"Landsakes!" she said. "What a morning's work! Taff, would you read this?"
"Sure," Taffy said. She took the piece of paper Myrtle handed her and read:
Myrtle B. Jones is an authoress from New Jersey. She has earned multitudinous educational degrees in things that haven't done her any good at all. She is fluent and in a previous life was probably quite fluent in German. She has spent the last decade working on a biography of Benjamin Franklin and hopes to finish it within the next half-decade."I didn't know you were writing a biography of Benjamin Franklin," Taffy said.
"What?" Myrtle said. "I'm not."
"It says you've been working on one for the last decade," Taffy said.
"Working on reading one," Myrtle said.
"You've been reading a book for the last decade," Taffy said. "What you've written here is pretty misleading."
"Not my problem," Myrtle said. "I can't help the conclusions people jump to."
"I think this whole thing is ridiculous," Taffy said. "You're fluent. Which languages? It doesn't say."
"I'm fluent in language, it doesn't have to say anything else."
"And it seems pretty dismissive of your education."
"My education hasn't done me a damn thing, you know that. We were architecting and traveling and putting on world-class exhibitions before we even graduated from high school. All education has done for me is make me a bad speller."
"'Multitudinous' isn't a word," Taffy said.
"You know what it means though, right?"
"I suppose I do."
"Then it is a word and you shut up about that."
Taffy sat at the typewriter and typed for a few minutes. Then she cleared her throat.
"How about this," she said, and read:
Myrtle B. Jones grew up in New Jersey. A child prodigy, she had traveled around the world by the time she was 13. After receiving degrees from Princeton and Harvard and honorary doctorates from Cambridge and the University of Oslo, she moved to Fort Lauderdale, where she now lives and writes. In her spare time she enjoys hunting, racing Shetland ponies, and tending her garden."No," Myrtle said. "I don't want anyone finding out about the ponies."
"Why not?"
"They'll steal them or make fun of me. It's impossible. Leave my bio the way it is."
"You won't get any work, Myrtle."
"You're on drugs, go to bed," Myrtle said.
Taffy crumpled a sheet of paper and threw it into the trashcan. She put another sheet of paper into an envelope and sealed it.
"Here's your bio for the magazine," she said, handing the envelope to Myrtle.
