Triangle

Excerpted from Triangle by Katharine Weber. Copyright 2006 by Katharine Weber. Published in June 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. ONE This is what happened. I was working at my machine, with only a few minutes left before the end of the day, I remember so clearly I can still see it, that I had only two right sleeves remaining in my pilemy sister Pauline, she did the left sleeves and I did the right sleeves and between us we could finish sometimes as many as twenty-four shirtwaists in an hour, three hundred shirtwaists on a good day, if the machines didn't break down and if the thread didn't break too often, and if nobody put a needle through her finger, which happened all the time and the biggest problem then was you didn't want to bleed on the goods but you didn't want to stop work so you took a piece of scrap and you wrapped your finger tight and you kept workingmy sister was a little faster than I was and sometimes her finished pile would be high because she did her sleeve first and then I would take from her pile to do the right sleeve but I have to say my seams were the ones always perfectly straight. And then when I was done, the waist would be finished except for sewing on the buttons and trimming the loose threads, and who did that was the little girls over in the nursery, that's what we called that corner, the nursery, some of those girls were only ten or eleven years old already working and working, poor things, but what other life did they know? Those little girls would sew on the buttons and cut all the loose threads and then the waist would be ready for pressing. It was payday that day, it was a Saturday, and the pay envelopes had just been handed out, and before that for a few minutes there was a break and my friend Ida Brodsky, she died, she was a wonderful friend to me, she made a cake for a surprise because of my engagement to Sam, because we had just said a few days before we would get married, we didn't even get a ring yet, and people were happy for us, all the girls working together, it was so cheerful sometimes even with the hard work. I had my pay envelope and my sister's also, to keep for her, we each got maybe six or eight dollars or sometimes less, except in a good week, and once we each made twelve dollars for a week's work but that was an exception, but you could live on that money we made and send some home, too. We thought we were doing well, we were happy enough with what we had, even though the unions told us to get more and told us we shouldn't be so happy, and they were right, but we were never hungry, we were so young and healthy and strong, and it felt like a chance to get ahead, so we didn't mind the long days and the terrible loud noise of the machines and the smell of the oil everywhere. That oil, they had to use it, to keep the machines going, but they could have opened those dirty windows for even a breath of fresh air, it wouldn't have made us work slower and who knows it might have made us work better, but all the windows were always kept closed tightand I remember I just took a moment from my machine to tuck the pay packets for both of us into my stocking to be safe like always, I took them both from our boss, Mr. Jacobs, so my sister could keep working for every minute leftand the next day would have been our one day off in the week, so we were looking forward to thatand then there was a big noise behind me, while I was still bending down, like nothing I had ever heard, and I thought, What could that be? So loud, like an explosion and something breaking all at once! So I turned around, and my sister next to me, she turned around too, and what did we see? Flames! They were just outside the wWeber, Katharine is the author of 'Triangle ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780374281427 and ISBN 0374281424.