The Send-Away Girl

Abstract

The afternoon's snow still had the lift of an infant's blanket—or teased hair, maybe a spongy Orion sweater, the bed of cotton under jewelry. Jewelry. The girl couldn't even think the word anymore with out feeling the lot of the hopelessly cheap crawl into bed with her, every last scallop of let's pretend—let's at midnight trysts, at cabs from here to there, at ocelot clutch-bags with their own matching lighters. This is why she never attempted jewelry: she couldn't stomach let's pretend for a lime rickey with the girls in offices down the hall and up and down the stairs. Stupid girls, nauseating girls—she herself just one more, an advert repeated all over town: Earnestly seeking secu rity; will cross legs for early dinner and Gregory Peck picture. This particular picture was Copley Square at dusk, lit the way only January can do—Trinity, the library, black cars moving like beetles in a box of baking soda—and beyond that row upon row of pinkish stone, with people inside, living their foreign lives. Her boss had called her attention to the blood-tinged rosiness of the sky, and as they stood in the window of his seventh-floor office, stood side by side before the limp glow, she thought that maybe what he wanted to share was the shameful innocence of this intrusion upon the most cheerless part of his day, this serendipitous injection of radiance into his seventh-floor view of the world. In theory it made no sense to specify this part of her boss's day as the most cheerless, as he always seemed to derive some vague satisfaction from the activity known as getting ready to go home. But he was an unhappy man getting ready to go home, and that was different from a man stuffing his hat on his head and dashing to get the 5:45 from South Station. He'd leave the office never wearing his overcoat; it would be slung over his arm, like something dead he was taking to a funeral par lor to have pressed out and made to look momentarily good. He'd pause at the threshold between her office and the shabby reception area