Running Around (and Such) (17 page)

She was so friendly, Lizzie felt much more at ease, especially when she made a big fuss about the twins as she helped Mam put them each in a high chair. Some of the other waitresses had watched Lizzie and her family as they sat down around the table. That was one thing about being Amish that Lizzie did not like—when people unfamiliar with their plain clothes stared at them. Most people were just curious about their long dresses and coverings, but some people were not very polite.

When the kind waitress handed them a large plastic-covered paper, Mam told them it was the menu, and they should look for food listed under “Breakfast.” That breakfast was plain-down unforgettable. Lizzie didn’t think of her weight once, as they all enjoyed bacon, eggs, and pancakes topped with huge globs of butter and all the syrup they wanted. Tall glasses of ice-cold orange juice and crispy toast that was also saturated with butter made their meal extra special.

Mam was smiling and saying they had the best coffee she ever tasted. Dat was smiling at Mam as they all enjoyed the delicious food. Emma was fascinated by how fast the waitress poured coffee. She had never seen anything like it, she told Lizzie.

“You could pour coffee every bit as fast as she does if that’s what you did all day. That doesn’t look as hard as balancing all those trays of food. Did you see how many plates were on that one tray?” Lizzie asked.

“Yes. That would be fun,” Emma answered.

“I wonder if Amish girls are allowed to be waitresses,” Lizzie said.

“No. Certainly not,” Emma said.

“We could go English and all work in the same place,” quipped Mandy.

They had giggled together until Mam said they had to be quiet since they were not being respectful.

Lizzie spun around on her kitchen chair. She had eaten in restaurants only a few times since that first meal, but each time she thought it would be so fancy to wear a small white apron, writing down orders and putting her pen in the pocket of her little white apron.

“But Mam, I would love to work in a restaurant,” she said.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “No daughter of mine will be prancing around a whole roomful of English men. No good could come of it.”

That’s how Mam was. She wouldn’t think of letting her daughters work at questionable establishments. She was very careful about everything, even the van drivers she chose.

“Lizzie, you shouldn’t complain,” Emma said. “Mam is only being careful because she cares about us.”

Lizzie stuck her nose in the air and made a snorting sound as she left the kitchen. Mam was a bit over-protective.

Lizzie continued to pester Mam about working in a restaurant. But Mam wouldn’t agree. Instead, Mam was overjoyed when Darwin Myers, a local Mennonite man, came to the kitchen door a week later.

Mam was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when Darwin stepped up onto the porch. “Oh, I know who that is! I bet he wants some help,” she said to Lizzie.

Quickly, Mam dried her hands on her gray work apron and went to open the door. She greeted him warmly, and he asked how they were. They talked about the weather, as people always did, Lizzie mused.

Finally, Darwin got down to business.

“I need someone to help with the egg-grading,” he said. My wife does too much of it for her age, and she’s not as well as she once was, so would you consider letting one or two of your daughters come work for me? I would need them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”

“Oh, yes!” Mam responded eagerly.

So that was that. Lizzie would go, and if he needed more help on summer days, Mandy would also help at the hatchery, whatever that was.

After he left, Lizzie picked up a dish towel and absentmindedly wiped at a dry plate. She always dreaded starting a new job, but she knew she was getting older and everyone had to have a job after they were out of school.

“How many hours do I have to grade eggs in a day?” she asked, turning to look at Mam with what she hoped was a sweet, martyred expression. She thought that if she lifted her eyebrows at just the right angle and made her eyes look as sad as possible, there was a slight chance that Mam would take pity on her and make Emma go.

Mam was busily reading a recipe card, but she stopped and looked at Lizzie. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“Didn’t he say he’d pick you up at eight o’clock? Then probably until four or five in the evening. Around eight hours.”

Lizzie grabbed another plate and wiped it ferociously. Well, that hadn’t helped.

“Well, Mam, I think if we need money to fill Emma’s hope chest, shouldn’t Emma be the one to make the most money?” Lizzie ventured again. She was trying to complain in a very polite way.

Emma sat at the table cutting sheer white fabric that she would make into coverings, whistling under her breath as she worked.

“Lizzie, I do work away most of the time, but someone has to sew our clothes, too. Do you want to stay home and make coverings?” Emma asked.

Lizzie turned her back and didn’t answer. She was too old to cry, and she knew it was plain childish to complain.

“Lizzie, you know you’re very fast with your hands. You can do anything you try, and rapidly too,” Mam said. “That’s why grading eggs will be a good job for you. You do your work just like Mommy Glick, so be glad you inherited her talent. I think you will make a very good egg-grader, and a competent one. Emma is much better at doing fine, careful work like sewing our coverings, so I think this is the best arrangement.”

Emma started whistling under her breath again as she watched Lizzie. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at her.

Lizzie swallowed all the rest of her complaints, because what Mam had said made her feel good. Maybe that was true. She probably would be a good egg-grader. She just wished the first day was over.

T
HE NEXT MONDAY MORNING
, when Darwin stopped his car in front of a long, low, silver building, Lizzie’s heart sank. The chicken house was a corrugated steel box with huge round fans on each side. An unruly jumble of weeds and briars grew along the building’s base, and old chicken coops leaned in an odd pile-up beside the door.

The door itself was wooden with layers of paint peeling off the front. The window was so splattered with fly dirt you could barely see it was a window at all. Cardboard cartons lay strewn beside the chicken coops, and eggshells littered the gravel drive.

When Lizzie opened the car door, a stench filed her nostrils and turned her stomach. Her first thought was to make a wild dash for freedom, but instead she followed Darwin into the hatchery. Inside, a lone yellow light bulb hung from the ceiling, reminding her of a jail cell. The bright green walls were barely visible between the stacks of cardboard boxes and dull metal carts piled high with square gray cardboard trays used to hold eggs. A huge machine stood along one wall, which Lizzie assumed was the grader.

Through a door at the far end of the room Lizzie heard a rustling, cackling sound. Apparently that was where the chickens were housed. A green door burst open, and an older gentleman pushed out a darker green cart, piled high with cardboard trays of white eggs. He wore an old denim coat and denim overalls, and a navy blue hat covered his white hair. His face was still quite handsome, Lizzie thought as his light blue eyes shone and he smiled.

Lizzie smiled back and said, “Hello.”

“This is Enos Martin. He gathers the eggs every day and pushes them into the cooler room,” Darwin said.

He pointed at another large green door. When Enos opened it, Lizzie saw that it was insulated, like a refrigerator door. The dim interior of the cooler room gave her the creeps. A wet, rattling sound from up high on the wall came from a cooling unit. Water dripped down the walls into a round granite tub. Would it be her job to empty that tub of cold, dirty water? Lizzie wondered. She shivered and wished with all her heart that Emma was here in this new, scary place and that she was still in school with Sara Ruth and Joe and John.

Darwin showed her where to stack the boxes of jumbo eggs, the extra-large, large, medium, and pullet-sized. That’s a lot of eggs, Lizzie thought. Oh, I hope I can do it without breaking them. She chewed her lower lip nervously and took a deep breath to steady herself.

Darwin flipped a switch on the wall and the long lights attached to the ceiling flickered on, filling the room with bright, white light so that the area was no longer haunted and shadowy.

Pulling a cart of eggs over to the machine, Darwin flipped switches, opened boxes, and adjusted dials. The whole machine purred, rattled, and hummed into action. He stepped to the right of the machine, motioning to Lizzie to come and watch.

“Come closer so you can see,” he said.

Using both hands, he lifted six eggs and quickly laid them on the moving belt. He did it so rapidly and with so much ease, Lizzie almost forgot that he was holding fragile eggs. The eggs rolled across a light so bright that the eggshells appeared transparent. A dark round object appeared inside each one.

“That’s the yolk,” Darwin said.

“Now watch,” he said. “The reason for this bright light is to find any blood inside the egg. If there is any, you’ll be able to see it quite easily, and you put that egg on this flat.”

Lizzie nodded. So that was what the cardboard containers were called—flats.

Darwin led her down to the left side of the machine where the eggs were already rolling out, washed and dried to a glistening finish. Stepping up to the machine, Darwin showed her how to pack the eggs.

“Now, if you can’t keep up, just holler and I’ll stop the machine. You probably won’t be able to go very quickly at first,” he said.

So the egg-grading began in earnest. Lizzie felt as if someone had pushed her off a cliff and she was hanging in midair. It was absolutely terrifying, all those eggs coming down the moving belt and rolling across the shining stainless steel trays. What if she couldn’t keep up and all the eggs got stuck in the moving belt, breaking apart with yellow egg yolks dripping all over the floor?

Darwin was calmly dropping eggs on the light, whistling under his breath. Just like Emma, Lizzie thought. At that moment she resented Mam, Emma, the hope chest, Joshua, growing up, and everything else in her life. This was awful. Mam may as well give up, because she would not spend one more day in this stinking, creepy place.

But Lizzie set her jaw and lifted eggs off the belt, trying to put them into the flat with the pointed side down. It was impossible. There was no way she could lift six eggs at a time and then get them into the right position. Her hands moved quickly, but she needed to stop and turn eggs over so often that the trays were soon overflowing. Meanwhile, the flats were filling up. She was supposed to reach over and lift another one on top of the already filled ones. Once there was a stack of six flats, she had to place them into the big brown cardboard box marked “EGGS.”

Lizzie struggled to keep her tears from showing when she finally asked Darwin to stop the machine. He smiled as he came over to help her, but the lump in Lizzie’s throat was so big she couldn’t respond. What a dreadful job, she thought, pushing a strand of hair away from her face with trembling hands.

After Darwin helped her catch up, he returned to his station, and Lizzie started picking up eggs again. She wondered how she could ever run back to the cooler room, get the cart, push it under a stack of eggs and take them back, all while the eggs kept steadily rolling into the trays. But as the forenoon wore on, she calmed down enough to holler to Darwin whenever the trays got full. He took care of moving the stacks back to the cooler room since it was her first day.

By lunchtime, she was becoming much more accurate at directing six eggs into each cardboard flat, but her back felt as if there was a knife between her shoulder blades. She swung her shoulders, trying to ease the pain. But there was no time to stop and really do anything about it, so she kept going.

At noon, Darwin turned off the egg-grading machine.

“I’m going to the house for lunch,” he said. “I’ll be back at one.”

Oh good, Lizzie thought, I get a whole hour for lunch. Her mouth watered, thinking of the good food she had packed in her insulated lunchbox that morning.

Lizzie washed her hands in the bathroom and went outside to eat her lunch. She found a freshly-mowed strip of grass that stretched beneath a towering oak tree. If only the smell wasn’t so bad, my lunch would taste a lot better, she thought as she sat down on the grass.

She opened the lid of her lunchbox and pulled out her plastic container of juice. She took long gulps of the ice-cold drink. She felt so much better as she unwrapped her sandwich made with Mam’s homemade bread, sliced turkey, white American cheese, and lettuce. It was so good, she thought, as she munched it down with a handful of crunchy potato chips. She was so hungry that she didn’t worry about counting calories at all. After all, you couldn’t work if you didn’t eat.

Her spirits lifting, Lizzie watched the leaves swaying in the breeze. Trucks and cars sped past on the road below her. She wondered where they were all going. She sat up straight when a truck pulled into the drive leading to the chicken house. She was all alone and quite a distance away from the house and hatchery, she realized.