The Broken Teaglass (10 page)

“Huh,” I said again.

I didn’t see Mona until the
following Wednesday. I looked up from my citations to find her standing by my desk. There was a satisfied smile on her face.

“Long time no—”

She put a warning finger to her lips, then slid a citation onto my desk. Another
Teaglass
cit. Before I had a chance to read it, however, she slid another one on top of it. The first was for the word
paperbound
, the next for
plus
.

“What the hell, Mona?”

Mona rolled her eyes. Clifford started tapping on his keys in the next-door cubicle.

“Is this what you’ve been doing all week?” I whispered. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to lose your job?”

“I’m a pretty good multitasker.” She kept her voice low. “Don’t worry about me. Besides, I should be scolding
you
.”

“Me?”

“You left all your cits at my house. It’s been days and you haven’t even asked about them. They’re in my desk. So it doesn’t look like you’re holding up your end of this deal.”

“I didn’t know we were in a hurry.” She was taking this
Teaglass
stuff pretty seriously.

“Dan’s coming,” Mona said, gazing over my head. I turned to see Dan’s tall form weaving its way between the cubicles.

Mona leaned into my cubicle.

“Your place next time,” she said softly. “Friday?”

I nodded.

Dan smiled when he reached my desk.

“Hello,” he said, and then, after a slight pause, “you two.”

He put his hand gently on top of the cubicle wall, and then swayed a little on his feet. The gesture was oddly like a curtsy.

“Sorry to interrupt. Mona, if you’ll excuse us, I need to grab Billy for a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Mona said. She gave him a tight smile and took off without looking at me.

“I wanted to go over a batch of definitions with you,” he said. “Give you a little feedback.”

I stood and followed him dutifully into his office.

“All right then,” Dan said, sighing as he closed the door. “I apologize for not doing this sooner. I’ve been a little tied up.
I meant to go over some of your work with you right after your first or second batch.”

“No problem.” I sat in the chair next to his desk.

“Yes. It seems that way. Looks like you’re moving along fine on your own. And overall, you’re doing a good job.”

He settled into his chair and opened a bulging manila folder. Inside were my first definitions, along with all of the citations I’d used to write them.

“Just a couple of issues,” he said, showing me my definition for
Bellini
. I had written
an alcoholic beverage made from champagne and peach nectar
.

“It’s a small thing, but space is so precious, you should be careful of superfluous words. You could change ‘beverage’ to ‘cocktail,’ if you wanted the headword to be more specific. Then you wouldn’t need ‘alcoholic.’”

I nodded.

Dan hesitated, and then said, “This reminds me of a little tradition a colleague and I used to have. When one of us would define a new kind of wine, or sometimes an interesting-sounding drink, at the end of the week we’d make an effort to try it out.”

“Do you still do that?”

“No. That was years ago. I was about your age.”

“How about foods? I’ve already defined some interesting foods. Often the cits are from recipes.”

“I’ve done it on occasion. But there are so many foods to define. We didn’t try all the recipes, no.” Dan picked up a new batch of cits from the folder and slipped off its rubber band. “Moving along to ‘beauty queen’ …”

He showed me my definition slip, where I had written
a contestant in a beauty pageant
esp:
a beautiful one
. I had known, when I had written it, that it wouldn’t quite fly. Now I felt a stab of embarrassment at submitting it anyway.

“Something isn’t quite right here,” Dan said. “You’re trying to say that a beauty queen is a contestant in a beauty pageant, but you think that a more specific type of contestant is generally implied?”

“Yeah. Basically.”

“Aren’t most beauty pageant contestants beautiful? Isn’t that usually assumed?”

“You ever seen a beauty pageant? I mean, a local one? Like … uh …” I felt my voice lowering to a mumble, “Miss Tolland County?”

“Excuse me?” Dan said.

I realized then that he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t looking at me, but gazing down at the cit by my hand. My adrenaline shot up when I saw it said
paperbound
at the top, and
The Broken Teaglass
on the bottom. I’d absently carried Mona’s cits into Dan’s office with me and set them on Dan’s desk as we’d talked.

“Well. I was just thinking that the … the impetus to enter a beauty pageant doesn’t exactly, uh, coincide with physical beauty.” My thumb twitched uncontrollably at the corner of the cit. “In my experience.”

Dan cleared his throat politely behind his hand, then kept his fingers curled gingerly over his mouth. He looked at me over his fist and didn’t say anything, so I continued my idiotic soliloquy.

“The girls who enter those things aren’t always beautiful, is what I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s a low-self-esteem thing? I’m not sure. But some of them are, well, let’s say, not attractive by conventional standards.”

I crawled my hand over the
paperbound
cit as Dan gave me a thin smile.

“But would you call such women
beauty queens?
That’s the only question you should concern yourself with,” he said.

“Exactly!” I said, too enthusiastically. “Would you?”

“No,” Dan said slowly, flitting his eyes toward his tiny office window. He put his thumb under his chin and rubbed his beard absently.

I crumpled the
paperbound
and
plus
cits into my lap and took a breath. I waited for further criticism, but he didn’t say anything more.

“That’s why I thought I needed to be a little more specific,” I said, after a while.

“But, Billy …” Dan finally returned his gaze to me. “What do the
cits
say?”

After several weeks of defining, I was already starting to see the awkward logic of my earliest efforts. But I still wanted to explain my reasoning.

“The word usually means a beauty pageant contestant … but always a beautiful one,” I began. “That’s sort of implied.
Or
more general, like that song … You know … ‘When I was seventeen, I thought love was meant for beauty queens,’ or something like that, right? The idea there is just ‘beautiful women,’ don’t you think?”

“Or perhaps beauty contest
winners,”
he said, raising one eyebrow. “Then you wouldn’t need to specify that they’re beautiful ones, I wouldn’t think. But I see what you’re saying now. There is the pageant sense and then something of an extended sense. But your definition is a little awkward. I think you should look at it again. It could probably be finessed a little more tightly.”

“All right,” I agreed.

“Good. Let’s see. ‘Beatnik.’” Dan flipped through another pile of citations, and then chuckled. “Excellent job. You were correct to update the old definition. The old one
did
seem slightly editorialized. Use of the word ‘arty’ isn’t exactly neutral. Perhaps the original definer in the sixties or seventies
couldn’t help getting a little dig in. It happens. I suppose no one had noticed that recently or no one’s bothered to change it. Once something’s in, sometimes it just doesn’t get noticed anymore.” He gave a regretful little shrug before continuing. “It’s interesting that you suggested this change, though. Most new editors are afraid to question anything in our older editions.”

“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to this observation. I wasn’t certain it was a compliment, so I didn’t thank him for it.

Dan didn’t seem to know what to say next, either. He tapped the little pile of
beatnik
cits on the table to align the edges. Then he clipped them together and handed me the folder.

“I’ll let you look at the rest yourself at your desk. There are only a few other suggestions.”

After I returned to my desk, I discovered that there was actually only one other suggestion. On my definition slip for
beat one’s meat
, Dan had written,
There aren’t really enough cits to justify defining this. But that’s okay—when in doubt, define it
.

C’est la vie
. It was worth a try. Who could pass up the chance at being the guy who gets to say he put
beat my meat
into the American lexicon? I folded the slip and stuck it in my pocket. A memento of my effort.

Then I uncrumpled Mona’s cits and read them.

Red
again. Borrowed books seemed to keep coming up as well, although that detail was less interesting. And then
plus
. Everything in that one seemed a little random, like it could be from a different narrative. Pie? And who was the “he”
with the bizarre stories? The fact that one of the stories involved a Latin teacher made me suspect that
plus
, despite its random quality, still dealt with the dictionary crowd. It seemed a Samuelson kind of detail, characters with training in classical languages. I also wondered about
plus
. Surely that wasn’t a 1950 word. I double-checked our list, then the dictionary. The word had been in the English language since the sixteenth century. As an adjective, and then later as a noun. Use as a conjunction, though, had started in 1950. I looked back at the cit. A conjunction. A somewhat awkward one, actually. Someone was being very careful, it seemed, to keep the 1950 pattern. I’d chat with Mona about this later.

I played around with my
beauty queen
definition for a while, then checked my email. Nothing. I looked at the clock. Two hours and twenty minutes until I could go home. Way too early to take out a magazine and start research-reading for the remainder of the afternoon. I logged on to the Internet again and did a Google search on
beauty queen
. “Asian Beauty Queens XXX” came up, along with some similar sites. Great idea. Just what I needed right now.

I logged off the Internet and stared at my sorry definition.

Reverse the order
, I decided, after a while. That’s it. Start general. Then add the specific sense. I took out a fresh definition slip. “beauty queen
n
:” I wrote carefully, then chewed the end of my pen for a moment: “a beautiful woman:
specif:
one who participates in a beauty pageant.”

An improvement, at least. I was pretty proud of myself. I made the other changes Dan had suggested and dropped the folder of cits into my out-box. Then I picked up my next pile of cits.
Calibrate
. I looked at the clock. One hour and fifty-four minutes to go.

The whole dinner was designed around
the Bellinis: cod with a lemon butter sauce, herbed rice, zucchini. All a little light for an October meal, but perfect to go along with champagne and peach juice. I’d even called my dad for advice on his famous fruit tart for dessert.
Real vanilla bean, that’s the only advice you need
, he’d said.
But I don’t know if you can swing that on your salary
.

I had swung anyway. When Mona knocked, I was dabbing the tart with its final touch: a glaze made from apricot jam. I quickly put away the paintbrush I’d been using for glazing. It hadn’t dawned on me until that moment that the whole spread—with its delicate flavors and fairly elaborate preparations—might look a little gay.

“Some long-haired freak let me into your stairwell,” Mona murmured to me when I opened the door.

“That’s just Tom,” I said. “He’s not so bad.”

“That guy’s your neighbor?”

“One of them.”

“Well, be careful with that. That guy reminds me of some people I knew back home that I wish I could forget. You ever seen
Deliverance?”
Mona handed me a plastic grocery bag. “I brought dessert. I hope you like Chips Ahoy.” She
wandered into the kitchen. “This place isn’t so bad. You made it sound like you were living in some dump. Hey. What’s that? Did someone get shot in here?”

She was looking at the tomato-cream sauce stain. I hadn’t cleaned it up right away. Once I’d gotten around to it, I couldn’t get the greasy orange tinge out of the wall.

“Oh, that.” I took a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”

“Hmm. Gross. Could be anything.” She made a face. “What are we celebrating?”

I explained to her about my
Bellini
definition, and Dan’s drink-defining tradition.