When I worked as a copy editor I had two friends in the next cubicles. Patty was small with long dark hair, and once when she leaving she said, ―I‘m going to beat feet outta here.‖
Denise was a little older and heavier – we were all in our early twenties – and smelled of disinfectant soap. She was warm and quiet to Patty‘s chattiness.
We used to go out to lunch together every day. Once or twice we went to the Union Oyster House in Haymarket Square, where there was sawdust on the floor and you sat at long trestle tables. Usually we went to a fish place, the same place my boss had taken me to when we were signing my contract. My boss was friend of my father, very nice and full of laughter and he had an ear that looked as if someone had bitten a piece out of it.
We usually had fish soup and salmon sandwiches.
Once we went to something called The Gypsy Tea Room and had our fortunes read in tea leaves. My grandmother used to show us how to do that. My little sister and I would finish our tea and then we would look in the Canton cups and see what message the tea leaves had made. There was a little blue design at the bottom, and the tea leaves made a pattern over it. Sometimes all the tea leaves would be connected and sometimes they would be scattered. If they were connected, the pattern would look like something, a person, a place, and you could read it.
The gypsy fortune teller also read our palms. She wore a scarf with gold coins around the edge. She said that there was break in my lifeline. She said that Denise would travel over water and that Patty would meet a tall, dark, stranger who would give her money.
The gypsy said, ―Cross my palm with silver.‖
We were very relieved to escape to the street, Patty laughing.
I was copy editing a book by a Professor Blank. I would be given a certain number of pages a day, and when I was finished a I would go to the ladies room and sleep on the couch.
―You must have a very exciting night life, ― Patty said.
Sometimes at lunch Patty and Denise brought sandwiches. Then I would go to a snack bar and have a sandwich and walk up and down Tremont Street. My feet hurt and once I went into a shoe store to try to buy some sandals. The young man who helped me asked if I was English. He said, ―You have an accent.‖
―No,‖ I said, ―I‘m American.‖
He said he was Greek. ―You look Greek,‖ he said. ― You have Andalusian eyes.‖
11
I felt I had to buy something, so I bought some green sandals with little gold coins on them that I never wore.
I used to walk down to the Combat Zone, the red light district. Steinway Piano was on the other side of the street. It was beautiful Spring weather and I got tired of sitting on a cubicle all day. I went into the Steinway showroom and asked if I could try out a piano.
The man who was selling them was very nice, and I tried one and then he showed me another one and then another one that was made of rosewood.
―Do you want to buy one?‖ the man asked.
―No,‖ I said. ―I can‘t afford it.‖ He seemed angry and disappointed and I left.
The climax came when I finished all my pages early and the Italian woman who oversaw my work and dressed beautifully, like an exotic bird, told me that they would pay for a taxi for me to take a manuscript to an editor who was working at home. I took the package and got in a taxi. It took me to her address and stopped and pressed the doorbell with the name I had been given on it. The buzzer rang and I walked up a flight of stairs and rang the doorbell.
A young woman opened the door. She had a towel around her head and she was in her bathrobe. She was irate.
―I was in the shower!‖ she said.
I realized that this was what I wanted to do, work at home. I walked back down the stairs and go in the taxi.
The idea that you could wash your hair at any time of day was infinitely appealing.