She did make Colin flinch; she had to admit that. But she didn’t make him back down. “You know what I mean,” he said.
“I may know, but I still think you’re wrong,” she answered. “A lot of the time, people hit kids to make themselves feel better. That’s not a good enough reason, not in my book.”
“Ha! You’ll find out!” he said, and, much as she wished she could, she couldn’t ignore the certainty in his voice. He had years’ more experience in such things than she did. He went on, “I didn’t say smack ’em all the time. I didn’t even say to do it very often. You do it a lot, it stops meaning much. But every once in a while, you’ll decide it’s the only way you can make sure they get the point.”
“Hmp,” she said, a syllable that meant I don’t believe it for a minute. They left it there; they didn’t do much out-and-out quarreling. Time would tell which of them had it straight, or if either one did.
VII
Vanessa Ferguson swore in Serbo-Croatian—in Serbian, Bronislav would have said. She certainly imitated his accent, not the one a Croat would have used. As far as she could tell, the difference between the two was about as big as the difference between Brooklyn and Alabama.
She’d heard people say you couldn’t get any satisfaction cussing in a language not your own. She wasn’t so sure of that. Serbo-Croatian’s gutturals and heavy rolled R’s—she had a decent ear, and could do them pretty well—seemed made for telling other people where to go and how to get there.
Best of all, as long as she didn’t scream out the foreign profanity, she could use it at Nick Gorczany’s widget works. Even muttering you stupid son of a motherfucking bitch would get you talked about—possibly fired, if the stupid SOB in question was the boss, as it all too often was. But the Serbo-Croatian equivalent hardly got noticed.
She despised her job with the hopeless hatred of someone who knew how unlikely she was to find anything better. Fixing other people’s dreadful prose all day was not the kind of work that inspired you towards admiration of your fellow man—or woman. Someone had once said that people were the missing link between apes and human beings. Whoever that was, Vanessa was convinced he’d been an optimist. As far as she was concerned, her coworkers still walked on their knuckles, picked fleas from their friends’ armpits, and used sticks to hunt termites for a snack.
The widget works was trying to land a Federal contract that would make sure it stayed in business a few years longer. With fiendish gusto, Vanessa tore the first draft of the proposal to bloody bits. She did her best to translate it into something related to English. Her red marks didn’t outnumber the black ones on the pages, but they came close. She tossed the bloodied document on Mr. Gorczany’s desk.
Did he thank he for her diligence? Not a chance. He called her in on the carpet (the stuff in his office was softer and thicker than the industrial-strength junk the peons had to walk on). Patting the wounded proposal, he asked, “Did you have to be quite so thorough?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gorczany,” she said, which would have been fine had she left it there. But then she added, “Which dumb parts do you wish I’d left in?”
He had a blunt, bulbous nose. If it had been a little bigger, it would have given him the look of a blond Elmer Fudd. Elmer Fudd couldn’t flare his nostrils, though, and Nick Gorczany could. “The engineers and I worked hard on that,” he said.
The and I told her she was in trouble. Nobody got off on having his own deathless words edited (Vanessa didn’t herself, but chose not to remember that). More cautiously, she answered, “I do think I’ve made it better. I cut out a lot of repetition.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll need to put some of that back in,” Gorczany said. “When you deal with the Feds, first you tell ’em what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you’ve told them. Otherwise, they don’t get it.”
Vanessa’s lips moved, not quite soundlessly: “Jeben te u glavu bluntavu.” The curse meant something like Fuck you in your stupid head. Bronislav thought it was funny that she wanted to learn obscenities in his language. A proper Serb woman, he made it plain, wouldn’t come out with such things. Vanessa wasn’t a Serb and wasn’t proper, so she didn’t care.
She wasn’t soundless enough, either. “What did you say?” Nick Gorczany asked.
“Nothing,” she replied sweetly. “I was just trying to figure out what to uncut, if you know what I mean.”
“Huh,” he said. He might be illiterate, he might bring out that stupid cliché about telling things three times as if he’d just made it up, but he knew an insubordinate employee when he saw one. But Vanessa hadn’t been very loud, and she also hadn’t spoken English. He suspected, but he couldn’t prove, so he went on, “Never mind, then. Fix it up, uh-huh, but not like this.”
“Repetitively repetitious,” Vanessa said.
She was pushing things, but she got away with it. Her boss nodded. “That’s right,” he said. His sarcasm detector hadn’t gone off. Maybe it needed a new battery or something.
She made the second revision of the proposal dumber than the first one. If she wanted to go on getting paid, she had to keep Gorczany… not too unhappy. The really scary thing was, he might have been right when he claimed the Feds needed everything spelled out more than once.
All the same, the rewrite was the dictionary illustration for the term soul-deadening. Vanessa was swearing in English when she walked out of the widget works. She swore some more as she popped open her umbrella and trudged toward the bus stop. Nick Gorczany’s Beemer sat in lonely splendor in the company parking lot. He could still afford to drive in. Why not? He belonged to the one percent, not to the ninety-nine. Vanessa fought down the temptation to key the car. It would be just her luck to have a working surveillance camera catch her.
The supper she fixed herself was almost as crappy as an MRE. She couldn’t imagine anything worse to say about it. That she was choking on her own bile sure didn’t improve the flavor.
“There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said again and again as she washed several days’ worth of accumulated dishes. “There’s got to be.”
Her dumb little brother sold his stupid stories. He didn’t exactly make a living with them, but he did sell. Vanessa was sure she could outwrite Marshall in her sleep. She could… if only she found the time.
Here she was, all by herself in this crappy little apartment she could barely afford. If she couldn’t find the time now, when she loathed what she did every day, when would she ever?
For the moment, her place had power. She plugged in the secondhand laptop she’d got after she came back to L.A. and waited impatiently for it to boot up. She ran the battery as little as she could, because sometimes she had to wait a long time to charge up again.
On came Microsoft Word, as familiar to her as the shape of her own hands. She frowned, nodded to herself, and started to type. Beneath the bloated, leprous moon, Clotilda killed her lover. Ignoring the squiggly red line that appeared under Clotilda—Word was a fussbudget—she plunged ahead.
She kept plunging for a little more than a page. That was as far as she got on inspiration alone. Then she had to stop and think and work out what ought to happen next, and why it ought to, and how it should look when it did. Fussing and cussing under her breath (in English now—this was serious), she fought her way forward for another page. She felt as if she were hacking and slashing through thick jungle with a rusty machete.