He wasn't sure what to do with his hands. I hummed, "Stopped into a church..."
He said, "Huh?"
I said, '"California Dreaming'... the song."
He said, "Right."
I said, "Here's a deaclass="underline" I'm going to sit right here, right beside you, and I am going to dream. And you ... well... why not continue praying?"
"Right'' he said. And he prayed and I dreamed.
Oh-Ethan finished his freeway.
6. Chyx
MONDAY (One week later)
From behind the fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions of our office I heard Emmett mumble to Susan: "Hey, Sooz-want to go out tonight?"
"I don't know, Emm ..."
"Hey, it'll be great. We can listen in on cellular calls with my Radio Shack Pro-46 scanner-I altered its megahertz range with a soldering gun- or maybe listen to some crank calls I have on tape-hack a few passwords. Grab some calzones . . ."
Susan played it cooclass="underline" "Uh huh-I'll, umm, think on it."
But the moment Emmett was out of sight, Susan instant-mailed Karla and they scurried down to the street for a debriefing, Susan's hoop earrings jangling like Veronica Lodge's tambourine. Karla told me afterward that Susan said it was the best date proposal she'd ever had. "Dream date!"
No conversation is private in our small office, and every day I listen in on what is becoming a female bond-o-thon.
Today, however, Karla, Susan, and Dusty really broke through a wall into a new level. It started out simply enough, with all of us discussing the way that food products in recent years have been cloning themselves out into eighteen versions of themselves. For example, old Coke, new Coke, diet
Coke, old Coke without caffeine, new Coke without caffeine, Coke with pulpy bits, Coke with cheese . . . We tried to figure out the roots of product multiplication and we decided it was peanut butter manufacturers who decades ago invented chunky and smooth versions of themselves.
Then things went out of control. Karla suddenly remembered to tell Susan about how Fry's doesn't sell tampons, and Susan got angrier and angrier, and the conversation became entirely tamponic.
"I don't know why they don't sell them. If nothing else, they're so damned expensive the profit margin must be like 1,000 percent."
She phoned to fact-check that Fry's indeed did not sell them.
Karla said, "This woman Lindy that I met at last week's geek party works at Apple, and she told me that in all of the women's bathrooms there they have these clear Lucite dispensers of tampons that are free. Now that's corporate intrusion into employee's lives that I could live with."
They all agreed tampons gratis are the acme of hip.
"Apple must be run by a woman," said Dusty. "Maybe it is and they're hiding it to stay on good terms with the Japanese."
Karla said, "Wha ... ?" and Dusty replied, " Oh, come on, babe, Japanese businessmen are notoriously adverse to accepting authority from women, no matter how powerful they are in their American companies."
Conversation lapsed into a discussion of Apple's charisma deficit crisis, but then soon enough returned to tampons, and for me it was so embarrassing, like watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with your mom, and suddenly a Summer's Eve commercial comes on, and Mom scurries out of the room and you're not sure why you're supposed to be embarrassed, only that everybody is.
Karla said, "But the bad thing about the free tampons at Apple is that
they're Playtex, not O.B."
All three in unison: "Designed by a woman gynecologist..."
Susan said, "Playtex suck because they just get longer, not wider . . . When I bleed, it's not a vertical thing . . . it's 360 degrees. And it's so freaky because when you put it in, it's this innocuous little lipstick size, and then when you take it out there's this long cotton rope at the end of the string! I'm afraid it's going to hook my uterus and I'll accidentally drag it out!"
Todd sent me an instant mail, which blinked on my screen, saying, I can't believe what I'm hearing.
Dusty said, "O.B.'s rock! But I guess not every powerful female executive is comfortable enough with her body to put her finger (fake '50s housewife voice) you know where."
They all laughed ironically.
Susan said, "I think that the lamest excuse women use about why they don't use O.B. is because they don't want their index finger to get dirty ... I mean whenever you pay for something with a dollar bill your hand gets filthy, but does that stop them from making purchases with dollar bills?"
"They need to make tampons for those 'chunky' days . . . 'light' days panty-liners blow!" said Karla.
This is obviously a universal tampon concern judging by the enthusiasm that ensued.
Todd instant-mailed me, Women have *chunky* days? Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear.
I was trying to think of a "guy" equivalent of chunkiness, but I couldn't, and meanwhile, the three of them just kept rocking on, and Todd, Bug, and I just buried our heads deeper into our work areas.
Dusty said, "Gawd ... I was rilly, rilly freaked out the first time I had chunks. No one ever tells you about that in, like, school or at home or anything. You see those Playtex commercials and they've got this watery blue liquid and that's what you're expecting, and then one day you look at your pad and there are ... chunks there. Grotacious."
Karla, ever logical, said, "I knew intellectually it had to be uterine lining, but I envisioned the lining as being thin, wispy . . . not like chunks of liver."
Dusty figured, "We, as women, also need to invent some alternative to that adhesive they use on pads. I wouldn't even wear them if it weren't for chunks. It rilly bothers me to think of these chunks that want to migrate south, but they can't because of this Tampon Roadblock. So I always wear pads on like the second day, but I hate them. It's like getting a drive-by waxing."
Karla suggested, "If they ever made 'chunky-style' tampons, we wouldn't need to ever wear pads."
Susan said, "I'll bet you anything Fry's doesn't carry tampons because they're misogynist and afraid of adult, bleeding women . . . they can't accept the non-Barbie, fully-functional female!"
Karla and Dusty: "Right on, Sister!"
Susan said, "Yet again men win: with condom hysteria and semen they monopolize the notion of sacred body fluids. Women lose again. I want pads to be to the 1990s what condoms were to the 1980s. Destigmatize the flow!"
Susan had the idea to start up a support group for Valley women who code. She's calling it Chyx and has put word out on the Net. She said, "I was going to spell it 'Chycks' but then 'Chyx' sounds more like a bioengineering firm, and that's kind of cool."
Prerequisites for joining Chyx (which makes you a "Chyk") are "fluency in two or more computer languages, a vagina, and a belief that Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards in a slinky pantsuit is the worldly embodiment of God."
Susan will probably be swamped. Karla and Dusty have Chyx member numbers 0002 and 0003 respectively. They have been given a full set of photocopied writings of Brenda Laurel.
This reminds me, the lower your employee number down here, the higher your status-and the more likely you are to hold equity.
Later on in the day, our lives devolved into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. We all decided we needed sunlight-we've all been working so hard lately and our internal clocks are somewhere in the Eastern Bloc nations- so we went for a drive in the Microbus up through Stanford, up to the linear particle accelerator that passes underneath the 280 by the Sand Hill Road exit.
It was the core team from the old Redmond geek house: Karla, Michael, Todd, Bug, and Susan-as well as Ethan. Dusty didn't come because everything makes her sick these days. She's set her workstation up by the bathroom door. She craves instant "Mr., Noodles," and is constantly sending Todd out for food runs to Burger King. Michael gave her his collection of international airline sickness bags as a "fertilization present."