I made state-of-the-art
onion rings and readied them for packing, at
$5.15 an hour last summer. More often I was given the glamorous task of hunching over rows and rows of onions, picking out the
green parts,
brown parts, skin.
My penance for wondering about the lives of people who worked at the
sugar beet factory on the highway as I drove to my grandma's was I had to find out, seriously, how it would feel to have to face frozen
food for hours on end, earplugs only a slightly protective padding over the rattle of
machinery and, occasionally, conversations and work instructions I vaguely
understood, if at all.
(I forget the
trimming line. Everybody liked it but me. I couldn't cut the brown spots out of
whole onions quick enough to be satisfied; the line moved too fast; I got
dizzy often and lost my knife in the gutters of skin and
onion garbage.)
The better part was
picking up Spanish words and offers of real free
Mexican food on forced-overtime nights, a little more time with Noey on breaks, walking home in the
summertime, late,
under the moon.
I couldn't
wear the same thing twice before laundering; the
salt-and-onion smell was so
pervasive that even the same
bra worn two consecutive days without washing offended, thickly, everyone within a
20-foot radius. My hands - I wore two pairs of
gloves to handle the onions were better protected;
my eyes were not; there was not enough
stainless steel to go around; I would have built a
shower of it, a
bed, whatever. And on shift at the plant, I was always
arguing with the dead, thinking of things I should have done, singing whole albums of
songs I didn't like, dictating (through my surgery mask) words I would never get the energy to write; they were never good thoughts, but I was left with them, left with what I could not shake for sleep or greater stimulation.