Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) by Delia Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

that time, I didn’t have a clue who I was except that I was a New Yorker.
    So there was this problem in my first marriage along with many others. I was actually in love with a city, not a person. No movie prepared me for city love. If one had, Isuspect it still would have been no match for
Seven Brides
.
    My life in Providence was essentially false. I was pretending to be a helpmate (pretending that helpmate was a valid destiny, which for others it may be, but for me it wasn’t). I was terrible at cleaning house. There is a saying: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” It’s not true. Housecleaning is only worth doing to the point that the place is clean enough that no one notices it’s not.
    I got a job as a Girl Friday.
    A Girl Friday was a secretary with a BA. The term, which died sometime during the 1970s thanks to the Women’s Liberation movement, is worth discussing because it’s so insulting. In the classic, perhaps racist classic,
Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe (published in 1719), Friday was Robinson Crusoe’s servant. Crusoe, shipwrecked and alone on an island, rescues a “savage” from death when a few cannibals canoe over to picnic on him. Crusoe names him Friday (after the day he saves him), thereby anticipating the creative baby-naming of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Crusoe’s name, he tells Friday, is Master. After that is settled and Friday has cleaned up the bones and flesh the othercannibals have left behind, Master teaches him other words like
yes
and
no
. Thus the origin of Girl Friday, a title intended to make a college-educated woman feel better about her menial job—better, that is, than another woman, a secretary.
    I had this job at the Research and Design Institute.
    In retrospect, I’m not sure what this company actually did. The guys who ran it claimed to design interior spaces, but they were not architects or designers. They were, they believed, better than that. More enlightened. It was a drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of place, and as for their designs, what I remember most was a lot of library shelving. The important thing was that my boss was mean. He lived to make underlings feel like shit. Picking on them, criticizing their work, causing them to anguish about whether they were about to be fired. Usually they were. This man was never mean to me, but here’s what I learned and I pass on: A mean boss is eventually mean to everyone. One day he started ragging on me, something to do with the job he claimed I wasn’t doing. It went on for a few weeks, and after one unpleasant attack, I picked up my purse and, as I passed him and some library shelving on the way to the exit, I said, “I quit.” And he said, “You’re flat-chested.”
    This is one of my favorite things that has ever happened to me. Because I love, love, love to tell it.
    Only it is also one of those things . . . well, as I said, I was quick with a comeback, but in this case, to my lifelong regret, I said nothing.
    In any event, as a result, I was, at approximately twenty-seven years of age, unemployed and flat-chested.
    What was I to do?
    I went into the crochet business. This may not seem the obvious next move, although in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Jane Powell knits. Knitting is harder than crocheting. My friend Lorrie taught me. We formed a business crocheting purses and belts for New York department stores. We landed a big order from Bendel. I had a week to crochet fifty purses. I was crocheting in my sleep. Two months after beginning, we flamed out.
    Shortly thereafter, however, I was at a cocktail party in my beloved New York City, which I tried to escape to as much as possible, and met an editor from Simon & Schuster. I said to him, “I know you’d never be interested in this, but would you like a book about crocheting?”
    He said, “Yes.”
    To my astonishment.
    He must have been impressed by how confidently I presented myself.
    That is how I got a contract for