“He probably sent for her again,” Betsy said.
“Who?” the newest girl asked—but the rest of them already knew. Amanda Mahooney was the woman Dixie described astrim and salacious.
“Charles Tuttle, you dummy. Amanda’s the employee of the year.”
But there, in that green-carpeted room, Opal didn’t share all that. What good would it have done to turn Bertie against poor Amanda Mahooney? She wasn’t to blame. Bertie adjusted her gloves, pulling them up at the fingertips, then down at the wrists, and then she made a fist, as though she’d caught a mosquito in her grip.
“I need to ask you for another favor,” Bertie said.
“A love potion?”
Here, Bertie laughed so heartily she nearly lost her breath. She loosed herself from her perfect posture and doubled over. When she regained her composure, tears wetted her cheeks. Opal hadn’t known Bertie could release herself like that, and it made her more fond of the woman. “I haven’t laughed like that in a while. It feels good, you know?” She heaved a breath. She removed her gloves and wiped her tears with them. Then she pushed the newspaper forward. “I need you to talk to the other Earthshine Girls. It’s my father’s factory, you know. It means something to me.”
Opal must have looked confused.
“Organize them, whatever you want to call it. Like these women at the shirtwaist factory in New York.” She now pointed to the article about the Shirtwaist Strike. After eleven weeks, the strikers finally negotiated an ending to the ordeal. In the photograph in the paper, the women linked arms. They looked flushed and victorious, but their tight, straight smiles revealed anger simmering still. “Convince them to strike,” Bertie said. “They’ll listen to you.”
Opal’s silence forced Bertie to continue. “They will fire every single one of you Earthshine Girls, you know. Old Goodman plans to bring in his own workers. He’s moving them here from Pittsburgh. From his beard wax factory. Beard wax,” she scoffed.
Bertie stood and faced the portrait of her father. She touched the canvas tenderly, as though smoothing his hair. “My father introduced us,” Bertie explained. “At the time, the prospect of marrying Charles seemed promising. He can be surprisingly sentimental. A portrait of his first wife hung on his wall. It still does. He’s afraid removing it would betray the woman, and I’m not jealous. I told Charles, at the very start, I do not want to be a common wife. Let me work with you, I told him, like I worked with my father. I wrote some of my father’s advertisements, you know. But I think it’s different when it’s your wife. Some men claim to want an equal until they realize the logistics of it.”
Something about facing that portrait allowed Bertie a moment of such candor. She seemed to notice this and turned her back to the painting. “Queen City’s Soap. It’s not contested. Pure and clean, your dirt’s arrested,” she recited.
“That was you?” Opal said. “That rhyme always stuck in my head. You have a knack for jingles.”
“Charles calls it a hobby.”
“Why do you want the factory so badly?” Opal said. “You’ve seen it yourself. The heat. The noise. The machinery is ancient. Just last week one of the girls nearly cut off her finger on the slicing machine when a bolt loosened. And the workers, half of them are sick.”
“Sick from work.” Bertie laughed. “Now you sound like Dixie Ellison.”
Last week Betsy had come to see her in the lunchroom.I feel strange, she’d said. While they sat together, Opal felt the woman’s driving pulse.Is it the baby?Opal had asked. Betsy shrugged; her cheeks had rounded out, her belly, too.For a moment, I was standing there, and I didn’t feel real, Betsy said.Lightheaded?Opal asked. Betsy nodded, then shaded her eyes and squinted, like it was too bright in the dim room. Opal helped her to sit.You’re real, see?Then she pinched the skin at the base of Betsy’s palm, but the woman did not flinch. Afterward, she’d given Betsy some more Comet Pills, and she didn’t charge her the customary fifty cents.
“My father was a great defender of the women’s cause,” Bertie said. “He believed what women needed most was to work. Industry. That’s the great equalizer.”
But Opal had worked all her life, hadn’t she? Even before she’d made a single dollar of her own. She had spent hours of her life toiling in the kitchen making goulash or mincemeat pie. How she loathed cooking and scouring the pans afterward; how her stomach pitched at the flotsam that rose to the top of the dishwater that Opal had to skim off with a strainer so she wouldn’t clog the sink.
“And yet you want us to walk off the job? It makes no sense.”
“Just temporarily. Just until I can prove this pregnancy will take, until I’m further along. Charles can’t sell a soap factory on strike. Nobody would want to be associated with it. Poor publicity, angry women, all that, not to mention what it could do to the brand. The newspapers would be all over it. Front-page material.”
Opal couldn’t risk her picture in the paper again—not with Jagr looking for her now. “They won’t do it,” Opal said. “They need their jobs. We all do.”
“Think about it: You girls could improve your position. A calculated risk. Look at these women in New York. They negotiated higher wages. Nearly double!”
“And better work conditions,” Opal added. “No exploding boilers or unbolted machines.”
“Now,” said Bertie, as thought they had settled the matter. “You have my word. If you convince the girls to strike, afterward, I’ll inspect every square inch of this place, and make improvements, even if I have to do it with my own two hands.” Bertie pinned her hat and readied to leave. “From the start I suspected you were different. Ambitious.” She offered an approving look, then picked up her bag. “We could help each other,” she said. “What is it youreallywant?”
That question again. Opal stood now and straightened her apron. Wasn’t this just another way of asking:Who are you?And what are you willing to do to become her?Wasn’t Bertie just daring her to say it out loud? And what if she did?
I want the Dowd money, she might have said. But that wasn’t quite right.I want to go to France, she could have said. Or,I want to save this baby. Or,I want a different life. Or,I want what I want.I want to be able to want.Now that was closer to the truth, but she couldn’t quite put it to words. Plus, the women weren’t intimate enough for that kind of conversation.
“I want a space of my own,” Opal said. “A place to work. Spirit work.” In a single week, the Dowd order had already doubled. She hadn’t the space. Her kitchen was cluttered with glass dishes and bowlsand botanicals strung from twine with clothespins to dry. The pots were at a constant boil, decocting roots and herbs. And recently, her landlord had given her that final warning. Her rented rooms reeked of sulfur and soured wine and something pungent and medicinal. The neighbors had complained again. The scent of it kept even her awake at night, her baby enhancing all her senses.
Bertie suggested the old testing laboratories at the Earthshine Factory. She knew the building’s layout—and a better, more private way in, she’d explained. She led Opal outside into the sunlight, then across the street to a stout annex building where they stored maintenance supplies. Bertie took Opal down a set of stairs and through the old tunnel so they wouldn’t be seen, lagering tunnels that once served to cool beer when the factory was a brewery, before her family owned it.Beer caves, she’d called them. The beer cave was chilly, with brick archways tall enough for transporting casks. Two lamps were plenty to illuminate the way. Old barrels were stacked along the sides, like forgotten trunks in the hold of a ship.
They arrived at the base of a slat-wood staircase. Upstairs, Opal found herself in a square room where she’d never been, a separate entrance from the one she used, all the way on the other side of the factory. A memorabilia room of some sort. A small sign, a replica of one that hung over the city, bore the company name:EARTHSHINE SOAP. Advertisements lined the walls. Women in kitchens. Women in aprons. Women in sudsy bathtubs with long-handled brushes.SO CLEAN, one read, against an illustration of a woman radiating beams of light from her skin,HE’LL SEE YOU FROM MILES AWAY.
