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Miriam’s knees buckled, and she started to cry, just a little. How to explain, in any language, why she behaved this way? She had come to Mexico in hopes that she could stop explaining once and for all. She had come to Mexico to escape the phone calls, the ones where no one ever spoke. (“Dave?” she yelled into the empty air. “Who is this? Why are you calling me?” Once, just once, she had forgotten herself and said “Honey?” only to hear a sharp intake of breath.) She had come to Mexico to start over, and here she was, trapped in the same old life. Amazing, the levels of pain, the subtle variations, even after more than a decade. Miriam lived every day with a dull, chronic ache, like some permanent nerve damage she had learned to compensate for because there was no surgical fix. But no matter how careful she was, no matter how tenderly she protected these compromised joints and tendons, there were things that made the pain flare up, sudden and searing. Anything could trigger memories, even new experiences such as this, which she sought out hoping for a context in which the girls could not insert themselves. She looked at the white peacocks strutting across the lawn at a hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and burst into tears for the children who would have been delighted by them.
But the beauty of a first-class hotel, the whole point of paying seventy-five dollars a night when you could be just as comfortable for thirty, is that the staff is trained in unfaltering politeness. The señora must be tired after her long day of travel, the blond man told the hovering staff-in Spanish, yet Miriam could understand his Spanish, which was not as rapid, whose words did not run pell-mell into each other. She was escorted to a sparkling room, where a maid brought her fresh-squeezed orange juice. The maid then gave her a tour of the room’s amenities. Nothing was too small, too trivial, to be explained. She indicated a rug on the floor. For your little feet. She showed her a bowl of fruit. In case you have hunger. And, at last, she placed a small pillow on the snowy white bed and urged her to lie down. For your little head, Miriam translated. For your little head.
Miriam pantomimed her desire for a glass of water, which would have to be distilled or purified, even in this shining place. She then tried to ask if it was necessary to dress for di
“¿Tiene sueño?” the maid then asked, and Miriam started. But she was only being asked if she was sleepy, not if she had dreams.
She surrendered to the bed and when she awoke, night had fallen and the hotel lawn was full of people having drinks and di
CHAPTER 35
“Barb, I lost my story!”
The cry, all too familiar at this time of the afternoon, came from the usual source, a messy desk in a corner of the newsroom, a desk piled so high with papers and reports that its occupant would have been virtually invisible if it weren’t for her towering hairstyle. A tiny, formidably stylish woman, Mrs. He
“Let me see, Mrs. He
“Did you save as you wrote?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“Well, I tabbed at the end of every paragraph.”
“The tab key doesn’t save. You have to execute the save command, Mrs. He
“I don’t know what you mean.” Mrs. He
“If you hit ‘Function 2’ every ’graph or so, then the computer will store a copy of your file and continue to update it. You never saved this work. As far as the computer’s concerned, it doesn’t exist. It can’t save what it can’t see.”
“What do you mean, it can’t see it? It’s right there,” she said, gesturing at the screen with her be-ringed fingers. “It was right there,” she amended, given that the screen was blank. “I could see it. These machines are useless.”
Barb always felt defensive on the computer system’s behalf, flawed as she knew it to be. The Gazette, part of a small chain, had the incompatible habits of being progressive in its thinking and tight with its coffers, a combination that had brought them this dinosaur of a system, one that wasn’t intended for newspaper work. “It’s a tool, like anything else. When you used typewriters, there was no copy unless you inserted carbon paper. It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”
The saying, one of her father’s, came out of nowhere. As usual, she felt wistful and sad and anxious all at once, as if this wisp of an echo could unravel her life.
“What did you say to me?” Mrs. He
Barb might have been worried, if she hadn’t witnessed the same performance at least twice a month since she’d started working in the newsroom last summer. Mrs. He
“If you could just see your way to being a bit more tactful with her…” the editor, Mike Bagley, began.
“I’ll try,” Barb said. “I do try. Do you ask her to be more tactful with me? She treats me like her personal servant. Granted, the computer eats her work every now and then, but most of her problems stem from the fact that she refuses to do the most basic stuff correctly. I’m not her keeper.”