The Corrections

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.