76: While Guppa was working . . .
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” Chapter 6 concludes
While Guppa was working with his pigeonholes, Gumma liked to pass the time manipulating large numbers with one of her slide rules. Gumma’s affection for the slide rule began when she took an off-season job in one of the slide-rule factories in Hargrove. She had worked at one job or another for nearly all her married life, but her work at the slide-rule factory was, as far as I knew, the first that she had ever really enjoyed. Before that, she had worked because Guppa was either selling too many Studebakers or too few. When he was selling too few, she worked to bring the income up to the budget, and when he was selling too many, she worked to help him keep up with the demand. Selling Studebakers in Babbington was a seasonal business, like clamming. Since the economy of Babbington was so dependent on the clam and clam by-products, such as gewgaws and driveway topping, most businesses in Babbington slipped into a torpor in the winter, when the bay was cold and choppy, and the air stung, and fewer clammies were at work. With fewer clams coming in, the work at the Babbington Clam packing plant and at Bivalve By-products, the by-product plant, would slow. Less money circulated around town, and most shopkeepers stood at their windows most of the day, looking at one another across the slushy streets. Most people in Babbington, in every line of work, expected this winter lull and considered whatever work they did seasonal. Only a few occupations—schoolteaching and bartending come to mind—provided steady, reliable employment throughout the winter, and the few people in these occupations were courted during the cold months by anyone who tried to make a living selling something. Only Guppa, the most senior of the salesmen at Babbington Studebaker, worked the year round; the others did one thing or another to make ends meet during the winter. And even Guppa, skilled as he was, found the pickings lean during the cold months. So, Gumma worked during the winter to help make ends meet.
During the summer, on the other hand, when the sun was strong and the breezes were warm, the ranks of clammies would be swollen by vacationing college students, moonlighting milkmen, and many others. The clam-packing plant would go onto three shifts, working day and night, and a person could find work there just by showing up at almost any time. Then Babbington bustled, people felt flush, and Guppa would say that selling a Studebaker was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, although when I asked him how exactly shooting fish in a barrel was done and how the fish got into the barrel in the first place, he admitted that he had never tried shooting fish in a barrel and that it might actually be pretty difficult for all he knew. During the summer, Babbington Studebaker would take on extra help, and Gumma often pitched in then just to help Guppa out.
However, as soon as she began working on slide rules, Gumma fell in love with them, and she worked at a slide rule factory year-round for many years thereafter. A slide rule, which is today merely a curiosity, a relic of a simpler and cruder past, the mechanical analogue of an electronic calculator, has three main parts: the stock, the slide, and the cursor.
Gumma was fondest of the cursor. From her first off-season job installing screws in the shiny little metal frame that holds the cursor in place on the stock, she had worked her way up to chief checker in the cursor department.
Despite the effort that Gumma and her dedicated crew put into making the hairlines in the cursors fine and straight, the slide rule remained an imprecise device. For discovering the final digits of an answer, the user had to rely on interpolation, on imagination. It was this quality of the slide rule—its bringing the user not to an absolute, indisputable answer, but only within the realm where the answer could be more or less accurately imagined—that won Gumma’s affection, that made working with the rule as intriguing a pastime as reading detective stories. What Gumma understood at once—and she was always just a bit annoyed by the fact that she couldn’t get anyone else to regard this fact with quite the awestruck reverence that she did—was that the hairline in the cursor did not reveal the answer to a problem: it concealed it. The edges of the hairline defined the limits of the range within which the answer lay; therefore the answer itself was under the hairline somewhere.
Gumma reserved for herself the best of the cursors that were produced there in the cursor room, the ones with the smoothest action, the ones with the finest and straightest hairlines. Each member of her crew would bring her any that seemed especially good pieces of work. If Gumma accepted one of these for her own, her having accepted it was a greater reward than the thanks she gave for it. But when she sat curled up on her sofa in the evening, working at recreational mathematics problems, even when she bent over the largest and finest rule in her collection, with a jeweler’s loupe in her eye, she was only working at the edges of accuracy, she was only making tiny steps toward a more correct answer, the way the toast in her toaster made tiny steps from breadness to toastness.
[to be continued on Friday, August 27, 2021]
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