Factory Work
Finalist
by Jen Knox
Ohio Writer
In the late nineties, no one used dating apps. C and I met when he pulled his Camry out of the car wash and stopped to roll down his window. I was walking with a friend, and he asked for my number. I told him to give me his instead and didn’t think much of it. But a polished smile meant something to me back then, so he settled somewhere in the back of my mind.
Not long after I called him, we were constantly on the phone. I was now staying on the north side of Columbus, in a neighborhood where the bus schedule was less accommodating, so after a few months C suggested I move in with him. “You could apply for a job where I work,” he said. I filled out an application and tried not to appear too impressed by the hourly rate, but I wasn’t yet sure about moving in.
A few weeks after applying, I had a gray uniform, and a timecard that lived at the factory had my name on it. C and I would arrive at the same entrance each morning, where we’d wait in line behind other workers, his arm around me till we reached the vestibule where he would sign a paper as a shift supervisor and I would clock in as a line worker. From there, it was all business.
The line part of my role was quite literal. I was paid a little over eleven dollars an hour—more money than I’d previously made at any legitimate job—to stand in line three feet behind a man who stood in line three feet behind someone else, and so on. We all stood in between two machines that would move racks of clothing toward us and around the room.
While C got to wander around and oversee packaging, I would stand at my station and wait for dark blue and green uniforms, mostly large and extra-large heavy-duty workwear, to move toward me on the left side. I would lift each arm and look for an orange- or green-colored tag and then, depending on said tag, move the uniform to the line on my right to be routed to the appropriate state. I was shorter than most workers, so I occasionally had to ask for help from the person behind me, but no one minded because I was fast.
At the beginning of a shift, the racks would send me a uniform or two every few minutes, but once things were up and running for the day, the work would intensify, and my arms would ache as I tried to keep up. I could never move fast enough, but none of us could. That was the point. If the goals had been attainable, there would be no reason for the woman with the screechy voice to speed walk around with a clipboard and yell, for which she was probably paid at least two dollars more an hour than me.
Despite the physical pain, I loved the work. At least for a few months. I got to daydream and catch glimpses of my new boyfriend every couple of hours when he’d drift away from his team to “check my work.” Every now and then, we would sneak out to his Camry during lunch, but most days we were discreet. My honeymoon period with both C and the factory would soon dissolve, but at the time I felt on top of the world.
Recently, I found an image of my great-great-grandmother Mary who worked much of her adult life in a potato chip factory and was lauded in Toledo Blade, her local newspaper, when she finally became a U.S. citizen at eighty-two. A Polish immigrant who washed and cut potatoes most her life in the States didn’t humor the newspaper. The picture of her was resolute and unsmiling, staring matter-of-factly from the black-and-white print above a story in which Mary said she’d originally planned to return to Poland when it became liberated and she only recently realized she would never return, so she begrudgingly began studying for her citizenship.
I appreciated her honesty.
According to my mother, the women in my family never got recognized for their work, but they were “tough.” She recalled Mary wringing the neck of a chicken for dinner and throwing my mom, a young child at the time, the hearts to play with as she tended to the rest of the bird. To make extra money, Mary and her daughter, Sophie, would read fortunes for women in the neighborhood at night. Mary had ordered a book that held the fortunes associated with cards and would simply charge women to pick a card, then purport to tell their fortune based on the day and time when that card was chosen. According to my mother, it was a scam, not magic—they were trying to survive, and ways that meant more than just extra income.
As for my own journey on the line, a relatively cushy one that began with me hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock before I woke up each day, I never believed I’d be doing what I was doing for more than a year or two, and that doing included C. After six months, I grew achy and tired of meeting C in his car, where he’d drink a tall can of beer and try to kiss me with sour breath. Shaking off a headache and preparing my body for pain, I simply went through the motions because they were all leading somewhere else. On less busy days, I thought mostly of lunch, then dinner, then sleep—until I, too, found a way to leverage alchemy.
When the woman with the clipboard, my boss, screamed, I began envisioning the walls melting down to the cement floor and being replaced by trees, as we factory workers navigated a trail toward some mythic land—crossing over into an existence where the next meal or orgasm was no longer the true climax of our lives. I would channel my child self and imagine the floor below me turning to water. It was in the cauldron of a boring and strenuous factory job that I found what had been missing for years—my imagination.
Coworkers I rarely spoke with took adventures in my mind often, as we traveled the world and beyond, exploring our tough pasts with philosophical study, both at ancient ruins and in the most prestigious classrooms. The man in front of me, a grandfather at forty and a quiet alcoholic who served reluctantly in the army and loved Star Trek, might dialogue with the woman behind me, who no longer complained about her prematurely arthritic hands, but instead used them elegantly to recount the story that brought her to her true love: abstract painting. I would take such details and imagine their alternate lives.
And when C and I moved in together, we began to fight. I felt alone, not yet understanding that my experience was not unique—many of the women in my family took care of alcoholic men who were paid more for less work but often became jobs in of themselves. I watched C at the factory, a manager, roaming about and smiling at other women who worked there, and while I cared less by the day, I also began to imagine him being sucked into my magical world, quite literally, only without a happy ending.
The factory work that carried me through what ended up to be a year is likely robotized by now. And if it’s not, it will be. But the experience of doing hard physical labor for eight or ten hours a day with an hour-long break, during which hundreds of workers would collect around long tables that reminded me of high school, offered an opportunity to refine my ability to visualize stories in ways otherwise unfathomable. The longer my shift, the more my arms ached, the more grease stains marked my hands from the oiled lines or hangers … oh, and the less C and I would hold hands and the more he’d drink, the more my daydreams could go wild.
It was here, in line, picking and sorting, that I rekindled my love of storytelling. I was yet to start college and yet to understand the basic rules of grammar, but at eighteen I was beginning to form the foundation for my future life. And soon, I would begin to write.
All these years later, I look back on this girl and see the pure privilege of being able to envision something different, as I clocked out with a boyfriend who would ultimately turn sour. As my great-great-grandmother found ways to connect to a community of women in the dark hours via psychic readings, I envisioned only my own future. I was still young, and, while I was confused and lacking any semblance of self-knowledge, I knew that I was in a moment of time, not sentenced or stuck.
Mary lived to ninety-eight. Mary’s daughter, who passed away in her seventies, didn’t work in a factory, but she had five children and an alcoholic husband. Both women’s gravestones said, simply, “Mother” next to their names. And indeed they were.
But these women left far more behind than their children, including the stories they wove late hours in the backrooms of their homes. The neighborhood women whom my mother remembers filtering into the house late at night to get psychic readings or ask for advice about their problems left upbeat, with hope. And, yes, some of what they were offered came from a mail-order catalogue, but I’d like to think that some of it also came in the form of our shared superpower—the ability to see beyond what was in front of us.
Not long after I called him, we were constantly on the phone. I was now staying on the north side of Columbus, in a neighborhood where the bus schedule was less accommodating, so after a few months C suggested I move in with him. “You could apply for a job where I work,” he said. I filled out an application and tried not to appear too impressed by the hourly rate, but I wasn’t yet sure about moving in.
A few weeks after applying, I had a gray uniform, and a timecard that lived at the factory had my name on it. C and I would arrive at the same entrance each morning, where we’d wait in line behind other workers, his arm around me till we reached the vestibule where he would sign a paper as a shift supervisor and I would clock in as a line worker. From there, it was all business.
The line part of my role was quite literal. I was paid a little over eleven dollars an hour—more money than I’d previously made at any legitimate job—to stand in line three feet behind a man who stood in line three feet behind someone else, and so on. We all stood in between two machines that would move racks of clothing toward us and around the room.
While C got to wander around and oversee packaging, I would stand at my station and wait for dark blue and green uniforms, mostly large and extra-large heavy-duty workwear, to move toward me on the left side. I would lift each arm and look for an orange- or green-colored tag and then, depending on said tag, move the uniform to the line on my right to be routed to the appropriate state. I was shorter than most workers, so I occasionally had to ask for help from the person behind me, but no one minded because I was fast.
At the beginning of a shift, the racks would send me a uniform or two every few minutes, but once things were up and running for the day, the work would intensify, and my arms would ache as I tried to keep up. I could never move fast enough, but none of us could. That was the point. If the goals had been attainable, there would be no reason for the woman with the screechy voice to speed walk around with a clipboard and yell, for which she was probably paid at least two dollars more an hour than me.
Despite the physical pain, I loved the work. At least for a few months. I got to daydream and catch glimpses of my new boyfriend every couple of hours when he’d drift away from his team to “check my work.” Every now and then, we would sneak out to his Camry during lunch, but most days we were discreet. My honeymoon period with both C and the factory would soon dissolve, but at the time I felt on top of the world.
Recently, I found an image of my great-great-grandmother Mary who worked much of her adult life in a potato chip factory and was lauded in Toledo Blade, her local newspaper, when she finally became a U.S. citizen at eighty-two. A Polish immigrant who washed and cut potatoes most her life in the States didn’t humor the newspaper. The picture of her was resolute and unsmiling, staring matter-of-factly from the black-and-white print above a story in which Mary said she’d originally planned to return to Poland when it became liberated and she only recently realized she would never return, so she begrudgingly began studying for her citizenship.
I appreciated her honesty.
According to my mother, the women in my family never got recognized for their work, but they were “tough.” She recalled Mary wringing the neck of a chicken for dinner and throwing my mom, a young child at the time, the hearts to play with as she tended to the rest of the bird. To make extra money, Mary and her daughter, Sophie, would read fortunes for women in the neighborhood at night. Mary had ordered a book that held the fortunes associated with cards and would simply charge women to pick a card, then purport to tell their fortune based on the day and time when that card was chosen. According to my mother, it was a scam, not magic—they were trying to survive, and ways that meant more than just extra income.
As for my own journey on the line, a relatively cushy one that began with me hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock before I woke up each day, I never believed I’d be doing what I was doing for more than a year or two, and that doing included C. After six months, I grew achy and tired of meeting C in his car, where he’d drink a tall can of beer and try to kiss me with sour breath. Shaking off a headache and preparing my body for pain, I simply went through the motions because they were all leading somewhere else. On less busy days, I thought mostly of lunch, then dinner, then sleep—until I, too, found a way to leverage alchemy.
When the woman with the clipboard, my boss, screamed, I began envisioning the walls melting down to the cement floor and being replaced by trees, as we factory workers navigated a trail toward some mythic land—crossing over into an existence where the next meal or orgasm was no longer the true climax of our lives. I would channel my child self and imagine the floor below me turning to water. It was in the cauldron of a boring and strenuous factory job that I found what had been missing for years—my imagination.
Coworkers I rarely spoke with took adventures in my mind often, as we traveled the world and beyond, exploring our tough pasts with philosophical study, both at ancient ruins and in the most prestigious classrooms. The man in front of me, a grandfather at forty and a quiet alcoholic who served reluctantly in the army and loved Star Trek, might dialogue with the woman behind me, who no longer complained about her prematurely arthritic hands, but instead used them elegantly to recount the story that brought her to her true love: abstract painting. I would take such details and imagine their alternate lives.
And when C and I moved in together, we began to fight. I felt alone, not yet understanding that my experience was not unique—many of the women in my family took care of alcoholic men who were paid more for less work but often became jobs in of themselves. I watched C at the factory, a manager, roaming about and smiling at other women who worked there, and while I cared less by the day, I also began to imagine him being sucked into my magical world, quite literally, only without a happy ending.
The factory work that carried me through what ended up to be a year is likely robotized by now. And if it’s not, it will be. But the experience of doing hard physical labor for eight or ten hours a day with an hour-long break, during which hundreds of workers would collect around long tables that reminded me of high school, offered an opportunity to refine my ability to visualize stories in ways otherwise unfathomable. The longer my shift, the more my arms ached, the more grease stains marked my hands from the oiled lines or hangers … oh, and the less C and I would hold hands and the more he’d drink, the more my daydreams could go wild.
It was here, in line, picking and sorting, that I rekindled my love of storytelling. I was yet to start college and yet to understand the basic rules of grammar, but at eighteen I was beginning to form the foundation for my future life. And soon, I would begin to write.
All these years later, I look back on this girl and see the pure privilege of being able to envision something different, as I clocked out with a boyfriend who would ultimately turn sour. As my great-great-grandmother found ways to connect to a community of women in the dark hours via psychic readings, I envisioned only my own future. I was still young, and, while I was confused and lacking any semblance of self-knowledge, I knew that I was in a moment of time, not sentenced or stuck.
Mary lived to ninety-eight. Mary’s daughter, who passed away in her seventies, didn’t work in a factory, but she had five children and an alcoholic husband. Both women’s gravestones said, simply, “Mother” next to their names. And indeed they were.
But these women left far more behind than their children, including the stories they wove late hours in the backrooms of their homes. The neighborhood women whom my mother remembers filtering into the house late at night to get psychic readings or ask for advice about their problems left upbeat, with hope. And, yes, some of what they were offered came from a mail-order catalogue, but I’d like to think that some of it also came in the form of our shared superpower—the ability to see beyond what was in front of us.
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Jen Knox lives and writes in Ohio. Her debut novel, We Arrive Uninvited, is the Prose Award winner from Steel Toe Books. Jen's shorter work appears in McSweeney's Internet Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Review, and Chicago Tribune, among others. She recently won the 2023 CutBank Montana Prize in Nonfiction and is finalizing a collection of essays about work.
Instagram: @_jenknox_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jen.knox2/ Notes/Substack: https://jenknox.substack.com/ |
