Belgian

Sears & Roebuck Administration Building, March 1942. Last gracious hours of Friday, and the other switchboard ladies wear party hats and raise champagne flutes, toasting Rebecca as she makes the first cut into a sheet cake with Good Luck! iced in cursive.

They crowd around her in a corner of the room, away from the long walls of plugs and dangling wires, where a side table has been cleared of phone directories to make room for the cake. Hattie Lewis, shift supervisor, takes over the cutting and distributes slices on bright paper plates. Sarah Feinberg gets the looping underside of a “c,” Hannah Gold the rigid ascender of a “d.” Letters are dismantled and scattered across the room. A few girls flash guilty smirks or make obligatory comments about their figure, but none refuse. Cake makes its way to the skeleton crew still at their stations, who set their plates a careful distance from the machine. Each station contains a five-by-five space, just to the right of the plugs, where the ladies are allowed to display personal items. Some have bent family photos to stand up in the narrow crease between two housing plates, while others have hung small tokens from a little-used modulator dial, the occasional hamsa or rabbit’s foot.

Rebecca continues passing slices down the line until they finally pressure her into keeping one. They meet her gaze with gushing smiles. Rebecca, whom they’ve called Human Decoder Ring and Lady of Babel. Irene Heller cries that they’ll have to rewrite the unofficial manual. If you ever pick up...