CALL YOURSELF A WRITER, STEVIE CRYE? YOURE AN INCOMPETENT HACK WHO CANT HACK IT. A GRUB, A DRUDGE, A DULLARD, A PENNY*A*POPPER. YOU HEARD ME, A PAUPER. AND NO WONDER, POOPSIE. ALL YOUR BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS BANG DOWN ON PAPER BELLOWING THE STENCHFUL STIFFNESS OF BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT!!!
Stevie banged the on/off key with the side of her hand and yanked the page out. She could not unclog her brain. This string of alliterative raillery represented her most productive burst of the morning. If only she could achieve such fluency typing news stories and feature columns . . . and, yes, book proposals. Some writers could just let their fingers fly, but she . . . well, she could not unclog her brain. Shitting bricks, Ted had called this kind of labor, but he had always stayed with the struggle until victoriously spent.
It’s the typewriter, Stevie suddenly thought. Typewriters are passé.
This thought amused her. She knew she was rationalizing her failure to get going, using the typewriter as a scapegoat—but, at the moment, the rationalization, irrational as it was, appealed to her. She threw away her last botched proposal page, along with its codicil of free-associational abuse, and left her desk.
At the discolored Dearborn heater, she warmed her back, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes fixed on the recalcitrant instrument of her stuckness. It worked perfectly, but it also frustrated her every effort to overcome her block. It exuded a smug fractiousness. It grinned a bleak analphabetical grin. It withheld the words it had an innate power—yea, obligation—to surrender.
“Typewriters are passé,” Stevie informed the machine.
Over the last few years, lots of writers—some of them only mildly affluent—had begun using word processors, computer systems with display consoles and printer hookups. The Ledger newsroom in Columbus, which Stevie occasionally visited to discuss free-lance assignments with the managing editor, now had more video consoles than typewriters. Reporters could emend their copy by deleting errors, opening up their texts for insertions, moving entire paragraphs from one place to another, all without recourse to strikeovers, ballpoint pens, Liquid Paper, or flaky little tabs of Ko-Rec-Type. Word processors willy-nilly permitted a writer to overcome blocks and increase production. Although these nifty systems now cost about three thousand dollars (at least), you could take investment and depreciation write-offs and so bid a tearless permanent farewell to your typewriter. Stevie envisioned a day when only die-hard sentimentalists and penniless beginners would sit down at their Remingtons, Royals, Smith-Coronas, and PDE Exceleriters. These poor benighted souls would seem as backward and disadvantaged as a court stenographer with a Venus No. 2 lead pencil. And that day was probably not far off.
A fantasy. Stevie did not really believe that a word processor would solve her problem. She was stuck. Whether working with a goose-quill nub or an Apple computer, she would be just as stuck. Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Trollope—all the great Victorian novelists—they had never even seen a typewriter, much less the blank unblinking eye of a word processor, and yet they had produced staggering quantities of work, some of it brilliant. Her problem was not technological, it was emotional and mental.
I’m stuck, damn it, I’m stuck. And I’m stuck because I don’t have any confidence in this stupid proposal. It’s a dumb idea for a dumb book, and no matter how I dress it up or attempt to prettify it, it’s going to remain a dumb idea. A word processor could not possibly play ’Enry ’Iggins to my illiterate Eliza Doolittle of an idea.
Or could it?
Stevie returned to her Exceleriter, rolled in a clean sheet of paper, and imagined the touch of a single button lifting several paragraphs of text out of the machine’s (nonexistent) random-access memory. Another touch and an instance of muddy diction gave way to just the right word. Yet another and the sequence of her arguments rearranged itself in a truly forceful pattern. Her basic idea was not at fault—think of all the dumb ideas that had giggled or panted their way to bestsellerdom—but rather her presentation of it, and she was having trouble with its presentation precisely because this damn machine had no reliable capability for error correction. A word processor would supply that lack.
Impatiently Stevie jabbed the on/off control and let her fingers speak her disillusionment:
TYPEWRITERS ARE PASSE.
The Exceleriter had no key for accent marks, and the word passé looked funny to her without the necessary diacritical symbol. (Did the keyboards of word processors have this symbol? She did not know.) Stevie advanced the paper and tried to think of a synonym that would not require an accent mark. It took her only a moment.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
There. That was very good. Happy with this choice, Stevie typed the sentence twice more, releasing much of the anxiety occasioned by her block. What a gas, belittling the heretofore unhelpful Exceleriter through its own stupid instrumentality.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
Of course it was a foolish rationalization, but it was also a form of therapy, and, by indulging herself, maybe she could coax herself back into a productive frame of mind. Scapegoating an innocent typewriter made more sense than going after the president of Pantronics Data Equipment with a .22-caliber Röhm RG-14. And no one need ever know, either.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OB
Blaaaaaht! protested the PDE Exceleriter 79. The noise horrified Stevie. Reflexively she lifted her hands from the keyboard and gripped her shoulders. Before she could untangle herself to turn the machine off, however, the type disc reeled off eight more letters and a period without her even touching the Exceleriter. She stared at the result.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.
Omnipotent, it undoubtedly meant. The mechanical hangup—the brief Bronx cheer—had not taken place quickly enough for the machine to substitute the requisite m for the b left over from obsolescent. In fact, the Exceleriter had failed to demonstrate its assertion. What it had done, though, afflicted Stevie with an incredulous fear and curiosity. It had typed several letters by itself, and it had somehow typed them in a meaningful sequence. The letters refuted her own self-serving claim and held the implicit promise of an even wider power. No typewriter could perform such a feat without prior programming, of course, but she had just seen it happen.
“No, you didn’t,” Stevie said aloud. “You saw no such thing.”
The pleasant low-level purr of the Exceleriter seemed to confirm this assessment. It was eerie, though, and Stevie shut the machine off. The declaration on her paper—TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT—did not disappear with the hum. It stuck around, a ridiculous joke and a threat. An accident, surely, with a subconscious impetus.
What had happened, Stevie realized, was that she had quickly and inadvertently typed NIPOTENT just before the type disc’s noisy revolt and the machine had printed out these letters after the element righted itself. The Exceleriter had only seemed to be operating independently of her control. As for that particular sequence of letters, it embodied a sardonic Freudian gloss on her failure to get going this morning. She was tweaking herself for her pride, her indecisiveness, her readiness to elude responsibility.
Or maybe the space heater had used up so much of the oxygen in her little room that she had hallucinated the entire episode. Don Willingham at Barclay Builders Supply had advised her to vent the heater, but Stevie had resisted because of the inconvenience and expense. Maybe, though, the propane fumes and the depletion of oxygen in her upstairs study had combined to play tricks on her mind. Had she really heard that raspberry? Had she really seen the type disc spin out those last eight strident letters by itself?
Whether she had or hadn’t, the fact of what she, or it, had written would brook no disbelief. It was there to touch and look at, twenty-some bright, black characters, a graffito as perplexing and impersonal as a scrawled obscenity. What I have written, Stevie thought, I have written:
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.
VII
“Mom’s in a grumpy mood because she didn�
��t get a lick done all day,” Teddy said.
“Is that why we’re having chicken potpies?” Marella asked.
“The grumpiness I admit to,” Stevie said testily, stooping before the oven to peer at the potpies dripping beige lava on the burnt-black baking sheet. “What that has to do with our evening menu, though, escapes me. There’s nothing wrong with potpies, for God’s sake. They’re inexpensive, and reasonably nutritious, and you’ve both said you like them.”
“Once in a while,” Teddy said.
“I don’t like them,” Marella corrected her mother, “I never told you I liked them.”
“And you always fix ’em when you’re in a grumpy mood, Mom. If you were feelin’ great and somebody served you one, you’d turn grumpy. That’s the way it is with you and potpies.”
“Listen, buster, if anybody in this house served me anything, I’d turn a cartwheel for joy. As soon as basketball season’s over—season’s a great word for it; you never even play any games—anyway, as soon as these nightly practice sessions are over, you can take over the chef’s duties.” One hand hidden in a padded glove, Stevie carried the baking sheet to the table and upended a potpie on each plate. “Beggars can’t be choosers, and fanny-sitters can’t be grousers. My alleged grumpiness does not revoke these hallowed rules, and I’m damn tired of hearing about it.”
“It’s not alleged,” Teddy said. “You admitted it yourself.”
Stevie gave the boy a long withering look, and they ate for a while in silence. Marella, Stevie noticed, toyed with her dinner, plunging a fork into each tidbit of chicken and revolving it skeptically in front of her before either eating it or dislodging it from the tines beside her salad. Had she fully recovered from her virus? Her face looked drawn, almost transparently pale. As for the potpies, well, they would probably never elicit a rave review from Julia Child or Gourmet magazine, and Stevie began to feel sorry for the girl.
“Why couldn’t you get anything done?” Teddy asked. “I thought those people Sam and Elsa know fixed your typewriter.”
“The typewriter wouldn’t cooperate,” Marella said. “It’s fixed, but it wrote Mama a nasty note.”
“I was being facetious, Marella. It just seemed the silly thing was acting up, resisting me. That’s the kind of day I had. Of course, being told how grumpy I am and having my delicious dinner insulted has improved my spirits so much that I may try to do some work this evening.”
“Oh, Mama,” said Marella, crestfallen. “Please don’t.”
“Why not? If you’d like to see sirloin strip on this table again, or even prime ground round, Mama’s gotta grind it out. Otherwise it’s vitamin bars and chicken tripe forever.”
The children stared at her, uncomprehending.
“That’s a sort of a joke, just to prove I’m not all that horrendously grumpy. Bars and tripe forever. Stars and stripes forever. See?”
Marella said, “I wanted you to help me memorize my lines for our Fabulous February skit.”
“You were home all day yesterday,” Stevie pointed out. “Why didn’t you mention your skit then? This is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“She was having too much fun pretending to be sick.”
“I was not!” Marella replied, glowering at Ted. “I forgot about it. Miss Kirkland reminded us today.”
“Now who’s the grump?” Teddy said.
Lord, thought Stevie. Spare me this persnickety hassle. I was almost coming out of it, but if these two get going, I’m liable to lapse and dump my potpie right into somebody’s lap.
Blessedly, the telephone rang. Teddy left the table to answer it. “It’s for you, Mom,” he said, bringing her the receiver on its curly elastic cord. “Long distance, I think. Sounds sorta echoey, anyway.” Stevie took the receiver and murmured a hesitant hello.
“Mrs. Crye,” came the familiar monotone. “Mrs. Crye, this is Seaton Benecke. In Columbus. I . . . I called to see if your typewriter was working okay. I’m the person who fixed it. I’m just checking up for the company. It’s our policy to do that a day or two after a repair.”
“Oh,” said Stevie, nonplused by both the caller’s identity and the inquiring looks on her children’s faces. “Oh, it’s fine. It’s working just fine. It’s me who needs a tune-up, I’m afraid. My brain’s a little muzzy. The work didn’t go well today. The typewriter, though, it worked just fine.”
“That’s good.”
The words simply hung there, awaiting Stevie’s disagreement or concurrence. “Yes, it’s good,” she obliged the young man. “I’m lost without that machine, even when I exasperate myself by not using it well.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well,” she said, “is that all? I’d talk longer, but we’re right in the middle of dinner.”
“I wanted to thank you for the five-dollar tip. My dad gave it to me yesterday afternoon.”
“You’re perfectly welcome, Seaton. You earned it. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been more.”
“I think a writer’s machine should be in tiptop shape.” Again, an annoying pause designed to prompt her response or to let Benecke think. But before Stevie could mutter another broad hint about their dinner hour, he found his tongue: “So if you have any trouble, Mrs. Crye, I’d be glad to ride up and fix it. It wouldn’t cost much. I have a motorcycle.” His next pause was briefer. “Probably, though, you won’t need to call me.”
“I appreciate your concern, Seaton.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Crye.”
“Good night. Thanks for calling.”
When Seaton broke the connection, Stevie gave the receiver to Teddy to hang back up. The boy returned to the table wearing a Cheshire cat grin.
“What’s that for?” Stevie demanded.
“I guess it’s about time you had a gentleman caller, huh? I guess Marella and me wouldn’t mind having a new dad.”
“Ugh,” said the girl. “Yuck.”
Stevie shuddered. Marella had succinctly articulated her own feelings about the prospect. Especially, she was afraid of this woebegone prospect (a word altogether unacceptable in its application to Seaton), who was almost a decade younger than she.
“You’re way off base, young man. Way off base.”
“I’m basketball, Mom. You’ve got the wrong sport.”
“I probably do,” Stevie observed. “I probably do.”
VIII
After the children were in bed, snuggled beneath their electric blankets against the damp mid-February cold, Stevie returned to her study and lit the space heater. Marella, as usual, had already learned her part in Miss Kirkland’s corny but well-intentioned skit, and the mandatory rehearsal session after dinner had not taken long. Unfortunately, the temperature in Stevie’s study had dropped twenty or thirty degrees since late afternoon, and she doubted she could raise it enough to make sitting at the Exceleriter a bearable enterprise. Her feet had gone numb inside two pairs of socks, and her breath was spilling from her nostrils and lips like smoke from a burning building.
This is no place to keep an expensive typewriter, Stevie scolded herself. No wonder you’ve had trouble with it.
The machine did require a long time to warm up in the mornings. Even though she lit her Dearborn and turned the Exceleriter on before going downstairs to prepare the kids’ breakfast, on really cold mornings the machine might not accelerate to top speed until she had finished a page and a half of double-spaced copy. A good thing she had not mentioned that to the jerks at PDE. They would have told her she had reaped just what she had sown, breakdowns being the natural consequence of improper storage and skimpy maintenance, blah blah blah & blah.
Shivering, Stevie slid into her chair and removed the typewriter’s dust cover. The page bearing the “nasty note” was still on the platen: TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT. Well, not quite. Cold weather and their operators’ disobedient fingers often sabotaged them, even when a giant corporation like PDE supposedly stood behind them.
Stevie pulled the typed-upon page from the E
xceleriter and wound in a clean sheet. Although she had pretty much decided to get a fresh start tomorrow, this visit to her study was a necessary step in reasserting her dominion over a mere assemblage of pulleys, levers, wires, keys, and cams. She would not do any real work, but would call the electric demon’s bluff. Mockery was a time-honored form of one-upmanship. She would mock the Exceleriter’s presumption as it had earlier mocked hers. At the top of the clean page, then, Stevie energetically lampooned the monster:
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIXIOUS!
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNOXIOUS!!!
So there. Without removing this page or replacing the machine’s dust cover, Stevie hit the on/off control and leaned back to admire her handiwork. Later, her authority reestablished, she shut off the flow of propane to the space heater, doused the room’s overhead light, and tiptoed into her bedroom to crawl beneath her own electric blanket. It was warm, luxuriously warm, and once her feet had thawed, she forgot the frustrations of the past two days and fell into a heavy sleep.
IX
Stevenson Crye could never remember her dreams, but this one, as she endured it, lashed her with a multitude of familiar anxieties and a few completely fresh ones. Groping for a handle on her whereabouts, chagrined that the ghastly imagery of her dreams had again eluded her, she awoke in a bath of sweat. As usual, she had washed ashore ignorant of the size and number of the nightmarish jellyfish whose stings had scourged her. She kicked aside her blankets and lay in the frigid gloom trying to recover her wits. Her sweat began to dry, her body to convulse. She grabbed her shabby housecoat from the bottom of the bed and hurriedly snugged it about her shoulders.
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 4