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Shirley got up slowly. “Got a date, Lori?”
“Yes.”
Shirley motioned at the mail. “You go on, then. We can catch all this stuff in the morning.”
Lori got up.
“Oh, no, wait,” Shirley amended, remembering something. “There’s a letter that’s got to go out tonight.”
“Oh, okay.” The secretary reached for her dictation pad.
“Mom-meee!” A whine of impatience.
“Wait’ll I come down,” Shirley told Lori. She started to leave the kitchen, but stopped as Lori eyed her watch.
“Gee, it’s time for me to meditate, Shirl,” she said.
Shirley looked at her narrowly with muted exasperation. In the last six months, she had watched her secretary suddenly turn ‘seeker after serenity’. It had started in Los Angeles with self-hypnosis, which then yielded to Buddhist chanting. During the last few weeks that Lori was quartered in the room upstairs, the house had reeked with incense, and lifeless droning of ‘Nam myoho renge kyo’ (“See, you just keep on chanting that, Shirl, just that, and you get your wish, you get everything you want…”) were heard at unlikely and untimely hours, usually when Shirley was studying her lines. “You can turn on the TV,” Lori had generously told her employer on one of these occasions. “It’s fine. I can chant when there’s all kinds of noise. It won’t bother me a bit.” Now it was transcendental meditation.
“You really think that kind of stuff is going to do you any good, Lor?” Shirley asked tonelessly.
“It gives me piece of mind,” responded Lori.
“Right,” Shirley said dryly. She turned away and said good night.