VIII
After the children were in bed, snuggled beneath their electric blankets against the damp mid-February cold, Stevie returned to her study and lit the space heater. Marella, as usual, had already learned her part in Miss Kirkland’s corny but well-intentioned skit, and the mandatory rehearsal session after dinner had not taken long. Unfortunately, the temperature in Stevie’s study had dropped twenty or thirty degrees since late afternoon, and she doubted she could raise it enough to make sitting at the Exceleriter a bearable enterprise. Her feet had gone numb inside two pairs of socks, and her breath was spilling from her nostrils and lips like smoke from a burning building.
This is no place to keep an expensive typewriter, Stevie scolded herself. No wonder you’ve had trouble with it.
The machine did require a long time to warm up in the mornings. Even though she lit her Dearborn and turned the Exceleriter on before going downstairs to prepare the kids’ breakfast, on really cold mornings the machine might not accelerate to top speed until she had finished a page and a half of double-spaced copy. A good thing she had not mentioned that to the jerks at PDE. They would have told her she had reaped just what she had sown, breakdowns being the natural consequence of improper storage and skimpy maintenance, blah blah blah & blah.
Shivering, Stevie slid into her chair and removed the typewriter’s dust cover. The page bearing the “nasty note” was still on the platen: TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT. Well, not quite. Cold weather and their operators’ disobedient fingers often sabotaged them, even when a giant corporation like PDE supposedly stood behind them.
Stevie pulled the typed-upon page from the Exceleriter and wound in a clean sheet. Although she had pretty much decided to get a fresh start tomorrow, this visit to her study was a necessary step in reasserting her dominion over a mere assemblage of pulleys, levers, wires, keys, and cams. She would not do any real work, but would call the electric demon’s bluff. Mockery was a time-honored form of one-upmanship. She would mock the Exceleriter’s presumption as it had earlier mocked hers. At the top of the clean page, then, Stevie energetically lampooned the monster:
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIXIOUS!
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNOXIOUS!!!
So there. Without removing this page or replacing the machine’s dust cover, Stevie hit the on/off control and leaned back to admire her handiwork. Later, her authority reestablished, she shut off the flow of propane to the space heater, doused the room’s overhead light, and tiptoed into her bedroom to crawl beneath her own electric blanket. It was warm, luxuriously warm, and once her feet had thawed, she forgot the frustrations of the past two days and fell into a heavy sleep.