2 The place consisted of a small front office and a large loft on the floor of which I noticed a series of large galvanized tubs half filled with water out of which I noticed protruding the necks of many bottles of various sizes and shapes. Around these tubs there were a number of workers, male and female, sitting on small wooden benches. All had their hands in the water of the tub, the left hand holding a bottle and with the thumb nail of the right hand scratching the labels.
3 The foreman found a vacant stool for me around one of the tubs of water. I asked why a penknife or a small safety razor could not be used instead of the thumb nail to take off the old labels from the bottles. I was expertly informed that knives or razors would scratch the glass thus depreciating the value of the bottles when they were to be sold. I sat down and started to use my thumb nail on one bottle. The water had somewhat softened the transparent mucilage used to attach the label to the bottle. But the softening did not work out uniformly somehow. There were always pieces of label that for some obscure reason remained affixed to the bottles. It was on those pieces of labels tenaciously fastened to the bottles that my right hand thumb nail had to work overtime. As the minutes passed I noticed that the coldness of the water started to pass from my hand to my body giving me intermittent body shivers that I tried to conceal with the greatest of effort from those sitting beside me. My hands became deadly clean and tiny little wrinkles started to show especially at the tip of my fingers. Sometimes I stopped a few seconds from scratching the bottles, to open and close my fists in rapid movements in order to bring blood to my hands. But almost as soon as I placed them in the water they became deathly pale again.
4 But these were minor details compared with what was happening to the thumb of my right hand. From a delicate, boyish thumb, it was growing by the minute into a full blown tomato colored finger. It was the only part of my right hand remaining blood red. I started to look at the workers’ thumbs. I noticed that these particular fingers on their right hands were unusually developed with a thick layer of corn-like surface at the top of their right thumb. The nails on their thumbs looked coarser and smaller than on the other fingers -- thumb and nail having become one and the same thing -- a primitive unnatural human instrument especially developed to detach hard pieces of labels from wet bottles immersed in galvanized tubs.
5 After a couple of hours I had a feeling that my thumb nail was going to leave my finger and jump into the cold water in the tub. A numb pain imperceptibly began to be felt coming from my right thumb. Then I began to feel such pain as if coming from a finger bigger than all of my body.
6 After three hours of this I decided to quit fast. I told the foreman so, showing him my swollen finger. He figured I had earned 69 cents at 23 cents an hour. Early in the evening I met my brother in our furnished room. We started to exchange experiences of our job hunting for the day. "You know what?" my brother started, "early in the morning I went to work where they take labels off old bottles–with your right hand thumb nail . . . Somewhere on the West Side of Lower Manhattan. I only stayed a couple of hours. ‘Easy job . . . Good wages’ . . . they said. The person who wrote that ad must have had a great sense of humor." And we both had a hearty laugh that evening when I told my brother that I also went to work at that same place later in the day.
7 Now when I see ads reading, "Easy job. Good wages," I just smile an ancient, tired, knowing smile.
Permission of International Publishing Co., New York.
A. has few job qualifications.
B. is a high school dropout.
C. was fired from his last job.
D. is not interested in working.
A. aware of what was about to happen to him.
B. daydreaming about his job experience.
C. convinced he had found the perfect job.
D. trying to persuade himself to go to work.
A. the foreman was concerned about the workers’ well-being.
B. it would slow down the process of scraping labels.
C. the surface of the bottles could be damaged.
D. it would prevent the labels from coming off in one piece.
A. asks for an increase in wages.
B. realizes the true cost of the job.
C. requests a penknife for peeling the labels.
D. complains to the foreman about working conditions.
A. onomatopoeia.
B. flashback.
C. allusion.
D. personification.
A. His smile is like his grandfather’s.
B. He is happy about his brother’s job.
C. He knows he will find better work.
D. He has learned an age-old truth.
A. stubbornly.
B. invisibly.
C. quickly.
D. sloppily.
|
The foreman found a vacant stool for me around one of the tubs of water. |
A. noun.
B. verb.
C. preposition.
D. conjunction.