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Tignor had promised Rebecca she would not have to work, as his wife. He was a man of pride, easily offended. He did not approve of his wife working in a factory and yet: he no longer provided her with enough money, she had no choice.
Since summer, Rebecca was better adjusted. But, Christ she would never be adjusted.
It was only temporary work of course. Until…
He had looked at her with such certainty! HAZEL JONES.
Seeming to know her. Not Rebecca in her filth-stiffened work clothes but another individual, beneath.
He’d known her heart. HAZEL JONES HAZEL ARE YOU HAZEL JONES YOU ARE HAZEL JONES ARE YOU. In the long morning hours HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES lulling, seductive as a murmurous voice in Rebecca’s ear and in the afternoon HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES had become a jeering din.
“No. I am not. God damn you leave me alone.”
Him removing his glasses. Prissy tinted glasses. So she could see his eyes. How sincere he was, and pleading. The injured iris of one eye, like something burnt-out. Possibly he was blind in that eye. Smiling at her, hopeful.
“Like I was somebody special. ”Hazel Jones.“”
She had no wish to think about Hazel Jones. Still less did she want to think about the man in the panama hat. She’d have liked to scream into his face. Seeing again his shock, when she’d torn up his card. That gesture, she’d done right.
But why: why did she detest him?
She had to concede, he was a civilized man. A gentleman. A man who’d been educated, who had money. Like no one else she knew, or had ever known. And he’d made such an appeal to her.
He was kind-hearted, he meant to do right.
“Was it just I’m ”Hazel Jones’ or-maybe, it was me.“
Remembered you. In his will.
Legacy.
“See, I am not her. The one you think I am.”
Must remember me, Dr. Hendricks’s son.
“I told you, I don’t.”
God damn she’d told him no, she’d been truthful from the start. But he’d kept on and on like a three-year-old insisting what could not be, was. He’d continued to speak to her as if he had heard yes where she’d been saying no. Like he was seeing into her soul, he knew her in some way she didn’t know herself.
“Mister, I told you. I’m not her.”
So tired. Late afternoon is when you’re susceptible to accidents. Even the old-timers. You get slack, fatigued. SAFETY FIRST!-posters nobody glanced at anymore, so familiar. 10 SAFETY REMINDERS. One of them was KEEP YOUR EYES ON YOUR WORK AT ALL TIMES.
When Rebecca’s vision began to waver inside the goggles, and she saw things as if underwater, that was the warning sign: falling asleep on her feet. But it was so…It was so lulling. Like Niley falling asleep, his eyelids closing. A wonderment in it, how human beings fall asleep same as animals. What is the person in personality and where does it go when you fall asleep. Niley’s father Tignor sleeping so deeply, and sometimes his breath came in strange erratic surges she worried he might cease breathing, his big heart would cease pumping and then: what? He had married her in a “civil ceremony” in Niagara Falls. She’d been seventeen at the time. Somewhere, lost amid his things, was the Certificate of Marriage.
“I am. I am Mrs. Niles Tignor. The wedding was real.”
Rebecca jerked her head up, quickly. Where’d she been…?
She poked her fingers inside the goggles, wiping her eyes. But had to take off her safety gloves first. So awkward! She wanted to cry in frustration… hurt. Or were told you were. I don’t judge. He was watching her from the doorway, he was speaking about her with one of the bosses. She saw him, in the corner of her eye; she would not stare, and allow them to know that she was aware of them. He wore cream-colored clothes, and the panama hat. Others would glance at him, quizzically. Obviously, he was one of the owners. Investors. Not a manager, not dressed for an office. Yet he was a doctor, too…
Why’d Rebecca rip up his card! The mea
Yet: he did not judge.
“Wake up. Girl, you better wake up.”
Again Rebecca had almost fallen asleep. Almost got her hand mangled, left hand this time.
Smiled thinking crazily: the fingers on the left hand you would not miss so much. She was right-handed.
She knew: the man in the panama hat wasn’t in the factory. She must have seen, in the blurry corner of her eye, the plant manager. A man of about that height and age who wore a short-sleeved white shirt, most days. No bow tie, and for sure no panama hat.
After work she would almost-see him again. Across the street, beneath the shoe repair awning. Quickly she turned away, walked away not looking back.
“He isn’t there. Not Tignor, and now not him.”
No one saw: she made sure.
Looking for pieces of Hendricks’s card she’d ripped up. On the towpath she found a few very small scraps. Not certain what they were. Whatever was printed on them was blurred, lost.
“Just as well. I don’t want to know.”
This time, disgusted with herself, she squeezed the pieces into a pellet and tossed it out onto the canal where it bobbed and floated on the dark water like a water bug.
Sunday passed, and Tignor did not call.
To distract the restless child she began telling him the story of the man-on-the-canal-towpath. The man-with-the-panama-hat.
“Niley, this man, this strange man, followed me along the towpath, and guess what he said to me?”
The Mommy-voice was bright, vibrant. If you were to color it in crayons it was a bold su
Niley listened eagerly, uncertain if he should smile: if this was a happy story, or a story to make him worry.
“Mommy, what man?”
“Just a man, Niley. Nobody we know: a stranger. But-”
“”Stang-er‘-“
“”Stranger.“ Meaning somebody we don’t know, see? A man we don’t know.”
Niley glanced anxiously about the room. (His cubbyhole of a bedroom with a slanted ceiling, that opened onto her bedroom.) He was blinking rapidly peering at the window. It was night, the single window reflected only the blurred undersea interior of the room.
“He isn’t here now, Niley. Don’t be afraid. He’s gone. I’m telling you about a nice kind man, I think. A friendly man. My friend, he wants to be. Our friend. He had a special message for me.”
But Niley was still anxious, glancing about. To capture his attention Mommy had to grip his little shoulders and hold him still.
A squirmy little eel, he was. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to hug him tight, and protect him.
“Mommy? Where?”
“On the canal towpath, honey. When I was coming home from work, coming to get you at Mrs. Meltzer’s.”
“Today, Mommy?”
“Not today, Niley. The other day.”
It was later than usual, the child hadn’t yet gone to bed. Ten o’clock and she’d only just managed to get him into his pajamas by making a game of it. Tugging off his clothes, his shoes, as he lay passive and not-quite-resisting. It had been a difficult day, Edna Meltzer had complained to Rebecca. At the delicate juncture of bones at the child’s forehead Rebecca saw a nerve pulsing.
She kissed the nerve. She resumed her story. She was very tired.
The three-year-old had been too cranky to be bathed in the big tub, Mommy had had to struggle to wash him with a washcloth, and then not very well. He was too cranky to be read to. Only the radio would comfort him, that damned radio Rebecca would have liked to toss out the window.
“A man, a very nice man. A man in a panama hat-”
“Mommy, what? A banana hat?”
Niley laughed in disbelief. Rebecca laughed, too.
Why the hell had she begun telling this story, she couldn’t imagine. To impress a three-year-old? Out of the crayon box she selected a black crayon to draw a stick-man and on the stick-man’s silly round head with the yellow crayon she drew a banana hat. The banana was disproportionately large for the stick-man’s head, and upright. Niley giggled and kicked and squirmed with pleasure. He grabbed at the crayons to draw his own stick-man with a tilted-over banana hat.