editrix

She warmed that water with her hatred. She sighed plagues into that water. I didn’t care. In this chill and inhuman place I was obedient and invisible to everything. I needed that tea to remember I was alive, warm-blooded. I always carried the tea slowly up the stairs and to my desk. I drank it with careful relish. No spilling on the citations. No slurping, no satisfied Aaaah! Such noises would echo through the cubicles and start an uncomfortable collective shifting of the editors and editrices in their seats. So I always sipped quietly.

The citation was from a book called The Broken Teaglass, written by someone named Dolores Beekmim, and published in 1985.

“This one’s kind of … weird, though,” I said slowly. “Should I be quoting something like this? There’s something a little off here.”

“Whadya mean?” Mona took it and read it.

“Kind of sounds like …” I looked at Mona, hoping she would say what I was thinking, so I wouldn’t have to risk sounding stupid. “But maybe not. I mean, a citation can be a lot of things, you know? There are officers’ citations, in police departments, and—”

Mona was silent for a moment. “‘No spilling on the citations’?” she said, wrinkling her nose. She read it again.

“I think this takes place … here,” she said.

“Yeah … that’s kind of what it sounded like.”

“Or maybe at some other dictionary company office. But there’s, like, only one or two other dictionary companies in the country.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I didn’t know there was a book like this.” Mona seemed tickled. For the first time since I’d approached her desk, her smile seemed real. “A novel about Samuelson. Isn’t that amazing? Can I hold on to this for now?”

“Sure. Doesn’t seem like a very objective thing to be quoting, so I’ll look for something else.”

“Right.” Mona looked distracted. She was watching Dan make his way to the men’s room. “Look through the rest of those cits. Then look through the ones for ‘dominatrix.’”

“Yeah. All right. Sounds like fun.”

“Don’t spend too much time on it.” Mona lowered her voice. “Dan probably just gave it to you so the guy doesn’t get any funny ideas about us being friends. The content of the answer probably won’t matter so much as the fact that a different editor’s name is signed on the bottom.”

“Dan didn’t quite say it like that.”

“Of course he didn’t. But that’s what he meant.”

Dan finally started my “research reading” training on the following morning. I’d been looking forward to it since Dan told me that all editors—even lowly editorial assistants like myself—got to choose most of their own newspapers and magazines for the task. The idea that I could get paid to read Rolling Stone and Time really jazzed me. He started me off with a little packet of photocopied articles to practice on. I peeked at the titles of his selections while he spoke: “Reality TV? Not!” “Learning to Say No.” “Lesbian Celluloid: Classic Screen Dykes.” “Uncle Sam Goody Wants YOU: Materialism as the New Patriotism?”

“As you can see, I’ve tried to give you a good variety. Nothing too heavy for your first few times around. You’re likely to find some pretty informal writing in some of these. But remember that you’re not just looking for new words. The easiest thing to spot is new words, especially slang words. But we also read for slight variations in how older words are being used. Or general usage issues. Or abbreviations. Anything that looks like it could be useful. You’ll find more to underline as time goes on. You’ll become more free to underline whatever strikes you.”

“Should I look things up as I go?” I asked.

“To begin, you can do that, if you wish. It might give you a feel for what we’ve already got in our books. But typically, you won’t be doing that. It goes too slow that way, and it’s unnecessary. Citations are there to help us to determine if our definitions are still accurate and up-to-date, not just to determine what we’re missing.”

Dan cleared his throat.

“It’s really one of the more fun parts of the job,” he continued. “Aside from defining, of course. You ought to know, though. It’s addictive behavior. We’ve got this one retired editor who still marks everything he reads. A pretty sad case. He comes in every once in a while to drop off his handwritten cits. Takes them off the TV and radio too. Half of his cits are quoted from late-night talk radio.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t think I could make that up.” Dan shook his head. “I shouldn’t speak of it so lightly, actually. That could easily be my own fate, I suppose.”

I glanced down at his hands as he handed me a stapled list. No wedding ring. I don’t know why I’d assumed he was married.

“Take a look at this list of periodicals,” he told me. “We subscribe to all of these, and you should feel free to add something if there’s a magazine you think would make a good addition. Some periodicals are read by a few editors, some only by one. People tend to catch different things. You have any idea what you’d like to read?”

“Rolling Stone?” I said.

“Sure,” he said, circling it. “Two other editors read that, but I’ll put you on the list.”

“Time?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line for that. Three people already read it. I just kicked someone else off it and put Mona on for a while. She asked for that about six months ago.”

I noticed that Motorcyclist didn’t have any initials next to it.

“Anyone read that?” I said, pointing.

“No, actually. The editor who read that retired a few months ago. His subscriptions have been piling up. I’d be quite happy to give you that one.”

“Sure, put me down for Motorcyclist, then.”

“And can I start sending motorcycle terms to you? Are you a motorcyclist?”

“Um. No, I’m not. It just caught my eye. I’m just interested in it as a, uh, layman.”

“I see,” Dan murmured. “Well. We’ll start with those. You can think about what other magazines you’d like and tell me over the next few weeks.”

I suppressed a groan when I saw Tom sitting on the porch as I drove up. Almost every day when I came home, he was there. He’d blow smoke rings and nod as he questioned me about the secrets of the dictionary trade. When he was satisfied with my answers, he usually offered me a drink.

“There he is,” he said as I climbed the porch steps. “Billy the Kid.”

“I don’t feel like a kid. Not after a day at that office.”

“Mmm.” Tom nodded. “You know, you’ve got circles under your eyes. You worn out?”

“Yeah. A little tired.”

“What did they have you do today?”

“I read a bunch of magazines.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. Sounds like a tough day. Did I tell you yet that I applied to work there once?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Well, I did. But they didn’t want anything to do with me. Didn’t even call me for an interview.”

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” I said. “They probably were just being sticklers. Probably didn’t call you because you don’t have your degree.”

“I don’t need to be consoled, man. It’s all shit.”

“It is,” I agreed.

Tom was staring out into the street.

“Shit,” he said again, slowly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It’s shit,” he said. “What superficial things separate an educated man from an ignorant one. In the eyes of conventional society, anyway.”

He closed his eyes.

“Shit,” he said again, apparently relishing the word. Then he started reciting, “‘For some time he has been aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic tunnel he’s in: shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hardwater minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning…. ’ You know Thomas Pynchon? Gravity’s Rainbow?”

“No, not really. Heard of Pynchon, but I never read any of his books.”

“That’s a part that really hits home. Some days don’t you just feel like you’ve gone headfirst into the crapper?”

“I’ve had a few of those, yeah.”

“Ah.” Tom opened his eyes briefly, and smiled. “‘Patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic … ’ Billy. You really should read him…. Hey. You know what ‘glyptic’ means?”

I looked at the ground. I couldn’t quite place what the root glyp might mean.

“I have a lot to learn,” I admitted.

“Don’t sweat it. No one expects you to be Daniel Samuelson. They don’t make ’em like Daniel Samuelson anymore. I hope they’re teaching you a little company history at the office.”

The city bus pulled up to the corner and Barbara struggled out of its doors, carrying about four white plastic grocery bags on each arm. She rearranged her bags and tugged at her skirt before heading toward the house. Tom kept talking as she approached.

“People don’t generally appreciate what a hardworking man Daniel Samuelson actually was,” he went on. “Imagine writing a whole dictionary in just a few years. Now they’ve got a full staff doing the same thing. The same thing one man did back then. Hey, Barb.”

“Hello.” Barbara stopped in front of the steps and tried to blow a wisp of hair out of her eyes.

“You want help with those bags?” I asked. She smiled, then handed me a bulging plastic sack full of cans.

“Either of you know when Daniel Samuelson started his illustrious company?” Tom asked.

Barbara rolled her eyes. I opened my mouth to answer, but Tom interrupted.

“Eighteen seventy-eight. See that?” He shook his head. “Barb here’s lived in Claxton her whole life and she doesn’t know a hell of a lot about Mr. Samuelson. It’s a shame. That company was here before most of our families even got off the boat. But see, many Claxtonites don’t even know about Samuelson. It’s actually a little-known fact that some of the country’s finest dictionaries are produced right here in our fair shithole of a city.”

Tom looked at Barbara and then at me. “You want a shot of something?”

“Please, Tom,” said Barbara, opening the screen door. “Not on the porch.”

“Tequila okay? That’s all I got,” Tom said, getting up.

“I’m good,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

As soon as I closed my front door, however, I was sorry I had turned down the tequila shot. The pouring, drinking, and subsequent light-headed conversation would’ve filled up a good thirty minutes far better than I could on my own.

I threw down my junk mail.

“What the hell do I do now?” I whispered.

On my kitchen table, 101 Damn Good Jokes lay facedown, open, with its spine cracked. When I saw the book, I felt chastened. What was wrong with me lately—treating time as if it were something that simply needed to be filled?

I opened the refrigerator and considered its contents. Chicken breasts. Celery. Broccoli. Zucchini. Heavy cream, even. What was that for? I couldn’t remember. I figured a stir fry was ambitious enough. I sat down and picked up my book. I would read it until I was hungry enough to start chopping.

• • •

There was an unusually tight and shiny quality to Mona’s hairdo when she stopped by my desk a few days later. As if she’d gotten up that morning and decided to really look the part of lexicographer. Ready for grammatical and personal perfection, with not a single loose hair in the way. But there was a mischievous little quirk to her face that offset the stark quality of her straight part, gray blouse, and black skirt—Mona smiled sideways, with one eyetooth showing.

“Good morning.” She leaned into my cubicle, whispering. I could smell her soap. It wasn’t a floral scent, but something wholesome and robust, like Ivory or Irish Spring.

“If you say so,” I whispered back. “Morning, afternoon, night—it’s all running together lately. I wake up in this chair sometimes and wonder what day it is.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Mona said. “Although some of the senior editors still fall asleep at their desks. Guess what?”

“What?”

“That ‘editrix’ cit we found? It’s even fishier than I thought.”

“Really?” I suppressed a yawn. “How’s that?”

“No Broken Teaglass in the editors’ library. No listing of it on any of the library websites I checked. I tried a couple of used-book-shop websites, and Amazon. Nothing. I even called this giant used-book store in Portland, where my cousin works. They didn’t have any Broken Teaglass. And no one’s ever heard of Robinson Press. It’s like it never existed.”

“I’m sure it existed. Maybe it was just a vanity press or something. Maybe The Broken Teaglass was just some crappy book that happened to fall into some editor’s hands. And then he research-read it for shits and giggles.”

Mona closed her eyes. “Please. I hate that expression.”

“Alrighty,” I said.

“Anyway. Do you really think such a book—about dictionary editors—would just fall into some dictionary editor’s hands, and then that dictionary editor would blindly research-read it like anything else?”

“I didn’t say it necessarily happened that way, exactly.”

“Then how do you think it happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just started working here a couple of weeks ago. There are probably a million ways that this could’ve happened that I’m not smart enough to know about.”

“Yeah, well,” she persisted. “I was looking forward to reading this book, whatever it is. And it looks like it’s just … imaginary.”

“Maybe you should ask some of the older editors about it. Someone’s probably heard of it. Maybe even one of them is the one who research-read it in the first place.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ll do that. I probably should have thought of that before.”

“Tell me what you find out.”

I was doing my best to feign interest. I liked Mona. She was sort of cute and vaguely amusing. I wanted to give her an excuse to come back to my desk.

About a month into training, after about fifty practice definitions, I was ready to start defining for real. About half of the staff—fifteen or so regular editors and three of the science editors—had just started working on New Words Supplement, and I got to join them early on in the project. The Supplement was a small paperback companion book to the unabridged dictionary. Samuelson published a new Supplement every ten years or so. The idea was that people could buy this to use alongside their unabridged dictionary, rather than buying a whole new, expensive unabridged. According to Dan, the Supplement was a good place to get one’s defining feet wet, since very few people actually bought it.

I joined the Supplement staff pretty near the beginning of the project, when they were halfway through the “B” words. After that they were going to do the “A” words, then “C” words, then onward. Turns out dictionary editors rarely start with “A.” Who knew? It’s because supposedly reviewers usually just lazily look up “A” words when they’re assessing the quality of a reference book, and you don’t want reviewers looking only at the work produced while your lexicographers are still a little rusty. And starting with “A” is just generally considered lexicographical hubris, Dan informed me on my first official day of defining. Not to mention bad luck.

Defining filled my solitary days. I flipped through citations for words like bear and béarnaise sauce and determined they needed no additional definitions. I looked through the cits for beat one’s meat and drafted a definition—a simple and elegant cross-reference to masturbate.

I didn’t see much of Mona. She gave me barely discernible smiles when we glided past each other in the office, but that was all. My only significant social encounters were with pitying older editors: There was Grace, who liked to stop by my desk for small talk about the Red Sox and the new car her husband was thinking of buying and—after I mentioned that I liked to cook—recipes. Dan also offered a dry, hesitant friendliness during our training sessions in his office. And then there was Mr. Phillips.

The first day I saw him, he was hunched over the coffee machine, humming a Sinatra tune and scribbling something on the back of an envelope with a red galley pencil. I waited silently behind him with my empty mug.

I peered over the guy’s shoulder. He was shading in some block letters he had drawn on the envelope.

“Do be do be do,” he muttered as he scribbled. Then, unexpectedly, he said, “You must be the new one.”

“That’s me.”

“Your name again?”

“Billy.”

“Billy. That’s right. Grace told me. Not Bill. Billy. I’m … uh … Mr. Phillips. John Phillips. Editor emeritus. Retired about three years back.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You look like you could use a doughnut.”

“I do?”

Mr. Phillips jutted his skinny hip to one side, revealing a box of doughnuts on the table behind him.

“Take one, Billy. There are a couple chocolate ones in there. And a jelly. I got it for Anna, actually, but she’ll eat a glazed if you really want jelly. She likes glazed too.”

“You brought these doughnuts?”

“Yeah. And the coffee. The real coffee. Jamaica Blue Mountain,” he said.

“Impressive,” I said. My old girlfriend used to like Jamaica Blue Mountain. It cost something like thirty dollars a pound. Mr. Phillips finished his shading and propped the envelope next to the doughnut box. It said ENJOY! in thick block letters.

“Well, it’s called Blue Mountain blend,” Mr. Phillips admitted. “But it’s still a pretty good brew. Better than what they’ve got here on a regular day.”

“Breaking in the new blood, John?” someone asked from behind me. The voice was familiar. Clifford, who sat near me. He was short and a little overweight, with blond hair curling over his receding hairline. I’d never actually seen him before, only listened to him answer the phone.

“Yep. How’ve you been, Cliff?” Mr. Phillips asked.

“Same old, same old,” Clifford replied. But he looked like he wanted to say something else to Mr. Phillips.

“Guess I’ll get back to work,” I said.

“Take a doughnut,” urged Mr. Phillips. “Take two.”

“No, thanks—”

“C’mon, champ. What’s your pleasure? Chocolate? Cruller? Boston cream? I think I had them put a few of those in there too.”

His rasping voice grew louder with each variety of doughnut that he named, and was now nearly a roar. I grabbed a cake doughnut and a napkin.

“Now you’re talkin’. Old-fashioned plain doughnut. Heh-heh,” Mr. Phillips chuckled.

“What’s so funny, John?” Clifford asked.

“Where’d they find you, Billy?” Mr. Phillips asked. “Strapping young fellow. And with a name like Billy. Bet you’ll suck that doughnut down in no time flat.”

Cliff shook his head without looking at me and then poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Nice meeting you, Mr. Phillips,” I said, fleeing the coffee station. “Thanks for the doughnut.”

“Any time, champ.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. For the third night in a row, I lay awake past one o’clock. My bedroom’s floral wallpaper made me feel oddly old and infirm. Bean poles and bean sprouts and bean threads snaked around in my head. Some animal—probably a cat—kept making a painful sneezing-crying sound from somewhere behind the house. It would stop occasionally and I’d start to drift off—and then it would begin again.

At about 2 a.m., I dragged a sleeping bag out to my living room and sacked out there instead. The old octagonal Victorian room had huge, curtainless front windows. I pulled up all the blinds so all of the headlights could roll over me as the night traffic shushed by. Crashing on my futon, I felt like an overnight visitor in my own apartment. It was this sensation that tricked me into sleep.