Opal had seen plenty of positive changes in many of the Earthshine Girls, she told Clara. The foreman announced that fewer girls missed days this month than any other month all last year; their numbers were up. A fifty-cent bonus was added to their weekly paycheck.
But, still, new girls sat with her in the lunchroom. Nervousness. Low libido. High libido. Anger. Frustration. Rage. Crying, often, so much, all the time. Hopelessness. Helplessness. Desire. Terror. Exhaustion, but not just physical. They spoke in hushed voices like they were confessing a secret they’d long held in, as though the confessing itself was some sort of relief.
“Odd that all those Earthshine Girls haveillnesses, don’t you think?” Clara said. “Factory work is hard on a body and mind. Not everyone is fit for it.” Her cat jumped up on her desk and some papers fluttered to the floor. Clara lifted the cat and pinned it beneath her arm, a feline clutch.
“If you called me here to discuss working conditions,” Opal said, “I can tell you it’s no shirtwaist factory. Better than that, but only by a margin.” The story had been all over the papers. The Shirtwaist Strike, the Uprising of 20,000, the papers called it. A few months ago, those women garment workers had gone on strike, citing horrendous working conditions. Locked exit doors. No washroom. Unbearable heat.
“Well, then. We’ll get right to it. I want your brand.”
Opal thought of the goats Jagr once kept, the gamy stink of their flesh when he’d branded their flanks.
“Comet Pills—” Clara said. “Did you come up with the brand name yourself? I’ve read in other cities hucksters are selling pills and elixirs that purport to save people from the toxic gas in the tail of Halley’s Comet. Can you believe that? Capitalizing on fear.”
“I don’t believe what I read in the papers,” Opal said.
“You and I are alike then, except…” Clara leaned forward, elbows to her desk. “I do believe you have a product that’s helpful for those feminine maladies about which most women dare not speak. I’ve heard the stories from my customers. Euphoria—that’s how they describe it. Like morphine without the troubling side effects. No sleepiness or lethargy. In fact, quite the opposite. One woman I spoke with described it as a little capsule of happiness. Do you know how many inquiries I’ve already received?” She paused for a moment, then answered the question herself: “Many.”
Dowd’s had the means to bring medicines to the masses, Clara explained. She pitched the terms of the agreement: pricing, commissions, stocking fees, initial order size. Opal would provide the product, and Dowd’s would take care of marketing and sales. In thirty days, Opal would receive her initial commission, the standard agreement Claramade with all her vendors to ensure all up-front costs were covered and enough time to run some ads in the circulars.
“Four hundred dollars,” Clara said.
Opal tried to look unsurprised, to look like abusinesswoman. It’d take at least a year of working in the factory to save that much. She couldn’t even calculate how many boxes of soap she’d have to pack or how many women’s hands she’d have to hold in the dimness of the lunchroom. “And you couldn’t do eight hundred?” Her voice pitched deeper as she asked it.
“The most I could do is five,” Clara said. “Five and a half. Not a penny more.”
Clara produced a contract, and they both signed it. Opal withdrew the samples from her handbag. Clara held the open tin and tentatively sniffed it. Then she pulled out one pill and touched the tip of her tongue to it.
“No more selling onesie, twosies,” Clara said. “Think volume. Think scale. Think of the women you’ll be helping.”
OPAL HAD BEEN TAUGHT NEVERto think about money. Jagr would have preferred her to believe it didn’t exist, that he was the center of all transactions. He hid his tinderbox. He never let her handle cash, instead setting up accounts in town that he settled himself once Opal had gone shopping. Now, it was all she could think about. Money. Money. Money.
She counted the tins of pills as she made them—fifty, sixty, seventy, two hundred. Counting eased her nerves and occupied her mind. She bent over the stove, the steam letting off such an odor she wrapped a handkerchief over her face and resembled a bandit, like Jesse James, who was killed for a $10,000 reward.
Opal counted the days until the Dowd commission was paid: twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. At work, she counted the crates she filled in a day: seventeen, nineteen. She counted the hands she held in the lunchroom: eight, ten, twelve.
She preferred to be in motion, and on her day off, she went walking. Down near the public landing she watched the children scrambling up and down the bank like little crabs. Across the river, a railroad followed the Kentucky shore. So much of her time had been spent indoors. Now, when she looked out into the distance, her vision blurred, unaccustomed to such stretches. She blinked and watched the people around her, moving about. Men in wool suits carried attachés; a woman strolled with a package tucked beneath her arm; a group of sternmen rolled a cart up a boat ramp. And beyond them, the steamboats, both majestic and utilitarian. Something in Opal always stirred at the sight of a steamboat, with its sturdy stacks and stern wheels that implied motion, reminding her that all rivers flow to the ocean, drawn to the current of a larger body.
“Excuse me, lady,” said a voice, startling her. “You got a match?”
The boy was no older than six. He was missing his front teeth, and he wore a newsboy’s hat, though he wasn’t selling anything, just standing before her with a stubby cigar.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?” she asked. He looked like an old man in his hat, with his face scrunched up from the morning’s brightness.
“The world’s ending anyway, lady. That comet’s going to destroy us all. Boom!” Here he crashed his fists together to imitate an explosion.
She told him she didn’t have a match and that the world wasn’t ending, and then he turned and ran away, his strides short, his pants falling from lack of a belt, so he had to hold them up with his fist.
Comet Frenzy, the papers called it. Talk of it was everywhere. Newspaper astronomers blamed the unusually warm spring on Halley’s. Dixie Ellison reported the comet was responsible for the rise in heart attacks in the elderly. The tailor down the street advertised a Comet Sale—“Buy a suit you’ll want to wear for eternity.” That French scientist Flammarion predicted the possible extinction of humankind, and the papers reported he was himself taken by spiritism;he believed in telepathy, that ghosts were nothing more than spirit recordings that a person left behind and that these recordings could be played if one could access a spirit phonograph.
She wondered if a spirit phonograph were much like a Spirit Machine. She tried to imagine what a Spirit Machine might look like: nodes and wires extending from a box. She considered her baby was neither here nor on the Other Side, not dead but not yet born, somewhere in between the worlds, somewhere dark, waiting in the house of Opal’s body.
Opal walked farther down the path, toward the man who sold bratwurst. She felt most comfortable in motion these days. A string of uncooked meat hung like a rosary from a metal hook on the side of his cart, and fire poked above a barrel fitted with a grate. A gust of wind bent the fire, and the flames lifted higher. Opal started. The fire had a nose, a mouth, a face; she swore it. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired. At night, she couldn’t sleep. Her stomach made her uncomfortable. Her legs would cramp so badly, she’d wake up howling.
The vendor reached for a poker to turn the meat. The fire rose higher, and Opal made out a neck now, shoulders, sinuous stretches of orange shaped into arms. “Nothing to be ’fraid of, ma’am. Just a little grease from the bratwurst.”
She stepped back. For a moment, she felt faint. Her condition, she thought.
“You okay, ma’am?”
