Our Hands Are Tied

Yesterday, Jerry went to work.

He had kissed his wife twice as he shuffled out the door.  The first said “Good morning” and the second, although only a half-second later, said “Goodbye.”  Jerry had learned, or told himself, that this marital conciseness didn’t represent a waning of passion, only a  waxing of practicality, upon which he felt a small amount of self-praise was justified.

He ran his calloused fingers, rounded and stubby like so many ends of broomsticks, through his graying hair.  He observed the rows of houses that outlined his commute more closely yesterday, absorbing the continually ebbing tide of want.  Each intersection at first marking a step toward the well-to-do; houses became more uniform, more upright, less of an echo of a child’s doodling.  Then, streets later, the tide receded and each street marked again the incremental withdrawal of money and success.

Jerry wondered where he fell on the spectrum.  He knew where his house stood, Fourth and Jackson, but his wife had picked it out because she liked the bathrooms, and he never thought it should be a symbol of their family.  It wasn’t just the streets but the city.  He knew that wherever he lived this place would always make him feel inadequate.  There were two many past lovers and forgotten friends, too many former workplaces, too few wellsprings of hope to ever make him feel at home here.

He pulled into his parking space (it didn’t have a sign like the plant manager’s, but Jerry had deemed it his own and arrived early enough each day to make sure the designation was fulfilled).  Jerry had worked at Tri-Star beverages long enough to be awarded a t-shirt, two “World’s Best Employee” mugs, seventeen ink pens, and one plaque.  How long this amounted to in years, Jerry had forgotten.

He spent the first four hours of his day, as he did each day, checking lines and valves as gallons upon gallons of soda coursed its way through the factory, beginning as only syrup and coloring and powder and completing its travels sealed tortuously tight inside a contoured plastic bottle.  At lunch time, the plant manager announced the line would be shifting from cola to root beer for the afternoon and that everyone should begin making the needed changes.

Transitioning from cola to orange soda, or from ginger ale to lemon-lime, or nearly any other combination of countless sweetened sodas wasn’t much of an event.  Run the lines, switch the mix, fire it back up.  But moving to root beer, or from it for that matter, was a much more laborious process due to one unassuming ingredient, carbonation.  The amount of carbon in root beer is astronomically higher than any other soda.  While this can be clearly seen to even the most oblivious of soda consumers, it has always been more clearly, more painfully, obvious to Jerry.

Orchestrating a carbonation reconfiguration is anything but simple.  In Jerry’s words, “You’ve got to go back to the source, where everything’s starting out and re-do it all.  All the levels, the pressure points are all different now.  You’re checking and rechecking and usually end up with two or three test batches.  If you’re not careful, you’ll gum up the whole thing.”

Perhaps inspired by his drive or a growing concern that Fourth and Jackson wasn’t his home or the looming feeling that marital conciseness wasn’t what he vowed, Jerry stood up yesterday and asked the plant manager a question he had wondered to himself many nights for many years.

“Why don’t we just keep the carbonation the same?  It will still taste like root beer.”

He sat back down before an answer was given and in this second, as he was cradling his descent with one hand to aid his failing knees, he thought about various additions he should have included with his query.  “No one cares about the carbonation.  All it does is annoy people.  They either wait for it to fizzle out or use their finger to make it go away.  Isn’t that a health concern?”  Jerry felt like screaming or walking out of the break room, this casual but persistent annoyance, on this day, infuriated him.  When he reached his seat, he exhaled and his mouth tiredly formed the syllable “Why?”

The plant manager, younger than Jerry with sharp blond hair and an outfit he had purchased online, inhaled now.  His response was voiced as he breathed out, sounding like more of an afterthought than answer, like a reaction to a cute but trivial question of a child.

“That’s the way it’s always been.”

Today, Jerry called in sick.