David Wallace - Broom of the System

Walinda chuckled. “Ooh child. What’d Lenore’s little man think of that, I wonder. Was he sittin’ in her lap at the time?”

“Mr. Vigorous wasn’t there,” said Candy. “He apparently had some kind of appointment. I think you two were the only ones not there, of the day people.”

Walinda wet her finger and turned a time sheet. Candy started to get her things together in preparation for Vem’s arrival. Into her purse went her pack of Djarum; on went her shoes…

“Excuse me,” said a voice in front of the switchboard counter. “I’m looking for Mr. Lang.”

Walinda looked up briefly and narrowed her eyes and went back to her adding machine. Candy straightened up from putting on her shoes and looked into the eyes of Mindy Metalman Lang.

“I’m Mrs. Lang,” the woman said coolly. “I’m here looking for Mr. Lang. My husband. I was told by someone on the phone that he works here, even though the number they said was his when they put me through to him didn’t answer after thirty rings.”

Candy didn’t answer right away. She was busy staring at what she, Candice Eunice Mandible, would very probably be, had she not had the ever so slightest bit of an overbite, and had she had perhaps ten more judiciously distributed pounds, and eyes more like wings, and had she been rich per se. She saw perfection; she smelled White Shoulders; she assumed the fur jacket was sable. This was an enormously beautiful woman, here, and Candy stared, and also unconsciously began smoothing the tight old violet cotton dress she had on.

Mindy was staring back, but not really at Candy so much as at Candy’s dress. Her eyes faded a bit, as if she were trying to latch onto an elusive memory. Her eyes were different from Candy‘s, too. Very. Where Candy’s were light brown and almost perfectly round, giving her face almost too much symmetry, making it an almost triangular face when it would have been nicer and more comforting as a rounder, more vague-at-the-edges face, Mindy’s eyes were so dark they were almost black, and they seemed to spread out far more across the upper ridges of her cheeks, and back at the sides, like the wings of a dark sort of fluttery bird: large, delicate, full of a kind of motion even when still. Really nice eyes. A face very much like Candy’s, but vaguer at the edges, and so really better. Candy smoothed at her dress some more.

“Girl what you doin‘, employee addresses in the directory,” Walinda said to Candy, and she pushed the directory across the white counter until it hit Candy’s hand. “Wrote his address down at the back myself,” Walinda said.

Candy didn’t have to look at the directory. “Mr. Lang’s temporarily staying in a building in East Corinth, which is a suburb south of here.” She smiled at Mindy. “Actually the same building, or house is more like it, as mine, which is how come I know, although it’s a rooming house, so still like a building; it’s not like he’s living in my house.” She laughed breathily.

“I see,” Mindy said with a bit of a smile, nodding. “Perhaps then you could just jot down the address for me.”

Candy reached for a pad and pen and jotted.

“There was, too, the office number, which the operator tried before,” said Mindy. “Perhaps you could try him again for me. What… department is he in?” She looked around her at the marble lobby and the soft red chairs for lobby-dwellers and the tiny veins of the last bit of sunset moving together in the blackness of the walls.

“Translation,” Candy told her, not looking up.

“Translation?”

“Baby food,” Walinda Peahen said, flashing hostile green-shadowed eyes at Mindy’s fur jacket and then returning to tax forms.

“Baby food?”

“Nix,” Candy murmured into Walinda’s ear. She stood up and pushed the Tissaws’ address across the counter to Mindy.

“And I’d ring his office for you, but I happen to know he’s not there, Candy smiled. ”He left the office after a Building-wide meeting, about three this afternoon. I know more or less where he’ll be tonight, though.“

“Do you.” it

“He’s going to be in a bar called Gilligan’s Isle with an old friend of his, watching religious television.”

Mindy was putting Lang’s address into a really nice Étienne Aig ner purse. She snapped it closed and looked up. “Religious television? Andy?”

“One of the… The show features a bird who belongs to a friend of mine, and of Mr. Lang‘s,” said Candy. “We’re all going to try to watch the bird tonight.”

“A bird? Andy’s going to watch a bird on religious television?”

“Gilligan’s Isle is just right across Erieview Plaza from here,” Candy said, pointing in the correct direction out through the revolving door of the lobby. “It’s pretty easy to find. Has big colored statues in it.”

Mindy was staring at the violet dress again. She looked up into Candy’s round eyes. “Have we met before?” she said.

“No we haven‘t, I don’t think.” Candy shook her head and then cocked it. “Why?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I know I’ve seen that dress before.”

“This dress?” Candy looked down at herself. “This is an incredibly ancient dress. It used to belong to a friend of mine, the person who also owns the bird I just mentioned. Do you know Lenore Beadsman?”

The console began to beep. “Wait a minute,” Candy was saying to Mindy. “You mentioned Lenore on the phone when I talked to you.” Mindy just looked at her. Walinda was making no move toward the console. Candy bent to the call. A rapid, in-house flash. “Operator,” she said.

Mindy had suddenly bent over the top of the cubicle counter and was looking down at the equipment. “That’s a Centrex,” she said to Walinda. “Is that a Centrex?”

Walinda looked up and narrowed her eyes again. “Yeah, it is.”

“In school, in Massachusetts, my roommate worked as a student operator, for the college, and sometimes I’d read at the switchboard at night to keep her company. They had a Centrex.”

“Twenty-eight?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Mmmm.”

Candy released and straightened up. “Well that was just Mr. Lang’s supervisor, on the phone, Mrs. Lang. He’s coming down for his newspaper, the supervisor.” Candy gestured over at a well-perused issue of that day’s Plain Dealer that lay on top of the cubicle typewriter’s gray plastic dustcover. “If you’ll wait here a second, he could probably answer your questions a lot better than I could.”

Mindy continued to look down at the console. Then she smiled up at Candy. “I was freshman roommates at Holyoke with Lenore Beadsman’s sister,” she said in a low voice.

Candy’s jaw dropped. “God, is this Clarice’s dress?” she said. “Lenore sure didn’t tell me. And well I had no idea you knew Lenore’s family.” Through the doors came Vem Raring, at 6:05. “Listen, here’s my relief, so to speak,” Candy said. “Let’s just go have a seat out in the lobby, here, and we can—”

“But Lenore and I have met too,” said Mindy, as if she had decided something, smiling for Candy a truly beautiful smile.

“No kidding. Well I had no idea Lenore knew Andy’s wife.” Candy clapped her hands once and smiled back into the wings of Mindy Metalman’s eyes. “Listen,” Candy said. “I really just love your jacket. Can I maybe touch it?”

“I suppose so.”

Candy was stroking Mindy’s sleeve when she looked past Mindy at the elevators in the northeast comer and saw Rick Vigorous and Lenore emerge.

“Well here’s Lenore and Mr. Vigorous both, now,” she said. Vem Raring entered the cubicle and gave Walinda Peahen a big kiss on the cheek, and she pretended to swat him, both of them laughing.