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Show 91 and Lorin actually preferred it to bunging out the offices or serving at the banquets. It was slow, steady, endless, and you felt connected and accounted for. The heat, the steam, above all the noise of the machinery and the spraying water, made Lorin feel comfortably walled off. Of all the jobs that rotated among the five students who worked here this was the one most congenial to solitary brooding. He could brood, for instance, on the fact that his light source upstairs had not really given his picture a fair chance. It would have been better if he had not been forced to draw the face in the same light he had seen it in. That always caused tonal incongruities. He could also brood on the class he was failing because he could not comprehend Mendelian law. He could reflect that something was slowly becoming unstuck in his relationship with Melanie, who scarcely wrote to him any more, and that he was frantic with helplessness. He pulled off his rubber sandals and tossed them under the counter. The cement floor was slick with condensed steam and he would have to be careful stepping from the rinser to the washer so as not to slip and split a toe against the iron leg of the conveyer. But his feet had been sliding sideways off the sandals and he was afraid of stumbling and breaking a tooth against one of the machines. The few letters she had written to him in the last month wrung his heart She had begun chattering in them, and normally she did not chatter. She talked about her classes at Brigham Young and punctuated her sentences with words like "ugh!" She never said ugh. She mentioned people by name as though he had heard of them. She described riding through campus late at night in an open convertible, without being clear about how many people were also in the convertible, to plant studentbody campaign posters in front of the science building and the Cougareat, whatever that was, and being stopped by a university policeman who licked an ice cream cone while he wrote them |
