The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Denise had always had trouble saying no when she felt wanted in the right way. Growing up in suburban St. Jude, she’d been kept at safe distances from anybody who might have wanted her in this way, but after she finished high school she worked for a summer in the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, and here, in a big sunny room with twin rows of drafting tables, she became acquainted with the desires of a dozen older men.

  The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building with rounded rooftop crenellations like the edges of a skimpy waffle. Higher-order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor and in the offices of the more abstract departments (Operations, Legal, Public Relations) whose vice presidents were on fifteen. Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were mid-level skill functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals.

  The Midland Pacific lines were twelve thousand miles long, and for every signal and every wire along the way, every set of red and amber lights, every motion detector buried in ballast, every flashing cantilever crossing guard, every agglomeration of timers and relays housed in a ventless aluminum shed, there were up-to-date circuit diagrams in one of six heavy-lidded filing tanks in the tank room on the twelfth floor of headquarters. The oldest diagrams were drawn freehand in pencil on vellum, the newest with Rapidograph pens on preprinted Mylar blanks.

  The draftsmen who tended these files and liaised with the field engineers who kept the railroad’s nervous system healthy and untangled were Texan and Kansan and Mis-sourian natives: intelligent, uncultured, twangy men who’d come up the hard way from no-skill jobs in signal gangs, chopping weeds and digging postholes and stringing wire until, by virtue of their aptitude with circuits (and also, as Denise later realized, by virtue of being white), they’d been singled out for training and advancement. None had more than a year or two of college, most only high school. On a summer day when the sky got whiter and the grass got browner and their former gangmates were battling heatstroke in the field, the draftsmen were happy indeed to sit in cushioned roller chairs in air so cool they all kept cardigans handy in their personal drawers.

  “You’ll find that some of the men take coffee breaks,” Alfred told Denise in the pink of the rising sun, as they drove downtown on her first morning. “I want you to know they’re not paid to take coffee breaks. I expect you not to take coffee breaks yourself. The railroad is doing us a favor by hiring you, and it’s paying you to work eight hours. I want you to remember that. If you apply yourself with the same energy you brought to your schoolwork and your trumpet-playing, you’ll be remembered as a great worker.”

  Denise nodded. To say she was competitive was to put it mildly. In the high-school band there had been two girls and twelve boys in the trumpet section. She was in the first chair and boys were in the next twelve. (In the last chair was a part-Cherokee girl from downstate who hit middle C instead of high Ε and helped cast that pall of dissonance that shadows every high-school band.) Denise had no great passion for music, but she loved to excel, and her mother believed that bands were good for children. Enid liked the discipline of bands, the upbeat normality, the patriotism. Gary in his day had been an able boy trumpeter and Chip had (briefly, honkingly) attempted the bassoon. Denise, when her time came, asked to follow in Gary’s footsteps, but Enid didn’t think that little girls and trumpets matched. What matched little girls was flutes. But there was never much satisfaction for Denise in competing with girls. She’d insisted on the trumpet, and Alfred had backed her up, and eventually it had dawned on Enid that rental fees could be avoided if Denise used Gary’s old trumpet.

  Unlike sheet music, unfortunately, the signal diagrams that Denise was given to copy and file that summer were unintelligible to her. Since she couldn’t compete with the draftsmen, she competed with the boy who’d worked in Signals the previous two summers, Alan Jamborets, the corporation counsel’s son; and since she had no way to gauge Jamborets’s performance, she worked with an intensity that she was certain nobody could match.

  “Denise, whoa, God, damn,” Laredo Bob, a sweating Texan, said while she was cutting and collating blueprints.

  “What?”

  “You gonna burn yourself out going that fast.”

  “Actually, I enjoy it,” she said. “Once I’m in the rhythm.”

  “Thing is, though,” Laredo Bob said, “you can leave some of that for tomorrow.”

  “I don’t enjoy it that much.”

  “OK, well, but y’all take a coffee break now. You hear me?”

  Draftsmen were yipping as they trotted toward the hallway.

  “Coffee time!”

  “Snack cart’s here!”

  “Coffee time!”

  She worked with undiminished speed.

  Laredo Bob was the low man to whom drudge work fell when there was no summer help to relieve him. Laredo Bob ought to have to been chagrined that Denise—in full view of the boss—was performing in half an hour certain clerical tasks to which he liked to devote whole mornings while he chewed up a Swisher Sweet cigar. But Laredo Bob believed that character was destiny. To him Denise’s work habits were simply evidence that she was her daddy’s daughter and that soon enough she would be an executive just like her daddy while he, Laredo Bob, would go on performing clerical tasks at the speed you’d expect from somebody fated to perform them. Laredo Bob further believed that women were angels and men were poor sinners. The angel he was married to revealed her sweet, gracious nature mainly by forgiving his tobacky habit and feeding and clothing four children on a single smallish income, but he was by no means surprised when the Eternal Feminine turned out to have supernatural abilities in the area of labeling and alphabetically sorting thousand-count boxes of card-mounted microform. Denise seemed to Laredo Bob an all-around marvelous and purty creature. Before long he began singing a rockabilly chorus (“Denise-uh-why-you-done, what-you-did?”) when she arrived in the morning and when she returned from her lunch break in the little treeless city park across the street.

  The chief of draftsmen, Sam Beuerlein, told Denise that next summer they would have to pay her not to come to work, since she was doing the work of two this summer.

  A grinning Arkansan, Lamar Parker, who wore enormous thick glasses and had precancers on his forehead, asked her if her daddy had told her what a rascally, worthless crew the men of Signals were.

  “Just worthless,” Denise said. “He never said rascally.”

  Lamar cackled and puffed on his Tareyton and repeated her remark in case the men around him hadn’t heard it.

  “Heh-heh-heh,” the draftsman named Don Armour muttered with unpleasant sarcasm.

  Don Armour was the only man in Signals who seemed not to love Denise. He was a solidly built, short-legged Vietnam vet whose cheeks, close-shaved, were nearly as blue and glaucous as a plum. His blazers were tight around his massive upper arms; drafting tools seemed toy-sized in his hand; he looked like a teenager stuck at a first-grader’s desk. Instead of resting his feet on the ring of his high wheeled chair, like everyone else, he let his feet dangle, his toe-tips dragging on the floor. He draped his upper body across the drafting surface, bringing his eyes to within inches of his Rapidograph pen. After working for an hour like this, he went limp and pressed his nose into Mylar or buried his face in his hands and moaned. His coffee breaks he often passed pitched forward like a murder victim, his forehead on his table, his plastic aviator glasses in his fist.

  When Denise was first introduced to Don Armour, he looked away and gave her a dead-fish handshake. When she worked at the far end of the drafting room, she could hear him murmuring things while the men around him chuckled; when she was close to him he kept silent and smirked fiercely at his tabletop. He reminded her of the smartasses who haunted the back rows of classrooms.

  She was in the women’s room one
morning in July when she heard Armour and Lamar outside the bathroom door by the drinking fountain where Lamar rinsed out his coffee mugs. She stood by the door and strained to hear.

  “Remember we thought old Alan was a crazy worker?” Lamar said.

  “I’ll say this for Jamborets,” Don Armour said. “He was a hell of a lot easier on the eyes.”

  “Hee hee.”

  “Hard to get much work done with somebody as good-looking as Alan Jamborets walking around all day in little skirts.”

  “Alan was a pretty boy, all right.”

  There was a groan. “I swear to God, Lamar,” Don Armour said, “I’m this close to filing a complaint with OSHA. This is cruel and unusual. Did you see that skirt?”

  “I seen it. But shush now.”

  “I’m going crazy.”

  “This is a seasonal problem, Donald. It’s like to take care of itself in two months.”

  “If the Wroths don’t fire me first.”

  “Say, what makes you so sure this merger’s going through?”

  “I sweated eight years in the field to get to this office. It’s about time something else came along and fucked things up.”

  Denise was wearing a short electric-blue thrift-store skirt that in truth she was surprised was in compliance with her mother’s Islamic female dress code. To the extent that she accepted the idea that Lamar and Don Armour had been talking about her—and the idea did have an undeniable strange headache-like residency status in her brain—she felt all the more keenly snubbed by Don. She felt as if he were having a party in her own house without inviting her.

  When she returned to the drafting room, he cast a skeptical eye around the room, sizing up everyone but her. As his gaze skipped past her, she felt a curious need to push her fingernails into the quick or to pinch her own nipples.

  It was the season of thunder in St. Jude. The air had a smell of Mexican violence, of hurricanes or coups. There could be morning thunder from unreadably churning skies, ominous dull reports from south-county municipalities that nobody you knew had ever been to. And lunch-hour thunder from a solitary anvil wandering through otherwise semi-fair skies. And the more serious thunder of midafternoon, as solid sea-green waves of cloud rolled up in the southwest, the sun shining all the brighter locally and the heat bearing down more urgently, as if aware that time was short. And the great theater of a good dinnertime blowout, storms crowded into the fifty-mile radius of the radar’s sweep like big spiders in a little jar, clouds booming at each other from the sky’s four corners, and wave upon wave of dime-sized raindrops arriving like plagues, the picture in your window going black-and-white and fuzzy, trees and houses lurching in the flashes of lightning, small kids with swimsuits and drenched towels running home headlong, like refugees. And the drumming late at night, the rolling caissons of summer on the march.

  And every day the St. Jude press carried rumblings of an impending merger. The Midpac’s importunate twin-brother suitors, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, were in town talking to three unions. The Wroths were in Washington countering Midpac testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The Midpac had reportedly asked the Union Pacific to be its white knight. The Wroths defended their postacquisitional restructuring of the Arkansas Southern. The Midpac’s spokesman begged all concerned St. Judeans to write or call their congressmen …

  Denise was leaving the building for lunch under partly cloudy skies when the top of a utility pole a block away from her exploded. She saw bright pink and felt the blast of thunder on her skin. Secretaries ran screaming through the little park. Denise turned on her heel and took her book and her sandwich and her plum back up to the twelfth floor, where every day two tables of pinochle formed. She sat down by the windows, but it seemed pretentious or unfriendly to be reading War and Peace. She divided her attention between the crazy skies outside and the card game nearest her.

  Don Armour unwrapped a sandwich and opened it to a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard. His shoulders slumped. He wrapped the sandwich up again loosely in its foil and looked at Denise as if she were the latest torment of his day.

  “Meld sixteen.”

  “Who made this mess?”

  “Ed,” Don Armour said, fanning cards, “you gotta be careful with those bananas.”

  Ed Alberding, the most senior draftsman, had a body shaped like a bowling pin and curly gray hair like an old lady’s perm. He was blinking rapidly as he chewed banana and studied his cards. The banana, peeled, lay on the table in front of him. He broke off another dainty bite.

  “Awful lot of potassium in a banana,” Don Armour said.

  “Potassium’s good for you,” Lamar said from across the table.

  Don Armour set his cards down and regarded Lamar gravely. “Are you joking? Doctors use potassium to induce cardiac arrest.”

  “Οl’ Eddie eats two, three bananas every day,” Lamar said. “How’s that heart of yours feelin’, Mr. Ed?”

  “Let’s just play the hand here, boys,” Ed said.

  “But I’m terribly concerned about your health,” Don Armour said.

  “You tell too many lies, mister.”

  “Day after day I see you ingesting toxic potassium. It’s my duty as a friend to warn you.”

  “Your trick, Don.”

  “Put a card down, Don.”

  “And in return all I get,” Armour said in an injured tone, “is suspicion and denial.”

  “Donald, you in this game or just keepin’ that seat warm?”

  “Of course, if Ed were to keel over dead of cardiac arrest, due to acute long-term potassium poisoning, that would make me fourth highest in seniority and secure me a place in Little Rock with the Arkansas Southern slash Midland Pacific, so why am I even mentioning this? Please, Ed, eat my banana, too.”

  “Hee hee, watch your mouth,” Lamar said.

  “Gentlemen, I believe these tricks are all mine.”

  “Son of a gun!”

  Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap.

  “Ed, you know, they got computers down in Little Rock,” Don Armour said, never glancing at Denise.

  “Uh-oh,” Ed said. “Computers?”

  “You go down there, I’m warning you, they’re going to make you learn to use one.”

  “Eddie’ll be asleep with angels before he learns computers,” Lamar said.

  “I beg to differ,” Don said. “Ed’s going to go to Little Rock and learn computer drafting. He’s going to make somebody else sick to their stomach with his bananas.”

  “Say, Donald, what makes you so sure you ain’t going to Little Rock yourself?”

  Don shook his head. “We’d spend two, three thousand dollars less a year if we lived in Little Rock, and pretty soon I’d be making a couple thousand a year more. It’s cheap down there. Patty could work maybe half days, let the girls have a mother again. We could buy some land in the Ozarks before the girls got too old to enjoy it. Someplace with a pond. You think anybody’s gonna let that happen to me?”

  Ed was sorting his cards with the nervous twitches of a chipmunk. “What do they need computers for?” he said.

  “To replace useless old men with,” Don said, his plum face splitting open with an unkind smile.

  “Replace us?”

  “Why do you think the Wroths are buying us out and not the other way around?”

  Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap. Denise watched the sky stick forks of lightning into the salad of trees on the Illinois horizon. While her head was turned, there was an explosion at the table.

  “Jesus Christ, Ed,” Don Armour said, “why don’t you just go ahead and lick those before you put them down?”

  “Easy there, Don,” said Sam Beuerlein, the chief of draftsmen.

  “Am I alone in this turning my stomach?”

  “Easy. Easy.”

  Don threw his cards down and shoved off in his rolling chair so violently that the praying-mantis drafting light creaked and swayed. “Laredo,” he called, “come tak
e my cards. I gotta get some banana-free air.”

  “Easy.”

  Don shook his head. “It’s say it now, Sam, or go crazy when the buyout happens.”

  “You’re a smart man, Don,” Beuerlein said. “You’ll land on your feet no matter what.”

  “I don’t know about smart. I’m not half as smart as Ed. Am I, Ed?”

  Ed’s nose twitched. He tapped the table with his cards impatiently.

  “Too young for Korea, too old for my war,” Don said. “That’s what I call smart. Smart enough to get off the bus and cross Olive Street every morning for twenty-five years without getting hit by a car. Smart enough to get back on it every night. That’s what counts for smart in this world.”

  Sam Beuerlein raised his voice. “Don, now, you listen to me. You go take a walk, you hear? Go outside and cool down. When you get back, you may decide you owe Eddie an apology.”

  “Meld eighteen,” Ed said, tapping the table.

  Don pressed his hand into the small of his back and limped up the aisle, shaking his head. Laredo Bob came over with egg salad in his mustache and took Don’s cards.

  “No need for apologies,” Ed said. “Let’s just play the hand here, boys.”

  Denise was leaving the women’s room after lunch when Don Armour stepped off the elevator. He had a shawl of rain marks on his shoulders. He rolled his eyes at the sight of Denise, as if at some fresh persecution.

  “What?” she said.

  He shook his head and walked away.

  “What? What?”

  “Lunch hour’s over,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  Each wiring diagram was labeled with the name of the line and the milepost number. The Signal Engineer hatched plans for corrections, and the draftsmen sent paper copies of the diagrams into the field, highlighting additions in yellow pencil and subtractions in red. The field engineers then did the work, often improvising their own fixes and shortcuts, and sent the copies back to headquarters torn and yellowed and greasily fingerprinted, with pinches of red Arkansas dust or bits of Kansas weed chaff in their folds, and the draftsmen recorded the corrections in black ink on the Mylar and vellum originals.