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just knock in the head.

ELEVEN

    THIS’LL BE your jack panel,” Miss Edna Boudreau said, “and it’s brand-new. You won’t have any problem with the plugs getting stuck like they do in the older ones.” She glanced over her shoulder at Cassie Pickett, who sat in a tall swivel chair, wearing a pair of headphones. “Cassie, will you kindly move over so I can get close enough to show Shirley the procedures?”
    Cassie, who looked like she’d eaten her last full meal back in the Roaring Twenties, cast an appraisive glance at Miss Edna’s hips, as if to suggest that they, not the position of her chair, were the problem. She rose, though, and pulled the chair over a few inches.
    “When a call comes in,” Miss Edna told Shirley, “you’ll see a blinking light beside the number. At that point, what you do is plug your headset into the jack and then you just say ‘Operator’ . . . pause . . . ‘May I help you?’ Got it?”
    “I believe so.”
    “Let me hear you say it.”
    Shirley felt like a first grader. Indeed, the building housing the telephone company had served as Loring’s first school-house, back in the 1880s. It had heavy oak floors and low water-stained ceilings; it was as if the odor of anxious little bodies still hung in the air. “This is the operator,” she said. “May I help you?”
    “Not ‘This is the operator.’ Just ‘Operator’ . . . pause . . . ‘May I help you?’ Would you like to know why?”
    Surely Miss Edna’s talents were being misused, Shirley decided: she belonged in the military. But she didn’t want to be rude. “Sure,” she said. “Why?”
    When Miss Edna propped her fists on her hips, her belly pushed at the buttons on her blouse. “You may not realize it, but when you say ‘This . . . is . . . the’—well, on average, it’ll take you close to two seconds. Now, two seconds might not seem like much, especially if you’ve got only one light blinking, but when three or four folks on your panel are trying to place calls at the same time, the seconds add up.” She pointed at a pair of jacks in the lower left-hand corner. “These two, numbers five four four and five four six, are the lines to Camp Loring. You don’t want them waiting to reach the War Department because you’re saying ‘This . . . is . . . the.’”
    “If time’s so precious,” Shirley said, “shouldn’t I eliminate the pause, too?”
    She could tell, from looking at the woman’s face, that Miss Edna didn’t have much hope for her. She hadn’t wanted to hire Shirley to begin with and had given in only because Fred Harney, who ran the local branch of Southern Bell, had ordered her to, and that was because Alvin promised him extra gas coupons for his Stutz Bearcat, which he liked to race on the levee every weekend. Shirley also knew all too well why Miss Edna hadn’t wanted her around. If she’d committed half the sins folks like Miss Edna thought, she probably would have been content to lie down and die, figuring she’d lived her life, and two or three others, to the fullest.
    “The pause,” Miss Edna said, “is just a small touch of nicety, which is only right and proper. Some people might disagree with what I’m about to say, Shirley, but I believe that especially in times like these, it’s important to preserve at least a
little
decorum.”
    That afternoon, Cassie Pickett poked her in the ribs. When Shirley looked over, Cassie pulled off her headset and gestured for Shirley to take it. Shirley slipped hers off and put Cassie’s on.
    She recognized one voice right away, but the other took a little longer.
    “Why don’t you come over tonight?” Vera Bivens said. “You haven’t been over here in so long, and I get so lonesome, always waiting.”
    A little hemming and hawing on the other end, a word or two about work and bad weather.
    “You remember how you found me last time?” Vera said.
    There was a long silence. Then Kent Stark said, “Well, I reckon I might could come