Tessie and I look woebegone at one another. Cardboards? Cardboards?
Ida glues her Eyetalian eye on Lena down the line. “Lena, you fool, didn't you tell these here girls about cardboards?... My Gawd! My Gawd!” says Ida. Whereat she dives into our belabored boxes and grabs those ached-over chocolates and hurls them in a pile. “Get all them top ones out. Put in cardboards. Put 'em all in again.” Tessie and I almost could have wept. By that time it is about 4. We are all feet, feet, FEET. First I try standing on one foot to let the other think I might really, after all, be sitting down. Then I stand on it and give the other a delusion. Then try standing on the sides, the toes, the heels. FEET! “Ach! Mein Gott!” moans Tessie. “To-morrow I go look for a job in a biscuit factory.”
“Leave me know if you get a sit-down one.”
And in that state—FEET—Ida makes us pack over the whole top layer in three hundred and fifty boxes. Curses on Lena and her “dopes.” Or curses on me that I could so suddenly invent such picturesque love affairs that Lena forgot all about cardboards.
About then my locker key falls through a hole in my waist pocket and on to the floor and out of sight. In the end it takes a broom handle poked about diligently under the bottom shelf of our table to make a recovery. Before the key appear chocolates of many shapes and sizes, long reposing in oblivion under the weighty table. The thrifty Spanish woman behind me gathers up all the unsquashed ones and packs them. “Mus' be lots of chocolates under these 'ere tables, eh?” she notes wisely and with knit brows. As if to say that, were she boss, she'd poke with a broom under each and every bottom shelf and fill many a box.
At least my feet get a moment's rest while I am down on my hands and knees among the debris from under the tables.
By five o'clock Tessie thinks she'll throw up her job then and there. “Ach! Ach! My feet!” she moans. I secretly plan to kill the next person who gives me a box of chocolate candy.
The bell has forgotten to ring. It must be 7.
My earrings begin to hurt. You can take off earrings. But FEET—
Tessie says she's eaten too many candies; her stomach does her pain. Her feet aren't so hurting now her _magen_ is so bad. I couldn't eat another chocolate for five dollars, but my stomach refused to feel in any way that takes my mind in the least off my feet.