Writers & Lovers(24)

I find myself on the ground a few feet away from where I was. It all probably looks a lot worse than it is. The car stops immediately and a woman comes flying out saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’ in a Caribbean accent and lifts me up and holds me in her arms. Someone else brings the dog back. I’m crying but not because I feel any pain. My hip and wrist are a little sore, but that’s it.

‘I will take you right this minute to hospital,’ she says.

But I can’t go to the hospital and am relieved I don’t need to. She insists, just to make sure, she says. Sometimes there are injuries inside the body. I have to explain I can’t afford it.

‘I will pay! Of course I will pay!’

When I tell her that without insurance X-rays will cost hundreds of dollars, she grows frightened and gets back in her car.

At work the wrist gets sorer, and by the end of the night the busboy is carrying most of my food. It doesn’t feel broken, though. I got lucky. If the accident had been any worse, the cost would have sunk me.

When Liz and Pat Doyle come back a few nights later and tell me about a job, a real job with health benefits, I’m more receptive than I would have been before the accident.

‘I thought of you because your mum helped get this organization off the ground,’ Liz says. ‘And it’s a writing job. They need a writer.’ She hands me a card: LYNN FLORENCE MATHERS. FAMILIES IN NEED. ‘Lynn is a character. You’ll love her.’

Muriel makes me wear pantyhose and a pair of her beige pumps to the interview. I blend in with the women I pass on Boylston Street, but I feel like a freak.

Lynn didn’t know my mother, but she’s the type of person my mother loved: quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

‘Sit, sit,’ she says, directing me to a green padded chair. She sinks into the armchair behind her desk. I slide my resume toward her. She scans it and passes it back. ‘You’re thoroughly overqualified. Hablas espa?ol?’

‘Si. Viví dos a?os a Barcelona con mi novio Paco que era un profesor de Catalan pero me hizo loca y tuve—’

‘Whoa. Okay. You lost me back at Barcelona.’ She exaggerates the theta.

She gives me a W-9 form and tells me about their health insurance—a gold policy, she says—and other benefits.

Muriel told me I should ask about the ‘mission’ of the organization, so I do.

‘Rich people’s unwanted crap transported to poor families who are desperate for it.’ She pulls out three blank pieces of paper from her drawer. ‘This is just pro forma. I don’t know what a master’s in creative writing means exactly, but I’m sure you can write circles around all of us here.’ She pairs the papers with an index card and stands up. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Richard Totman of Weston have donated an old refrigerator that went to a home in Roxbury. I’d like you to write a brief thank-you to them.’

I follow her down the hallway to a windowless room with a chair, desk, and typewriter. ‘Just bring it to me when you’re done.’ She shuts the door behind her.

I look at the card. Both the organization’s address and the Totmans’ address are on it. I don’t know where to put the addresses on a formal business letter. I strain to think of all the business letters I’ve gotten, the kinder ones before my debts were turned over to collection agencies. I make my best guess and start in. The typewriter’s electric, and it takes me a while to figure out how to turn it on. It has one of those balls in the middle with all the letters on it. The keys are sensitive. I go through the first two sheets of paper quickly because it keeps typing letters I didn’t mean to touch. I’m careful with the last sheet and manage to get both addresses on without errors, one above the other on the left side of the paper. No idea if that’s right. I begin:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Totman,



Or should I have written ‘Mr. and Mrs. Richard Totman’? My stepmother always got mad at me when I addressed a letter to her as Mrs. Ann Peabody instead of Mrs. Robert Peabody. But it’s too late.

Thank you very much for your donation of the refrigerator.



I don’t know what to say after that. Something about the family in Roxbury. You have made a lovely family in Roxbury very happy? Is that true? Already used ‘very’ above. It has been installed in the house of a family in need in Roxbury? Three ‘ins’ in one sentence. It was very generous of you? ‘Very’ again. My pinky touches a key and six semicolons shoot out onto the page. Fuck. I scan the room for Wite-Out. Nothing. The desk has one thin drawer below the surface. No Wite-Out, but a small stack of white paper. I yank the sheet out of the machine and begin again.

It takes me eight drafts and forty-five minutes. Lynn is on the phone when I emerge from the room. She asks me with her eyes what happened and I don’t know how to mime the answer and she doesn’t signal for me to wait. I set the letter on her desk and leave.

I feel like kissing every step of the staircase as I climb up to the restaurant that night in my comfy black sneakers. I never have to go back to that office on Boylston Street again and sit in uncomfortable clothes and type in a windowless room. I get to move and talk and laugh and eat good food for free. And my mornings, my precious mornings, are saved.

Victor Silva, who recently told me he writes poetry and essays, comes in late in his big black cape and overhears me talking to Harry about the interview.