The Other Typist Read Online Free PDF Page B

boarding-house. When I walked in, the first thing I encountered was a blast of thick stew-scented air. This first part, at least, was typical. The house generally smelled of bones boiling in water on the stove—mostly all chicken, but sometimes also beef. It was such a pervasive odor throughout the boarding-house, I often wondered if this meant I carried the smell of beef stock and chicken stock around with me in my clothes and my hair, unwittingly trailing it about the precinct and among my coworkers, who were too polite to remark upon it. But today when I walked in the house I instantly noticed there were a few additional fragrances wafting in the atmosphere: the scent of coffee brewing and of cologne. And cigarettes—it smelled very strongly of cigarettes.
    I peered into the parlor and was greeted by a dense fug of cigarette smoke. The chalky cloud appeared even more opaque where it drifted under the weak light of the overhead electric bulb—and this, too, I spotted as being unusual, as Dotty did not often allow us to turn on the electric lights during the day. I blinked, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and stinging smoke, I made out the figures of two men perched side by side on the sofa, each casually arranged so that his legs were crossed with one ankle resting on the opposite knee. I thought, at first, that the smoke had affected my vision, but presently I realized this was not the case. I was not seeing double, but rather a pair of identical twins, even dressed and groomed in a similar manner.
    “You must be Rose,” the one on the right said. Neither man got up from the sofa—a gesture that would have only been polite—and so I simply stood in silence, blinking at them. I noticed they were wearing similarly patterned but different-colored plaid jackets, complemented by identical boat shoes and straw boater hats. Somehow, though, I very much doubted the existence of an actual boat, as otherwise implied by their attire. There were ink stains on the thumb and forefinger of each man’s right hand. Clerks or accountants, I guessed.
    The silence was broken as Dotty and Helen burst into the sitting room, each carrying a tray full of coffee things, the cups chattering against the saucers like teeth in the cold.
    “There you are,” Helen exclaimed, as if my presence in the room was something they had long anticipated. Helen set her tray down next to Dotty’s, and Dotty began pouring out slightly burnt-smelling coffee from a very tarnished silver carafe. “You’re just in time to meet Bernard Crenshaw, my
beau
,” she said, pronouncing his name
Burr
-
nerd
. “And Leonard Crenshaw, his brother,” she finished, with a slight flourish of her hand.
Bernard and Leonard.
They had clearly fallen victim to the somewhat silly tradition of naming twins in a vaguely rhyming way, as if twins were not individual humans but rather two variations on the same theme. I knew there were lots of mothers who failed to resist this cozy habit.
    “Actually, we mostly go by Benny and Lenny,” the one on the right said. In an attempt to be amicable, I repressed the snort that rose reactively to the back of my throat. Even more ridiculous than the almost-rhyme of their given names was the rhyme of their preferred sobriquets, but it would be rude to laugh outright. I did not approve of rude behavior in others, and I couldn’t very well permit myself a different standard. I regarded the twins again, trying to determine which one was Benny, Helen’s “beau.” Leave it to Helen to use a word like that. In addition to the faces she made in the mirror, there were times when her speech sounded inexplicably affected.
My people are from the South,
I once heard her drawl to an inquiring stranger. I knew that this was only true insofar as Sheepshead Bay could be considered the South, as her “people” were all Brooklynites, going back several generations.
    Meanwhile, Dotty was flitting around with the distracted, burdened air of