Watch the author read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:
It was an early afternoon in mid-July, the sun at the height of its powers, and while Laura was stirring a gin and tonic, her co-workers were stretching their picket line across the parking lot of the New Epoch shoe factory. Sitting in a wicker chair on the stained deck of the palatial home of the floor supervisor and his wife, a cool breeze sweeping through the overhanging trees, her ears buzzing with the chirping of birds and the bubbling of the pool filter, Laura told herself she never wanted to be here. She knew any deal between workers and management had to be made with the backing of the entire factory floor. Otherwise, the bosses would try to pick them off one by one, like lions to lagging gazelle. Still, it had been decided she would accept the supervisor’s offer to negotiate over dinner, if not to strike a deal, then at least to feel the man out.
The screen door to the house screeched open, and Laura turned to find her supervisor’s wife, Fatimah, stepping out onto the deck with a tray of charcuterie and a pair of fresh drinks.
“I figured you might be due for a refill by now,” she said. She was wearing a sailboat-dotted apron over her coral sundress. A diamond tennis bracelet glistened and jangled off her wrist.
Laura caught herself smoothing out her wrinkled denim skirt and adjusting the white T-shirt she had tucked into it. You can play hostess all you want, she thought, but I’m not dumb enough to get drunk before the negotiations even begin.
As if sensing her suspicion, Fatimah added, “Daniel should be out shortly. He’s wrapping up some phone business. In the meantime, us gals can chat,” and set the tray down on a glass end table.
It was strange for Laura to hear her supervisor referred to by his first name, when her only conception of him was as “Mr. Land.” As in: “Mr. Land says we’re not packing boxes fast enough” or “You better not let Mr. Land catch you staring off into space like that” or “Mr. Land can go fuck himself with a rusty fork.”
Laura felt her stomach folding in on itself in hunger, so she tongued an ice cube from her otherwise empty glass and sucked on it. She would not help herself to the charcuterie before Fatimah did, no matter how badly she craved the burn of the salted meat on her tongue. She would not allow herself to look desperate.
Fatimah walked over to where Laura was sitting, her legs long and stride purposeful, sandals slapping against the wood. Instead of taking up any one of the many empty chairs, she stooped in front of Laura and gently clasped her wrist. She smelled of sea salt and apricot.
“What happened here?” she asked, tracing her finger along the E-shaped scar on the back of Laura’s hand.
The woman’s fingers felt like live wires on Laura’s skin. She pulled her hand away and slid it beneath her thigh. Fatimah stood there, unfazed. Was it possible she didn’t know? What details of this meeting had her husband kept from her?
Laura did not believe in the power of any single event or idea to change the course of history. Such a notion belonged in—or rather, should be eradicated from—elementary school textbooks. History was a continuous process that unfolded according to very real material conditions and social relations. All history was the history of class struggle. And just one particular struggle among many was the night when, weighed down and weary from working nine hours straight without a break, Laura accidentally ran her hand through the industrial sewing machine so that the New Epoch logo was stitched into it with blood and leaked onto the factory floor. Granted, it was not Mr. Land himself but one of his lackeys who ordered that she finish her shift before she be allowed to seek medical attention. But it was the man she was now expected to refer to as “Daniel” who had increased the daily production quotas in the first place, who balked at the very idea of maternity leave so that Cheryl’s water broke on the floor, who threatened to fire anyone who followed Laura out the door and into the parking lot, who penned an op-ed for The Boston Globe comparing the ensuing walkout to the “petulant cries of a child told she cannot have a pony for her birthday.” And it was Daniel whose voice now emanated from behind the shadows of the screen door to ask if it was time to eat yet because he was fucking famished.
All through the appetizer of golden-crusted spanakopita and Greek yogurt; through the replenishing glasses of wine, turning from white to red with the introduction of the main course: a roasted lamb that bled rich juices into the soft spears of grilled asparagus and seasoned slopes of potatoes; through the distant trickle of jazz piano and boozy small talk, in which Daniel twice brought up voting for Bill Clinton as a means of invoking his liberal bona fides; through it all, Laura, with an anxious flutter in her chest, had waited for her hosts to finally address the reason she was seated at their table. Now, exhausted with the evasions but unsure how to broach the subject, she raised her water glass so that her scar shone under the chandelier. Almost instantly, the glass was intercepted by Fatimah, who shepherded it to the kitchen under the pretense of a refill. The absence of any hired help seemed less to do with modesty than with self-satisfaction, as if to say: We could afford to never do domestic labor if we wanted, but we still do it for the novelty.
There had been a similar false modesty in the “humble invitation” (Daniel’s words) that appeared in her mailbox two weeks into the strike. Emblazoned with red New Epoch letterhead, it promised the impossible: “a settlement both parties will find mutually satisfying.” The letter was here with her now, tucked into her back pocket, pressed between her ass and a chair that was minimalist in both style and comfort. She had been ready to confront Daniel with his own words, but now she wanted to fold the surely damp and wrinkled page into a dart and fling it into his yawning, grease-rimmed mouth.
“Everything was so delicious,” she said instead. After an hour of little more than one-word answers and polite mhmms, her voice sounded strangely loud to her, like it was being broadcast over surround-sound.
“Fatimah will be back with your water any second.” In contrast, Daniel’s voice was thin and distant.
How do you negotiate with someone you have to thank every few minutes for feeding you? Surely, she had raised this very question upon presenting her fellow strikers with the invitation. They had gathered, as they always did after a day of picketing, around Cheryl’s sky-blue Dodge Dakota. None of them ready to return to the embarrassingly small demands of their daily lives, still vibrating with what Laura thought of as an excess of feeling. Laura’s concern was echoed and then shouted over with others: that the invitation amounted to bribery, that it was a trap, a divide-and-conquer strategy. That her role as the face of the strike was becoming anything but reluctant. Tearing absently at the label on a bottle of Busch, Laura largely excused herself from the conversation. She was surrounded by a few people she loved, some she disliked, a couple she both hated and wanted to impress, and many more she felt no way about at all. In other words, they were people she worked with. How strange, then, to have her future so intimately bound with theirs. Ultimately, it was Cheryl and her seniority who tipped the clamor toward consensus. Standing in the bed of her truck, she removed her straw hat, its drawstrings flapping in the breeze, and said, “Let’s not get so used to losing that we can’t recognize an opportunity when it lands at our doorsteps.”
Determined not to squander that opportunity, Laura started with what she considered their smallest demand. “Shall we talk breaks? A half hour is not nearly enough. We need an hour at least.”
“We haven’t even had dessert yet.”
Pinching its stem, Daniel drew his wine glass in small circles over the tablecloth, whirlpooling the liquid inside. He let out a hollow little laugh. Where an hour ago he had been at least accommodating—encouraging second helpings, laughing at the right moments—without Fatimah, he appeared unnerved by Laura’s presence. Like she was a door-to-door saleswoman who had forced her way in. Like the whole thing hadn’t been his idea.
She was used to the stuffy air of opposition. It had taken hours to reach a consensus on anything, from the most evocative shade of paint for their picket signs to the strike’s official demands—what they dubbed “Longer/Shorter/Higher.” Breaks longer than the state-mandated thirty minutes, shifts shorter than the all-too-common fourteen-hour days, and a minimum wage two dollars higher than the current seven an hour. Though they were already concessions—scraps gathered from the butcher block of “realism”—these demands classified Laura and her co-workers as “economic strikers” and thus legally protected them from being discharged, though not from being replaced. (And, sure enough, she had gone hoarse screaming “Scab!” at the cast-down heads and slumped shoulders that appeared one morning and started pushing past her on their way to the employee entrance.)
“I wouldn’t want to waste any more of your time than I already have.” Laura didn’t bother trying to sound sincere.
“You’ve made it this far, haven’t you? No need to force anything. This is a dance, not a backyard brawl.” Daniel sucked something off the tip of his thumb.
Feeling stupid and small, like she had crossed a line she didn’t know existed, Laura excused herself to the restroom. Desperate for a moment alone, only half listening as Daniel called out directions, she found herself wandering down a dim hallway with three doors on either side and a blood-dripped mural of a bullfight pinned to the opposite wall. For no good reason at all, she tried the last door on the left and opened it to find a spacious home office. Her first thought was that it must belong to Daniel, but as she peeked inside, it did not conform to what little she knew of him. For one thing, it was immaculate, which she knew was a far cry from the paperwork skyscrapers she had glimpsed in his work office. More than that, the room’s contents—the aloe vera sunbathing in the window, the tufted chaise longue, the very presence of an area rug—as much as she hated herself for the thought, evoked a woman’s touch. But what drew her across the threshold and into the room was what at first looked like a wooden puzzle on the desk but, as she picked it up, revealed itself to be a wooden sculpture of female genitalia. As she turned the sculpture around in her hands, she found that its various components came apart, so that she could separate the labia majora from the minora and so on.
“Lost?”
She nearly dropped the sculpture at the startle of Fatimah’s voice before turning to her sheepishly.
“I see you’ve found some of my work.”
“You made this?” Laura asked, impressed by the object’s lifelike details.
Fatimah laughed as she stepped into the room and took the sculpture from Laura’s hands. The room seemed to bend to Fatimah’s presence, its natural light softening her already soft features. “I’m a sex therapist. I help couples with all sorts of issues in the bedroom.” She returned the object to its place on the desk. “Are you familiar with sex therapy?”
Sex had never been an issue for Laura and her husband while he was still alive. It had occurred frequently and enthusiastically, which she appreciated. If she had any complaint, it was that it had been too neat: a pillow placed thoughtfully under her back, a towel always at the ready, when sometimes what she wanted was for them to revel in their shared filth. She did not say this to Fatimah, only nodded.
“It’s not just about teaching men how to make their girlfriends and wives come, though often it is that,” Fatimah continued, without a flush of embarrassment. “It’s about helping people communicate those confusing urges that burn deep in their bodies. In a healthy way, of course.” Perhaps she had been standing in the doorway for a while, had watched Laura look lovingly around the room, because she added, “I do pretty well for myself.”
Suddenly, the disparity between the luster of Daniel’s home and his middle-manager status made sense: Fatimah was the breadwinner.
“I have to admit,” Laura replied, “at first, I figured you were sort of a trophy wife.” She hoped Fatimah would read the apology in her voice.
“I’m looking forward to changing your mind about me.”
Fatimah placed her hand on the small of Laura’s back. She felt her spine soften to the warm pressure of the woman’s palm and let herself be led out of the room.
When they returned to the table, Fatimah disappeared into the kitchen, and Laura was once again stuck with Daniel, who had tucked his napkin into the open collar of his golf polo so that the dark tufts of his chest hair brushed over the white fabric. Leaning back in his chair, bearish arms stretched behind his head, he seemed to have doubled in size since she left him. She wondered if, were he a stranger in the grocery store or on the T, knowing nothing of the man he was, if she might be attracted to the divot in his chin or the sweep of his salt-and-pepper hair.
More animated now, he wanted to discuss December’s bombing of Iraq, or, as he referred to it with a sudden solemnity, “Operation Desert Fox.” He hurriedly replenished his glass of wine, errant drops staining the snowy field of tablecloth; angled the bottle to Laura; and, when she declined, downed a third of his glass in a single Adam’s-apple-bobbing gulp. “Of course,” he slurred, picking up a conversational thread that, as far as Laura could tell, dangled only in his head, “he caught a lot of flak for that decision, people pretending it was only to distract from the Lewinsky nonsense. But tell me: What was the alternative? Let Saddam stockpile nukes and blow us to Timbuktu?” There was nothing in his watery expression that suggested he expected or even wanted a response.
“What about the civilian casualties?”
“Sometimes, when you are in a position of power, you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.”
It’s easy to sacrifice the lives of people halfway across the globe, Laura thought. And, as she often did in such situations, she imagined her interlocutor’s response: “Tell me, what have you ever done for these Iraqis you claim to care so much about?” But she had done something—or at least tried to—hadn’t she? She had ridden the commuter rail into Boston to protest outside the State House in ten-degree cold, wind biting at the tips of her ears and nose, snow falling in zigzags across the charcoal sky. Mouth muffled by scarf, chanting, “No war in the Middle East! We demand justice, we demand peace!” alongside a spatter of students and a graying, ponytailed man in a camo jacket who waved a sign reading: Critical support for Milošević! She couldn’t have known it then, but she had felt little of the goodwill that would come to dominate this summer’s strike. She remembered thinking: Are these my people? A man whose nose glistened with snot and whose brand of anti-imperialism had him defending a genocidal maniac? She remembered riding home defeated, forehead frozen to the window, jostled out of sleep every few minutes by the train’s fits and starts.
She mentioned none of this to Daniel, who, judging from the way he twirled a napkin ring around his finger, had grown bored of the conversation. She, however, was not finished with it, so she asked, “Do you fear we might face some retaliation?” as if she were Diane Sawyer. This is how she had learned to frame her anti-interventionism, couched in neutered terms, forever concerned with what “our” bombing campaigns might mean for “us.” She had to be careful; he was no longer her supervisor, but she still represented her co-workers.
“Listen.” He pulled the napkin from his shirt and used it to blot his forehead. “My wife agrees we did what we had to do, and she’s from Saudi Arabia, so.” His voice did not trail off but stopped suddenly, as if there would never be any other word on the matter.
Fatimah appeared beside him then. Seated, Daniel came up to his wife’s navel. He acknowledged her sudden presence by tugging at the fabric around her hip, running it between his index finger and thumb. A moment later, his hand found its way underneath the fabric and was moving up and down her thigh. When Fatimah finally spoke, it was not to remind her husband of the company in front of them but to tell Laura they would take their coffee in the den and sort out the business at hand. Her voice fluctuated the higher her husband’s hand rose, but her eyes never wavered from Laura’s.
In terms of décor, the den seemed the perfect space for conducting business. The wall facing the entrance was consumed by a brick fireplace, from which came the snap of logs splitting in flames. The remaining walls were lined with bookshelves that housed titles seemingly pulled from a freshmen Chicago School of Business syllabus: Thomas Friedman, The Wealth of Nations, several Reagan biographies—no literature and no cracks in any of the spines. In one corner, Laura eyed the sort of rolling bar she had only previously seen in movies starring Ingrid Bergman, topped with ornate glass sifters that glowed orange with the flickering light of the fire. The room smelled at once of smoke and mahogany.
There existed no such space in her own home. The closest comparison might have been the living room, except swap the fireplace for the boxy Hewlett Packard her son clacked away on all night, the library of hardcovers for the dog-eared copies of The State and Revolution and Langston Hughes’s A New Song piled on the coffee table, and the rolling bar for the plastic handle of Gordon’s gin tucked behind the couch.
Ironically, the den also couldn’t have been further from Daniel’s office, where Laura had been summoned the day she first whispered the word “walkout.” She had been surprised not only by its emptiness—there were few amenities on his paper-covered desk, other than a beige and blinking PC and a phone the same color—but also by how cramped it felt. The folding chair she had been instructed to sit in was pressed right up against the wall, and she could see where its back had left a series of black marks in the white paint. Daniel’s warning proved to be as nondescript as the office itself. He informed her of his efforts to establish a sense of accountability between management and the floor, spoke distantly of “the New Epoch family” and of the literal families—Cheryl’s newborn included—who wouldn’t last even a week without a paycheck. These words, so carefully chosen and yet so empty, had a neutralizing effect on her, leaving her with nothing to grasp onto and thus nothing to dispute. If only he had accused her of fomenting dissent, then at least she could have felt like an actual threat.
At no point during his monologue had he made eye contact with her, choosing instead to peer through his horizontal blinds down into the parking lot while he spoke, as if visited by a vision of the strike that would soon take place there. The only time he addressed her directly was to let her know that her shirt tag was sticking out of her collar, and even then, he fixed his gaze at the top of her head as he watched her tuck it back in. At the time, she assumed his avoidance was either a business strategy or proof of his indifference toward her, as if she was beneath his very gaze. Now, in the amber light and woozy heat of the den, she was not quite sure. It occurred to her that the blank purgatory of Daniel’s office laid bare the fact that he was middle management—it was not quite the chaos of the factory floor but certainly not the sleekness of an executive office. Only here, with his miniature putting green and framed antique maps to help give shape to the image he had of himself, could he once again face Laura. If the likely fact that these luxuries were funded by Fatimah threatened the illusion for him, he hid it well.
The only place for her to sit was a lone wooden chair by the fireplace—that is, unless she wanted to join her hosts on the leather loveseat. They were sitting there with space between them and their hands folded in their laps, perhaps now sobered from the coffee.
Though she had been trying to suppress it ever since wheeling her ’91 Plymouth Acclaim up the impossibly smooth, football-field-length driveway, Laura had to face the rotting fact that she had wanted to come here all along, to spend a few hours as a class traitor, to relax in a home that did not smell of Lysol, to eat an appetizer that was more than just Triscuits. Lower back aching against the wooden spine of her chair, pinpricks of sweat dotting her forehead and neck, stomach swelling with a meal she would never have the money or energy to prepare, she vowed to steal a fancy bottle of lotion from the bathroom and give it to Cheryl as consolation. But before that, she had to tell her hosts that her coming here was a mistake, and thank you for your hospitality, but this has to happen through the proper channels, and there can only ever be full capitulation to our demands.
“Are you married, Laura?” It was Fatimah asking, leaning forward, elbows on her perfectly shiny knees. It was also the first time either of them had asked her a personal question.
The surprise was enough to compel her to answer, “He died fifteen years ago,” rather than the simple “No” she normally reserved for relative strangers. What she did not say was that her husband had taken his own life, had hanged himself in their closet with his belt while their then three-year-old son napped in their bed. She did not mention her finding him while scouring for a pair of pumps for their dinner date later that night or how the blood vessels in his neck had burst like tiny supernovas. She did not share how much she hated him for leaving her behind or that his Lawrence Fire Department T-shirt was, at that very moment, tangled with her bedsheets, that she slept with it every night.
“I am so sorry to hear that,” Daniel said, holding eye contact and sounding like he meant it. He proceeded to squeeze Fatimah’s knee, as if she were the one in need of consoling.
“I noticed you admiring our library,” he added, perhaps uncomfortable with the silence that had followed. “Have you, by any chance, read any of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s writing on scientific management?”
She had not—only its critics—and marveled that bosses were still devoted to Taylorism eighty years later. She knew that this was another question that did not depend on an answer.
“You would think that, given its influence on Fordism and even, to a certain extent, the principles of Lean Six Sigma, I would be a fan. But then you would be wrong.” As he spoke, he kneaded Fatimah’s knee as if it were a ball of dough. “In reality, I find his endless systematizing and studies on time and efficiency boring as hell. His descriptions of labor especially are just so cold and, well… scientific.”
As if on cue, Fatimah rose from under her husband’s hand and crossed the room. At first, Laura assumed she might be prepping yet another serving of something, likely some sort of after-dinner liqueur, given the evening’s endless flow of alcohol. But instead, she lurked by the book-lined wall behind Laura, perhaps flipping through the title her husband was currently going on about.
“It’s my belief, and maybe you’ll agree, that labor is actually a lot more dynamic than all that and even…”—he scanned the ceiling, as if the missing word might be scrawled there—“sensual.”
Laura felt a pair of hands on her shoulders and the oxygen leave her lungs. They were the same hands that had traced her scar, the same shock on her skin. And they were moving downward, inching past her clavicle, fingers angling toward her chest. It took her a moment to realize that Daniel was still speaking to her, his voice now sounding like it was coming from behind a thick layer of aquarium glass. “What is missing from his descriptions of work are the rivulets of sweat, the rippling of flesh, bodies in motion, the grunts and sighs and screams….” For some reason, the only thought that kept flagging in Laura’s mind, like a leaf caught in the spoke of a bicycle wheel, was that it had been several years since someone had touched her like this—not since the date with the bartender who fingered her in his car before dropping her off, then called the next morning to tell her he wasn’t ready to have her son in his life. She imagined what it would feel like if it were Daniel’s hands on her now—meaty, clenching. Only in looking at him and finding what she expected but feared—the outline of an erection in his pants—did the dam in her brain open itself to another thought: You need to leave.
As she squirmed in her seat, she felt the soft brush of Fatimah’s hair on the back of her neck. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
Her breath caught in Laura’s ear like dandelion seeds. What a nice sentiment, Laura thought. If only it were true.
Hovering above her seat now, Laura spilled with excuses: It was getting late, her son needed her at home, she had promised to lend a neighbor her car. And yet she was disappointed by how easily Fatimah’s hands fell to the side, how readily Daniel rose to see her to the door. It occurred to her these were not serious people. They had never intended to negotiate with her. And their sudden proposition seemed too crudely obvious to be tactical and too easily revoked to be real lust. The whole night suddenly felt like a whim, when what Laura really wanted was a struggle. For Fatimah’s nails to pierce her skin as she tried to wrench herself free of the woman’s grasp. To feel that silken hair between her fingertips as she yanked it from Fatimah’s scalp. To find Daniel’s testicles beneath the sole of her shoe, crushing them like garlic cloves as she dug her heel in. She wanted them to strike back, so she could turn feral, crawling with rugburn and choking on her own breath and spitting out someone’s blood. She wanted them to want her bad enough to fight for it.
Instead, her hosts fluttered with condolences as they escorted her out. Fatimah insisted they reschedule. “Maybe somewhere more comfortable for everyone, like the country club.” Daniel proposed it might be easier if, next time, Laura sent Cheryl in her stead. They led her—not by touch but by the suggestion of their shared movement—to the front door. In this way, time seemed to flow in reverse, and she witnessed her entry into their home through its mirror image: the pattern on the runner rug spiraling in the opposite direction; a previously hidden dead patch peeking out on the potted bonsai; a bronze statue of a narwhal presenting its tail, rather than greeting her with its glinting tusk. And just like that, she was back where she began.
Fatimah pushed the large wooden door open, and they idled there for a moment. The skin of Laura’s chest felt like it was blistering, as she was forced to radiate in the couple’s final hospitalities.
“It truly has been a pleasure,” Daniel said, “getting to see another side of you.”
Finally, he lurched at her. It was only after she had put the full force of her being into shoving him back, stumbled out the doorway and down the front lawn, climbed into the car and slammed the door behind her, that, in reaching back for her seatbelt, she felt the tag of her T-shirt sticking straight up. Reversing down the driveway, her thoughts flashed to the morning ahead: the coffee maker hissing while her son sleeps upstairs; her fingers twirling around the phone cord as she tries to coax out of bed people who hoped they’d finally won a day’s rest; her car engine growling in the early morning calm, boxes of fliers and picket signs jostling in the backseat; the factory’s clock tower looming into view, giving way to the dull expanse of parking lot stretching before her like a starless night sky. But, for tonight, Daniel was caught in her frantic glance back, flailing backward, struggling for but never finding his footing.
Douglas Koziol lives in Western Massachusetts. His writing has appeared in Quarterly West, The Millions, and Lunch Ticket, among other places.
