Featured Fiction: Dustin M. Hoffman
Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), No Good for Digging, and the chapbook Secrets of the Wild. His newest collection, Such a Good Man, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. His stories have recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Fiddlehead, Alaska Quarterly Review, and One Story.
An Introduction by John Fulton:
"Rosie the Riveter's Résumé" by Dustin M. Hoffman is a masterclass in how form can function in fiction. He uses the classic résumé both to celebrate this iconic figure in American culture and to make her real and matter to our present moment. She’s bigger than life in Hoffman’s portrait and deeply, convincingly human. She speaks for working women everywhere and across time as both a laborer and a caretaker of the young and old. And while she’s mythic, she’s no stranger to the sort of workplace abuses that women experience too often in our current moment. She knows what it’s like to be used and then discarded when the men come home. She stands for peace (riveting rather than shooting) even as she celebrates freedom and her part in defeating fascism. This story gives a powerful voice both to a historical moment and (unfortunately) our present era, in which the forces that want to continue to repress women, their bodies, and their labor remain all too present. While Hoffman makes a serious statement here, he’s also funny, sly, and ironic. Reading this résumé will remind us of what we fail to see and need to recognize in the women who make our lives possible. It will also make us smile.
Rosie the Riveter's Résumé
Rosina, Rosalind, Rose
“Rosie the Riveter”
Peekskill, New York; Ypsilanti, Michigan; San Diego, California; and everywhere America needs women until they don’t
Objective
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To reobtain a position in your riveting department. Show me back to the bucking bar and the pneumatic gun. Let me shear steel and bend lead. I once replaced your every job, and I’ll ghost my way back. Give me any tool but this typewriter clacking its tinny cadence, scheduling your drunken lunches, dictating your memos, this labor for mere fingers that pays half what I made on that grease-pocked floor back when you were away killing Nazis.
Skills
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I replaced you, and now that you’ve returned you tremble. But I can smelt your carbine rifle into something useful. How about rebar to hold the concrete beneath your home? How about rivets? Too many guns but never enough rivets.
I won’t complain about the heat, the endless hours standing. I’ve always been able to handle more pain than you.
Proficiency in the pneumatic riveter, as well as the orbital, the radial, and the rollerform. That goes double for the impact. If it can be crushed into fastening, put it in my hands. My arms have turned lever, my fingers trigger.
Yet you fixate on the way I wear your old uniform. My red hair bundled into a gingham turban, my legs running lean under the coveralls that fit you too snugly at the crotch. I won’t unbutton the top three buttons, no matter how many times you ask. This heat doesn’t get to me, and I’d prefer to keep the burrs from biting my neck.
And, yes, I can type eighty words per minute, but I also learned the lathe, the saw, the grind wheel.
Since you can’t stop imagining, might mention also that I can fuck, and Marvin the marine might kiss and tell if he was a lesser man.
Inspired eight million women out of the home and swarming to your work. But it’s a bitch removing a rivet once it’s bucked.
Helped sell 700,000 thousand Redd Evans 45s, 500,000 thousand movie tickets mounting to an Everest avalanche of popcorn sales, and at least a couple billion dollars in your goddamn war bonds that never made me a cent.
Career History
The Riveting Department | 1940 – 1946
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Started in munitions, squeezing lead thin as rope, cordite thin as hair, and then marrying it all together in brass. What started with my green eyes working quality control ended with me operating the presses, churning out millions of flashing cartridges to send to my man Marvin for shooting Nazis in France.
Promoted to riveter. “Rivetress” bossman Mr. Lucas labeled it the day he bragged about gifting me a thirty-seven-cent raise through his cigar smoke. He said, Wouldn’t that make Marvin the marine proud? He said, Or if you haven’t heard from Marvin, you can make your boss proud. And I imagined what a mess his nose could make if inserted in the lathe’s chuck.
You lose track of what you’re fastening by the 1,742nd rivet. Eternity is as shapeless as a formless bullet casing and its spool of unwed lead. But now and then we’d wait outside the inspection hanger after hours, me and the girls sharing smokes, and that Boeing B-17 would float out on its tiny wheels, that flying fortress shiny as a polished dime.
Aided in the production of 17 Boeing B-17s; 6 behemoth Boeing 314 Flying Boats that never seemed like they’d have a chance of flight; 23 Vought F4U Corsairs; 37 B-24 bombers; and 3 bloated dirigibles big as floating cities.
Awarded production “E” by Army-Navy for wartime production.
Bucked 1,320,941 rivets with less than 10,000 deformations smiling back at me with their ugly scowls.
Wiped my boots with “Mein Kampf” before punching out each night to return to my sister Esther boiling macaroni and cheese for my kids for the fourth night in a row.
Childcare | 1931 – present
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Coordinated household of tiny humans, ensuring their development as upstanding contributors to this precious democracy, this crushing capitalism that begged me to the factory line, then doomed me to the typewriter keys.
Hoped at least they’d grow up to not be cannibals. Especially considering the way Emit and Hank were always biting each other and how often my own fingers would throb red and raw from trying to split them up.
Amelie outdid them by once lopping the tip of her pinkie off with my tinsnips. She streaked the bedroom in ropes of red. I staunched the blood. I bandaged the wound. I stitched shut the wound. No need for doctors asking the whereabouts of my husband, his life still inscrutable somewhere in France.
Mothering, yes, three times over. I managed the mountain of diapers, the screaming, the arms gone numb from cradling, my body no longer mine but theirs. You can’t unimagine the remedies—your marine husband’s pistol, or this car at that speed into that brick wall, or this head in that oven. Inside the running car, inside the oven, you notice each rivet, every machine screw. Recognizing the monster inside you becomes natural as breathing. We survived, each child grown, and I never loved them any less than the most you ever loved anyone. But we know this bullet point will not be considered in my application. Omit what you must, as we all must.
Senior Care | 1924 – 1929
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Ensured quality of life for the elder in my care, my Grandpa Garth, who’d once worn blue like my riveting coveralls to clomp through swamps and shoot Americans claiming secession. I spoon-fed his mashed peas, his blood-red tomato soup, his oatmeal thick with brown sugar before those days when everything sweet became war-rationed.
Provided intellectual stimulation to stave off encroaching dementia, even when Grandpa Garth barked at me, called me a whore, a stranger, a succubus. He refused to glance at the photo albums of the two of us holding up my first stream trout, nearly big as six-year-old me.
Trained my replacement. My sister Esther, of course, and not my brother, took my place when my marine tricked me with a diamond that twinkled bright as escape.
And more and more that doesn’t count | 1920 – present
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Suffered math teacher Mr. Brooks’s sneaky close walks trying to look down my sweater’s front at parent-teacher meetings. Taught the boys to sew and Amelie to read when the schools neglected. But you only want to hear how I stamped my hours with dollars. You only consider the clocked time, the wage hours. And what’s left out is all that made me able to buck those rivets for twelve hours straight, no breaks, eating the onion sandwiches grown from my victory garden while I worked. This is play compared to what I’ve survived. We worked into the twilight unceasingly, the punch of one million rivets ringing through our bones.
References
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“The more women at work, the sooner we win!” -U.S. Employment Service
“Rosie is as easy to look at as overtime pay on the week’s check.” -Acme Photography
“That little frail can do more than a man can do, Rosie brr-rrr-rrr the Riveter.” -Redd Evans
“Can you use an electric mixer? If so, you can learn to operate a drill.” -Uncle Sam