn’t bring myself to. I would’ve licked every brush in the room to see that smile again. I would’ve licked all the paint pots clean if she asked me to.
She was a pretty, kind, and funny girl that I took to seeing socially. In the beginning, we met for coffee before shifts. Then came dinner and theater dates, trips to the library, bus rides for ice cream, and later: drinks in my little walk-up apartment.
Sometimes she stayed the night. It was safer, we agreed that first time, than her walking home alone drunk or hailing a cab. We didn’t make excuses the second time, or any time after. It was enough that we wanted to lay together, whisper, and kiss.
It was the happiest time of my life, until it ended. Miserably. And it was always going to. I know that now. Rosie had worked for Ingersoll longer. She was one of the last remaining from the previous batch of hires.
The others had dropped off from Gershwin’s without explanation, so Rosie never knew that they—and she—were sick. It compounded somewhere deep inside her, that sickness, out of sight, turning headaches to week-long migraines, violent vertigo, and nausea. She grew sluggish and disinterested. Her work got sloppy, her watch faces unsellable. She vomited on her desk one day, went home early, and never came
back.
I visited her several times a week when it started but never for long. She was bedridden, her skin greener every time I went. She insisted on sitting up for me, though it was obviously painful. She could hardly speak without groaning and belching. Eventually, for her sake, I stopped going.
I kept to phone calls after that, checking in to keep her spirits up and to hear about her frequent trips to the doctor. I prayed for good news every night but it never came. She was losing too much weight and hair, too many teeth.
“They look like little stones on my pillow,” she said one day, deliriously. “And I’ve swallowed some. They go down easy as rice.” Her puffy tongue garbled the words, and I could hear her jaw cracking. It sounded like someone stomping on animal bones. “Gladys, am I dying?”
***
I let Gerswhin get ahead, let him think that he can outrun me. His house isn’t far away, and he’s made it before. All of the other nights he’s seen me—whatever he tells himself that he’s seeing—I’ve let him scamper inside, just in time, and lock the door.
His house, a handsome brownstone sandwiched between other handsome brownstones, all uniformly blanketed by snow, has been his fortress. He thinks he’s safe inside it. He thinks he’s safe from me.
Well, he isn’t safe tonight.
I wait until he’s nearly over the hill before I give chase. There’s nothing to avoid, no bikes or walkers out this late. Gershwin’s neighborhood is safe, but night is still night. It’s frosty cold, with ice slicking the roads and clinging to windows still crossed with string lights.
It’s quiet, and yes: pretty, picturesque, even. But winter is still winter; night is still night.
And I am still a thing that children hurry home from when the sun begins to settle low in the sky. They don’t have a name for me, but in their minds, I’m fear. Something risen from its grave, reanimated by spite.
***
The last time I saw Rosie, she was in a hospital bed. The sheets were tucked and folded down over her chest. She was posed perfectly in the center, so still I’d have thought she was dead if not for her rasping breath.
I didn’t touch her. I was afraid to. She was so bruised and swollen, and her face—God, it was awful. Her jaw was eroded, cheeks sucked tight against bone, her gums dotted with dry sockets. Only a few wisps of hair were left, as brittle as straw.
I sat next to her for a long time and thought about Fasting Girls, bound to their beds, enshrined in pillows, remembered only for their suffering. I promised then that whenever I thought of her, I’d remember kisses and swapping dresses. I’d remember that she smelled like peonies and try to forget this.
When I returned to work, my own sleepy sickness was worse. I still didn’t understand it. I thought it was grief. My vision was blurry and my head pounded. My fingers were stiff and my teeth felt strange.
I didn’t start to panic until one popped out.
“Something’s wrong,” I told Gershwin the last time he and I spoke. By then, ...
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