Clarence

Sunday. Brilliant sunshine. Rose sat in bed under the quilt, laughing over her Kingsley Amis novel. Occasionally she coughed. She blew her nose into a crumpled Kleenex. She poured mint tea into an old Captain Kirk mug she had bought the year she crashed a Star Trek convention (and she had gotten William Shatner’s autograph, too).

Where had she caught this cold?

The Amis novel’s protagonists, Jenny and Patrick, made up a yokel game, “in which the idea was to have a conversation where you added nothing to what the other person had said without actually repeating it. If you did either you lost a point.”

The yokel game was just like modern conversation. It was, in fact, the only kind of conversation she ever heard at the office. It was a prerequisite of 21st century manners. Off with your head if you said anything real.

Downstairs she heard the doorbell, then feet tromping. More than two feet. Four, possibly six. The murmur of voices. Like a troupe of hobbits or elves. Ben had company.

Who? Why? Sunday, bloody Sunday.

A minute later, Axel, the retired Shakespeare professor, was pulling up a chair by her bed.

There is nothing worse than a catarrh, he said. And no one sympathizes.

Yes, it’s miserable. But please don’t sit there. You don’t want to catch it.

I don’t catch colds, he said absently. Look, I wanted your advice. Clarence can’t pronounce his lines. So I wanted to run my phonetic version of his speeches by you.

Which one plays Clarence?

The unemployed gentleman who hurt his back in the workplace.

Oh, yes. Well, he’s a good actor, she said. Very lively. He just needs a little help.

She glanced at the altered script. She had done a phonetic AS YOU LIKE IT a few years ago when several immigrants struggled with their lines. She was then expected to produce a phonetic version every year. This year she had refused.

Ben, you’re the Shakespeare person, she’d said. I’m just an occasional idea person.

Yet here it was in front of her again: “yay” for “yea,” “oh-bay” for “obey,” “proh-fuh-sees” for “prophecies.”

Looks good, she said. I give it the seal of approval.

Axel hesitated. There’s just one thing.

Yes?

Ben suggested maybe you would be so kind as to type Clarence’s part on your computer for me. Unfortunately I never learned to type. And, as you can see, my handwriting is frightful. Of course, I could hire someone to type it. But Ben... He trailed off.

Rose sighed. Axel was an old man in his seventies, a man who had had a secretary during his years as English department chair. How startled he would be by the contemporary office, by the secretary in Rose’s office, who would laugh in her face if anyone asked to have something typed. Rose didn’t mind typing. It wasn’t a big deal. Yet there was something crazy about it. Here she was in bed, sneezing her head off, her nose red and raw, and the men couldn’t leave her alone apparently. What a laugh. They were determined to work her to death. Even her bedroom wasn’t sacrosanct. She was the Nana of PR, phonetics, and word-processing. Should she have put up a KEEP OUT sign?

It was because Ben doesn’t have good boundaries, her sister once hypothesized on the phone. He sees no difference between himself and you. So he assumes you want to share all his work.

It was vaguely annoying, vaguely endearing.

I’ll have this done in a jiff, Rose told Axel.

In a jiff? Where was this coming from? She didn’t talk like that. Had she been a secretary in a past life? How outdated was the slang “in a jiff”?

After she printed out the pages, she went downstairs to join the little party, part of which had spilled out into the back yard. It was really rather sweet to hear the Bosnian Richard III declaiming his lines in a domestic setting.

Ben came indoors and kissed her.

I thought I’d make pancakes, she said, yawning. The crowd looks hungry. I’ll try not to breathe on anything.

You’re an angel, he said.

An angel with good secretarial skills, she said. Are you going to pay me for typing?

I’ll do something nice for you soon. After the play is over, he said.

Well, I’ll make buckwheat pancakes. We don’t have real maple syrup. Just that Log Cabin stuff.

No one will care. This isn’t one of your snobbish book group meetings.