“Nowhere,” I said, turning around yet again. “I was just waiting for you.”
“Awesome. Let’s get to work.”
She passed the bag to Zelinsky and led me through the store. She was moving quickly, like she couldn’t wait to get started. Hall and Oates were on the radio singing “You Make My Dreams Come True.”
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but the radio was playing the same song yesterday.”
“It’s not the radio,” she said. “It’s a mixtape. My mom’s favorite songs. She taped them all off the radio.” I nearly made a smart-ass comment, but I was glad I didn’t because Mary continued, “She died two years ago. Stomach cancer.”
She said this so matter-of-factly, I thought I’d misheard her. “Did you say stomach cancer?”
“Yeah. June 21, 1985. It was the last day of school.”
Up until that moment, I assumed Mary and her father went home every evening to a warm dinner and a houseful of siblings, but Mary explained it was just the two of them. She was quick to steer the conversation back to the mixtape. “I know the songs are cheesy, but my dad likes them, so I put up with it.”
“I don’t think they’re cheesy,” I said, because I wanted to say something nice, but Hall and Oates hooted “ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh,” and Mary laughed.
“This song has more cheese than a quesadilla,” she said, “but I’m glad you’re cool with it, because you’re going to hear it a billion times. The stereo loops it automatically.”
We arrived in the showroom, and I saw that Mary had rearranged the furniture so there were two chairs beside the computer. I brought out my own copy of How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days so we could study side by side. The book was full of mini-programs to type and try, so I started keying one into the 64. But after a few lines, I noticed Mary frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“This is just a suggestion,” she said, “but what if you read the code aloud and I do the typing?”
It took me a moment to catch her meaning.
“You think I type slow?”
“You’re hunting and pecking. Your fingers are nowhere near home row.”
“What’s home row?”
“Exactly,” Mary said, as if this proved her point. “Sister Benedict clocked me at ninety words a minute. She called my typing skills a miracle. And coming from a nun, that really means something.”
We settled the debate by unpacking a second 64 from inventory, placing the machines side by side, and then racing to input the first paragraph of the user’s manual word for word, no mistakes, on your marks get set go! I was lightning quick, my fingers flying all over the keyboard with perfect accuracy, but when I shouted, “Done!” I heard Mary echo me. We had finished together in a dead heat.
So our contest had settled nothing, but going forward we moved twice as fast, because Mary convinced her father that two computers increased the persuasive power of the store’s showroom. “It’s like walking into the Gap,” she explained. “They never show just one T-shirt. There’s always a table with six or seven. Products look better in groups.”
I didn’t totally buy her logic—for starters, T-shirts come in different colors—but Zelinsky seemed willing to try. “It’s not doing anything sitting in a box.” He shrugged. “Three months we’ve had these damn machines, and we’ve yet to sell a single one of them. ‘The Most Popular Home Computer in America.’?”
He glared at me like somehow I was responsible, like I had personally invented the 64 and then petitioned Zelinsky to stock the machines.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His glare intensified, and his eyebrows arched to epic heights. “Why do you keep apologizing?”
“Dad, we’re on a tight deadline,” Mary said.
“I want him out by seven o’clock,” Zelinsky said. “You’ve got homework.”
We spent the next three hours testing patches of code and reading aloud from How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days. The mixtape looped from Howard Jones (“No One Is to Blame”) and Bruce Hornsby (“The Way It Is”) to Marshall Crenshaw (“Someday, Someway”). A pattern quickly presented itself: Mary would read aloud a dense and difficult passage, I would fail to understand it, and then she would re-explain the concept using her own words until it made sense to both of us.
This happened so often, I soon felt embarrassed. I knew Mary would be turning the pages much faster without me, that my “intellectual shortcomings” (or whatever Hibble had called them) were holding back our progress. I hunched forward in my chair, biting my cuticles and sighing and watching the clock. But Mary didn’t seem flustered. She’d repeat herself three or four times without ever sounding aggravated. She acted like we had all the time in the world.
“I’m sorry I’m such a dummy,” I said.
“This is tough stuff.”
“But you understand it.”
“Because I’m explaining it to you,” she said. “Saying it out loud helps it make sense to me.”
We ended the day with a practice exercise from the book. Each of us created a mini-program that utilized graphics in machine language. Mine flashed the words PLANET WILL SOFTWARE in different colors. Mary’s featured a boy and girl dancing, popping and locking and moonwalking like Michael Jackson in the Motown 25 special. I realized the boy was wearing a white shirt and jeans, and the girl had long dark hair. Mary had programmed them to look like us.
“How did you make this in forty-five minutes?” I asked.
“Yours is good, too,” she said.
The crazy thing is, she actually managed to sound sincere. I listed the commands and studied her code, a long block of ideas I’d never considered and strategies I’d never tried, an entirely different approach to programming. I felt like I was finger painting next to Pablo Picasso.
1100 REM *** DRAW GUARD 2 SPRITE ***
1110 POKE 52,48:POKE 56,48
1120 FOR GU=0 TO 62:READ G
1130 POKE 12480+GU,G
1140 NEXT GU
1150 POKE 2043,195:POKE V+21,8
1160 POKE V+42,4
1170 POKE V+6,GGX
1180 POKE V+7,GGY
1190 RETURN
ONCE AGAIN ZELINSKY BOOTED me out of the store at seven o’clock, and I left to find Alf and Clark waiting on their bikes. Alf had the Beast perched on his handlebars—this was our nickname for his massive Sony boom box, an enormous radio with giant speakers, twin cassette decks, and a hundred useless lights and levers. The Beast weighed a ton, but Alf had rigged a small platform onto his handlebars so we could bike around accompanied by movie soundtracks. He saw me coming and pressed Play on the cassette deck. Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” came blasting out of the speakers, turning heads up and down Market Street. Alf pantomimed a performance on the sidewalk, using a Coke bottle as a microphone—Ohhh, won’t you take me home tonight?—until I hurried over to the Beast and spun down the volume.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.