Note: This excerpt began as a short story and became the opening of my novel-in-progress, Beyond the Boneyard.
November 1963
Two mannequins stood against the factory wall beneath a tall unadorned window that offered a glimpse of sky. Across the room, a chest with narrow drawers butted against Flora Abbott’s drafting table. French curves for drawing sleeves, busts, and waists of dresses covered much of the chest top. A beer stein with an assortment of pencils and paint brushes pressed against her transistor radio that was no bigger than a book she might borrow from the library. A mannequin’s hand, shoved beneath the door, held it open to the factory floor.
Steven worked at his drafting table. They created mockups of dress cards to be printed for sales ladies across the country. He sang along with music playing on her transistor and opined on hourly news reports. Flora tolerated his noise. For spring sales kits and catalogues, they illustrated knockoffs of Mrs. Kennedy’s shifts, sheaths, wiggle jackets (with pillbox hats), pencil skirts, and evening gowns. On the factory floor, women hunched over pinpoint-lit machines that buzzed and thwacked in fits and starts as they stitched seams.
Flora’s daily attire, black slacks with a white shirt and black sweater, white socks, black oxfords meant she wasted no time choosing an outfit or doing laundry in the basement of her fourplex among shadows as dark as those in the barn on her family’s farm. She looked to the Timex watch on her wrist. The minute hand marched toward one o’clock.
Twenty-eight years she had worked at the factory. When she was eighteen, she rode a Greyhound bus to Cincinnati where she began as a checker at the factory. Her boss stressed no flawed dress left the floor. A dress might slip through with a cracked button or a missing stitch in a seam. War years, when the factory switched from dresses to parachutes, she checked seams with diligence, mindful that a break in a thread could cause a soldier’s death.
After the war, she worked a machine on the factory floor. Lunch time she avoided small talk and gossip with other women, preferring to eat alone and sketch in her notebook. One day she left it in the break room and the floor supervisor showed the drawings to their boss. Flora received a promotion to assistant card illustrator and a few years later to card illustrator.
Tonight, she was to have a dinner date with Peter. They’d met at an art museum lecture, though a woman her age, forty-six, had no business taking up with a man eight years younger. She never spoke of him at work.
To capture the flow of fabric and accurate lines of a dress, she trailed her pencil along a French curve. Then Flora painted the dress to match a square of peach shantung silk she stapled to the mock-up of a sample card. A man’s voice on the radio, Britain declaring it’s no crime to be a witch, Flora had known a witch. Her mother. Then Doris Day sang her latest release, “Funny.” Then. A special bulletin. From Dallas Texas …. Three shots fired ….
Flora stood, Steven at her side. Another bulletin. More on the shots fired …. No casualties. A serious injury ….. She turned up the volume. “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a possibility …. standby on this bulletin …. President Kennedy was shot today…. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up …. One, and then another, of the sewing machines fell silent. Women crowded near her radio, their worried looks no partner to the smiling mannequin faces.
A late report …. The president cradled in the arms of his wife …. he is dead ….
None of the women spoke.
The floor supervisor threaded his way through them. “You’re dismissed for the day. Report back tomorrow, usual time.”
As sounds of weeping crept over the factory floor, the women retrieved coats and purses from lockers on the wall. Steven lifted his hat and coat from a wall hook. At the door, he paused. “Are you okay?”
Nodding, Flora noticed the mannequin’s hand, kicked from beneath the door, palm up against the brick wall as though in need of a touch. Gathering her purse and car coat, she took the stairway to the street. The day warm for November, she carried her coat. Few cars passed as she walked in eerie quiet beneath trees not yet finished letting go of glorious color, the same quiet as on her last day at the farm, her mother in the kitchen at her sewing machine while, without a word, Flora carried her suitcase out the front door and down the lane.