There was one long and pleasant room that seemed to serve a number of purposes. Griza’s mother was standing at the stove. His wife was putting a fresh diaper on their daughter. Old Mrs. Griza was a heavy, gray-haired woman who wore a Christmas tree ornament on her dress. Christmas was far away and this ornament had the appeal of those farmhouses you pass, coming down from the ski trails in the north where the colored Christmas lights burn way past Epiphany and are sometimes not dismantled until the snow melts, as if Christmas had been unself-consciously enlarged to embrace the winter. Her face was broad and kindly. Young Mrs. Griza wore a torn man’s shirt and a pair of tartan slacks that she had outgrown. Her face was large, her long hair pretty and disheveled, her eyes were beautiful when they were open wide, which they seldom were that evening. The cast of her eyes and her mouth was downward, suggesting sullenness, and it was this sullenness, so swiftly contradicted by the light and authority of her smile, that made her face compelling. Gentling and dressing the baby she seemed nearly imperious. Griza opened two cans of beer and he and Coverly sat down at the end of the room farthest from the stove.
“We’re a little crowded in here now,” the old lady said. “Oh, I wish you could have seen the house we had in Lowell! Twelve rooms. Oh, it was a lovely house; but we had rats. Oh, those rats. Once I went down cellar to get a stick of wood for the stove and this big man rat jumped at me, jumped right at me! Well, he missed me, thank God, went right over my shoulder but ever after that I was afraid of them. I mean when I saw how fearless they was. We used to have a nice centerpiece in the dining room. Fruit, you know, or wax flowers, but I come down one morning and there was this nice centerpiece all chewed up. Rats. It broke my heart. I mean it made me feel I didn’t have anything I could call my own. Mice too. We had mice. They used to get into the pantry. One year I made a big batch of jelly and the mice chewed right through the wax tops and spoiled the jelly. But the mice was nothing compared to the termites. I always noticed the living-room floor was kind of springy and one morning when I was pushing the vacuum cleaner a whole section of the floor give way and sagged into the cellar. Termites. Termites and carpenter ants. It was a combination. The termites ate the underpinnings of the house and the carpenter ants ate the porch. But the worst was bedbugs. When my cousin Harry died he left me this big bed. I didn’t think anything about it. I felt funny in the night, you know, but I’d never seen a bedbug in my life and I couldn’t imagine what it was. Well, one night I turned on the light good and quick and there they were. There they were! Well, by this time they’d spread all over the house. Bedbugs everywhere. We had to have everything sprayed and, oh, my, the smell was dreadful. Fleas too. We had fleas. We had this old dog named Spotty. Well, he had fleas and the fleas got off him into the rugs and it was a damp house, the fleas bred in the rugs and you know there was one rug there when you stepped onto it there would be a cloud of fleas, thick as smoke, fleas all over you. Well, supper’s ready.”
They ate frozen meat, frozen fried potatoes and frozen peas. Blindfolded one could not have identified the peas, and the only flavor the potatoes had was the flavor of soap. It was the monotonous fare of the besieged, it would be served everywhere on the site that night, but where were the walls, the battering rams, where was the enemy that could be accounted for this tasteless porridge? Coverly was happy there and they talked about New England during the meal. While the women washed the dishes Coverly and Griza spoke about running the Keats vocabulary through the computer. Griza’s invitation to dinner seemed to have been a gesture of trust or assent and he agreed to run the vocabulary through the hardware if Coverly would make the preparations. They drank a glass of whisky and ginger ale and Coverly went home.
On the next night Coverly arranged his life along these lines. He left the computation center at five, cooked supper, bathed and put his son to bed. Then he returned to the computation center with his soft leather copy of Keats and began to translate this, on an electrical typewriter, into binary digits. “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” he began, “the air was cooling, and so very still. . . .” It took him three weeks to get through it all including
