TrainWrite

Situations for Young Ladies

On the twenty-eighth floor of a building now long demolished, Dorothy Zimmer returned to her desk and found a girl with the new puffed sleeves and white lace all around the base of her high collar. She was fixing her hair at Dorothy’s hand-mirror. She had the scent of the El on a summer afternoon.

“What are you doing here?” Dorothy said.

“I type,” the girl said. “On twenty-nine. Two hundred words a minute.”

A mole, glossy like new iron, clean-edged as a new bolt, showed behind her ear. Dorothy fancied a gold sheen to the girl’s skin. The girl opened a shallow tin with a fine line drawing embossed onto its top, of a girl dressed the way she was. Inside was something cream-colored, smooth and concave like an unburned candle.

“Coco butter,” the girl said. “Here. Taste.”

It tasted of pantries, preparations, cookies. The girl held Dorothy’s wrist and rubbed in a small patch. Dorothy was aware of a cool barrier to the air, thin as gold foil.

Going home, she stood on the El platform where she could see the towers around Wall Street, focusing and defocusing them between the shine of her new fingers. By the time an uptown train stopped, she fancied the gold had reached her shoulder. A fancy, no more; but no harm. Indeed, why not? Steadying herself to sit, she felt her arm light and strong, and flexed it as her brother did with his barbells. Flexing felt like what it was supposed to do. In her belly gears engaged, a belt whirred. She sat very straight, facing crosstown, and in the hot tenement stretches between the shadows tall enough to cross the tracks she felt the barred sun in her cheekbones. A woman opposite drew a boy and a girl tightly to her skirts.

“Hello, children,” Dorothy said.

“Henry, Charlotte.” The woman pressed the boy and girl’s faces to her lap.

Dorothy found herself unable to locate the word to describe the woman’s blinking. There was one, an exact word.

She got off one stop early. Walking up Eighty-Forth Street, her legs did not feel tired. They did not feel anything. Her mother was in the parlor, looking at a pattern-book.

“You seem happy,” her mother said. “There’s a spring in your step.”

Dorothy heard a punch card drop into a metal slot, behind her left breast from its sound. The slot registered the number of holes in the card. Fifty; the shape of happy. The card slotted back and another card slotted in.

“Yes,” Dorothy said. “There is a spring.”

In her room she dusted and organized her books by the colors of the human visible spectrum. She was aware of lenses so thin as to be invisible, sliding across her optical apparatus. Her mother knocked.

“Dinner,” her mother said. “How tidy your room looks.”

“I would like to read,” Dorothy said. “I have a great deal to study.”

She slept standing. Or not quite slept: the belt wound down. She was aware of a cooling. She read the Encyclopedia Britannica, one volume with each optical apparatus. Whatever was happening to her, perhaps she could become a professor. Or a secret agent. Or a navigator on a trans-Atlantic steamer. The bolt behind her ear vibrated a little. Card T5 slotted into read position. Thirty-five holes—hope. Card T6—fear.

The hall outside her room was unlit. Her parents and brother had gone to bed. She could hear their breathing. She could not hear her own. Two lenses locked in place across her optical apparatus and by the moon in the skylight she was able to register the polished wood banister. In the parlor she read the New York World and the Times, the classifieds—situations for young ladies.

Something was wrong, something missing, some procedure no longer being triggered.

She re-registered the papers, letter by letter, a five hundred point nine percent increase in efficiency over her previous input, which her chronometer registered as a two hundred percent increase over estimates of previous, biologically-tooled readings.

No deficiencies. All operations were proceeding optimally.

In the morning, on the platform, she marked a minimum three-foot distance from the hem of her skirts to the next passenger. On the train, she sat at the end of one bench, and the no one took the seat beside her.

At her desk mirror, she fixed her hair to fully cover her right rear cranium bolt.

“Ah, Dorothy,” her boss said. “Excellent. There’s a new girl on twenty-two. I trust you know how to proceed.”

“Correct,” Dorothy intoned. “I am familiar with the routine.”

In her chest cavity, to the left of her spinal cable, where everything should have been dry, something dripped onto a flywheel, and the flywheel flew, in error or excellence, and to what purpose, she would have to determine. Not immediately; no need. Nearly half her daily chronometer was, as yet, undesignated.

She could locate no instructions concerning limits.

Sarah Malone’s fiction has appeared in PANK, Five Chapters, The Good Men Project and elsewhere.