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By Root 603 0

with interviews of greater depth, done in person. And, Marian hoped, behind closed doors. The whole business, especially some of the questions that were to be asked, had rather shocked her sense of fitness, though Lucy had pointed out over a coffee break that it was most proper these days, after all it was a respectable product, you could buy it in the supermarket and it had full-page advertisements in some of the best magazines, and wasn’t it nice they were getting it out in the open and not being so Victorian and repressed about it. Millie had said of course that was the enlightened view but these surveys were always a pain, not only did you have trouble with people at the doors but you couldn’t get the interviewers to do them anyway, lots of them were quite old fashioned, especially the ones in small towns, some of them even resigned if you asked them to do it (that was the worst of using housewives, they didn’t really need the money, they were always getting bored with it or fed up or pregnant and resigning and then you had to get new ones and train them up from scratch), the best thing was to send them out a form letter telling them how they must all do their best to better the lot of Womankind – an attempt to appeal, Marian reflected, to the embryonic noble nurse that is supposed to be curled, efficient and self-sacrificing, in the heart of every true woman.

This time something worse had happened. In the West, whoever had been in charge of selecting from the local phone books the names of the women who were to be hit by the first wave (who had been in charge out there? Mrs. Lietch in Foam River? Mrs. Hatcher in Watrous? No one could remember, and Emmy said they seemed to have misplaced the file) had not been overly meticulous. Instead of the expected flood of responses, only a mere trickle of filled-in questionnaires had been coming through the mail. Millie and Lucy were scrutinizing these now at the desk opposite Marian’s, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“Well, some of them obviously went out to men,” Millie snorted. “Here’s one with ‘Tee Hee’ written on it, from a Mr. Leslie Andrewes.”

“What I can’t understand is the ones that come back from women with NO checked in all the boxes. What on earth do they use then?” said Lucy peevishly.

“Well this lady’s over eighty.”

“Here’s one who says she’s been pregnant for seven years straight.”

“Oh no, poor thing,” gasped Emmy, who was listening. “Why she’ll ruin her health.”

“I bet that dumb cluck Mrs. Lietch – or Mrs. Hatcher, whoever it was – sent them to Indian reservations again. I specifically told her not to. The lord knows what they use,” sniffed Lucy.

“Moss,” Millie said decisively. This wasn’t the first time something had gone wrong in the West. She counted once more through the stack of questionnaires. “We’re going to have to start it all over again and the client will be furious. All our quotas are thrown off and I hate to think what’ll happen to our deadlines.”

Marian looked at the clock. It was almost time for lunch. She drew a row of moons across her page: crescent moons, full moons, then crescent moons pointing the other way, then nothing: a black moon. For good measure she drew a star inside one of the crescents. She set her watch, the one Peter had given her for her birthday, though it was only two minutes off by the office clock, and wound it. She typed another question. She was aware of being hungry, and wondered whether her hunger had been produced by her knowledge of the time. She got out of her chair, spun it round a couple of times to raise the height, sat down again and typed another question; she was tired, tired, tired of being a manipulator of words. At last, unable to remain sitting in her chair at her desk in front of her typewriter a moment longer, she said “Let’s go have lunch now.”

“Well …” Millie hesitated, and looked at the clock. She was still semi-held by the illusion that there was something she could do about the mess.

“Yes, let’s,” said Lucy, “this is driving me bats, I’ve just got to get out of here.” She walked towards