Sliding and stumbling through the droning afternoons at the plant, Annie thought grimly of the empty-eyed poster monsters. Real workers! She looked around her at the women, bubbleheaded in curlers, at the little groups of men near their lockers, playing cards or passing around pints of bourbon. She listened to the talk, often combative, seeming to consist solely of code words echoing from mouth to mouth, about money and sex, sports and drinking. The men looked witlessly and boldly at her body; the younger men seemed older than their years, the older ones, locked up in themselves, dour, hard-voiced. What she found difficult to explain to Max was their friendliness, even if perverted, even if shallow. It was strange, she thought, that Max, concerned about the rights of labor, should be at an aristocratic remove from his co-workers, while she, muddle-brained, and bored with hardly digested Marxist theory about labor and capitalism, should find the people milling around the great shed so familiar, even sympathetic.

He was somewhat offended when she described him as aristocratic, and reminded her that the Communist party was the vanguard of the working class, and what she thought of as hauteur in him was simply that he was more advanced in his understanding of social forces. She must have looked bewildered. He shook her arm. “That isn’t what I’m talking about,” she said stubbornly. “You are different!”

“We’re all different!” he exclaimed.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re not being clear.”

“You’re pretending!” she accused him.

He frowned angrily—she kept looking at him. Then his face cleared. “Oh, well, I have to, I suppose,” he said.

She became friendly with one or two of the women. One was Hannah Groops, a turret-lathe operator from Alabama. Her family troubles were somewhat rank. Her father, she said, “got this itch for my daughter, his own grandchild. I got to do a search at night, make sure he isn’t crawled into her bed.”

“Why don’t you lock the door?”

Hannah Groops gave her a scornful look. “What door? You think we live in some kinda palace? We had one room back home. Now we got two. We ain’t got to locking doors yet.”