The computer beeped and then laughed at me.
I sat back quickly and reached for my coffee, and the cup jangled nervously against the saucer. The computer laughed again. "Honey," it said, "you're out of your mind."
I almost jumped out of my chair as Nana's bare arms snaked around my neck and gave me a squeeze. "How come I slept alone?" she said. Her breath smelled good even in the morning.
I had to inhale twice before I could talk. "Don't startle me this early, okay? I'm a little bit jumpy. How are you feeling?"
"Great, better than I've felt in days."
I ran my tongue experimentally over my teeth. My mouth was as furry as an inside-out puppy. "What was so goddamn funny?" I asked a little sourly.
"You. Threatening that computer. How much RAM have you got?"
"As much as I need," I said defensively. What the hell was RAM?
"What, though? Three twenty K, six forty K, or thirty-eight thousand K?"
"Thirty-eight thousand. And change."
Nana gave my throat a vaguely threatening squeeze. "You simp," she said. "Where's the coffee?"
"Where do you think?"
"Aren't we sweet in the morning?" She slipped past me and ambled into the kitchen. Against my will, I turned to look. She'd changed. She was wearing a pair of underpants. My underpants. They hung lazily lopsided, high up on her right hip and so far down on her left that the cleft between her buttocks peeked demurely over the white elastic waistband. Tiny as she was, the elastic was doing its job. She had wonderful, teaspoon-size dimples on either side of the base of her spine. They were the kind of dimples I'd always wanted to fill with salt and dip celery into.
"You don't know squat," she said pleasantly as she poured. "Everybody knows that six forty is the maximum RAM for that machine. What in the world did you buy it for?"
"Work."
"Oh. Work." She slurped her coffee. "Whoo, hot," she said. "Where's the sugar?"
"In the cabinet. Behind you."
She pulled it down and poured half the box into her cup, then gave it a stir. Then she added some more. She sniffed it.
"Sugar doesn't smell," I said in spite of myself. "How do you know when you've got enough?"
"When the spoon stands up by itself," she said. She sipped it once and nodded, then dropped the spoon into the sink. "Coffee's finished," she said. "I'll make some more." She went through the motions, waited until the water was dripping, and turned back to me. "So, you're going to use a computer in your work. What's your software?"
"My what?"
"Software. You know, the stuff that teaches that thing how to think." The pot began to drip obediently behind her.
"I haven't gotten that far."
She came over to me and peered over my shoulder. I could feel her body heat on my arm. "Honey," she said, "you haven't got anywhere at all. What do you want to do first, write something?"
"Sure. I guess so."
"Okay, where are the disks?" She flipped up the neat little black file that I'd bought with the machine and pulled out a diskette. "WordPerfect," she said. "You're in luck. I know my way around this one." She yanked out the DOS diskette and slipped the new one in its place.
"Anything in B?" she asked rhetorically, snapping the drive open. "No, nothing in B. Well, we'll just use good old DOS, no need in wasting time formatting one. In we go."
"God, you're chatty."
"Get off the stool. I can't reach the keys. Scoot, scoot." I scooted. She typed WP and hit Enter, and the screen came to life, welcome to WordPerfect 4.2 it said.
I leaned over her shoulder. "How'd you do that?"
"If you're sweet, I'll teach you. Get a piece of paper so you can write all this down."
Feeling like a third-grader, I got a piece of paper. Negligently naked at the keyboard, Nana initiated me into the mysteries of word processing. I took notes while she batted the machine around in an expert manner, and when she got up to check the coffeepot, I took over. "My God," I said while she clinked things around in the kitchen, "I'm writing."
"Now all you need is something to write about."
"Shush."
In fact, I did have something to write about, TOBY = JACK SPRUNK? I typed. CHECK. HOMETOWN? TOBY'S BUSINESS IN THE BACK ROOM WITH TINY. CHECK. WHO'S SAFFRON, REALLY? VERIFY THEIR STORY. NAMES OF OTHER GIRLS TOBY'S BELTED. DID AMBER HAVE A ROOMMATE?
"Sure, sweetie," Nana said, reading over my shoulder as she sipped a fresh cup of coffee. "That charmer, Pepper. You know, the one who was putting the arm on you while I was sweet-talking Tiny." The underpants had slipped a little lower, clinging for dear life to the sharp jut of her left hipbone. I put my thumb in her navel and gave it a soft twist. It returned immediately to its former shape. The muscles beneath were as smooth and firm as a trampoline. "Jesus, you're elastic."
"Youth," she said. "You probably remember it."
"You know the answers to any of these other questions?"
"Not so's you'd notice. Saffron I know something about. Put your thumb back in my belly button. It's such an unusual approach."
"Later. What's with Toby and Tiny?"
"Toby likes him, I guess. Hell, I like him, too. But as for Toby, well, Tiny takes care of him, sees that nobody hassles him in the club, sets him up with a girl occasionally. Tiny knows a lot of girls."
"Girls for what?"
"What does that mean? You mean, does Toby pay for them, or what? He doesn't have to. Toby's a TV star, remember? They're thrilled just to be with him."
"I mean what does Toby do to the girls Tiny sets him up with?"
"The usual. He doesn't beat them up, I don't think. Tiny'd pasteurize him."
"He beat you up."
She colored slightly. "Tiny didn't know about that. I told him I'd had a car accident." She took my cup and filled it with the coffee she'd brewed.
"How thoughtful of you," I said as she placed the cup in my hand.
"Well, you feel ridiculous when you get slapped around, you know? I've had practice. Anyway, it was none of Tiny's business. I got myself into it, I got myself out of it. You know, you really shouldn't leave the screen on like that if you're not working. You can burn words into it. Have you got Screensave?"
"Have I got what?"
"Eigo," she said. "That's Korean for 'you simp.' It's a utility. Got any utilities? Give me that stool."
She slid up onto it, swapped a couple of disks, and slapped some keys around. The screen went dark. "Now we've saved what you wrote onto the disk in the B drive. I'll show you how to get it back in a minute." Pulling the WordPerfect disk out of A, she put DOS into it, typed DIR, and hit Enter. A whole bunch of junk rolled past on the screen.
"Hoo-ha. There it is," she said. "Next time, before you put the word processing program in, type SCRNSAVE." She typed it as she said it.
"This is the worst coffee I ever drank," I said. "On the other hand, where'd you learn to do all this stuff?"
"Computer school. I went for a year daytimes, when I started dancing. I'm a real whiz kid. I even got Tiny to put the books at the Spice Rack on computer. Okay, here's WordPerfect back again, and here come your notes." Sure enough, they blinked back onto the screen. "Now watch." We watched. I slid my thumb up her spine to pass the time. After about a minute, the screen went blank.
"What happened?"
"That's Screensave. To get it back, just hit a key." I hit one, and there everything was again.