This Sweet Sickness Read Online Free PDF

resembling newspaper printing presses unrolled bolts of white plastic filler between thin pink or blue or green or any colored plastic material, and at regular intervals this was stamped with diamond designs, squares, dots, or whatever. The results were horrid. They went all over the nation and were exported too. You could spill drinks on Cheswick fabrics, babies could puke on them, just wipe them clean again with soap and water. The one aesthetic aspect of the production was perhaps the snow-white bolts of plastic filler, five feet long and three feet in diameter that weighed almost nothing. They at least looked clean. But before the stuff was white and on bolts, it had to be processed and washed and subjected to various rinses (whose formulae Lewissohn unnecessarily and rather romantically guarded from competitors), and from the carding stalls the white wool-like stuff floated out into the air, got into the nose, and stuck to the clothing and the hair. In the “experimental department” on the second floor, Wes Carmichael and a half-dozen other young chemists worked, played, and “experimented,” drawing quite handsome salaries for doing very little. They played at making plastic covering for wire, of the sort dish drying racks are made of, they came up with liquids that could remove stove grease, emollients that were good for the skin, rat poison, and silver polish. They outdid one another in creating cartoons and slogans detrimental to factory morale and effort. On the second floor the men’s room was labeled “Bulls” and the women’s room “Heifers.” The day David had accepted the job, Mr. Lewissohn had told him with a happy slap of his palms, “All our products are turned into dollars and cents in a matter of days.” This was not exactly true of the products of the “experimental department,” Mr. Lewissohn’s one extravagance for the sake of his vanity. Or David himself might have been one other extravagance. It flattered Mr. Lewissohn to be able to say, “I’ve got a real chemist working for me. A young fellow who’s won three scholarships.”
    David disliked his job and, ironically, had taken it only because of Annabelle, and then lost her because of staying on that crucial month to learn the work. David would have preferred a research job. But he had thought that if he wanted to marry soon, he would do well to have some cash in hand and cash coming in. The research job he had had in Oakley the preceding year had not paid enough for him to have put much away in the bank. David had started out very promisingly in the capacity of chemist, and seeing his quickness, Mr. Lewissohn had conceived the idea of putting him in charge of the whole downstairs, and so dismissing two or three foremen who were not particularly efficient. This had been just at the time he had intended to go back to La Jolla to ask Annabelle to marry him. He had been writing to her daily, and now he wrote that he would be delayed a month. He hadn’t said “wait for me” and hadn’t told her in his letter that he wanted to marry her, because he preferred to say that in person. After all, she had said to him only two months before, “I love you too, David.” The fact she had called him David at that moment instead of Dave somehow made it all the more serious and true. He hadn’t believed it when his Aunt Edie wrote him that Annabelle had married somebody else. David had never heard of Gerald Delaney. He was from Tucson, Aunt Edie wrote him. Annabelle had known him less than a month when she married him, Aunt Edie said, and maybe it was too sudden, but she blamed it on the “bad time” Annabelle had been having at home. David knew: her mother ailing and complaining, her father ill-tempered, and her two good-for-nothing brothers making her wait on them hand and foot as if she were the Cinderella of the household. But to have married somebody