Stress Test Ch. 27

Wally jumped back and said, "Ahhhh," like someone tottering for balance. He spun around to see what Sandy had screamed at.

Sandy spun in the opposite direction so they came face to face in an odd dance like two figures on a Swiss clock.

"What is it?" Wally was shaking more than Sandy.

"I thought—" Sandy's mind went blank as the fear drained away. "I'm sorry. It's nothing."

"I thought you went home."

"The car wouldn't start. The radio, the lights, everything went dead."

Wally carried jumper cables in his trunk, along with enough tools, hardware and spare fluids to open a garage. Just to be safe, he followed her home, his headlights reassuring her in the mirror.

As she drove down her street, she thought she glimpsed a familiar car idling at the crossroad, its exhaust rising in ghostly clouds on the frosty night. Wally pulled up to the curb while she fiddled with her keys on her parents' porch. He flashed his brights twice and waved in the dashboard light when she cracked open the door.

Six years passed before Stephen X mentioned that night. By then they were married and Sandy knew that nothing he focused on could be insignificant.

She was surprised to find his car in the drive when she came home from Thrift Aisles with Saury on a Tuesday afternoon. Economizing on sacks helped Thrift Aisles keep their prices down. So Sandy clutched a bag bursting with produce in each arm while Saury skipped in circles around her and she tried to open the back door without spilling the groceries. She clenched her teeth and held her breath as she twisted the door knob a finger's width at a time, too tired and proud to put anything down.

"Holy garbanzo beans!" Saury shouted, showing off the word he'd learned half an hour earlier. His chest swelled. "Ho-ho-holy garbanzo beans!"

Just as Sandy won the wrestling match and burst through the door, the left bag lost its bottom. She twisted her right arm to hold back the green, leafy tide, but that made her spill the potato chips, eggs—and ultimately the apples—from the right bag onto the carpet she'd vacuumed that morning.

"Human beans and garbanzo beans!" Saury yelled in a voice beyond his years. "Beans, beans, beans."

Sandy cursed and threw the rest of the groceries in a heap in front of her. "Please be quiet for just one minute, Saury," she said.

She looked at the pile a moment, then knelt and tried to scoop the eggs back into their shells. It wasn't going to work. But as she rose to get paper towels from the kitchen, she stopped and gasped.

Stephen X was standing dead still in the middle of the room, staring at her.

"What?" she asked, too surprised to manage more than a syllable.

"For God's sake, Sandy, look what you've done." His face hid behind a mask as pink as flesh, as hard as steel. "I work my butt to the bone to give you a decent place and this is how you treat it."

"I'm sorry." Sandy appeared to curtsy, not knowing whether she should get something to clean the mess or save time by kneeling down and doing what she could as quickly as possible. "Is something wrong?"

"Of course something's wrong. There's fifty pounds of vegetables rotting into the new carpet."

"I know. I know. I meant, you're home early."

"Ah ha! Giant garbanzo beans!" Saury shouted, jumping through the door into the midst of the potatoes.

"Saury," Stephen X snarled, "get outside and play, goddam it." Saury froze an instant and then ran out, pumping his arms wildly.

Stephen X watched until his son disappeared around the corner of the house, then he turned back to Sandy.

"Have you got a problem if I come home early? Have you got something else planned?"

"No. I meant—"

"Don't look at me like that. Are you afraid I'll catch you with your boyfriend?"

"What boyfriend?"

"You mean which one? How about Wally? Long, thin Wally?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You think I'm stupid?"

"No," She said quickly.

"I've known about Wally since the first time he followed you home, back when you were living with Jack and your mother."

Sandy had no idea what he was talking about.

"I'll bet he's just like a hot needle on those cold nights, isn't he, Sandy?"

"Oh, please." She shook her head and crouched to clean up the mess.

Stephen X grabbed a fistful of hair and snapped her head back. "Don't you look away from me when I'm talking to you." He yanked her to her feet and showed her the devil in his eyes before the first blow cracked against her jaw.

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Some of the women at ATI thought Sandy was putting on airs when she wore tinted glasses and turned up the brightness on her VDT. "Miss Hollywood," they called her behind her back.

Others figured she was hiding hangovers. They could relate to that, except Sandy never joined them when they closed the bars after the Friday night shift.

One night, Sandy stopped at the mirror in the rest room. She took off the glasses and studied the dark bruise around her left eye, gently testing its tenderness with her fingertips.

Suddenly, the door swung open and before she could put the glasses back on, Carla came in. Each of them gave a little start to see the other, then Carla's eyes locked on Sandy's reflection in the mirror.

"Did you get rid of him yet?" she asked.

Sandy felt the hot wash of embarrassment match the tone of her face to the bruise. Her mind raced and the world seemed to shift into slow motion. People made so many assumptions. They could never begin to understand. They just wanted to ridicule her, to set her apart so that none of her uncleanness would come off on them. "Who?" she said at last, but she had to squeeze the word out of her throat.

"Who? Your husband—you did marry him, didn't you?" Carla, a new DIT, was a dark-haired, blunt-chinned woman. She spoke like a teacher who already knew the answer and just wanted to get you to say it.

Sandy turned the water on too hard so it sprayed up from the bottom of the sink. Before she adjusted it, she waved at her face. "I had an accident," she stammered.

Carla burst into laughter, but Sandy didn't feel threatened so much as curious. When the older woman calmed down, she said, "Get rid of him. That's all there is to it. And the sooner, the better."

Sandy slipped her tinted glasses back on and finished washing her hands when Carla locked herself in the nearest stall. She looked around at the spotless tile, then hurried back to her desk, worrying that she'd been gone a long time.

She'd been at ATI long enough that most of her co-workers had given up trying to include her in their plans for coffee breaks and off hours. Lucinda always came by when the gang made its quarterly trek to The Bun Shop after work, but everyone knew Sandy would politely decline the invitation.

"What would you do if I said yes?" She asked Lucinda one April evening.

"I'd say it's about time, mama! Let's go."

Sandy rolled her chair back snug to the desk. "I didn't say yes," she protested. "I just wondered what would happen if I did."

They were nice enough, but she didn't feel close to any of the women at the office. Now she wondered if Carla had divined something they could use as gossip fodder. She wanted to hang around as if she were someone else, so she could hear what they really thought of her. She planned long monologues, how she would explain everything to someone who could never begin to understand.

They might have been from another planet for all she knew of them. The closest she came to social interaction with them was when Wally called everyone on the shift together for his monthly GIGO Gatherings.

To computer nerds, GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out - is a law of the universe more dependable than gravity or the speed of light. It holds that the system will produce the correct answer if it is fed the proper questions and data. Only the human element corrupts the search for truth.

Wally twisted the acronym into Goodies In Garbage Out. On the third Wednesday of each month, cookies, cakes, pies and ice cream filled the office. He figured if he loosened the tongue with sweets, problems in the work place could be hashed out before they became serious.

"I just don't see how some people can keep their data straight if they're taking personal phone calls at the keyboard," Shelly whined with a sideways glance at Caroline.

That gave Wally a chance to explain the company's intricate telephone policy, based on a three-dimensional Phone Usage Matrix Sonny Nix had constructed. The PUM allowed a certain length for any given call based on the frequency, duration and shift positioning of an employee's calls for the week.

"How come DataBasics gives its DITs three weeks vacation and a buck an hour more than we get, and they're still working three full shifts?" asked Maureen, the pear-shaped woman who always looked like she'd put her mascara on while standing on her head.

"I think we should have parking spaces assigned by seniority," she went on before Wally could open his mouth. "All the real companies do that.

"There's never any good stuff in the vending machines.

"Do we have to listen to Sonny Nix every night?

"Why don't the janitors come after our shift? That hunchback guy looks up my skirt every time he picks up my wastebasket.

"A hundred times a night, I key all the way down to the bottom of a survey before I see it's been invalidated with a double response. Why the hell doesn't someone sort those out before the DITs ever see them?

"Trouble with this place is, the bosses don't know what's going on. One thing after another."

Wally waved both hands when Maureen finally paused for breath. "Improvements are part of the process, Maureen—"

"Pretty damn small part, if you ask me."

Wally leaned against the frame of the window that looked out over a brightly lit courtyard.

"Reminds me of when I was in QC at TimeTek," he said. "We worked up the best Stress Test they'd ever seen. We pulled watches off the line at random and put them through it to see how long they kept running. We squashed 'em and dunked 'em and twisted 'em and poked and pounded 'em until their guts flew across the lab.

"We made it so tough the engineers started competing with each other. They built watches by hand in their spare time just to see if they could beat the Stress Test. They might spend weeks honing the tolerances down until they were tighter'n a wino on Westmore.

"Then they'd turn it over to us and make bets about whose watch would last the longest—but the only way to find out was to destroy them. When a guy broke the record, we handed him a little plastic bag with whatever was left and he'd tape it to his door until someone built a watch that could last a couple minutes longer."

"What's that got to do with this place?" Maureen asked.

Wally laughed and unfolded his arms. "You're the best, Maureen." He walked back to the table of pies and cakes. "You must be the best to keep going no matter how hard we try to make it for you."

"Anhhhh!" Maureen waved her hand as if she'd seen a bug on it.

The other women enjoyed a laugh, but Sandy's mind had wandered before the punch line. She realized she was staring at a tray of ginger snaps, but she felt no hunger.

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Go back to Chapter 1 of Stress Test.

Read the next chapter.

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