The Corrections

flutes. But there was never much satisfaction for Denise in competing with girls. She’d insisted on the trumpet, and Alfred had backed her up, and eventually it had dawned on Enid that rental fees could be avoided if Denise used Gary’s old trumpet.
    Unlike sheet music, unfortunately, the signal diagrams that Denise was given to copy and file that summer were unintelligible to her. Since she couldn’t compete with the draftsmen, she competed with the boy who’d worked in Signals the previous two summers, Alan Jamborets, the corporation counsel’s son; and since she had no way to gauge Jamborets’s performance, she worked with an intensity that she was certain nobody could match.
    “Denise, whoa, God, damn,” Laredo Bob, a sweating Texan, said while she was cutting and collating blueprints.
    “What?”
    “You gonna burn yourself out going that fast.”
    “Actually, I enjoy it,” she said. “Once I’m in the rhythm.”
    “Thing is, though,” Laredo Bob said, “you can leave some of that for tomorrow.”
    “I don’t enjoy it that much.”
    “OK, well, but y’all take a coffee break now. You hear me?”
    Draftsmen were yipping as they trotted toward the hallway.
    “Coffee time!”
    “Snack cart’s here!”
    “Coffee time!”
    She worked with undiminished speed.
    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 viewof 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 seemednot 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