maven

When the papers went crazy, I knew everything might very well explode. Still, I resigned myself to the stern presence of my fellow word mavens. There was at least an odd comfort in submitting to the long silence of the day. Reliable and insistent, it served as a kind of protector. I was reading a book about drug slang, underlining the word “stash,” and you came to my desk. When you saw what I was reading, you said, Now you’re talking. You said that junk slang was your favorite, and wanted to know if there was a chapter on junk. Then you asked if I’d finished that other book yet. No, I whispered. I was unraveling fast. Was it a trick question? What exactly had been in that article that I hadn’t had time to read? Was there something suspect near the corpse? Were you smiling, Red, because of something you knew?

Dolores Beekmim
The Broken Teaglass
Robinson Press
14 October 1985
32

I read it over a couple of times. Mona went to the refrigerator, got out a beer, and quietly placed it next to my hand.

“That’s yours,” she said. “You can drink it, if you’re so inclined.”

“I think that’s a good idea. Now that we’re dealing with a corpse and all.” I snapped open the can.

“I know.” Mona sounded pretty thrilled. “Isn’t it great?”

“Great? Well, I don’t know about great, but—”

“You know what I think is interesting about this one?”

I took a long sip.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t you find the mention of the corpse a little casual? I mean, it’s mentioned almost like an afterthought.”

“I wouldn’t say that—”

“Come on. Corpse? Mixed up in some conversation about junkie slang? I think this is supposed to be amusing.”

“Amusing?”

“You know, like British humor.”

“British humor?”

“Yes.” Mona was growing irritated. “Like someone uncovering the corpse you buried is just a bother. Just a dreadful bother.”

“I don’t read it like that,” I disagreed.

“You want to know what I think this is, Billy?”

“What?”

“With all the washed-up English master’s degrees that pass through Samuelson, there’s got to be a half dozen wannabe novelists floating around the editorial office at any one time, right?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah. A corpse? With some telltale clue next to it? I think someone decided to write a pulp mystery novel and have it take place at Samuelson.”

“Okay. And that’s interesting to you? What’s so great about that? A bored editor writing a trashy novel?”

“Well, obviously with this 1950 thing there’s got to be some kind of additional inside game to it.”

“Mona, do you want a drink? I brought you some stuff.” I showed her the little bottle of rum. “Where do you keep your glasses?”

Mona hopped up again.

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I prefer to mix my own drink, thank you.”

“Well, make it a strong one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I have a theory for you. And it might be a little much for you.”

“Lay it on me,” challenged Mona. She poured a little trickle of rum onto the bottom of a drinking glass.

“Maybe … Maybe it’s not a story. Maybe … maybe you should put more rum in that?”

“I’m not a hulking frat boy like you. I’m a lightweight.”

“I’m not a frat boy,” I said, considering whether I should be offended by hulking as well.

“Sorry.”

“But anyway. Suit yourself. I was saying. Maybe it’s real. Maybe they’re talking about a real corpse.”

Mona gulped her drink and shook her head.

“Wouldn’t that be cool, huh?” she said. “But no. Some of our fellow dictionary people are somewhat lacking in street smarts, but I don’t think any of them are dumb enough to kill someone and then write down little clues to drop in the cit file like little Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. I could be wrong.”

“Okay. Of course it probably wasn’t a murderer who wrote these cits. But maybe there was something shady going down. Maybe someone was secretly writing about what they knew.”

Mona took the cit from me.

“You know, I hadn’t even considered that possibility. Call me naive. I guess I just like to think of lexicographers as essentially a gentle people. Shall we?”

She motioned me into the living room, small and empty but for a simple but expensive-looking black couch, a little wooden coffee table, and a tall, skinny bookcase. A single framed Ansel Adams poster hung behind the couch. On the table there were two pairs of shoeboxes. Unchecked was written in blue marker on two of the boxes, and Done written in red marker on the other two. Two of the boxes already had banded batches of cits lined up inside.

“I made a pair of boxes for you,” she said sheepishly.

“I see that,” I said. It was both disturbing and flattering, the mental image of Mona sitting down at her kitchen table, carefully fashioning me a set of makeshift “In” and “Out” boxes for my maximum productivity at her place. Probably she was doing her careful colored lettering just as I was selecting her bottle of rum.

“Got your cits in your bag?” she asked.

“Yup.”

Mona sat cross-legged on the floor. She picked up a stack of cits from her little coffee table and removed the rubber band.

“I just flip through like this, see? You barely have to look at the bottom right-hand corner to see if it’s got ‘Broken Teaglass’ written on it. See, a word like ‘melon baller’ goes by really fast. Not many cits for ‘melon baller.’ Kind of a shame, don’t you think? Anyway. No Broken Teaglass cits. I just band them back up, put them in the ‘Done’ box, and check off ‘melon baller’ right here.”

She pointed at the stapled printout of 1950 words, on which she had begun a neat row of check marks, and put a star next to maven.

“This won’t just help us keep track, it might also help us see if there’s a pattern to which words have Teaglass cits.”

“That’s a good idea.” I sat on the couch and dumped a bunch of citations from my backpack into my “Unchecked” box. “Especially since I probably won’t be doing this in alphabetical order.”

Mona looked like she was considering saying something else to me. Instead, she just swallowed some more rum and Coke. I picked up a thin pile of citations for American pit bull terrier, and started to flip through them.

One of them was from an article entitled “Fourth of July Tragedy,” from some women’s magazine. It seemed to be from an article about a kid attacked by a dog at a picnic.

“I can’t think of much worse of a nightmare than to see your kid mauled by a dog,” I said.

“Don’t read, Billy. We’ll never get anywhere if you’re going to read everything.”

I flipped through the rest of the pile, put a rubber band around it, and chucked it in my empty “Done” box. Mona pushed the list and pen toward me without looking up from her cits.

Fffft. Fffft. Fffft. She shuffled through her citations like a banker counting cash. I watched her for a moment before reaching for my next stack of cits.

“So this is it for the evening?” I asked. “Just plowing through these cits as fast as we can?”

Mona looked up. “We’ll take a break for pizza. I’ll call the pizza place after we get through a few piles.”

“You don’t want to even … put on some tunes or something?”

“That’s a good idea. Get through a couple more piles and I’ll bring my CD player in here.”

We didn’t find anything in the first half hour. When Mona decided we’d earned it, she went into the kitchen to order the pizza. I took the liberty of making her another drink.

“Thank you,” she said as she sat back down. She took a big gulp of her cocktail. If she noticed that it was significantly stronger than her last one, she didn’t mention it.

We worked silently until her buzzer rang. She ran downstairs for the pizza, and I got up from the couch and wandered over to her bookcase. The top shelf was full of Norton literature anthologies and classics. Propped in front of these books was a picture of Mona at her graduation, surrounded by what had to be her family—an attractive woman, taller than Mona, but with her hair pulled back in a style similar to Mona’s, a shorter man with gray hair and glasses, a little girl, and two young men who looked a little older than Mona. On the second shelf was another photograph. This one was of Mona looking a little younger and sitting on a picnic table with a man with an overgrown mustache. Mona was wearing cutoff shorts whose length almost qualified them as Daisy Dukes. I wondered if Mona’s legs were still that skinny under all the gray and black clothing.

Behind the photographs was a flat hardcover book: The Hindenburg. Next to that was a paperback titled When We Were All in Bed. There was kind of a kinky ring to that title, so I pulled the book out of the shelf and looked at the cover. When We Were All in Bed: Accounts of the Chicago Fire of 1871. Maybe not so kinky. Next to that was A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, which I remembered reading in high school. It was about the Titanic.

Mona came creaking back up the stairs. The large pizza box in her arms dwarfed her.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

“You want something to drink with your pizza?” I asked her.

“Yes. That’d be great, thanks.”

Mona sipped away at another rum and Coke as we ate our pizza at the kitchen table. I drank another beer.

“Is that your family with you in that graduation picture on your bookcase?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s my mom and my stepdad. With my stepbrothers and my half sister. The guy in the other picture is my father. In case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I kind of was,” I said.

“It doesn’t ever seem right to put up a picture of one side of my family where I’m not going to put up another.”

“Shouldn’t it be enough just to have an equal total number of pictures of each side in the house?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The people you put in your living room are the ones you’re proud of. The people you put in your bedroom are the ones you have the most intimate, emotional relationships with. I don’t want to compartmentalize my family like that.”

I decided to change the subject. “Gotten any good letters at work lately?” I asked.

“Oh. Yeah.” She slammed down her glass and laughed. “Didn’t I tell you about the ‘poon’ letter?”

“No, I think I would have remembered that if you did.”

“Yeah, so I get this letter. Dan apparently read it and had it sent straight to me. I don’t know what the hell goes through his mind sometimes. Genitally fixated correspondent? I’ll put Minot right on it! Anyway. The writer wants to know all about the word ‘poon.’ And ‘poontang,’ too. Guy wants to know if it has an Asian origin. He says he figures it does since it sounds sort of Chinese. You know, ‘tang’?”

“So what did you write?”

“Nothing. I decided to try and squeeze a little chivalry out of old Dan. I went into his office and said, ‘Do you really want me to answer some pervert’s letter about a word like “poontang”?’”

“You said that to Dan?”

“Why not? It’s not exactly appropriate for me to be answering that sort of thing. Especially now that we’ve got you around. At least you might enjoy researching something like that.”

“Maybe too much,” I admitted.

“Anyway. Dan looks at me sort of funny and says—get this—‘I’m sorry, is it a slang term? I’m not familiar with it.’”

I shook my head. “Whoa.”

“I know. So I tell him what ‘poontang’ is—”

“Hold on. How exactly did you say it?”

“Well, I just said ‘female reproductive organ.’”

“Nice.”

“And he turns red and says, ‘Give me the letter. Sorry. I’ll handle this.’ Then he grabs the letter from me and goes back to his citations.”

“Poor Dan,” I said. “Some aspects of this job are a little too sleazy for someone like him.”

“Yeah. But what kind of guy goes his whole life without knowing what ‘poontang’ is?”

“Maybe a guy who spends his whole life with his head in a bunch of dictionaries?”

She smiled her sideways smile. “He is a gentleman, though. There’s just something old-fashioned and honorable about him.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “With the pale face, and the graying black hair, and the long, thin body … he kind of reminds me of an aging vampire who never really had any bite.”

“A vampire? I wouldn’t say so. Vampires don’t have beards, for one.”

“Well, that’s why I said an aging vampire. I mean, he has the look of a dapper old Dracula who never had the heart to suck anyone’s blood.”

“You’ve given this a great deal of thought, I can see,” Mona said, yawning. “Have you ever actually read Dracula?”

“No,” I admitted. “You?”

“About two thirds of it, then I stopped,” Mona said, looking bored. “It’s no Frankenstein.”

“Should we get back to work?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Mona said, and sighed. She slumped in her chair and let her arms hang down at her sides.

“Someone’s a little tipsy,” I teased.

“Just like someone else wanted,” she retorted in a sing-song voice that mimicked mine.

We dragged ourselves back onto the couch. Mona scrunched into a little ball and ruffled through her citations at a much slower pace than before.

“You can’t leave,” she said firmly, “till we find something.”

“But we don’t know for sure if there’s anything else.”

“I’m just sayin’.” She was slurring just a bit.

I looked through citations for auxotroph, baby oil, and access time. Nothing. When I looked up at Mona again, her eyes were closed.

“Wake up, Mona,” I called to her. “It’s still early.”

“I don’t know about you,” she said, without opening her eyes, “but this job takes a lot out of me somehow. By the end of the week, I just crash. I get so tired.”

“I try to get some sleep at my desk.”

“Mmm. I’ve noticed.”

“Mona?”

“Yes?”

“Why is this Teaglass stuff so important to you? I mean, for real.”

“Aw, shit, Billy,” she sighed. She nestled her head against the back of the couch.

“C’mon,” I prodded. “I really want to know.”

“I just want to be in on it, that’s all. I want to be a real member of this exclusive little dictionary club. Not just one of the babies.”

“I think everyone there already really respects you.”

“Give me a break. You have no idea.”

“No idea what?”

Mona snuggled her head deeper into the couch cushion.

“These are hard questions,” she murmured. “Maybe you should ask me on Monday.”

“Never mind,” I said.

Mona dozed off and I kept flipping through the citations. Soon she was breathing loudly in her sleep, snoring almost, and the sound of it nearly put me to sleep as well. I almost missed it when a Broken Teaglass cit fluttered by in my fingers: