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The Occupations of Muriel Thompson
Amanuensis The going rate for freelance typing in the mid-sixties is ten cents a page. Required: typewriter; ribbons; bond paper. At the kitchen table, Muriel types, clickety-qwerty, into the night. It’s a soothing sound to the four girls in bunk beds down the hall. They listen, though, for the carriage rolling up to accommodate the eraser, listen for the grumble, the Damn! Dramatic, because it’s the only swear word they ever hear pass her lips. The other ones must pile up inside, crowding the pockets of her mouth. A sheep farmer from out south of town has been spending his winters in the city at the college of agriculture. Muriel types his thesis, a hundred and sixty pages to do with the breeding of sheep. She does the math: bread is 5/$1.00, on sale days, down at Lucky Dollar. 160 pp. = 80 loaves. Muriel doesn’t bake her own; she isn’t one for household chores. Add the revisions, cutting, pasting, interleaving pages 95a, 120a and 120b, the table of contents, the acknowledgements: +9 loaves. The farmer wears sloppy, unbuckled galoshes, but he has a proper overcoat and the smile of a gentleman, and he thanks her for her work with a care for enunciation you don’t hear much in this town. In the mind of well-read Muriel, he approaches the platonic form for Decent Man. Sometimes Muriel and her husband aren’t on speaking terms with each other. Other times, they have things to say: – That’s the only thing you know how to do, Muriel, bang at the keys of a typewriter. The only thing you’re any damn good at. – Drunken old goat, your pre-eminent talent is in going broke. Over and over and over. But such bald transcription can’t be left to itself: rants are off-gases of coddled resentments; their provenance is complicated. They shouldn’t be over-simplified. He wasn’t a bad man; she wasn’t a bad woman; but they married wrong, both of them. |
