You don’t know Bertie Tuttle, Halley had said. But I did.
Standing there, I didn’t know the name Opal Doucet. Not really.Not yet, even though it was close to me, so close I could have almost touched it. I didn’t know about her cures or the Comet Pills or the baby or the voices she heard or channeled through her own. I only knew what I’d been told. That’s what history is, stories repeated until they’re no longer stories, until they’re monuments or books or gravestones bearing our names.
1910
At first, Opal mistook the sound for something else, a machinist ratcheting a stubborn pipe. Her hearing had grown more discerning since she arrived in Cincinnati a month ago, when every noise startled her, when her own name shouted by the foreman caused her alarm.Cautiously alertshe might have described herself on those first few paydays, the other Earthshine Girls watching as she collected her envelope.
Now, she’d grown accustomed to the sheer volume of the factory, the layered sounds she’d learned to separate: the clanging of metal, the growling of the grinders, the hissing of steam. Madame de Fleur had told her that if you focus, you can bring distinct vibrations directly to your ear like a telephone receiver.Listening, she said,is a choice. A skill, too. Opal had been practicing. She found if she paid attention, her sense of hearing could swaddle itself around a single sound. And there, behind the background whirring of the factory, she heard it, the unfamiliar rhythmic clapping, like a metronome.
She directed her attention back to her station. She mustn’t bring scrutiny to herself. She was here to work—not to practice—to earn enough money so she could leave. The job provided means, a weekly wage for her living expenses plus some for her savings tin, if she scrimped. She must keep up with hernumbers, which is how the floormanager described the quantity of boxes each worker could fill in an hour.
The girls behind her were gossiping again, but Opal focused on the materials in front of her: the sponge pot, the sealing wax, the stack of overwrap. She wetted her thumb. She pulled a piece of paper from the stack. The uneven floor caused the arches of her feet to ache. One of the boilers in the corner kicked out heat, and she wiped her brow with her apron.
“Come on, Earthshine Girls. Pick it up. No slacking today of all days,” the foreman yelled from his perch on the platform.
In front of her, the plodder machine discharged the long waxy-looking log the color of egg yolk. Then, the arm of a blade mechanically rose and fell, slicing the soap into even cakes. The machine wasn’t too dissimilar from the pill cutter Jagr kept in his office, the one he’d instructed her to use from time to time. She detested this habit of hers—this thinking of Jagr, even now when she was free of him and his medicines. Would she be doomed to consider him for the rest of her life? Would that be her punishment?
Now she pulled a single bar of soap to the table and set it on the paper. Fold, tuck, flip. A dab of wax at each end. The work itself was tedious but uncomplicated. She never imagined working girls could be paid for such simple tasks, when she herself had been paid nothing for more difficult labor. She turned the Earthshine mark forward, that recognizable circle formed by a sun and a crescent moon. It was an unusual mark, not because of the merging of opposites but because the eye was first drawn to the thick, sloped line that both joined and separated the two images. Opal stacked the soap in a box and repeated the process. At night, her fingers ached, and she soaked them in Epsom salt.
When Opal had responded to Earthshine’s help-wanted advertisement, the foreman asked her personal questions: about her constitution, about her ability to stand for hours at a time, about whether or not she was an againster or if she read books. He circledher, like Jagr had done the first time she’d been brought to see him as a patient, and this made her nervous. Her form was already changing.Former work experience?the foreman asked. His voice was gruff, but the body it came from was slender, slightly stooped.Not formal, Opal said.
Children?the foreman asked, and here Opal touched the curve of her stomach, the secret she was keeping, the secret she must continue to keep until she got to France. She shook her head.
Husband?the foreman asked, and Opal’s mind fluttered to Jagr, to the jagged breaths he took as he lay heaped on their bed.No, she had said, and in that instant she chastised herself for thinking about Jagr again.
That was her old life, her old self. Now, she was what the papers would call aself-sustaining woman. She earned her own cash. Five and a half dollars a week, to be exact. From her check, the company deducted rental fees for the white uniform dress similar to what domestics wore. She’d overheard the other Earthshine Girls complain about this—and about low wages and the foreman and the suffocating heat—during their breaks, standing in their aprons and hair netting, taking thirsty drags of cigarettes by the back door. When the women spoke, clouds of winter breath formed, like something was smoldering inside them.
Tick, tick, tick. Now that Opal heard it, she couldn’t unhear it. That noise. More like a clanging, like the pots and pans revelers banged at the stroke of midnight to ring in the new year. 1910. A year ending in zero. Opal liked the number 0, like theOin her name, the roundness of it, like a hole she could slip through to a place where she felt, after years of waiting, her real life would finally begin.
Soon.
There, in the factory, Opal inhaled the dusty lavender scent of Earthshine Soap. By the end of her shift, she’d reek of it. She tucked and folded. Flipped and stacked. Silently, she filled her box. At the other stations, girls spoke excitedly, for today was the day the owners would be touring the factory, along with a newspaper man from theCincinnati Inquisitor. Some of the girls hoped to get their picture in the paper; they’d even worn makeup for the occasion.
The newsman was writing a story about the seventy-fifth anniversary of the company, founded by the Bremen family in 1835, the last time Halley’s Comet had orbited the earth. Back then many believed the fantastic flame of the comet’s tail would burn bright enough to illuminate the entire world. In December of that year, the Great Fire in New York City blazed for seventeen hours, destroying nearly a quarter of the city. The papers blamed the bearded star.
And now, in this first year of a new decade, Halley’s Comet would appear again. Opal thought of what hadn’t existed seventy-five years ago, or even a dozen: telephones, telegraphs, automobiles, electricity. Now airplanes could power through the sky. Now X-rays could penetrate one’s body to glimpse bone inside.
“They’re selling the factory,” the girl at the station next to Opal whispered. The two of them weren’t overly friendly, but they covered for each other if one needed to run to the washroom. Maria was a girl accustomed to defenses. She planted her feet shoulder-width apart and bounced like a footballer. When she spoke, she lifted her chin as though every word were an act of defiance. “That’s why they’re visiting the factory, you know. I heard it was Mr. Tuttle’s idea, to do the article in the paper. Free advertising.”
Jagr had never allowed Opal to read the papers, said it wasn’t good for her condition, for herunusual episodes, the ones he’d been treating her for since right after they married. Lightheadedness, dizziness, the sense that her head was a helium balloon risen very far from herself. Opal read the papers all she pleased now. During lunch breaks, the Earthshine Girls huddled around the benches in the paved courtyard out back, eating pickled eggs and reading aloud from Dixie About Town, the gossip column in the back of theInquisitor. Opal listened from the bench where she sat by herself, keeping her distance.
Dixie Ellison reported stories of personal affairs: marriages, births, deaths, of debts unpaid, of miscegenation and other misconduct,of the awful streaks upon the glassware at ladies’ luncheons, of the wretched color of the ladies’ toilet at the Women’s Club. Recently, she’d reported that Charles Tuttle was having an affair, that he’d been spotted riding with a “mystery woman” in his automobile. Dixie described the woman as “trim and salacious.” All the Earthshine Girls were talking about it.
But not Opal. She read the papers, but she didn’tlikethem. The papers marveled at the misery of others. They survived on fear and outrage. She couldn’t let the papers override her own good sense, not when her eyes and ears worked just fine.
And then there was what the papers had said about her.
“He’s selling the factory, I’m telling you. He believes the future’s in appliances. Mechanical washtubs. Electric irons. That sort of thing. I read all about it,” Maria said.
“Then let him sell it.” Opal couldn’t just ignore the woman. “What should it matter?” she asked as a means to end the conversation. She creased the edges of the overwrap and placed the soap in the crate.
“We’ll all be out of work, that’s why,” Maria said.
What should it matter to me?Opal should have said. She didn’t intend to be here for very long. A few months more and then—
Her bosoms throbbed, even though she’d bandaged them beneath her shirt to dull the ache. She needed to relieve herself, a symptom of her pregnancy that sent her to the washroom twice as often as the other girls. She eased into the discomfort. She looked to the clock and counted the minutes until their break, then she counted the number of cakes in her box. She tried to calculate how much each box was worth in wages, how many weeks it might take to save enough.
Opal was used to counting now, counting money and minutes and boxes and days, counting the weeks, waiting for a quickening, a sign from the baby. Her monthly bleeding had already accustomed her to waiting, to counting, to the keeping of secrets, to the disposal of messes.
