The Corrections

trivial. He still managed a reasonably wicked laugh, but in the end the struggle to hold fast to the trivial proved as desperate as any other. When Denise said goodbye and kissed him, he seemed not to apprehend her personally. He smiled with downcast eyes, as if he were a special child whose beauty was to be admired and whose tragic situation pitied.
    She never saw Don Armour again either.
    On Monday, August 6, after a summer of give and take, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth reached agreement with the principal rail workers’ unions. The unions had made substantial concessions for the promise of less paternalistic, more innovative management, thus sweetening the Wroths’ $26/share tender offer for the Midland Pacific with a potential near-term savings of $200 million. The Midpac’s board of managers wouldn’t vote officially for another two weeks, but the conclusion was foregone. With chaos looming, a letter came down from the president’s office accepting the resignations of all summer employees, effective Friday, August 17.
    Since there were no women (besides Denise) in the drafting room, her co-workers prevailed on the Signal Engineer’s secretary to bake a farewell cake. It came out on her last afternoon of work. “I reckon it’s a major victory,” Lamar said, munching, “that we finally made you take a coffee break.”
    Laredo Bob dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.
    Alfred passed along a compliment in the car that night.
    “Sam Beuerlein,” he said, “tells me you’re the greatest worker he’s ever seen.”
    Denise said nothing.
    “You made a deep impression on those men. You opened their eyes to the kind of work a girl can do. I didn’t tell you this before, but I had the feeling the men were dubious about getting a girl for the summer. I think they expected a lot of chattering and not much substance.”
    She was glad of her father’s admiration. But his kindness, like the kindness of the draftsmen who weren’t Don Armour, Had become inaccessible to her. It seemed to fall upon her body, to refer to it somehow; and her body rebelled.
    Denise - uh - why - you - done, what- you- did?
    “Anyhow,” her father said, “now you’ve had a taste of life in the real world.”

Until she actually got to Philadelphia, she’d looked forward to going to school near Gary and Caroline. Their big house on Seminole Street was like a home without home’s sorrows, and Caroline, whose beauty could make Denise breathless with the sheer privilege of speaking to her, was always good for reassurance that Denise had every right to be driven crazy by her mother. By the end of her first semester of college, though, she found that she was letting Gary leave three messages on her telephone for every message she returned. (Once, just once, there was a message from Don Armour which she likewise did not return.) She found herself declining Gary’s offers to pick her up at her dorm and return her after dinner. She claimed she had to study, and then, instead of studying, she watched TV with Julia Vrais. It was a hat trick of guilt: she felt bad for lying to Gary, worse for blowing off her work, and worst of all for distracting Julia. Denise could always pull an all-nighter, but Julia was useless after ten o’clock. Julia had no motor and no rudder. Julia could not explain why her fall schedule consisted of Intro Italian, Intro Russian, Eastern Religion, and Music Theory; she accused Denise of having had unfair outside help in choosing her balanced academic diet of English, history, philosophy, and biology.
    Denise for her part was jealous of the college “men” in Julia’s life. Initially both she and Julia had been besieged . An inordinate number of the junior and senior “men” who banged their trays down beside them in the dining hall were from New Jersey. They had middle-aged faces and mega-phonic voices with which they compared math curricula or reminisced about that time they went to Rehoboth Beach and got so wasted. They had only three questions for Julia and Denise: (1) What’s your name? (2) What dorm are you in? and (3) Do you want to come to our party on Friday? Denise was amazed by the rudeness of this summary exam and no less amazed by Julia’s fascination with these Teaneck natives with monster digital wristwatches and merging eyebrows. Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody has stale bread in his pocket. Leaving a party, she would shrug and tell