‘Could be. Do it again, and I’ll tell you.’
She whistles the song, a little self-consciously. ‘Great song. Great whistle, too.’
‘Oh, gee, thanks. I’ve always got a song going in my head,’ she says. ‘Always.’
‘Yeah, I bet you do. I’ve noticed you humming a lot too.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No need. You hum and whistle away, honey. Just get those letters typed right, and you can dance too if you want.’
Now she’s humming a Glenn Miller tune she’s forgotten the name of. Her fingers fly over the keys, clickety clack, clickety clack, in time to the song. She daydreams while she hums and types. She wonders what to wear tonight, and remembers her birthday is next month and she’ll be twenty-two. For heaven’s sake, what kind of age is that for a single girl? Time she was choosing someone. Mentally, she reviews Andy, Harry, Jimmy and Larry. All swell guys, but nope, nope, nope and nope. Andy’s a cook in a diner downtown, not good enough prospects. Too like her high-school quarterback boyfriend, who begged to marry her right up till the midnight before she moved to the city. Harry’s an accountant, white-collar, but a little chubby and both his parents are very fat. Fat is not a good thing. Jimmy’s not fat, and he has a noble career as a social worker, but he’s just so…nice, so very nice. Billie, who never swears, always finds herself wanting to say something shocking in his presence. Larry’s slender, well paid and white-collar, and also a good mixture of corruption and goodness, but – and this is a big but – the man cannot kiss to save his life. Dear me, she’s tried enough times, but given up. A man sucking her tongue like a Popsicle is enough to make any girl run a mile. And tonight’s guy. Tommy, or Timmy. Well, she summons his face and it’s an all right face, not too handsome or homely, just somewhere in between. He works at a high school in the Castro. They’re supposed to go to a movie later, the Fillmore. She’ll give him a whirl, she supposes.
Time’s getting on; maybe she’s too fussy. Her mother thinks so.
‘You just find a man who doesn’t drink or gamble or knock a girl around, and then you work on loving him. There ain’t no Mister Perfect, Miss Milly Mae Molinelli.’ Her mother loved to use her full name like that. All those m’s. No one else calls her Milly. She renamed herself during junior year in high school after reading novels by Carson MacCullers and Harper Lee. Sophisticated, artistic girls had boys’ names, it was simple as that. Not that she actually enjoyed those novels; she loved them because they looked so marvellous, so out of place, sitting on her mother’s kitchen table. They embodied the world she wanted to find, the life she wanted to live.
Clickety clack, clickety clack. All the time she’s thinking, her fingers flying and the words appearing. Clickety clack, clickety clack.
She notices, not for the first time, how when you really think about it, typing sounds a bit like a train. Like one of those big old freight trains at home, rolling down the track. She and Louise hearing the whistle, then dropping everything and racing each other down to the tracks, long weeds scratching their bare legs, their old mongrel Sally following them through the vacant lot – just for the thrill of that big noise, that diesel smell, that black greasy smoke, the sight of the caboose man. Sally was used to the trains, so she never barked, just sat patiently at a safe distance and watched the girls. They’d absent-mindedly grab some liquorice weed to chew – there was always plenty by the tracks. But, oh, the times their mother gave them each a hard slap up the sides of their heads.
‘You gals! When you gonna learn? Tracks ain’t no place for nice gals.’
Still, they could never resist, right up to the time they left home. The whistle sounding all mournful and excited at the same time. The dust rising and the clickety-clacking filling them up as it whooshed three feet from them. The caboose man, with a red handkerchief around his neck, smiling and waving.
Now, Billie pretends that her true love is the caboose man, and when he spots her, he makes the train slow down so he can leap off and sweep her up. He is Clark Gable. No, he’s actually James Stewart. And he doesn’t so much as glance at Louise.
Billie is cursed with a vivid imagination. It leads her into all sorts of difficulties, mostly to do with imagining scary things, or impossibly exciting things. She doesn’t sleep well. A constant movie in her head, and the soundtrack too – always the soundtrack. She occupies two realities. Her imagined reality gives the world a pretty good run for its money. She assumes everyone is basically like herself. She has to. There are limits to even her imagination.
Jacko is being introduced to his colleagues. They are all older. Salesmen in suits with slicked-back hair. Copy-writers in rolled-up sleeves. Boozy red noses, and old man’s aftershave. Not much like his pals from college. He bets none of them read Penguins or shop at Brooks Brothers or listen to real jazz.
‘What do you think, so far?’ asks one of these colleagues, a man with bad breath and a stained shirt.
‘Fine, fine,’ says Jacko, offhand. ‘What time is lunch?’ This job is a mistake. His real job is elsewhere, somewhere intellectual and cultured. He sighs and his tour of the building continues.
‘The bathrooms are down the hall to your right,’ explains his boss. ‘And the cafeteria is on the third floor. And here, this is your desk.’
This is the best news he’s had all day. The desk is right by a window, and it is a big desk with a pencil organiser full of sharp pencils, and a cut-glass ashtray. There’s even a file drawer. He can see a chance of being happy here. Jacko MacAlister, star copywriter: a sudden upsurge in sales since his arrival. Yeah.
‘Sorry it’s so far from our offices,’ his boss is saying. ‘My office is on the fifteenth floor.’
He’ll be unobserved, in his own little kingdom, right here, within the perimeters of this desk. Jacko-land. Truth is, Jacko is not crazy about having a boss at all.
‘You won’t mind being down here, will you?’
‘Not a problem.’
‘Good. Good, I thought you seemed an independent type. Now, you might see Mr Tidmarsh from personnel later. Usually makes a point of introducing himself to the new folk.’
‘Okay.’
‘And if you need anything typed, or a cup of coffee, just about anything, just ask Billie. Her desk is over there. Guess she’s away now, but you’ll see her later. Nice gal.’
Billie is delivering her typed letters to the mail department in the basement. This is one of her favourite things to do. So satisfying, to interpret a man’s rambling dictation, condense it with her shorthand, reproduce it on her Remington till it’s a tidy black-and-white document, then see it on its journey. Louise is there, at the new Xerox machine.
‘Loulou, I swear those heels look better on you than me. I hate you. Hate you.’
‘I know. I’m pretty darn gorgeous, aren’t I? I’d hate me too. I mean, if I was as ugly as you.’
‘What you doing tomorrow? Want to go shopping?’
‘Nah, can’t. Going to Redding tonight. I told you! Don’t you ever listen to a word I say?’
‘Oh, yeah. Gosh, Lou, it’s such a long drive. Weren’t you home last weekend?’
‘Yeah. Well. Mom’s saying it’s an emergency again.’
‘Tell her you’re busy. That’s what I do. You’ve got to be firm.’
‘Oh, you know I can’t. She needs me. And Chuck’s muscles.’
‘You know she’ll try and make you feel bad about moving here again.’
‘Yeah, well. Maybe I should feel bad.’
‘Oh, no! You better not move back, Loulou.’
‘Oh, I like it here fine. But it ain’t home, is it?’
