Then, Fe was told the next thing that she didn’t find entirely on the up-and-up, and that was that she was going to have to carry each of these heavy parts downstairs to the basement and work in isolation. “Because of ether?” she asked. Yep, came the response. They did not want no one else in contact with it. So down she went. Down to the basement, first carrying the parts to be cleaned that day, one by one and then a big brown bottle of harmless, sleepytime ether to keep filling the pan with. She lifted and dunked the parts two or three times until finally she got the job done. Spic and span, right out of the ether pan. Nothing harmful about this. All in a day’s work, she told herself all day. Yawning all the time never killed nobody was another thing she kept telling herself, down there alone.

After the first day of what she called Ether Hell, she got used to the constant lethargy and just went with it. She was getting better bonuses, too. It was a lot of work, though, even for someone like Fe, so she was really earning them. When another girl was put on the same job for a few days, she went right back to the assembly line because she couldn’t handle the smell or having to lug those burdensome parts down all day, neither.

Not that Fe liked it any better, nor did she like the sorry excuse for a vent at the far end of the wall. That first day she put her hanky up next to it and it just dropped to the floor. She wasn’t given no mask by any of the useless and ineffectual rotating foremen, so she helped herself to the kind used upstairs, and though she realized that in fact, it did no good, she still wore it because at least symbolically it made her feel better. She also used the usual orange gloves that they had upstairs, and not only did the chemical eat them up, it dissolved her manicure, not only the lacquer but the nails themselves!

“¡Hijola!” Fe said, and a few other choice words she did not hesitate to utter out loud, since she was alone all day and all and the only time anyone else came down was when a supervisor would stop by just for a minute or two to inspect her progress in cleaning those troublesome parts. After she lost most of her fingernails, she was given some “special” gloves for working with ether, they told her. But they could not come up with a mask that helped none, and three months went by and that’s just how it was.