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The unhappy situation gave me an excuse not to eat breakfast, and I gently pushed my plate a few inches away. “What’ll they do?” I asked.
Her lips tightened in a hard, flat smile. “I just don’t know.” She paused. “There’s been rumors of this for a couple of years now. Bartlett Industries, the company that owns the factory, is over in Cleveland, and it’s been on hard times for a while. I’d heard the rumors, but I never put any stock in them. The KTD seemed like too big a thing for them ever to close it.”
“What’ll you do? I mean, Mr. Vernon—”
“Oh, don’t worry about us,” she interrupted. “Walter is a foreman, and he’ll find work at another factory around here. They’re always trying to hire him away. No, it’s the other people I worry about, the people on the bottom rungs who don’t have something to fall back on. They’re the ones we have to feel sorry for. Them and Katydid itself. What’ll be left after the KTD goes?”
I thought of the two-story factory building, red brick on red brick, stretching the length of a football field, and I tried to imagine it closed up and quiet, lying there along Prosperity Street like something that had died. I’d heard stories about the Okies and I’d read The Grapes of Wrath, and I could see hundreds of Katydid families packing their belongings in cardboard boxes, tying everything down on the tops of their cars, and moving out in a long procession.
Suddenly, something occurred to me: With a crisis like this facing the town, how could anyone take the time to bother with me? Surely, they wouldn’t care about me, now that the whole town was at risk. They had other things to do, an emergency to deal with. I was nothing; surely they’d see that now.
“They say we’ve got three months,” Mrs. Vernon said. “Think of it, three months, after some people have given that factory their life’s work. There ought to be a law. A company shouldn’t be able to take people like that, use up their best years, and then throw away what’s left, like it was nothing more than a cornhusk.” Her small, white teeth bit at her lower lip. Quickly, I had another thought, again totally selfish: No one will notice me. I’d been agonizing over what people would think, but now they’d have something real to worry about, something that really mattered. Three months was too long to wait: I wanted the KTD to close down immediately. “Can anything be done?” I asked.
Mrs. Vernon stood up in several slow, aching movements. Her anger had passed as quickly as it had come. “I guess I’ll just pray,” she said. “That’s all any of us can do. Pray and ask God to try to explain what He has in mind for us with this thing.”
She picked up my plate of cold scrambled eggs and scraped them into the garbage can. “News like this kills an appetite,” she said.
By the time Mrs. O’Brien arrived, a little before nine, the clouds were rolling in just over the treetops, and the wind had quickened into sharp little gusts. Outings to the pool were being canceled all over Katydid. “Are we ready?” she asked, standing on the front stoop.
“Just let me get my suit,” I said.
If Mrs. O’Brien had heard the news of the KTD’s closing, she didn’t bother to mention it as we drove to the pool. She’d been to the high school the day before, collecting my records, and she’d run into Ellen Griffin, the assistant principal. At first Mrs. Griffin hadn’t remembered me, and they’d had to find my picture in the yearbook to remind her. “She remembered your brother, though,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “In fact, she said something that I thought was quite perceptive. She said that one reason you were so quiet might be because your brother had been so well known—in a negative kind of way.” She took her eyes off the street and glanced at me across the front seat. “I thought that was interesting,” she said.
I stared down at the bundled towel in my lap. “I don’t know why she didn’t remember me. I’ve talked to her a bunch of times.”
“Oh, well, some people just aren’t good at names.” We drove in silence for a few blocks. “I also ran into Mr. Morgenson, your algebra teacher,” she added. “He said you might have been quite a good math student if you’d paid better attention. Your mind always seemed to be wandering.”
Once, Mr. Morgenson had caught me reading Great Expectations in his class. Afterward, even though I never did a thing but stare at him and his strange, Brillo-pad hair, he constantly accused me of not paying attention.
“I did my best,” I mumbled.
“Oh, by the way,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I met that minister of yours, Reverend Vaughn.”
“You did?”
“Yes. A nice man, and very young. He can’t be more than twenty-five or so. And tall. He ought to play basketball. I don’t think he’s very athletic, though. He’s shy, have you noticed that? It’s strange for someone in his job, but maybe it’s because he’s young.”
“Did he remember me?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I think he did. Yes, he did.”
We drove across town, following, I realized with a moment’s discomfort, the route I’d taken on my bike just a few days before. But instead of turning off on Parkview Terrace, we continued on Pinkerton Avenue around to the front of the city park, entering on the main drive, between the two stone posts.
The city pool is sunk into the top of a grassy hill, the highest point in the park. The pool was built two years ago, after the town held a special election to decide whether to spend the money on it. Mayor Krullke and the council had argued that a public pool would give kids a place to go—get them off the square and out of their cars. No one expected the pool to win, however, since elections to spend money almost always lose in Katydid. But about a week before the vote, Tom and a group of his friends set fire to an old abandoned barn on the Snyder Farm. They all got caught, but the incident was given a lot of attention in the paper. There was talk that the boys called themselves a gang, and people started remembering other suspicious fires. Suddenly, everyone got so worried about juvenile delinquency coming to town that the pool won in a landslide. Afterward, my brother was always bragging that they should name it the Thomas P. Calhoun Memorial Pool in recognition of his contribution to its construction.
We arrived just at nine and got keys to the basket lockers from Mr. French, the tanned, white-haired man who runs the place.
“Haven’t seen you lately, Martha,” he said.
“I’ve been working,” I explained.
The changing room was cold and damp. My nose stung from the disinfectant they use to wash the floor at night. I folded my clothes and tucked them into my basket. The tiles felt icy against my bare feet. I hate swimming.
“I’m looking forward to this,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I don’t get many chances to swim anymore.” She ran her hands lightly down her sides, stirring the fabric of her baggy beige housedress. “I know it’s hard to imagine now, but I used to be a very good swimmer. I was the Minnesota girls’ champion in the hundred-yard freestyle my senior year in high school.”
“Really?” She was right; it was hard to imagine. “How’d you get so good?” I asked.
“Discipline, discipline, discipline.”
