Free Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald Page A

billious, blurb or babble.
    The CPA and the liaison man were very nice but they kept Mary and me so busy we never did get to finish “Sandra Surrenders” and they insisted on taking sides in our fights so that they were seldom on speaking terms with each other and one or the other was always not on speaking terms with one or the other of us.
    Mary and I had many violent fights, sometimes even slapping each other, but we made up instantly and it was most disconcerting to come back from lunch and find the fight of the morning still hovering around the office like stale smoke and the accountant and the liaison man wanting to take sides and talk about us, one to the other.
    They thought I really meant it when I screamed at Mary, “It’s no wonder you’re an old maid, for twenty-five years you’ve always gotten your own way and you think you can boss everybody!” and Mary screamed back, “It’s better to be twenty-five years old and unmarried than to shuffle through your old marriage licenses like a deck of cards,” or “You haven’t done a stroke of work in this office since I came—all you do is smoke and order me around like a slave,” and “I will continue to order you around like a slave as long as you act like a slave, think like a slave and smell like a slave.” By the fall of 1932, the depression was very bad and we were sure that the lumbermen weren’t going to put up with Mr. Chalmers much longer. Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on a battlefield, and I lifted up myself each day timidly and with dread expecting to find the dark despairing mask of unemployment staring at me.
    Mary was so unworried about it all that she took twohours for lunch, another hour or two for coffee, and when Mr. Chalmers finally took her to task, she told him that the interesting part of his job was over and she guessed she’d leave and sell advertising.
    Then for a few terrible weeks, until one of the lumbermen sent over his girl, I had to stop dusting and filling pens and take Mr. Chalmers’ volumes of dictation. He mumbled so and used so many enormous and obscure words that I could never read my notes and had to bring them home at night for Mary to transcribe. She was always able to read my shorthand but finally doing both our jobs must have palled for she told me that I should quit Chalmers and sell advertising. With great tact she said that red-haired people were not meant for dull office work and instead of bawling because I couldn’t learn shorthand, why didn’t I use some of my many other talents.
    I said that considering that Mr. Chalmers had put up with me this long and had paid my way to nightschool, I thought I should stay until the end. And I did, in spite of Mr. Chalmers’ telling me many times that the depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him.
    One day my brother Cleve came in to take me to lunch and caught the tail end of one of these little talks. “The only way to get rid of the poor is to line them up against a wall and shoot them,” said kind old Mr. Chalmers, chewing his cigar. “I feel the same way about sons of bitches like you,” said my tall, handsome, red-haired brother smiling in the doorway. Chalmers went into his office and slammed the door shut. Cleve and I went to lunch.
    Two days later, the office closed and its closing, like the death of an invalid who has hovered for long wearisome months at the brink of death, brought relief rather than sorrow. I cleaned out my desk, throwing away the accumulation of half-filled bottles of hand lotion, packages of personal letters, dried-up bottles of nail polish, used cakes of soap, broken-toothed combs and tobaccoy lipsticks, which littered my bottom drawer, and