Mr. Worth was converting Nina's old room into an office.
"Your father felt I needed a better environment for my work. I have so much correspondence." Mother touched her arm. "I hope you don't mind."
"I don't live here anymore," said Nina. "Mr. Worth does."
"I'm sorry. Your stepfather."
"I think it will make a nice office. The light is good in the morning."
"Every year there seems to be more paperwork," said Mother. "And every year fewer of the girls seem to have the time."
Redboy had been digging up the garden again. Nina helped her mother replant the oxalis.
"Muffy Chandler's daughter just moved to Boston."
Mother always knew someone, some classmate, whose daughter was moving to Boston.
"It sounds like she's having her troubles. Drifting."
"You mean like me."
"I didn't say that. I didn't say you were drifting." Mother frowned under her sun hat. "I meant that she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life either. And she's very independent."
They worked quietly for a while.
"Your stepfather wants to dig a swimming pool back here."
"Uh-huh."
"More for entertaining than for swimming. With a patio. He doesn't swim."
Redboy was there, snuffling over the dirt clods they'd piled. Mother shook her head.
"They're so sweet-tempered and handsome," she said. "But so stupid."
"Do you shoot guns?"
"Everything but. The whole basic-training thing."
"My oldest sister was in," says Kathleen. "She had a great time there for a while."
Chickie makes a face. "The service? How can you have a good time, the service, they're always givin you awders all the time?"
"It's not so bad. You just don't take it serious. And there's all the other girls there. There was times, my sister, her barracks was just like a slumber potty."
"And they pay for your education," says Mary.
"So what rank did your sister get to be?"
"Oh, she got tired of it so she got pregnant."
"They let you out for that?"
"If you're not married they do."
Chickie snorts. "Beats a note from your mother."
Whenever Miss McCurdy passes she eyes the photograph Nina put up on the wall. Whenever Nina looks to the back of the room Deke is watching her, smiling.
Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rivkin. Two hundred dollars.
Nina is the fastest, along with Chickie. Then Mary and Kathleen, then Gwen, who seems to be meditating more often as the day wears on, and then Barbara. Barbara isn't drawing anymore. She goes to the bathroom.
"She's not gonna work like the rest of us," says Kathleen, "she should go home."
"She's got prawblems." Chickie can talk and work steadily at the same time. "Hey, it's like that gospel lesson in church, where the guys who worked all day got paid the same as the guys who only came for the last hour. I mean, she's not makin you work any hodder. It's beween her and the employer."
Nina tries to wait till Barbara comes back but can't hold out.
Barbara is leaning over the sink, her face drained pale.
"It isn't gonna come. It's over a week now."
"Your period?"
"My stomach feels like shit but there's no dischodge."
"It might be something else."
"I'll kill the fucker," says Barbara. "I'll break his fuckin head."
If it was Chickie or one of the South Boston girls Nina would have put her arm around her. But Barbara stands there with her fists clenched, cursing into the sink.
"Don't tell nobody, okay?" she says. "They find out they'll send me home. I need the hours."
Nina comes back to her desk alone.
"Get a couple good hits in there?" asks Chickie, and nudges her in the ribs.
Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Dahlhart, twenty-five dollars.
Deke comes over to ask Barbara if she's all right. She tells him to fuck off. He says she should get more sleep.
Mr. and Mrs. Warren Friedrich, ten dollars.
Miss McCurdy finally comes over and just stands looking at the photograph on the wall.
"I'm sorry," says Nina, "does that bother you?"
"I'm not used to having something up there. And that picture — "
"It looks really old."
Miss McCurdy sits back on Nina's desk, upset, shaking her head. "Times have certainly changed."
"They look like my yearbook field-hawkey picture," says Chickie da Costa, "only puffier."
"When I was a little girl in Philadelphia," says Miss McCurdy, "the sisters used to march us all over to this place, a home for unwed mothers. Wayward girls, they called them then. And we had this poem we'd recite about Saint Catherine. She must have been the patron saint of wayward girls."
Miss McCurdy strains to remember.
Saint Catherine, Saint Catherine,
she says,
O lend me your aid, And grant that I may never Be an old maid.
A husband, Saint Catherine. A good one, Saint Catherine. But anyone better than No one, Saint Catherine.
A husband, Saint Catherine. Good, Saint Catherine. Handsome, Saint Catherine. Soon, Saint Catherine.
Miss McCurdy shakes her head, wipes her glasses.
"You must of been real pawpular with that," says Chickie da Costa. "Must of brung the house down."
Nina takes the picture off the wall and slips it under her pile of letters.
"Thank you," says Miss McCurdy. "I don't know what bothers me about it. Just fussy about the office, I guess, like to keep things in place."
"Personally," says Chickie after she's gone, "I was in that condition, I would of told em to go piss up a rope. Sisters and all."
Gwen clears her throat. Barbara goes to the bathroom.
Nina addresses letters, fills out thank-you cards. It's better work than cross-checking figures at a bank, or personalizing form letters for an insurance company or filing financial aid at BU. It's better than folding electric blankets for newaccount bonuses. It's better than being a receptionist for anybody. And the food is good in the cafeteria.
Deke plays his radio in the rear of the office, relentless topforty disco, and Chickie and Mary and Kathleen talk on.
Every time Nina finishes a letter from the pile she uncovers more of the girls in the picture. Some of them have their arms around each other, some hold hands. There are some real beauties with clear, sharp eyes. Their hair is long, braided. Nina thinks of them putting each other's hair in braids every morning.
Ms. Colleen Walsh. Ten dollars.
A few minutes before quitting time, Nina sees Deke hugging a woman in the parking lot. A woman in her forties, with a tan and a trim, tennis-player's body. Deke hugs her, kisses her on the lips. They walk away hand in hand.
"So," says Nina, "Deke's got himself a sponsor. No wonder he's so cocky."
Chickie looks out the window. "That's his mother. She picks him up."
"Every day?"
"Uh-huh."
"His mother."
"Whatta you want?" says Chickie, shrugging. "He's a retod."
"Oh."
"What, we'd give him all that gas he was nawmal? She has him go out on simple jawbs. She's friends with the big cheese at Career Girls."
Miss McCurdy lets them go a little early, signing their time slips. They all take the Green Line back toward the city, but only Mary and Kathleen end up in the same seat.
Nina takes the photograph with her. She plans to put it up on the wall in her bedroom, wherever that turns out to be. Nina looks at the photograph in her lap as they rattle through Brookline. She wonders what the girls in the back row were laughing about.
At the Anarchists' Convention
OPHIE CALLS To ASK am I going by the Anarchists' Convention this year. The year before last I'm missing because Brickman, may he rest in peace, was on the Committee and we were feuding. I think about the Soviet dissidents, but there was always something so it's hard to say. Then last year he was just cooling in the grave and it would have looked bad.