banana”—or arranged an exercise so that the first letter of each item spelled out a subliminally subversive message like “MEAT IS GOOD” or “BOW TO SATAN” or (in a twenty-item review exercise he was particularly proud of) “SATAN SEZ EAT MORE CANDY.” And when he was feeling unusually ambitious, he combined the two techniques into one exercise:
In each of the following sentences, underline the
direct object
once and the
indirect object
twice. Not all sentences have an indirect object.
1. I gave Renfield instructions not to wake me until sunset.
2. Lizzie offered her father a close shave that morning.
3. Oliver, have you told Mr. Fagin about the missing waller?
4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.
5. Eagerly, Oscar taught Bosie the backstroke.
6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.
7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.
8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.
9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.
10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.
Paul complained bitterly about Bonnie at home, especially on those days when she had caught him asleep in front of his monitor in the middle of the afternoon. What he didn’t tell Kym was that most of his coworkers were pert and stylish young women ten years younger than him, women just out of college who wore airy sundresses or tight, wraparound skirts to the office all summer long and decorated their cubes semi-ironically with magazine photos of pretty-boy actors. Some of these girls found Paul’s wiseass bitterness intriguing, and they slouched fetchingly in his cube doorway and flirted with him about books and movies, grad school life, or last night’s episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. One of them, a dark little Russian emigré named Oksana who worked in the Harbridge science department, took Paul into her bed on the evenings when Kym was working. Oksana had a wry twist to her lips and an adorable accent. “Say ‘moose and squirrel,’ ” he’d murmured to her in the clinch, and she’d slapped him on the backside and whispered salacious Russian in his ear.
On those evenings when Kym was working and moody Oksana did not want to see him, Paul haunted the coffeehouses near the campus, where he could eye bohemian young women or intense graduate students in sleeveless blouses over a copy of the local alternative weekly. He had prepared a story to explainhis situation in case he managed to engage one of these thrilling women in conversation; the last thing he wanted them to know was that he was a failed English professor. Instead, he told them that he was a former writer/producer for
The X-Files
, and that he had walked away from his television career and moved to Lamar to write a novel. “I wanted to get out before the show went down the tubes,” he was going to tell them, and he had prepared answers to the questions he thought he was likely to get: “He’s an asshole.” “She’s even smarter than she looks.” And “I wrote the ones about worms. If it had a worm or worms in it, that one was mine.” But in the end, he wasn’t able to use the story. In one of the coffeehouses, a renovated old house with creaking floors and mismatched couches and easy chairs, he ran into Virginia Dunning, an old friend of his ex-wife’s from graduate school. Paul had always considered Virginia a bit too, well, virginal for his taste, but since he had known her in Hamilton Groves she had picked up a mordant wit that Paul found instantly attractive. To Paul’s astonishment and envy, Virginia was not only a tenured full professor before she was thirty, she was already chair of the Longhorn State History Department. To his further surprise she invited him back that first night to her little Texas bungalow, where, as luck would have it, she lived with a cat, whose name was Sam, and who put his ears back and flattened himself to the floorboards at the sight of his
In each of the following sentences, underline the
direct object
once and the
indirect object
twice. Not all sentences have an indirect object.
1. I gave Renfield instructions not to wake me until sunset.
2. Lizzie offered her father a close shave that morning.
3. Oliver, have you told Mr. Fagin about the missing waller?
4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.
5. Eagerly, Oscar taught Bosie the backstroke.
6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.
7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.
8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.
9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.
10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.
Paul complained bitterly about Bonnie at home, especially on those days when she had caught him asleep in front of his monitor in the middle of the afternoon. What he didn’t tell Kym was that most of his coworkers were pert and stylish young women ten years younger than him, women just out of college who wore airy sundresses or tight, wraparound skirts to the office all summer long and decorated their cubes semi-ironically with magazine photos of pretty-boy actors. Some of these girls found Paul’s wiseass bitterness intriguing, and they slouched fetchingly in his cube doorway and flirted with him about books and movies, grad school life, or last night’s episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. One of them, a dark little Russian emigré named Oksana who worked in the Harbridge science department, took Paul into her bed on the evenings when Kym was working. Oksana had a wry twist to her lips and an adorable accent. “Say ‘moose and squirrel,’ ” he’d murmured to her in the clinch, and she’d slapped him on the backside and whispered salacious Russian in his ear.
On those evenings when Kym was working and moody Oksana did not want to see him, Paul haunted the coffeehouses near the campus, where he could eye bohemian young women or intense graduate students in sleeveless blouses over a copy of the local alternative weekly. He had prepared a story to explainhis situation in case he managed to engage one of these thrilling women in conversation; the last thing he wanted them to know was that he was a failed English professor. Instead, he told them that he was a former writer/producer for
The X-Files
, and that he had walked away from his television career and moved to Lamar to write a novel. “I wanted to get out before the show went down the tubes,” he was going to tell them, and he had prepared answers to the questions he thought he was likely to get: “He’s an asshole.” “She’s even smarter than she looks.” And “I wrote the ones about worms. If it had a worm or worms in it, that one was mine.” But in the end, he wasn’t able to use the story. In one of the coffeehouses, a renovated old house with creaking floors and mismatched couches and easy chairs, he ran into Virginia Dunning, an old friend of his ex-wife’s from graduate school. Paul had always considered Virginia a bit too, well, virginal for his taste, but since he had known her in Hamilton Groves she had picked up a mordant wit that Paul found instantly attractive. To Paul’s astonishment and envy, Virginia was not only a tenured full professor before she was thirty, she was already chair of the Longhorn State History Department. To his further surprise she invited him back that first night to her little Texas bungalow, where, as luck would have it, she lived with a cat, whose name was Sam, and who put his ears back and flattened himself to the floorboards at the sight of his
Similar Books
