Go on. Go on.
At last Stevie drew back the bedclothes, and, as she had known all along, uncovering Marella produced no surprise, no unbearable shock. The girl moaned because her blanket had been taken from her. She tilted her head, briefly opened unseeing eyes, and curled her nightgowned body into a tighter question mark. Asleep, lost in sleep, and Stevie pulled her covers back into place and tenderly tucked the overlap beneath the mattress. The typewriter’s version had been a lie. What else could it have been?
Stevie returned to her study, but paused outside it and looked in on Teddy, whose room, a cubbyhole in comparison to Marella’s, held the chilly southwest corner of the second floor—right across the hall from Stevie’s book-lined sanctorum. Teddy was a sound sleeper, much harder to wake up than his sister, for which reason Stevie felt no compunction about subjecting him to the glare of his overhead light.
He had thrown back the upper portion of his GE blanket and lay across the bed with his left foot dangling into space. He had also neglected, or disdained, to put on the tops of his pajamas. How he could sleep half-nude with temperatures under forty, even with his blanket securely in place, Stevie had no idea. The boy was incorrigible.
Just like his dad, she reflected. Though Georgia-born and -bred, Ted, Sr., had taken to cold weather like a polar bear, and when it came time for bed, he had no metabolic or psychological hangups about disrobing. While shivering under the covers in long Johns and woolen socks, Stevie had sometimes thought her laconic husband capable of sleeping naked in a snowdrift.
Young Teddy looked cold, though. His toplessness and his cast-back blanket had left him trembling, and as he trembled, he murmured unintelligible maledictions at the winter air. Indeed, one hand sought blindly for the edge of the missing blanket. Not finding it, the boy turned, moaning, to his left side.
Stevie went into the room to cover him. He was getting to be a handsome young man, growing up with astonishing speed. A year ago he had been a kid; now he was gaining weight, putting on muscle, discovering body hair in heretofore hairless places.
Beneath his right arm, which he had just flung over his head, Stevie could see a delicate brunet curl, a clock-spring of hair—symbolic, maybe, of his burgeoning maturity. His face still looked callow, the endearing mug of a wiseacre juvenile (its dearness a function of family connection, Stevie knew, and probably not readily evident to strangers), but his body was acquiring strength and something like an admirable classical purity. As she drew his blanket over his shoulders, Stevie kissed him lightly on the brow.
“Night, sport.”
After plunging his room into darkness again, she crossed the hall to her study. That damn Exceleriter. Its own spurious account of what she had done after waking to its mad electronic magic still lay on her dictionary stand. She picked up the sheet and read the story a third time. What wonderful phrases it contained: “Her clumsiness she charitably attributed” . . . “afraid to catch the Exceleriter” . . . “the percipient machine” . . . “solely because she had made a fool of herself ”—a host of casual digs that contained irritating glimmers of insight, even humor. Funny, very funny. A piece of electrically driven machinery was giving her the business.
Where was the other story? What had she done with the semijournalistic account of yesterday morning’s nightmare? Rummaging about, Stevie found this first example of the Exceleriter’s macabre literary talent on a package of typing paper on her rolltop. She reread this single page, its playful three-part headline concluding with the astute declaration: TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNOXIOUS!!! She had called that one, hadn’t she?
What you didn’t call, Stevie reminded herself, was the subject matter of tonight’s nightmare. You fed the machine a new strip of paper, and it outfoxed you. It wrote a brand-new story. If you want it to conclude the one it began last night, maybe you’ve got to use your head and make more careful arrangements. You’re smarter than that damned Exceleriter.
She wondered. The Exceleriter—this Exceleriter—was lots smarter than its PDE siblings; a veritable genius. An evil genius. In fact, that was the problem. She was attempting to match wits, not with a product of PDE technology, but with the unknown intelligence that had possessed her typewriter’s mundane metal and plastic parts. Once, after all, it had behaved as predictably, as docilely, as any well-mannered Smith-Corona, Royal, Olivetti, Xerox, Remington, or Olympia machine. But it had broken last Tuesday, she had taken it to Hamlin Benecke & Sons the following day, and ever since it had manifested a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality signaling . . . well, hell, Stevie, go ahead and say it, spit out those silly incantatory words . . . demonic possession.
Maybe her Exceleriter, once broken, had surrendered its motor functions to a demon precisely because the contemporary susceptibility to the power of this ancient concept—possession—had finally communicated itself to machines. And the most susceptible machines were the ones that broke and received repairs at the hands of disturbed amateurs like Seaton Benecke. Deepness was what Benecke really liked, that and not being afraid to write about fears and dark desires. Nitty-gritty stuff like that. The lesson for Stevenson Crye was all too clear.
“You should have paid the bastards at PDE their fifty-two dollars.”
She laughed mirthlessly. She had tried to beat Pantronics Data Equipment at its high-handed game, and what she had saved in money now threatened to bankrupt her beleaguered spirit.
Was it Seaton Benecke’s demon that inhabited the Exceleriter? Her dead husband’s? Her own? Or maybe simply—well, no, complexly—the terrible cacodemon of a single multinational concern? Maybe the vengeful PDE djinn was bending its enormous resources to the highly unprofitable business of driving her crazy. Well, let it—or whatever it was—try. She had not yet collapsed into a gibbering heap, and she was just as intent on learning what she could from the demon as it apparently was on achieving her breakdown.
Be smarter than the goddamn typewriter, gal.
To the 8½” x 11” sheet on which the machine had transcribed her first nightmare, Stevie taped five more sheets of typing paper. She then rolled this unwieldy train of pages into the Exceleriter, stopping at the bottom of the typed-upon sheet and aligning the type disc so that it could resume where it had left off. No one liked to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence. Maybe the machine’s mischievous demon would finish what it had begun:
“I fell apart down deep,” Crye said, a dead hand on his wife’s forehead. “If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because
“Because what?” Stevie asked. “Because what?”
To her intense astonishment the on/off control levered itself to the “on” position, and the Exceleriter began to hum. It then banged out a seven-word phrase and abruptly clicked off:
it was time for me to pay.”
For a moment the words meant nothing to Stevie. Despite having carefully prepared for this moment, she was dumbfounded by what she had just witnessed. Dumbfounded and spooked. Her hands tingled. Her spine felt like an ice-cold piece of wire hosting dozens of little chiming silver bells.
It was not as if some anonymous person had activated the Exceleriter by remote control, or as if the typewriter had responded to the instructions of a computer program. No, it was as if an invisible presence had sidled past her, typed those seven words, and just as blithely turned off the machine and retreated back into darkness—not to conceal itself, because its invisibility accomplished that, but simply to give Stevie a chance to think about the darker implications of its visit. A touch-typist thief in the night. A sixty-words-a-minute revenant to whose hit-and-run typing attacks she was instantly and maybe even everlastingly vulnerable.
When the tiny bells on her spine stopped jangling, Stevie clenched her fists and defiantly glanced about her study. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What right have you to invade my room, my house, my life?” Receiving no answer, either from the air or from the typewriter, she turned back to the machine to contemplate its final cryptic phrase.
“Tim
e to pay for what, Ted? Why do you keep me on tenterhooks? Why don’t you speak for yourself?”
But her invisible visitor—whether the demon of Ted or young Benecke or some other cruel jackanapes—had departed, and it would not return tonight. It wanted to leave her and those five Scotch-taped blank pages dangling. It wanted to make her anticipate with mounting impatience and bitterness its next visit. Well, she had already begun.
Nevertheless, Stevie removed the paper from the Exceleriter, separated the six sheets, and placed both upsetting stories—the one about Ted and the other about Marella—in a manila folder, which, in turn, she quickly crammed into the overladen filing cabinet beside her desk. Out of sight, out of mind. Ha! That was the most ridiculous aphorism she had ever heard—as she had gradually discovered over the months since Ted’s funeral. Out of sight, out of your mind. That was closer to it. However, Stevie believed you could be intermittently out of your mind without being certifiably insane forever.
She was not insane.
As she proved by returning to her bedroom and quietly talking herself into a deep, restful, and (apparently) dreamless sleep.
XVI
Saturday morning broke chilly but fair. The sky was baseball-summer blue, the air football-autumn brisk. Stevie was grateful for the good weather because the kids were home for the weekend and she needed to work. If Teddy could coax Marella outdoors to roller-skate on the quiet street in front of the house, or accompany her on a bike ride, or convince her to tag along when he went over to Pete Wightman’s, Poor Old Mom might be able to type up a submittable copy of her proposal for Two-Faced Woman. She needed to get that done. The post office closed at twelve-thirty on Saturdays, and she did not want to wait until Monday to get her work in the mail. Except for the article on the Ladysmith cancer clinic (the original deadline for which she had badly overshot), this past week had been, to succumb to cliché, An Unmitigated Disaster. Getting her proposal off to the Briar Patch Press, Inc., might mitigate it a little.
At breakfast both kids balked. Teddy did not want to babysit, and Marella wanted to invite Tiffany McGuire over to make up for having to leave her party yesterday afternoon. She and Tiff (she said, pleading her case) would stay in the den playing dolls, Outwit, Kings-in-the-Corner, and other such stuff, and they would both be Very Quiet. Teddy, on the other hand, said that Pete Wightman’s younger sisters would not be at home today (they were visiting their grandmother in Atlanta), and, anyway, he didn’t want Marella standing on the edge of Pete’s patio complaining about her cold feet while Pete and he played off the last round of the H-O-R-S-E tournament that darkness had interrupted Friday evening. Teddy therefore felt that Marella’s having Tiff over was The Perfect Solution.
“For you,” Stevie said. “That way you can go gallivanting off while I’m left to entertain your sister.”
“She and Tiff will entertain each other, Mom.” He was sitting at the breakfast bar, applying muscadine jelly to a piece of toast, and he tossed off this opinion as confidently as a big-shot city lawyer concluding his final arguments before a jury of untutored country folk.
“That’s what they say, and that’s what you say, but that’s not the way it works. I end up refereeing spats, cleaning up after ‘tea parties,’ listening to an impossible horde clomp up and down the stairs for Marella’s dolls and stuffed animals, and wondering what the hell they’re up to when it’s suddenly so quiet I could really get down to business if I weren’t worrying about the worrisome silence!” Stevie took a breath. “If you expect this household to survive—young man, little lady—I need some cooperation and a smidgen of help. We’ve had this discussion before, and I’m damn tired of it.”
Teddy’s look—the ill-disguised sneer of a would-be stud temporarily under the thumb of an uppity female—shocked her. It was eloquent of a gamut of bigotries. It drained the reservoir of tenderness she had replenished last night at his bedside. That it was altogether unlike her son and probably the consequence of a single moment’s disappointment and thoughtlessness did not lessen her anger. He knew better. She would teach him better.
“Listen, Herr Hotshot, H-O-R-S-E player of the year,” she said, pulling the hair at the nape of his neck, “I won’t be insulted in my own house by big-britches kids who spend the money I make, eat the food I bring home and prepare, and think they’re God’s own gift to the world for not being any more stuck-up than they already are! Do you hear me, Theodore Martin Crye the Living?”
Teddy ducked to extricate his neck hair from her fingers, while Marella, sitting over a bowl of Cheerios at the kitchen table, merely gaped. Their mother had seldom gone off the handle like this before.
“Do you hear me?”
Faintly: “Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you say something, Master Crye?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Teddy more loudly, still uncertain how to respond to this barrage. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you think you’re indispensable?”
“Ma’am?”
“Because nobody’s indispensable, and if you’re ever crazy enough to try to be, then you have to do something to qualify. No one becomes indispensable sitting on his butt. Or shooting baskets over at Pete Wightman’s house while barbarians sack his own.”
“I said we’d be quiet,” Marella interjected, indignant. “I said we’d be quiet, Mama, and we really will.”
“What you’ll be, daughter mine, is outside with your brother. Both of you together. At least until noon. No ifs, ands, or but-we’re-gonnas.” She stopped snatching at Teddy’s hair, picked up a plastic jug of milk with a dramatic flourish, and slammed it back into the refrigerator. “Besides, it’s a beautiful day. A gorgeous day. I wish I could be outside in it. But I’ve got to work, and you two are going to help me do that. Understand?”
Neither of the children said anything.
“Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they murmured together, genuinely chastened. Two years ago a scolding like that—a performance like that—would have elicited tears from Marella and a ritual sulk from Teddy. But the death of Ted, Sr., had endowed them with resilience. Looking from one to the other, Stevie could see that they were trying to bounce back, to accommodate their dependent lives to her goals and priorities. As well they should. Still, maybe she had come on too strong, hitting them with nukes when a dose of napalm would have sufficed. Forward Air Controller Stevie “Killer” Crye . . .
“We’ll throw the Frisbee in the back by the swing set,” Teddy said. “She needs to learn how to hold it. She holds it like a girl.”
Stevie chuckled mordantly. Marella asked if please couldn’t she just watch cartoons instead, that would keep her out of Mama’s hair, but Teddy pointed out that she had traded two hours of Saturday-morning cartoons for two hours of Friday-evening programming and that Mama wanted her outside in the fresh air. In his deliberate reasonableness he sounded uncannily like his dad, and even Marella surrendered to his arguments. If Big Brother and the Female Paterfamilias were against her, who could be for her?
As for Stevie, a few minutes later, she stared out the window over the kitchen sink regretting that she could not join the children in their game. Tossing a Frisbee would be fun, more fun than sitting at that damned—yes, damned—typewriter doing the dog work of a final copy. But the kids were cooperating, and maybe she could finish by noon.
XVII
She finished by eleven-thirty. She had even provided her proposal with a cover letter listing her previous credits, championing the relevance and marketability of her “package,” and offering to supply several more sample columns if her present selection whetted editorial appetite without yet convincing anyone in authority to send her a contract. A thoroughly professional performance, Stevie congratulated herself, slipping her morning’s work into a mailer. And the Exceleriter, her post-midnight bugaboo, why, it had cooperated fully, just as the kids had been cooperating. Indeed, she had found that during most daylight hours the Exceleriter was a sweetheart.
Time to get to the post office before closing. Stevie neatened her desk, put the dust cover over her machine, and went trippingly down the stairs and through the house to the VW van.
Teddy and Marella were no longer throwing the Frisbee (the joy of this activity apparently dissipated over a three-hour period), but playing with a neighborhood dog, a lovelorn basset hound that had developed an erotic fixation on Teddy’s pants legs. The boy was trying to interest the animal in taking a strip of paint-spattered dropcloth into its teeth for a game of Swing About, but the dog’s misdirected ardor was greater than its hankering for a platonic romp. Marella, poor child, seemed to be jealous of the attention it was bestowing on Teddy. She kept grabbing at the basset’s droopy scruff and speaking futile blandishments into its even droopier ear.
“Dear God,” said Stevie, laughing behind her hand. Then she shouted, “Send Cyrano home, Ted! I’ll be back from the post office in a few minutes, and we’ll eat lunch!” The children waved as she backed the microbus out of the driveway.
The post office was crowded, people trying to buy stamps or pick up mail before the weekend closing, some purchasing money orders, others insuring their packages or asking about special rates—with the result that Stevie spent twenty minutes in the narrow customer area before Mr. Hice, the postmaster, was able to wait on her. When she finally got her proposal off, she hurried out to her van for the three-block trip back over the railroad tracks and Barclay’s surprisingly busy main drag to the Crye house, a landmark Victorian structure that had been in Ted’s family since the days of the Great Depression, their one steadfast bulwark against poverty and rootlessness. It had saved Stevie and her small brood as it had once saved the elder Cryes and their children, all of whom had either died or moved away.
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 7
