Chapter Two: Initial Surprises
Long ago May had been an actress. Since she was really never one of the 'pretty girls' she was always forced to play the old ladies or the fat kids, but she really never minded. She had been good at what she did and was an experienced thespian, which unfortunately had carried over into her real life much to the dismay of loved ones. As much as she loved acting on stage, a large group of people would always send her into hysterics. She had a habit of being false around strangers, of being someone who she was sure that they would automatically accept and love. Not to mention she had always been good at hiding her true feelings or what she really thought.
This was one of those times.
As baffled as she was by the strangeness she had already encountered she kept a straight face and continued to follow the corridor. Along the way she had stopped and pulled out her notepad and her red pen and held them in her right hand, awaiting the chance to use them as she walked ahead. The corridor seemed to go on forever.
"He could have at least accompanied me to the first room." She muttered out loud to herself. She also wished that the man had handed her a dry copy of the documents she had signed, it would have been nice to read the fine print.
Finally she approached a rather harmless-looking door; simple doorknob, swirling woodwork, brass hinges. She glared at it suspiciously. There didn't seem to be a trick to it and so May declared it safe for her usage. She turned the handle and pulled open the door, the portal yielding her to the next room.
Yet beyond the door was not just another room, it was the second floor to some type of packaging and shipping department of the factory. She sighed inwardly; finally something that made sense. With a renewed sense of duty she straightened herself out and set her briefcase down, getting her pen and paper ready for action. The first step was to take a good look around and get a feel for how things worked in this place.
May found a set of twisting and turning staircases and followed them down to where machines were humming and the noise of work filled the large space. She could see workers from where she had been standing on the second floor, nothing struck her unusual about them yet. Not until she reached the ground floor did she see something extraordinary about the workers that were running about busily, something so absolutely fantastic and queer she had to take a moment to make sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her.
They were little people, their skin a shade different from any she had seen before and clothing absolutely outrageous and uncustomary. However, as May noticed, they all seemed the same so their funny-colored skin and clothing were uniformly normal. They went along their work packaging boxes of Wonka candy and overseeing production as if May hadn't been standing there with her mouth agape watching them. She shook her head, there had to have been over twenty of them in this one room alone!
One, a little taller than the other, approached her critically with his hands on his hips. "Can I help you?" He asked her. His voice was distorted only a drop and May was surprised by the demand in his question.
She wasn't sure what to say at first but since they seemed to be normally functioning people she tried to ignore the strangeness she was witnessing. She reached into her pocket and retrieved her ID. "May Sonnate. I'm with the FDA." She told him.
He reached forward and grabbed her ID. He stared at the picture on the card, then at May, then at the card again. He seemed confused by her appearance and she noticed that every once and a while the other workers would glance over at her, eyes filled with curiosity. "Everything seems to be in order." He said finally as he handed her ID back to her. "We were told an FDA employee would be arriving today."
"Normally we don't inform companies when we're about to do our inspections. This happens to be a special case." She explained. The scene felt like something out of a dream, yet it felt perfectly normal to be discussing such matters with a little off-colored man. In fact once she got past the initial shock, as May later told me, it was easy to ignore their differences.
"Well please, do continue." Said the small man who gave a curt bow and then went back to overseeing the packaging.
After this momentary distraction May found it difficult to remember how to do her job in the first place. She attempted to walk through the rows of conveyor belts and observe whether these workers were wearing the right type of gloves or had on aprons and hairnets, but the more she walked through the more curious looks she received. Clearly they were perceiving her the way she was perceiving them. Perhaps they were angry at her for disturbing their work. It was possible they resented her for questioning their techniques. Whatever the case she didn't exactly feel comfortable with the amount of staring going on.
But as I said before, May was a sensible person. She was not the dreamer she had been in her youth. Once she got past the mystery of the Wonka employees it was all business as usual, her red pen making furious marks on her papers. She scrutinized every part of the floor until she deemed this room to be inspected and went back upstairs to retrieve her briefcase. May did all of this without breaking a sweat. Once she had the briefcase back in her possession she approached the overseer and asked him politely if he could point her to the next door. He did so and she was off, gone through the door to her next destination.
End of Chapter Two
Chapter Three: The Gummy Room
"May?" I had started to ask. It was a couple weeks until September, a couple of weeks until we went our separate ways on to college and the adult world. We were sitting in the Boston Public Gardens watching the swans and ducks swim about the pond, our flip-flops lazing about on the sun-kissed tops of our feet, our hair pulled away from our faces to keep us cool. I had brought her out to the city for one last excursion before we had to say goodbye.
"Yes?" She replied with a grin. She swung her legs on the park bench and went back to looking at the couples strolling through the grass.
"Don't forget me. I couldn't stand it if you forgot me." I said.
"Oh Lisa, I would never forget you." She reassured me with a sigh. In those days she had so much potential, so much light in her eyes. She was going to help out kids and join her college's performance troupe. She was going to write short stories and poems and go to concerts. She was going to be somebody, and not only that, she was going to be somebody she liked.
"What if you out grow me?" I pressed on.
"I'd never grow out of you. It would be like out-growing of myself."
That answer had satisfied me then. Yet if I had known then how much May actually had grown out of her own self I wouldn't have believed her. We managed to stay together though, even through all the changes. Now don't get me wrong, I've changed too. We all change when we grow up. Our responsibilities increase drastically as our pleasures decrease and we find we have a lot less time to ourselves and ourselves alone. However most of us never really outgrow the person we once were. A little boy who bullied other little boys will grow up to be a big, mean, corporate bully or something similar. Likewise a dreamer will remain a dreamer, even through their adult life.
But somewhere along the way May Sonnate lost herself.
As she continued her journey deeper and deeper into the factory she was the same skeptical person she had been for the past ten years. She pushed aside the unfamiliar she had experienced so far and focused on the job at hand, even if the sheer peculiarity of the factory lingered on the outer ridges of her mind. So far she had been to the fudge room, the taffy room, the marshmallow room, and now she was on her way to the gummy room which she suspected was nothing like the first few rooms she had been in. Each department had been like another world apart, each completely different in style and decoration and smell, yet they all had a distinct feeling to them. It was this feeling that was crowding on the outskirts of her head.
She read the door in front of her. "GUMMY ROOM" was painted rather sloppily across in white letters which ran down the wood as if the person who had done the painting was extremely short. This didn't exactly flabbergast her. May opened the door and slipped in as she had done before, hoping to not be noticed. Things were always more natural when the workers didn't notice she was in the room with them.
However this time there were no workers, not a single one. The giant vats of sugared goo were close to the ground and as May approached them she saw that they were not very hot at all, in fact they looked like they were cool enough to congeal. Upon further inspection she came to the conclusion that the people who had been working there were at break at the present time, a lucky opportunity for her indeed. Almost immediately May got to work.
The more May continued the more difficult she found to be vague in her reports. Everything was arranged for the small workers; not scaled down but made in special ways. She had to take this into account when filing out the paperwork, but she was sure Mr. Wonka wouldn't want any information on these strange people leaked out into the public. What's worse, the more May thought about what she was seeing the more her disbelief struck her. The factory was absolutely insane in its twists and turns. She had nearly been lost and gone forever four times now. She was sure this was against some safety code or another.
After jotting down a few comments in the margins she put down her notepad and took out a pair of rubber gloves from her pocket. It was time to make sure the product was being made in a clean environment.
But before she did anything May noticed a brightly-colored panel that just needed to be looked at.
Perhaps it was a call-back to her younger days, or perhaps it was just curiosity, but May was hypnotized by the many buttons that adorned the silver panel. She knew they were the controls to the machinery, and she especially knew they were not to be fiddled with. With a sigh she stood her briefcase on the panel and returned to her duties, her responsibilities to her job overwhelming the childhood inquisitiveness that seemed to be jumping out of her today.
What happened next was all an accident but she told herself that she should have seen it coming anyway. She had tripped over a bucket, which in turn fell over and rolled into a broom, which then struck her briefcase, and her briefcase had fallen and pressed every single button on the silver panel. There was the eerie noise of humming that grew louder and louder all around her as she frantically looked about her. All of a sudden all the machinery had started up and before May could do a single thing she was knocked off her feet and sent backwards off of a platform into a vat of cooled goo.
She cried out when she hit the multi-colored slime before she sunk into the bottom like an anchor. Quickly May scrambled up and grasped the side of the slick vat, the goo coming up almost to her shoulders. The bottom was too slick for her to climb out of and she could feel the gummy congeal back around where she stood. May gasped and tried her best to wipe away the muck from her glasses, which miraculously had stayed on her head, and away from her mouth and nose. She yelled for help feeling like an absolute fool, that is until she realized that the vat was actually moving along a type of conveyor belt.
With a scream she saw what awaited her and her vat - a huge open fire that would once again turn the goo into a boiling-hot liquid. Wishing that the little workers were on their way back she screamed and yelled and cried out for help, all the while watching as her vat made its way closer and closer to the roaring fire.
"Help me! Somebody please!" May shrieked at the same time vainly trying to pull herself up. She never had much of an upper body strength so her attempts to pull herself up by her arms only were just that - in vain. She attempted again once more, this time almost getting her upper torso over the side of the vat before she slipped back into the slime. However she noticed that when she fell the vat had rocked back and forth almost like a Ferris Wheel seat would. With a small but brilliant plan in her mind she jumped up quickly to test her hypothesis. She grabbed the edge of the vat and pushed forward and then fell back, sending the vat into a steady rock.
May jumped up again and then fell backwards, the rock of the vat growing increasingly higher and faster. She repeated these actions of jumping up then falling back until her legs and arms were beginning to become sore. She made the mistake of looking over her shoulder at the row of vats before her and cried out when she realized that in two more vats she would be boiled alive. Now there was a hurried urgency in the way she threw herself against the sides of the vat.
She jumped back again, this time the goo had begun to spill over the side and on to the floor below. She looked over: the vat next to hers had gone over the fire. With a yell she dove forward as fast as she could and hit the side with all the force she could muster.
May and twenty gallons of gummy tumbled out of the large vat and on to the slick floor, the rush of all that sugar sliding May past the numerous astonished little workers that had heard the machinery running and her screaming and had rushed over to help. They gawked at her as she slid all the way past them and out the open door. She hit and bounced off of the wall of the corridor and then continued on some three yards down the hallway. She would have kept going too the force was so great of the sugary slime, that is if she hadn't been stopped by a pair of brown shoes and striped trousers.
From on the floor she looked up at the pair of normal-sized legs that had been running in her direction until she had slid right into them. Attached to the legs was a torso, and arms, and a head. Or so she thought. Her vision had been impaired by the gallons of gummy that had covered her entire head and body. May brought her hands up and flicked off the goo from her face, the candy making a squishing sound as it hit the clean walls of the factory. She focused her gaze on the man that had stopped her from slipping all the way down the corridor as he handed her a handkerchief.
"Thank you." She said as she cleaned off her glasses and face. Finally she could see who the pair of striped pants belonged to. May handed the handkerchief back to him as she held the walls and helped herself up from the floor.
"Government workers, always making a mess of things." He said disdainfully as he pocketed the gummed-up cloth in his deep, purple jacket. He frowned at May and shook his head, his wild hair bouncing underneath the matching top hat balanced on his head. "And you never stay around long enough to help clean up." He added.
"I'm so sorry about the mess. It was an accident." She attempted to apologize.
"Of course it was an accident. No one ever purposely gets caught in a vat of liquid sugar, not unless they're awfully desperate for gummy bears of course. But then again no one has ever tried and succeeded in getting gummy bears that way so I suppose you're either completely mad or just clumsy. But I do believe you're sorry, although not as sorry as all the Oompa-Loompas will be when they're cleaning up my factory floors because of you. "
He said this all very rapidly and May had to pause a moment in order to take it all in. There was so much to address in this statement, but May thought she address the most pressing one on her mind. "Your factory floors?" She repeated.
"Yes, my factory floors. Not yours or theirs or his or hers or cousin Carl's, but mine thank-you-very-much." He said matter-of-factly. "What a curious person you are." He muttered to himself as he looked at May from toe to hair. "I suppose all you government people are just like this."
"Mr. Wonka?" She inquired. He just had to be the elusive candy-maker himself, he just had to be. Even though she had never seen a picture of him or even heard a description for that matter, his manner of speech and dress fit the role of Willy Wonka perfectly.
End of Chapter Three