Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [80]
Dawn barely heard her. Every time Agnis Hamm’s truck pulled away Dawn was at the electronic typewriter. Stayed late some evenings to get at it. Letter after letter.
Dear Sirs: I am writing to inquire about the position of Auto Sales with your firm. Although my experience is in shipping traffic ...
Dear Sirs: I am writing in response to your ad for a Spanish-speaking clerk. Although I do not speak Spanish I have a B. E. in Maritime Traffic Engineering and will relocate. I enclose ...
Mavis Bangs kept talking. “Tell you a woman that fished alongside her man was Mrs. Buggit. Put the babies with her sister and out they’d go. She was as strong as a man they said. Mrs. Buggit don’t go out now, only to the clothesline. She suffers from stress incontinence, they calls it. She can’t hold her water. When she stands up or laughs or coughs or whatever. A problem. They was trying to get her to do some exercises, you know, stop and go, stop and go, she said it didn’t make a bit of difference except they noticed the dog would stand in front of the bathroom door when she was in there and act real concerned. She was took bad, you know, when they lost the oldest boy. Jesson. Just like Jack, he was. Stubborn! Couldn’t tell him a thing. What do you think, Dawn, you think it was Mrs. Melville done it? Whose fancy blue leather we all stitched up? Cut off his head? Agnis’s nephew says they was at one another like dogs and cats. Quarreling. And drunk. A woman drunk! And how they went off in the night and didn’t pay Agnis for the work we done? Of course, now it looks like it was she went off in the night and didn’t pay. But to cut a feller’s head off and put it in a suitcase! They say she had to have help, a weak old woman like that.”
“I don’t know,” said Dawn. The typewriter had a repeat setting. All she had to do was change the name of the addressee and the position and it spit another letter out.
[181] Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a research assistant. Although I do not speak Japanese I am willing to learn ...
Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a floral designer. Although I do not arrange flowers I am willing to learn ...
Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a position in brokerage operations. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to learn ...
“It’s these wicked people coming in. Nothing is like it was. Such ugly things never happened here. We had some good ways in the old times. They may laugh at them now, but they come out true more often than not. One I will never forget, hardly a girl knows it now, because they don’t make mats any more, but when there was a new mat made, you know, the girls, the young girls would get a cat, see, and they’d put the cat on the new mat, then fold up the sides and hold it in there. There was always a cat. Newfoundlanders like their cats. Then they’d unfold it, and whoever the cat came to, why she was the next one to be married. Now that was as true as the sun rises.”
The goal was twenty-five letters a week, every week. Out of them a reply must come.
Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement for a dog groomer. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to relocate ...
“My sister worked on a mat all winter, a pattern of roses and codfish on a blue background. Pretty. There I was, fourteen years old. There was five girls there. Liz, that was my sister, and Kate and Jen and the two Marys. They done the cat up in the mat when it was finished. And you know that cat comes straight to me and jumps in my lap. And strange to say, but I was the next one married. Liz was dead of TB before the summer. Kate never married. Mary Genge went to Boston with her folks, and the other Mary I don’t know. But I married Thomas Munn. On my fifteenth birthday.