The Broken Teaglass (5 page)

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.

“Guess what?” Mona demanded, sticking her
little head into my cubicle, forgoing hello. As if we’d spoken just the day before. As if we were buddies.

“What?” I said. It seemed her hairstyle had loosened a little in the past month. There was something softer about it, and less slick. Her face didn’t seem pulled so tight. I wondered if this had happened gradually or all at once.

“I found another one,” she said.

She shoved a citation under my nose. I took it from her.

“This one is more bizarre than the first,” said Mona.

“How’s that?” I asked. “It’s funny, cuz I’d forgotten all about—”

“The subject matter, for one. Obviously. Also, most cits are about three sentences. The sentence the word is in and then just enough of what’s around it to give you a little context. Look how long this one is. What the hell?”

“Yeah, it’s odd,” I said. “But I’ve seen longer ones.”

“Usually you make a long cit for a
reason
. What kind of idiot cites practically a whole page of text just for a word like ‘blow-dryer’?”

I thought of Dan cringing at my first couple of attempts at research-reading.

“Maybe it was a poor, lowly editorial assistant who didn’t know what he was doing?”

“I don’t think so, Billy. Look. You want to know what else is weird about these cits? They both have an exact date on them.
The Broken Teaglass
is supposed to be a
book
. Books don’t give an exact day of publication. Usually you just get the year.”

“Pretty weird,” I agreed. “So you think a typist is messing around, sticking bogus stuff in the citation files?”

“Maybe not a typist. Maybe anyone. But yes, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe they just really wanted ‘blow-dryer’ to make it into the dictionary,” I suggested.

“Right. And there’s no more covert way to pad the evidence for a word than to make up citations with dictionary editors as characters.”

“This one doesn’t have dictionary editors as characters.”

“How do you know? The narrator in this citation’s probably the same as the one in the first.”

“Unless it’s a short story collection.”

Mona shook her head, frowning.

“How’d you find this?” I asked.

“It was in one of my sets of cits for the
Supplement
.”

“Wow. That’s creepy.”

“Yeah. There must be a lot of these around, is what I’m thinking.”

“Mona.” I lowered my voice.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to maybe talk about this after work today? We could get a beer or something.”

“I don’t drink beer.”

“Coffee, then.”

“Okay. How about Friendly’s on Carpenter Street?”

The suggestion surprised me. I hadn’t been to a Friendly’s since I was a kid.

“Cool,” I said.

• • •

“I think I’m going to get
ice cream.” Mona was studying the menu through her squarish glasses. “What about you?”

“Just coffee, I think.”

“That’s too bad. I don’t like to get ice cream by myself.”

“Why not? You shouldn’t feel guilty. You don’t look like someone who needs to worry about calories.”

Mona sighed. “So charming, Billy. No wonder Anna’s already in love with you. ‘That new boy is such a gentleman. So
personable.’
”

“She said that? I just say hello.”

“That’s all it takes at Samuelson. But anyway. What I meant about ice cream is that it’s a communal kind of pleasure, don’t you think? Everybody piles into the station wagon when Dad’s in a good mood after work … drive out to the Dairy Queen and get cones together. It’s really not about the ice cream per se.”

“Is that how it is in your family?”