by Smiley, Jane
“True enough. I’ve got to tell you that this proposal has gone all the way to the top, not just of Egg and Milk, but to the top of the top, to Martin himself. That’s where they REALLY like it. The old man fancies himself a lifelong innovator.”
Dean didn’t know who Martin was, but Richards’ tone was reverent. Dean pretended he didn’t notice, adopted his own tone of casual but superior knowledge. “Hal, let me tell you a story. You know the story of the invention of the computer?”
“No.”
“You should ask Isaacs. I bet he knows.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, the short version is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late thirties never patented a thing—not the memory bank or the digitizing system or the application of binary numbers to the problem of computing. Not the drum or the switch, nothing. And the university over there didn’t take enough notice to do it for him, even in their own name, even as a crazy idea that might go somewhere. They forgot about the old machine, and threw it out, but when it came down to a court case about ten years or so ago between Sperry and Hewlett-Packard concerning who owned the patents, it turned out that nobody did. Now, that’s nice for us computer users, wouldn’t you say? But is that where Egg and Milk wants to be in twenty years?”
Samuels was silent for a long moment in which Dean could sense him adding up numbers. Finally, he said, “I think, Dean, that that’s a story the boss would like to hear. That’s true, right?”
“Call your friend Isaacs.”
“Naw, I’m going to call Martin himself. Then I’m going to call you right back.” He chuckled. “I don’t want to get a busy signal when I call you.”
“You can’t always get what you want, Hal. I got students calling all the time, asking for lab help and deadline extensions.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Betting takes money, Hal.”
They both laughed, and after a moment hung up. Dean leaned way back in his chair and stretched until each of his vertebrae seemed free and mobile. Then he let his head drop until he could see upside down out the window, and thought, Ring! The phone rang. It was Lawrence, a V.P. at Consolidated Embryo. Dean said, “Look, Bill, let me tell you a little story—”
25
A Revision of the Future
Assignment: You are to take a single paragraph of one of the stories that you have written so far this semester and expand that one paragraph to the length of the original story. The goal of this assignment is to excavate your knowledge of this situation or these characters much more deeply than you have, or, preferably, to learn to imagine them more complexly, more fully, in more detail, etc.
Gary—
I have decided since our talk to let you revise the Lydia and Lyle story, since you seem far more committed to that one than to the mass murderer-execution story. Your specific assignment in this revision, though, is to find some redeeming qualities of character OR personality in the Lydia figure.
Oct. 19, 1989
Monahan, FW 325
“Waking Up”
a story by Gary Olson
Lydia woke up and heaved her giant body over onto its side. She wondered, as she did every morning, how had she gotten like this? In college, only ten years ago, she had been thin and stylish. She had worn a size six with ease. And all her hair had fallen out, too. In college, she had had long thick blond hair, the envy of all the other girls. Now she was nearly bald. Actually, what had happened to her made her very sad. She couldn’t help blaming the kids, who she thought were at school. She laid there. Then it came into her mind that she hadn’t finished the box of candy she’d been eating the night before during the Johnny Carson show, so she felt around on the floor for it. They were gone, though. She decided to blame the dog. She yelled, “Brownie, get in here!”
What happened was that she had gained lots of weight with each of her pregnancies. She couldn’t help that. Her mother always said that it was glandular. With the boy, Frankie, she had gained eighty pounds and with the girl, Allison, she had gained over a hundred. Being pregnant gave her a big craving for junk food. She would eat five or six Big Macs at a meal, and a couple of McShakes, and then come home and have a big bowl of popcorn. She said to Lyle, “Well, I just can’t help it,” and it was true that she couldn’t. He knew that from college when they would argue about her weight. Lyle thought that maybe it was his fault for talking about it all those early years, and so he felt guilty and that’s why he stuck with her.
The boy, Frankie, weighed five pounds at birth and Allison weighed four. Nothing made a dent in what she had gained. Now everybody was afraid of her, even though she didn’t want them to be, and was really a rather nice person underneath. What she really wanted was for Lyle to make love to her again, but Lyle had seen what could happen, and didn’t want to take any chances.
She thought about how she had been in college—she had been very sexy. She wanted to be that way again.
The dog was afraid of her, and just hid under the kitchen table.
Suddenly, Lydia realized that her daughter and her son were in the room. They were sitting very quietly in the corner, huddled together. She thought that the worst thing that could happen would be if the same thing that had happened to her would happen to Allison. She felt tears come to her eyes at the thought and then run down her cheeks. She said to herself, “I wish I could die.” The children were holding hands. Lydia said, “Why aren’t you kids in school?”
(Even though he had come to the end of the original paragraph, Gary added two paragraphs to fill out the length demanded by the assignment.)
She made herself sit up. She could not help looking down at herself, seeing her giant breasts cascading over her giant stomach. She said, in her own mind, “Inside this big body, there is a thin, nice person trying to get out. When it gets out, then I will be able to take better care of my children and be more attractive to my husband, Lyle, who had lots of promise when he was an engineering student in college, but now works in a factory and is downtrodden and depressed.”
Frankie came over to the bed. He said, “We’re hungry, Mama.”
The End
Gary took a meditative handful of popcorn, then a sip of his McShake. Truly he felt that Lydia was a much more rounded character now. For one thing, she was sad about being fat and she really wanted to be a good mother. He wasn’t really sure about the glandular thing, but he had heard his grandmother and her sister say that about one of the neighbors. He could always change that part if Monahan didn’t like it.
Just that evening, Lyle and Lydia had had a big fight, right in the apartment, and Gary had tried to figure out a way to fit that in, somehow, but it hadn’t been about weight, it had been about the sheets on Lyle’s bed, which were filthy because he hadn’t bothered to send his laundry home in four weeks and he had forgotten the sheets the previous time anyway. Gary more or less agreed with Lydia that all the solutions Lyle proposed (sleeping on top of the blankets with his sleeping bag over them, ignoring the dirt, wearing some clothes to bed, all solutions that Lyle considered sufficient for himself) were both disgusting and revealing of deep character flaws. He also agreed that Lydia shouldn’t be asked to wash them and knew what Lydia suspected, that Lyle had said two or three times, while taking swigs from the milk carton, that when the sheets got black enough she would break down and do them—it was a test of their relationship. Gary, himself, had even offered to show Lyle how to do the laundry; it was especially not hard to do the sort of laundry Lyle had, everything at least 50 percent polyester, even his jeans, and guaranteed not to shrink or bleed.
It was exactly this sort of thing, in Gary’s opinion, that was so hard to deal with in a story. It was bad enough that Lydia was neither fat nor ill-tempered, bad enough that Lyle’s transformation from engineering student to factory worker could probably only be accomplished by brain transplant. What was worse was the way his personal loyalties seemed to shift around in this slippery way, confusing his narr
ative line. And worse than that was that he now couldn’t stop paying attention to Lyle and Lydia. Avoidance had turned into obsession. Was it just by chance that he listened to all their conversations, noted what they wore and ate, had Lyle’s daily routine (not an edifying one) down pat? Of course not. He could say that the obsession was Professor Monahan’s fault—he was always harping about details and paying attention, but he also knew that if Professor Monahan and English 325 dropped over the edge of the Earth, he would still keep teasing this scab.
And it wasn’t as if he were getting an A, either. The worst of the worst was that he knew the story was bad and he still couldn’t leave it alone. He pressed the “Save” and “Quit” commands on his computer, and here came Lydia. She ruffled his hair and said, “Whatcha doin’?”
“Writing a story about you? How’s that?”
“Better not.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Listen, have you read Lysistrata, that play?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, explain that to Lyle when he comes in. Explain that’s why I’ve taken my stuff back to my dorm. I’ll see you around.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Really and truly?”
“Lyle Karstensen is history.”
He looked at her. She didn’t look upset. She looked the way girls did when they were shooting out of the known universe and had no fear. This capacity was something he had seen only in girls, and one of the reasons he liked them so much, but how could he fit that into his story? He said, “I would like to see you around.”
“We’ll see, Gary, okay?”
“Okay.”
She picked up her bag and opened the door. After it closed behind her, he opened his document again. He just couldn’t help it.
26
Clutter
THE NEXT MORNING, just before seven, Lyle arrived at his job at Auroch Copies, as he did every morning between Tuesday and Saturday, his white bag of donuts clenched between his teeth and his eighteen-ounce cup of black coffee in his hand. Everything was as usual except that, as far as he understood, Lydia had dumped him because of some play that he’d never heard of that she and Gary had been reading together although they weren’t in any of the same classes.
This eventuality confirmed suspicions about Gary that Lyle’d harbored all fall, that he was after Lydia’s ass and had been working covertly against himself, Lyle, while his, Lyle’s, back was turned. This thing about the bedsheets wasn’t convincing at all—it was too sudden.
The overnight manager left, and as soon as he was gone, Gary laid out his six donuts in order—maple nut, powdered sugar, cherry, chocolate frosted, glazed, and plain. Breakfast, he knew, was the most important meal of the day.
Nevertheless, while he dismissed Lydia’s specific point about the sheets, he couldn’t help acknowledging that the shit all around him was getting deeper, and it was time to shovel some of it out. Here at Auroch Copies, for example, the bins were full of unclaimed originals, books from libraries public and private, and unclaimed stacks of copies. Rules handed down from the main office in Ann Arbor were clear—every week, send originals back to their place of origin, put coursework booklets in the stockroom for the duration of the semester or quarter, and hold private materials for twenty-one days, calling the client each week, then discard. Adhering to these rules was point three in Lyle’s job description, but his own rule was simpler—after a couple of months, throw everything out except books from the university library or the public library. If a disgruntled customer happened to appear during Lyle’s shift, the rule was to say that he’d just started working here in the last few days. If the customer recognized him (this had happened once), he liked to say that he’d been out of work, in the hospital, and had only just gotten back (and, of course, found the place in a royal mess).
Today was the day.
You had to admit it was pretty invigorating, and socially conscious, too, to heave those stacks of office paper into the giant recycling bin out in the back, to rip the brightly colored covers off, to empty the cubbies of Keats poems and papers about ag economics and fisheries biology, to box the books and address them to Circulation, University Library (they were always grateful). It felt like getting younger again, as if that state of unmarked whiteness, of waiting reams and copiers with their counters at zero, of full staplers, of passing that first dollar (on the wall, laminated, dated September 1, 1982), was being regained.
Lydia should see him now. She’d have those sheets off the bed in no time.
He came to the “oversize” cubby and pulled out some plans for a guy named Joe Miller, no phone.
He had a respect for plans, having drawn some up for engineering classes over the years. But these, you couldn’t even tell the top from the bottom—the words were turned in all directions, there was no scale, no title. Weird. Some kind of machine, maybe. He rotated the paper and scrutinized the drawing. A bicycle wheel. A compressor fan. A network of hoses. When he rotated it again, more familiar objects appeared—a couple of fan belts and a gearing mechanism, a big drum.
The bell rang above the door.
Lyle dropped the plans back into the oversize bin. They were maybe the only intriguing thing he had ever seen at Auroch Copies. As he stepped to the counter, he felt the cleaning urge dissipate for another month or so. That was okay, too. The customer took her hat off and smiled. Red hair fell in a wave over the shoulders of her jacket. She said, “I’d love for you to copy a whole book for me.”
He gave her his most serious look. “Do you have publisher permission, miss?”
“Why, no, but I’ve just got to have it. I’m flunking this course because the teacher is so unrealistic! There’s all this reserve reading and it’s so hard to get to the library. But I managed to get the book for a couple of hours.” She unzipped her backpack and pulled it out, then set it on the counter. Clearly marked on the cover were the words “Two-hour reserve, do not remove from reserve room.” They read them together.
It was a thick book, probably three hundred pages or more.
Lyle said, “The whole thing?”
“Yes, isn’t that awful? When she told us we had to read the whole thing, I’m, like, gagging!”
“You can use that machine by the wall.”
“But I have to go to class! I am just in such trouble. I’d be so grateful! I can’t tell you. Please?”
Her lips were perfectly lipsticked and glossed. They lingered in a smoochie way over the “p” in “Please?” then stretched around the “ee.” Lydia’s lips had been a little on the thin side. The girl lifted her red hair off the back of her neck. Lyle said, “Come back after your class. We’ll see.” He hadn’t cracked a smile the whole time. Smiles were for later. She put her little gloved hands up to his cheeks and he felt their soft wooliness. She said, “Ooh, thanks. You are sweet.”
“I said, ‘We’ll see.’ ” He thought, what we will see. He thought, if he mailed his laundry today, he might get it back by Saturday.
EVEN SHERRI had to admit that almost two months of making up for time lost back home was beginning to tell on her. Midterm exams, for instance, were speeding toward her like a brick wall, ten days away. At this point, though, she was still just clutching the wheel and gazing at them in horror, enthralled by coming failure. She wondered if they made you leave right away, or if they let you stagger around with your injuries until the end of the semester, but she was afraid to ask anyone, because anyone she might ask would encourage her, buck her up, stiffen her spine, and then she would have to start in on all that work she had to make up, and it was somehow easier, however frightening, to careen through each day alone in the knowledge of how badly she was doing.
On the other hand, she looked great. Kids from her old school didn’t even recognize her. She who had been big was now little. She who had had straight light brown hair was now a curly redhead. She whose face had been terminally round now had cheekbones, along with collarbones, hipbones, a
nkles, insteps. She who had once taken a boring call from Darryl every night at exactly nine o’clock now never knew who was calling, and they didn’t call to complain, either, as Darryl had; no no, they called to tease her and flirt with her and entice her to go out with them, and never on study dates to the library. The thing was, Mary had fixed on that Palestinian guy, and Diane was gaga for some reason over Big Bob, who was just like every guy Sherri knew back home, but Sherri had fixed on a life and she loved it as deeply and romantically as the others seemed to love their boyfriends. Its virtues were minimal sex combined with maximal attention, swirling variety in friends and party associates, lots of activity of the sort your parents were always restricting—not drugs and drink and sex so much as running around just because you felt like it and screaming and singing and cultivating high spirits.
She didn’t go to class, as she had told Lyle, but went back to her room at Dubuque House. If you shirked all your responsibilities you could have this in college, too—privacy, a nice little nap. She wrapped up in Keri’s afghan and fell onto her bed. Soon her deliciously favorite sensation of abandonment was diffusing through her.
27
Call for Papers
THE FOUNDATION FOR BLACK ENDEAVOR didn’t do anything on the cheap, Margaret Bell noticed as she inspected the envelope she had just gotten in the mail, and she was immediately suspicious. From pamphlets to smudgy Xeroxes to dittoed newsletters, the literature of the organizations she trusted was always produced on the cheap, always announced itself as marginalized and therefore trustworthy—the crackpot was openly crackpot, the sane and the profound were honestly sane and profound. But a letter from the Foundation for Black Endeavor, an organization she had never heard of, was proof that she had gotten on some unfortunate mailing list and now IT would commence. In America, it was the most common form of betrayal. As soon as you accomplished something, anything, that caught their attention, they started trying to raise you out of your natural milieu. Of course her betrayer was certainly the university, which must have given out, or sold, all the names of those newly promoted to the rank of full professor.