The Mathematics of Change

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

The need to work, and for the recognition that comes from work, rises directly from living in an interdependent community. The values society places on different types of work—and whether they are done in high heels or steel-toed boots—are not random. We, as active members of our society, have driven these judgments into existence.

–Dr. Abigail Rosen, The F Word: Femininity in the New Century

Mitch had learned countless life lessons from going into business with Sam Weisenberg, but the most important was never to answer “I don’t care” to anything more serious than a question about lunch. And maybe not even to that. Sam had taken that answer literally when drafting incorporation papers, and now their company was named Mitchell Industries. At first, she’d suffered jerks of misplaced recognition at bank statements, software licenses, and business cards, but now Mitchell didn’t feel like her last name even when it was jammed up tight against her first.

Although Sam was co-owner and had invested not only money and time but also the uncanny ability to poke holes in Mitch’s best-laid plans, he’d stepped back his involvement the last two years, leaving the role of chief-technologist-and-everything-else to Mitch. She’d had to recruit help in her fight against industrial friction, eventually hiring Steve and Eric, who each possessed still-wet Tilsen master’s degrees and way more dedication than Mitch had any right to hope for.

For six months after Mitch had hired Steve, they’d worked out of her home office while time-sharing lab space at Tilsen. They spilled over into the living room and kitchen before Mitch would hear of looking for a place to rent, but after scouring Millerton for commercial space, she settled on two basement rooms in the red brick Marketplace building on the south side of Main Street. The Marketplace rented out its aboveground floors to upscale boutiques and gourmet food shops and was a swanky address—one Mitch could in no way afford. But the basement suite, accessible only through a rust-flecked gray door in the alley on the building’s west side, had been vacant for a long time, enabling her to bargain a low rent on a two-year lease.

Now, over a year later and deep into this Friday night, Steve and Mitch banged away on their keyboards at desks facing each other across the office, each working on a different section of the same paper. It detailed their system for managing high-volume test data via predictive algorithms, and Mitch struggled with the long-delayed introduction while Steve prepared the data presentations. “Publish or perish” existed even outside academia, a hard truth that made Mitch miss consulting, where only your track record mattered. She spent more of her professional life fumbling with words than finessing equations and materials, which felt as wrong as it sounded.

Without looking away from her monitor, Mitch asked, “Did you get that other graph done?”

“Shit.” The word came out in a voice too tired to be vehement.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

A crumpled-up wad of paper flew past her and bounced off the wall a couple feet to her right. Steve said, “I still need that—”

“I know. I know. I’m almost done.”

Mitch stretched away from her keyboard, and her right shoulder popped resoundingly with a sizzle of pain that made her hiss and left her wary of further movement.

Steve looked over at the sound and said, “That didn’t sound good.”

She massaged the pain away. “It didn’t feel good.”

“What’s it like to be so old?”

“Given the feeble limits of your imagination, how do you expect me to answer with any accuracy?”

Steve genuflected with exaggeration and turned back to his computer. Mitch’s so-called advanced age had been a constant topic of conversation since her birthday several months before. Eric and Steve razzed her about her body falling apart. They razzed her about being an old maid. They razzed her about still working in this dump, about not making her first million, about not even trying to make her first million. It was a nice addition to the usual routine.

Besides the low hum of computers and lights, only their intermittent typing interrupted the dragging silence. Mitch made a concerted effort not to look at the clock—any of them. Three were within sight. When she was in the other room of the suite, the lab portion, she could go for hours so occupied that time only returned to her consciousness when her stomach growled or her eyelids started to droop. Here, tonight, she felt every minute.

When the phone rang, she looked first at her watch—8:32—then at Steve, and they both screwed up their faces then rock-paper-scissored for it. Mitch’s scissor cut his paper, and he answered. The squeak that emanated from the receiver when Steve held it away from his ear was unmistakably Carol. He raised his eyebrows in question, but Mitch shook her head.

She hadn’t been avoiding Carol, exactly, but they’d gone the two weeks since the party without a conversation. Mitch didn’t want to see Carol until she could find real determination to come clean about Reginald, but not talking for this long was already notable. Tonight, Carol surely wanted to dish about the party, probably about this Dr. Rosen, who, out of some misguided and certainly morbid curiosity, Mitch had looked into.

Carol hadn’t exaggerated the woman’s attractiveness, but what Mitch found even more interesting was that Dr. Rosen’s first book, obviously based on her dissertation and long out of print, was quantitative sociology complete with charts and graphs, while this latest book was almost completely qualitative, full of quotes and commentary and no numbers besides the ones at the top of each page. Mitch wondered what spurred the change, then wondered what it felt like to be new to Tilsen, not to mention Millerton. Mitch wore this environment like her favorite pair of jeans, couldn’t remember when everything had been unfamiliar.

Steve convulsed with strangled laughter, and Mitch grinned at Carol’s still audible histrionics. In the distant past, these verbal theatrics used to scare Mitch. They were loud and bright at a time when she swam under the rough, rippled surface of things, when some nights she was driven to tuck her pillow under her arm, shove her travel alarm clock in her pocket, and set off across campus to sleep in the quiet solitude of her hatchback.

Eventually, Mitch applied her analytic mind to the problem of Carol’s verbosity, identified patterns in its screeches, stage whispers, and breathless monologues—manifestations of outrage, happy scandal, and wanting something, respectively—and was able to tame fear with understanding. Now, when they were apart, Carol’s face or her exuberant gestures weren’t what lived inside Mitch but her wide-ranging voice and a huge stockpile of her words.

When Mitch had unveiled a prototype of the wind turbine product to Carol, she had dismissed Mitch’s technical explanations and cut to the chase. “So, what, is this device going to make us gazillionaires?” This device became “The Device,” and the name stuck so completely that Mitch and the guys used it as a matter of course in the lab and found it difficult not to say to customers.

Steve hung up the phone. “She’s going to The Station as soon as she gets her act together, and she expects you to be there.”

The Filling Station was a bar a few blocks over on Main, and a drink sounded good. “Let’s both go.”

“No way am I running interference between you two.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Mitch stood, patted pockets for wallet and keys, and used her wide black belt to resettle her jeans on her hips. “Come on, you know her. She won’t show up for a while yet.”

Steve ran a hand through already disheveled straw-blond hair. “I’m going to have to work all weekend as it is.”

“You need a break.”

“I’m serious, Mitch. I can’t. Not if you want my part by Monday.”

She crossed her arms and frowned. “You’re not the boss here. I’m the boss, and I’m telling you that a break is now your top priority. I accept the consequences, so I’m going to get my notebook and will meet you in the alley.”

Mitch walked through the open doorway behind her into the lab. The office area was a study in entropy, with its piles of dismembered electronics, tilted whiteboards, stacks of paper, and the disastrous black hole of Eric’s space, but the lab was the Jekyll to its Hyde.

Several benches, tables, and portable racks of equipment lined the room. Red and black patch cables sorted by length and connector type hung to her left, and a bank of chests to the right were full of small transparent drawers stocked with electrical and mechanical components: resistors, set screws, capacitors, stainless steel bolts, jumper wires of every length, bread boards, batteries, Band-Aids, and assorted odds and ends that might one day prove useful. The lab’s organization was necessary and calming—necessary because experimentation had to be controlled. If why something failed couldn’t be identified, any success was essentially accidental.

This neatness and the faint smell of metal and ozone kept Mitch company while she sat on a stool and riffed through her notebook pages, making a flipbook of sketched viscosity-temperature curves, lunch orders, charts of data, and lists of lab supplies to buy. Finally, she heard Steve grumble, his chair squeak, and the glass door to the stairway slap shut behind him. She tucked her notebook under her arm and hit the lights on the way out.

The Filling Station was Millerton’s premium beverage emporium, at least according to Angel Pappas, its proprietor. The Station was situated on the shady south side of Main Street and fronted a heavy door flanked with two large bay windows. In good weather, tables and chairs littered the sidewalk under its brown-and-cream awnings. From six in the morning until five in the afternoon, The Station served up pastries and the best coffee within a hundred miles. But at five, Angel brought the lights down a notch and mixed adult drinks until she got tired and called last round.

When she had opened up shop a couple years before, after having appeared in Millerton from out of nowhere, excited whispers had crisscrossed town for months over her platinum-blond hair, intricate manicures, and apparently single status. Angel let them talk, smiling through it all until her ability to make customers feel instantly welcome silenced judgment and speculation. Mitch, sucker for a good espresso, had been a regular from the start.

When Steve and Mitch arrived, half of the round cocktail tables were empty, but people had begun to gather in the open areas with their drinks. Angel was ringing someone up at the register, and Mitch caught her eye with a wave after sliding onto one of the last two stools at the curved bar.

“Mitch Mitchell.” Angel closed the register drawer with a snap of her hip. “As I live and breathe.” Before sauntering over, she rang an old-time gas station bell, the perennial sound of her excitement. Her lacquered nails—always painted the green and silver of Tilsen colors for the first month of school—drummed a staccato clacking on the bar top, and she said, “Check your oil?”

Steve let out a short laugh that she ignored.

“Really, Mitch, it’s been so long I thought you’d left town. Did you start sending your minions over to get your coffee?”

Steve said, “We don’t get her coffee. She drinks the stuff in the lab out of principle.”

“Oh, Steve,” Angel said, eyes wide. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Just remember, the minute a place around here starts serving better coffee, the boycott is on.” Steve slapped a palm on the bar top in emphasis.

“If a place with better coffee opens up, you’ll have to beat me to the front of the line. Two beers?”

“I’ll have whatever’s on special,” Mitch said.

“Mitch, you know the way to my heart.” Angel’s smile was wide and white and seemed to contain more than the usual number of teeth. It brought to mind Dr. Rosen’s sparkling author photo, but Angel turned and walked away before Mitch could ask her about being Millerton’s newest arrival, how long it had taken to nail down the seasonal hours of the Scoop-A-Rama, to learn the town’s unwritten rules.

Steve said, “I’ll get back to work after this beer.”

“After this beer, you’ll have another. Now you’re committed. Besides, I know what you still have left to do, and you don’t need tonight to get it done.” She slid a round coaster over from Angel’s side of the bar and occupied her fingers with its shape and thickness and texture.

“You’re probably one of those people who never needed to pull an all-nighter.”

She laughed. “No. Never.”

“Yeah, you just don’t want me to feel bad. What was your GPA?”