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someone deeply inconvenienced by a surprise guest—and in this case, a guest who had inconsiderately duplicated himself. But I knew her too well; she was secretly delighting in the opportunity to entertain two young men, not to mention the pleasure she took in playing the martyred host. “Please forgive this old coffee service,” she said, meaning the silver carafe. “I didn’t know youse two would be staying for coffee or I woulda polished this ratty thing up.” I think she meant to extract a compliment, but failed in this mission. She addressed mainly the twin on the right, whose plaid jacket was predominantly red.
    I decided Benny must be the one on the right, the one who had spoken up to introduce their nicknames.
    “We were just saying how, since Benny brought Lenny along, I should find a girl-friend to bring along, too,” Helen remarked. There was a brittle, stretched quality to the cheerful tone of her voice, and suddenly her desperation was transparent—these were the strings that came along with Benny; wherever he went, his brother also needed to be entertained, a fact for which she had not been prepared. Suddenly Helen whirled in my direction. “Don’t you look smart today,” she said, the rhetorical comment echoing with emptiness. In an attempt to come up with a more specific compliment, she looked me over, her eyes traveling from my head to my toes. It did not appear they could wholly endorse what they found there. “You look . . . ,” she began, still casting about wildly for something she might find pleasing about my person. “You look so . . .
healthy
!”
    “Helen!” Dotty chastised.
    “What? I’m paying her a compliment. Normally she looks so drawn and pale. But look, dear”—she turned back to me—“look how your complexion is just perfectly
rosy
! You’d be a fool not to come out with us.
    “And of course you can borrow some of my things,” she added quickly, making it clear that no matter how “healthy” I looked, she didn’t want me stepping into public with her dressed in the suit I’d worn to work and still had on now.
    “I would go if I could,” Dotty interjected. “But of course, who would take care of the children?”
    I suppose this was my cue to volunteer. Neither prospect seemed very appealing. At least with Helen and the twins I might get a nice meal. Dotty waited, and as the seconds ticked by, the look she gave me became increasingly laced with arsenic. In addition to Helen and myself, there were five other boarders, but they were all somewhat elderly, and none of them was reasonably equipped to babysit four small children. One of the oldest men who boarded at the house, a pensioner named Willoughby who had milky-blue eyes and who wore a copious amount of some sort of exotic, sickly-sweet cologne, would be all too happy to be left alone with the children, and I knew Dotty was guarding them from such an occurrence.
    I looked from Dotty’s genuinely miserable face to Helen’s agitated, nervous expression and realized I had won this coveted invitation merely by default.
    After a cup of coffee, my acquiescence was assumed, and I found myself whisked upstairs and forced to try on several rather frilly and ill-fitting dresses until one finally met with Helen’s approval. Eventually we came back downstairs with Helen’s dress fitted precariously to my admittedly scrawny frame by means of several black satin ribbons tied in strategic places. The quieter of the twins, the one in the blue plaid jacket—Lenny, I’d guessed by that time—made a halfhearted attempt to compliment me on the dress, a tactic I found somewhat offensive, as it had been made plain not more than fifteen minutes earlier that the dress was not something I could take credit for. A stickler for good manners, though, I mumbled a thank-you. Then we all said farewell to Dotty, who was tidying up the coffee dishes and doing absolutely nothing to conceal her disgruntled misery, and before I knew