After This Read Free

had some errands to run.”
     
Pauline eyed her. It would be Pauline’s way to say, No you didn’t.
It would be Pauline’s way to refuse the decorum of the fib, to embrace
the painful honesty. It would be her way to say, You just didn’t feel like
having lunch with me. Which would have been true, of course. And no
less embarrassing, regrettable, awkward, no less vigorously denied,
because it was true.
     
But Pauline had another conversation to pursue. She lifted her
hands and put them over the top of her typewriter, she scooted her
chair as close as it could get, a familiar routine, so that her breasts
were pressed against the keys. She mouthed something, a name—Mr.
Someone-or-Other—and rolled her eyes and cocked her head toward
the front of the room. “Adele,” she mouthed. Mary looked up, she
couldn’t help it, toward the desk where Adele sat, her back to them,
her dirty blond hair draped perfectly over her lovely shoulders. “Rita,”
another girl from the office, “saw them both,” Pauline whispered. “At
lunch.” She paused, her eyes joyous, her lips pursed, her cheeks drawn
in, as if the piece of news were butterscotch in her mouth. “Adele was
crying,” she added, only mouthing the words, or only speaking them
with a breathless wheeze in place of where the words might have
been. “Crying.” She pantomimed, dragging her own manicured finger
down her cheek.
     
Pauline had a large face, a strong jaw, and blue eyes forever
darting, gesturing, scanning the room, scanning the faces and the
backs of passersby—salesmen, bosses, other girls from the secretarial
pool—taking everything in with one set of eyes, avid and hungry, and
then turning another set, triumphant, well satisfied, to Mary, leaning
over her typewriter to report what she’d seen, a bit of gossip, a bit of
outrage, a bit of indecorous truth (did you see the shine on his coat,
the bad toupee, the yellowed tooth, the pimple, the belly she’s
getting?), all of it the same to Pauline, all delightful to savor, all
evidence to be used. Evidence of what, Mary sometimes wondered—of
the decadence and the decay, the homeliness,
     
the paucity of good intentions that plagued the world? Evidence that
no one else’s life, despite whatever false appearances, was any better
than her own.
     
“I knew something was going on there,” Pauline said returning to
her stage whisper. And then, louder still, “Something rotten in
Denmark,” just as another girl from the pool walked between them,
turning attentively to the sound of Pauline’s voice. Pauline raised her
eyes to her. “Oh yes, rotten indeed,” she said and gave the girl a “tell
you later” smile.
     
Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still
had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the
month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her
shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then
she would begin another. The march of time.
     
Pauline’s eyes were still on her, even as Mary found her place and
set the open book upright on her desk. The goal, Sister Clare had
taught them in school, was shorthand so neat and so legible that
anyone can pick up your steno book and type your letters for you. So
neat and so legible, she had said, smiling at them from within her
wimple, that if you elope on your lunch hour, another secretary can
finish your letters for you that afternoon.
     
She looked over her shoulder, glancing at Pauline, even smiling a
little, but Pauline only tilted her head again toward Adele’s back. Mary
nodded. This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her
into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch
with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter,
Pauline’s eyes still on her. She would like to ask “Who?”—but to do
so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to
enter too fully