Fortress and Fungus

It was January when Goodrich brought us the new girl, Lily, and told us right off we’d better be nice. That day, it was pouring rain, and the cold was bone-deep. The hundred year-old cinderblocks of our plant drank in a stale, musty stench, a stink that would turn warm and, for the entire shift, stick in our noses and throats. We felt, still, the pain of Christmas bonuses that never came. With all that, we figured: Why not get a new girl dumped in our laps, get the whole mess of our miseries over with in one day? The next day would be better—had to be better—guaranteed. 

This is how we thought. This is what we believed. 

Val gave the new girl a long look. Lily had dressed for work in a tailored skirt and shimmering, expensive hose. She’d pressed pink blusher into her cheeks. Goodrich looked around at us. He sent Lily and her rain boots sloshing off to the lockers, and we circled closer around him. 

Val threw out her chin and said, “Goodrich. Where’d you dig her up?” He looked at all of us, all around, and said again we’d better be nice and that she was from his church. His church was not our church, so that right there told us plenty. But Goodrich went on like he does, how he knew a few things about her he could share, to help us get to know her and like her. 

“Oh, I’ll just bet he knows,” Val said under her breath. “All about her. Inside and out.” We sucked on our cheeks to keep from giggling. 

Goodrich told us how Lily was a single mother, how she struggled to make ends meet. Her kid was stuck in a special class at his school, in there all day with the real slow kids. We knew old Prue would be scowling—her own kids, back in the day, were in that special class—but no one looked around the circle. 

“It weighs oppressively on her,” Goodrich said. “I’ve seen this young man. Heart of gold. Smart. Creative. He doesn’t belong there. They get teased, you know, the way kids do. He can’t stand it. And now she has to work here,” he said, “of all places.” 

As Goodrich talked, he got a funny look in his eye, like he forgot who he was talking to. He went on, how Lily was a fine woman, how devoted she was, how her private school dream for the kid ought to be realized. Like we ought to care. 

Val sneered at Goodrich and his fancy words. She kidded that he’d make our ears hurt using big words like that. We might have to walk off the line and take workers’ compensation time. 

We would have giggled, but just then Lily came out of the locker room. She was dressed for Pulp Processing like the rest of us, in coveralls and steel-toed boots. Before he went back upstairs Goodrich mouthed again the point he’d come to make: Just be nice. 

It wasn’t even a week before everyone knew this girl had no place among us. Val gave her the bottom-feeder shit-type tasks—we all had them when we were new—and she was clumsy and slow, and on lunch she sat on the opposite side of the cafeteria with Mona and her girls in Filtration. We’d stall through the food line, taking our time filling our trays, we’d get up and walk back past their table for an extra napkin, or a packet of sugar, all to overhear whatever we could. 

We heard how awful it was, her driving to the plant—no wonder she’d never joined our daily parade trudging along the sidewalk—she complained how the traffic between Forestdale and here slowed her down. Every day she got a sick, nervous feeling, worried about clocking in late and making Goodrich mad. Mona asked what did we do to her when she clocked in late. 

Lily said, “Oh, well, I’ve never been late. But I could be! And every day I feel so sick and nervous!” 

Mona said loudly that Lily was wise to be nervous, and one of Mona’s crew cocked her head in our direction. Mona said Lily should talk to Mr. Goodrich about moving up to Filtration. 

“That Mona,” Val said, crushing her milk carton in one beefy fist. “Calls that pig ‘Mister.’ What a bunch of kiss-asses.”

Filtration were the biggest kiss-asses at the plant. Everyone knew it—everyone but them—and a lot of us wanted to crush those girls, just once, like Val’s milk carton. But no one ever did. No one would ever go that far. 

The first day of February, it snowed. We all had to wear galoshes, and the walk to the plant was slow going. We slogged past the stink from By-Products to get inside the plant, where we took our places within the cinderblock walls of the locker room. We put into our lockers our scarves and our jackets, and we snapped up our coveralls and got into our hairnets and out onto our line. 

Goodrich wasn’t happy we were late. He stormed down from his glass-walled office. He nagged us to work harder, faster, except he told Lily how superbly she was catching on. They locked eyes on each other, longer than they ought to. By the time the horn blew for the lunch break, we were all in a bad mood. 

Val got to her seat and slammed down her tray. “Get a load of this. She thinks she might still be in love with her ex,” she said. “And don’t you just know who she thinks still loves her back?” 

We put our heads close together—all of us except for old Prue—and we whispered for Val our protests of disbelief, for she’d earned them: “No way!” and “You lie!” and “Fairy tales!” we said. 

“It’s so complicated,” Val said, mocking Lily. “‘Complicated,’ she says. They respect each other, just can’t live together. ‘It’s so dysregulating for Kurt when we’re together,’ she says. Can you believe the nerve?” 

No, we told Val, we could not believe that girl’s nerve. 

Kristy, who was still sort of new, showed up late. “Fucking Goodrich,” she said. “Put me on report ‘cause he heard we weren’t being nice. Did she tell him we’re not being nice? He told me to be nice, or he’ll put a note in my file. All our files.” 

We looked to Val. She eyed us all around the table. She pulled up her shoulders and repeated for Kristy what she’d just told us about Lily loving her ex. Kristy pulled a cigarette from the pack she kept in the waistband of her pants and held it cold between her teeth. 

“Lemme get this straight,” Kristy said, and she began counting on her fingers a few outrageous truths. “She’s got her own car. She lives up in Forestdale, so that’s gotta mean she has her own house. Doesn’t have to live with her man, so she’s not getting beat at night, and he still loves her. He probably pays hefty child support, and her kid’s at school getting special treatment. Am I missing something? She’s got the perfect life, and I gotta be nice to her?” 

Kristy looked all around at us, just like Val had done, and we felt an electric zap of hatred run through us. Kristy was not new anymore. 

“I say we mess with her locker,” Kristy said, eyes narrowed with spite, and Val nodded, and then we all agreed it was the best way to put Lily in her place—the only way to keep those notes out of our files—and then all of us, together, narrowed our eyes. We couldn’t let notes get into our files. Something had to be done. A message had to be sent. Our jobs—our security—depended on it. 

It’s what we all thought. It’s what we all believed. 

One day, Lily did not clock in—not late, not at all. It was the time of the mid-winter thaw. The concrete of the plant had absorbed unusual warmth overnight, and standing around in the locker room, we were energized and leisurely and comfortable. We stepped out of our street clothes, and we stood chatting in bras and panties. Smiles curled up our faces. We eyed Lily’s locker and could not stop smiling. 

We had ideas, but we thought she might be only running late, inching that car of hers through sickening, nerve-wracking traffic, all the way down from Forestdale, from her house, which the ex who still loved her probably paid for every month. 

“I hope the poor girl isn't sick or nervous!” Kristy shouted, her boobs jiggling around in her bra. “Wait, I just said something nice. That counts, doesn’t it? I was nice for a second, there, wasn’t I?” 

We all laughed. That Kristy, she sure could be funny. We were still shaking our heads and smiling when we snapped our uniforms shut over our fronts, cinched our boot laces, fixed our hairnets and headed out for the line. 

Goodrich came down. Lily had called out, he said—an urgent meeting was convened at her kid’s school—it was vital that she take the time she needed for the kid’s benefit. Overtime, he said, was approved for anyone who’d skip lunch and stay late to cover her quota. 

“She’d do it for any one of you,” Goodrich said, but the look on his face told us he didn’t really believe she would, and none of us thought so, either. Still, Kristy raised her hand for the overtime—she was saving for a new dress—and then Val did, too. We were surprised when the next hand to go up was Prue’s—our complainer, with her fat old feet and crappy, tar-slicked lungs, something was always paining her—but it was done. We had it covered. As for our reasons why, Goodrich was none the wiser. 

At lunch the next day, we were all together again, and we heard about what Lily kept in her locker. Like us, she kept on hand a little bit of everything: hand lotion and tampons, hair elastics, a roll of tape. There was a tiny pine-scented sachet, too, a reminder of home, which Goodrich had encouraged all of us to bring—he didn’t allow locks, though, so we weren’t about to do such a thing. 

Kristy leaned over the table, waving us in to tell the best part. Her elbow bumped Val’s. “Lily’s kid?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “She taped up a bunch of his poems he wrote, about school and the messed-up kids he’s with all day. He drew pictures on ‘em.” 

Kristy said the poems were about how they were targets, he and his classmates, how they got picked on for being in that special class. We imagined the drawings that went with poems like that—daggers, blood dripping, messy-haired boys with sad doe eyes, a machine gun, a sash like they make for a beauty pageant, only instead of using silk, it’s bullets. 

“But that’s what’s so creepy,” Kristy told us, waving us even closer in, for this was very special, this information, it was just for us. Val scooched closer to Prue. “It’s castles. And mushrooms,” Kristy said. “Some of them are really fucking weird looking.”

The castles were tall and narrow, she said, with turrets and flags flying from the tops, and the castles weren’t made of cinderblock or concrete, but of stone—the kid had drawn the speckles—and the castles were filled with mushrooms, they were completely surrounded by mushrooms, even the clouds hovering above were shaped like mushrooms. 

“It’s not just mushrooms growing everywhere,” Kristy said, looking at Prue, who did not look at her. “It’s mushrooms with, like, faces on ‘em, and some have skyscrapers coming right out of their caps, and some are climbing the castle walls. They have skinny legs, and bows and arrows on their backs.” 

We wondered what we should say. We agreed that it was really fucking weird to draw castles and mushrooms next to poems about all the teasing and misery, but Kristy’s story seemed, to everybody, unfinished. We had a lot of questions, like didn’t they toss Lily’s locker? What about the message? Wasn’t the point of going into her locker to send the message that she’d better not take us on? We believed that had been the point. We all thought so. 

But we didn’t dare ask, for Val hadn’t said a word. And old Prue only looked at her lunch tray, a little frown on her face, like she’d just found something lost to her long before, but she wasn’t as happy as she’d always thought she’d be if the day ever came that she got it back. 

Then it was Valentine’s Day. A fresh dusting of snow covered the ground. Against the dingy grey walls of our plant, the snow seemed to us a very clean and bright white, like the world had put on a nice new skirt for the lovers’ holiday. On the walk in, despite the stench from By-Products, we slowed our steps so we could look at the snow a little longer. We had thoughts about it, about pure snow lying snug like that right up against the sooty plant. But to share them, one of us would have to use a word like juxtaposition or symbolic and would have caught hell for it from Val, which was so not worth it, and so we didn’t share. 

But those thoughts entered the locker room with us, and we turned our attention inward, to them, instead of talking with one another like normal. As a rule we never talked about Valentine’s Day, the husbands who would forget, who would say there wasn’t money enough to celebrate or to satisfy us, the dates we didn’t have and hadn’t tried to get. The radiators along the locker room wall knocked and hissed, steaming with heat. We kept our heads down and we put on our uniforms and we were about to head out to the line, when—we all saw it—Lily pulled from her purse a folded packet of papers. 

She stepped closer to her locker, making herself a wall so she could unfold her packet in private. We all looked anyway, Kristy and Val and Prue craning their necks while the rest of us stared from the dressing benches. We couldn’t see much—Lily made a good wall—but all it took was one look sent around our circle, and we knew someone would get into that locker before the day was out. Then we’d all know what the new thing was, what she’d brought to remind her of home. 

In the cafeteria, we hadn’t all made it to our table, and Kristy was already talking. “I could just puke,” she said. “Didn’t Goodrich say she was divorced? She’s got a giant valentine card taped up, and a whole mess of pink hearts from her ex. What the fuck? Are they split up or not? I mean, what kind of mind game is that? Just gag me.” We got ready to ignore Kristy—Val had ignored her for two days—we studied the stewed chicken and rice on our trays. But Val didn’t ignore Kristy today. We watched as she pointed with her fork, looking Kristy right square in the eye. “You’re absolutely right,” Val said. “All day she acts like this kid’s father’s not messing with her head. She is one big phony.” 

We all wanted to chime in—we were so eager to agree with Val—but first we checked with Prue. 

“It would be very confusing, indeed, for that poor boy,” Prue said, and then she added—in a way that spoiled our whole lunch break, for it made us thoughtful and uncomfortable and awkward with one another afterwards on the line—“that is, if it’s even the truth, what we’ve been thinking all this time.” 

The following week, Lily took two days off. Goodrich came down. He explained it was school vacation week, that Lily was such a devoted mother, she wouldn’t leave her son alone in the house that whole time, to while away the cold, grey days alone. He asked for offers of overtime, which he got, and of skipped lunch, which he didn’t. We weren’t about to give up the chance to go through that locker, every inch, and then discuss it, heads together, all of us, in the cafeteria.

Kristy found all kinds of new stuff—a comb, a rain bonnet, an aspirin bottle— and new poems, addressed to her son’s classmates, all with the same weird drawings. Only now, Kristy said, the mushrooms had formed a kind of army. “Some of them are huge,” she said, “bigger than the castles they’re climbing. Some of them have frog legs. One has a giant mouth, big enough to eat the whole castle in one bite. Way out of proportion.” 

At proportion, Val rolled her eyes. We rolled our eyes, too. 

Then it was March, the month we all hated, for it was always long and cold and muddy. Gone was much chance of clean, white snowfall, and whenever it rained, it chilled us, deep in our bones, all along the walk to the plant. The heat was kept down, since technically spring would come soon. The walls were cold to the touch. Under our coveralls we wore dickies to stay warm. 

Goodrich came down often. Just checking on us, he said, but we knew it was to check out Lily. We’d trained our ears and could easily tune out the rumble and grind of the pulping machines. We heard their talk of the goings-on at their church, the youth group’s field trip up north to the shooting range and the sugarhouse, and wasn’t it wonderful to see how engaged Kurt had been with the other children? Another topic was Lily’s progress in finding a better school for her kid. Goodrich said maybe the local district could be ordered to pay for him to attend.

Goodrich said he’d help her start a small investment portfolio, and she said she wasn’t going to stop until a suitable placement had been made for her son. She’d rested her hand on Goodrich’s arm when she said it, and we all wondered if he thought like we did about her weird arrangement, the ex still loving her, the vice versa situation, and if he thought it was as messed up and confusing—for the kid, for everybody—as we did. 

At the end of the month, there was a huddle at Mona’s cafeteria table. Mona’s group was surrounding Lily. Kristy barely checked in with Val’s face, or with Prue’s. She just kept getting up to walk by those girls, getting more napkins and sugar packets. When she returned to us, she dumped the items into the middle of our table. She hadn’t even brought all the information. 

“I don’t know for sure,” Kristy said, those words odd in our ears, “but it sounds like she’s planning a trip.” 

Kristy was sent to walk right back there, and even then she returned only with, “It seems like she might be going away this weekend.” 

We stopped listening after she said, “I can’t tell who she means by ‘he.’ But it has to be the ex, right? Or the son? Either one?” Then Kristy’s eyes got wide, like when someone thinks of something that is mean and funny at the same time. “Goodrich!” she said.

It was no surprise, then, when Lily was allowed, that Friday afternoon, to leave our line in a hurry. Goodrich didn’t come down to ask us to work overtime. It was clear to us she sneaked out early because Goodrich said she could. For the first time in history, he seemed to forget all about quotas. He seemed to have something else throbbing away in his head.

It’s what we told ourselves. It’s what we believed. 

At the horn, we spilled out of the plant and into the sunshine. Some of us were still buttoning our blouses; we’d been so eager for the spring warmth and outdoor air to kiss our skin. Kristy was last to come out. She caught up to us on the sidewalk, waving a piece of paper she’d swiped from Lily’s locker. 

“You won’t believe it,” Kristy said. “Just look at this shit.” 

We stopped walking and formed a tight circle around Kristy so we could look at the shit on the paper she was waving. Taking up most of the sheet was a mushroom drawn with jaggedy teeth and with claws like a vulture. There were a few words on the paper, which we decided must be one of the kid’s poems, but it was only part of a poem. The mushroom had been drawn to make the poem appear mostly covered up, its message snuffed out, smothered. Then we noticed, way back in the jaw of the mushroom, a tiny flag, sagging in tatters. 

Our circle broke up as Prue waddled on fat achy feet to the center of where we stood. Val came up behind her.

“Let me see that,” said Prue, and when Kristy handed it over, Prue’s face formed a frown neither slight nor small. 

“This kid’s bat-shit crazy, am I right?” Kristy said, pointing at the parts of the poem the kid had exposed: poor, kind Punky and all ‘cause you’re a little slow and end to your misery. 

Prue turned the paper over. It was the last we would see of the kid’s poems and pictures. She folded the paper, gave it to Kristy, and told her to put it back. “I think we’ve done enough with that locker,” said Prue. “From now on, we stay out of there.” 

Kristy was surprised. We all were, for we hadn’t actually ever tossed that locker, hadn’t sent our message about how things went at the plant, about how things were not going to go at the plant, not for us, not for our files, and we wondered if anything was going to change or to happen at all with our plan. 

But of all of us, only Kristy spoke up. 

“Are you kidding?” she said, and she lit a cigarette. “Look at this shit! How the mushroom… and, and the words, how it covers the words. The planning this kid must…I mean, what’s he thinking? This is some crazy dark shit, we all agree. Don’t we?” She blew smoke at us in a fierce, thin streak. 

We were about to agree, right out loud for Kristy’s sake, and we would have, but old Prue still stood at the center of us, with Val right beside her, and when she told Kristy, “Stop talking. Put that back where you found it, and that’ll be the end of it. Go on. We’ll wait for you,” we realized that we all wanted Kristy to stop talking, and that it was a good idea if only that could be the real end of it, even if that last weird, bat-shit crazy dark paper—and all of our troubled, unsettling questions about it—would stay stuck in our minds for a very long time. 

The bright, sunshiny day after Mother’s Day our shift was interrupted by a lockdown. It wasn’t common. Only once or twice a year did the horn go off, sirens howling past the plant, rattling the old windows in their casings. Usually some knucklehead at the school had pulled a fire alarm. But this time, they pulled us off our line, locked us up inside the plant, forced us to huddle in a jumbled mass on the floor, away from the windows. They made us sit there even long after everything outside had fallen quiet. 

Goodrich came down. We figured he’d come to order our groups back online, that he’d go on like he does, tell us what had happened, that we’d better get back to work. We swung our heads in Mona’s direction—Filtration got to be first for everything —but he walked right by her and came at us instead, as if he didn’t know there was an order here at the plant, a system that wasn’t very nice—none of us liked it—but that we all agreed was necessary because that was the way the work got done. 

So we figured we’d never hear the end of it when Goodrich got as far as Lily and stopped. He bent to whisper to her, and then he pulled her up and together he and Lily hurried away, panic and mystery spread all over their faces. They practically carried each other across the floor and up the stairs to the supervisor’s office, which meant only one thing: Lily had received an emergency call. 

Everyone, all of us, Mona’s group, too, gazed at the supervisor’s window and watched as Lily put the phone to her ear. Then, just before Goodrich let the blinds slap shut, we watched her face twist into an ugly, distorted mess, eyeballs wet, bulging like an alien’s, like they’d pop right out of her head. We put it together only later, as we watched the evening news, that it was a police officer on the phone, telling her that her kid had passed out his poems and pictures to the kids in his class and then shot each one in the head before pinning the barrel to his throat and pulling the trigger—and we figured that was it, that ruined, horrified face was the last we’d ever see of her. No way could that girl ever show up around here again. 

But in September, right before the first day of school, Lily came back. We were surprised, for Kristy had spent her days off all summer taking the bus up to Forestdale and reporting back how she’d narrowed it down, and found Lily’s house, the only sign of life there a FOR SALE marker keeled over in dying grass. Kristy had walked into the open house showing, and then she came back to tell of the thin coat of paint slathered onto the wall, how she could see right through it that the kid had written more poems. Forestdale must have run Lily out of town, Kristy said. It only made sense that she’d found some new place to start over. 

And just when we’d let ourselves imagine it—starting over someplace new—there she was, in the cafeteria line with the By-Products girls at the lunch break. She looked awful, eyes all at once puffy and sagging, and blotchy in the face as if she couldn’t stop stabbing herself with her blusher brush. There was a nasty raised rash crawling all over her neck, like something had made a habit of clawing it. We could only imagine how she smelled. Lily carried her tray from the food line out to the tables just like always. She lagged behind the By-Products girls and slowed down when she got close to Mona. 

Mona and her girls didn’t look at her. They only spread themselves to fill the benches with their bodies, the whole army of them, until there was no room left for her. Lily only bowed her head and moved on. They snickered and whispered after her. We didn’t hear what they were saying, but we had a pretty good guess that it was the same things we’d been saying all summer. 

Lily found an empty end of a table, just outside the bathroom. She lowered herself to the bench heavily, like a rusted anchor cranked down through deep water. She nibbled her cheese sandwich and then set it down. She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. 

Kristy said, “Holy shit. That girl. Can you imagine? How does she even get through the day? I mean, how can it ever get better for her? Mona knows kids at that school. Prue, didn’t your kids go to that school?” 

Val stood up. She helped old Prue off the bench. Without so much as a glance at Kristy they walked across the room, aiming for the table where Lily was sitting. We looked on as they spoke with her, Lily dabbing her eyes all the time. 

We couldn’t hear what Val and Prue were saying, of course, on account of how far they’d gone from us. But we figured it must have been a whole lot of big and fancy and convincing words because when they returned, it was all three of them together, Val and Prue and in the middle of them, Lily, looking ahead with dying eyes. As they approached we had a thought for her, fleeting and gone before it could sink in: Start over someplace new. 

And then they’d arrived with her, and we knew what they would expect next, and so, because deep down we really were trying to be nice—it’s what we told ourselves, it’s what we believed—we did it: We made room on the bench, made the place Lily would occupy among us. Then we all sat very close. We completely surrounded her. We took her in.