Industrial Lace

The city had such pretty clotheslines. Women aired their intimate apparel in the emery haze: membranes of lingerie— pearl, ruby, copper slips— their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind. And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent of baking, a sensual net over a few yards of North Troy. The city had Niagara Mohawk bearing down with power and light and members of the Local shifting on the line. They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid, synthetics that won’t vent. They pieced the tropics into housecoats when big prints were the rage. Dacron gardens twisted on the line over lots of Queen Anne’s lace. Sackdresses dyed the sun as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass against the leading of the tenements, the warehouse holding medical supplies. I waited for my bus by that window of trusses in Caucasian beige, trying to forget the pathological inside. I was thinking of being alive. I was waiting to open the amber envelopes of mail at home. Just as food service workers, counter women, maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo their perms from the delicate insect meshes required by The Board of Health. Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route. She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes— milk crates of orange industrial lace the cartons could drip through. Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning put their veins up and sawed their nails to dust on files from the plant. All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper. Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called garnet cloth. It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed their larval curls and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs. It was yesterday—twenty years after my father’s death, I found something he had kept. A packet of lightning- cut sanding discs, still sealed. I guess he meant to open the finish, strip the paint stalled on some grain and groom the primal gold. The discs are the rough size of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle and label Best Before. The old cellophane was tough. But I ripped until I touched their harsh done crust.