Dream Fluff

Well, when I said to them all “Clear out!” I meant — well, I didn’t mean for EVER. But that’s what they’ve done. I mean, I haven’t seen or heard a sign from them in two days, but I bet they’re talking about me. Especially Dolline. Dolline, what a name. When she writes it down, she puts “Dolli.” You expect her to put a flower around the dot of the “i.” What’s even worse is that she has a twin sister named Charmla. Charmla and Dolline! That just goes to show you what their parents must be like and what little training of any kind they must have gotten at home. Except maybe eating lettuce and putting on hair spray. Well, I don’t really know about Charmla because she doesn’t work with me. Dolline does, though, and just about all she ever does around here is eat lettuce and put on hair spray. She brings the lettuce to work every single day in a plastic Tupperware container, and it’s all I’ve ever seen her eat for lunch. She also brings a bottle of Thousand Island dressing or sometimes Roquefort, and sits there eating lettuce for lunch just like any rabbit. She says it’s a diet. She does that and the hair spray for reasons that I’ll tell you later on. Basically, though, she does the hair spray to keep her hair piled on her head in a funny way. She rats it up real high and kind of lets it wing out on the sides, and she keeps it together with hair spray. But it’s always falling anyway, like the law of gravity or something. So she’s always running into the ladies’ room where she keeps a can of the stuff and SSSSSSSSSS lays it on. I nearly suffocate whenever I go in there.

None of the other people I work with are much better than Dolline. There’s Merilee and Betty. Merilee’s grouchy all the time because her husband Bob is always abandoning her and going to Los Angeles. With good reason I’d think. She probably drives him crazy being so grouchy. It’s a vicious circle. Then Betty is so boring there’s nothing to say about her. She just sits there in the office and files her nails a lot.

Those two are absolute slaves to Dolline. They do just about anything she does. They even did the lettuce diet. All three of them had their Tupperware and Roquefort bottles, and then I’d bring the most magnificent lunches devisable — everything from soup in a thermos bottle to big fat napoleons for dessert. Their jaws nearly dropped! They quit that salad thing fast. All except for Dolline, but I know she drools internally.

So these are the people I work with, pretty unpleasant except for our boss, Mr. Whitaker. He’s old so he’s quieter. He’s semiretired. He used to be all the way retired, but then he got someone to come in and manage the travel agency for him. That was Chuck Clark. Chuck smoked a pipe and everybody thought he was real sophisticated, especially Dolline. She thought she had special rights to him or something. She was always in the ladies’ room in those days. She used up three cans of hair spray in a month, which was all Chuck lasted anyway. Not even that lettuce helped her, because Chuck ran off with the new girl, Stephanie, that had gone to college for a while and so I guess went along with the pipe. Dolline was absolutely upset and would only nibble at the edges of her lettuce for a while. And Mr. Whitaker, the boss, came out of retirement because he said he got tired of just loafing all the time and, besides, it would be too hard to keep breaking in new managers.

This shows you the kind of girl Dolline is, though. And that’s why all the lettuce and hair spray. She’s MAN HUNGRY. That’s what she calls it herself. She says her real...