The Broken Teaglass (6 page)

“Well, no. Not exactly. But you get the idea. Ice cream is celebratory. It’s a special occasion. Eating it by yourself is a little like drinking by yourself. It’s base.”

“Maybe I’ll get some ice cream, then. If that’s how you feel about it. Are we celebrating something?”

“No.” Mona pulled two citations out of her bag:
editrix
and
blow-dryer
. “We’re investigating. Someone’s fucking around in the cit file.”

“Or maybe someone
was
fucking around in the cit file. In the mid-eighties.”

“Sure. The cits are both dated 1985. But everything else on them is bogus. The date’s probably bogus too.”

“So if they’re made up, what do you think’s the point? What’s it about?”

“Maybe a personal vendetta between editors? A bizarre
psychological game of some kind? All those silent types we have at Samuelson—there’s gotta be a sociopath or two among us. Or at least a few passive-aggressive types.”

A waitress took our orders. Mona asked for a sundae with hot fudge, peanut butter sauce, two different kinds of ice cream, and “no cherry.” I got a dish of rainbow sherbet.

Mona scoffed at my order. “Rainbow sherbet, Billy? Are you some kind of pansy?”

“No, I’m just not very hungry.”

“Right. Whatever. So we both agree that the first cit definitely sounds like it’s happening at a dictionary’s editorial office. Probably ours. Now, in the second one, there’s something very dramatic happening. She’s sobbing, making a desperate phone call. Did you
read
this thing?”

“Yes, I did.”

“
‘He couldn’t save me from anything.’
What did she want to be rescued from?”

“That’s one thing I already hate about defining. You only get to read little bits of things. You never get to hear what happens next.”

“This might be a vendetta. Or a trick. But maybe it’s a cry for help.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I can’t think of anything more boring.”

Mona put down the white slip and rested her pointy chin in her hand.

“This might not seem interesting now,” she said. “But trust me. Stuff like this doesn’t come up every day at Samuelson. Spend a few weeks triple-proofreading dictionary copy for typesetter’s colon errors, and then you’ll understand how interesting this really is. You’re definitely gonna thank me for involving you in this. Someday.”

“I’m thanking you already. Thank you for letting me in
on the second wacky cit. It was truly the most interesting thing that happened to me all day, although I did get ‘ass-wipe’ in my stack of citations today, so I shouldn’t complain. Not that there were enough cits to justify bothering with a definition. But—” I saw Mona’s mouth open to say something, but I didn’t let her.
“But
. These
Teaglass
things, they’re two cits in—what? Ten million? Why do you care so much?”

“You know how you said you don’t like reading just the little pieces of articles we get in the cits? It sucks, always just getting to read a few sentences and thinking,
Now
that
sounds interesting
. In the beginning, I used to write down the names and dates of articles with the intention of going to the public library sometime and looking them up. But I never did. You get used to it. You learn to be able to find something intriguing for a second, and then let it go.”

“It doesn’t seem like you’ve quite learned how to do that yet.”

“Well, I was about to say that these cits are different. This is the one story I want to finish.
This
story is driving me crazy. Because I know it’s not just hacked out of some magazine. There’s no way to go to the library and look it up. It’s
because
there’s no clear way to find the rest that I care. And it’s so obviously written by someone who works at Samuelson. You can tell. This person is tired of that office, with all of its intellectual, socially inept automatons. Sick of all the silent judgment, and
sticking
it to the place. Don’t you think that’s intriguing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sticking it to the dictionary man.”

“And then the next cit is about some personal story. Maybe about the same person, who knows? But don’t you want to know? Maybe two editors are communicating. Maybe—”

The waitress approached with Mona’s large sundae and my sherbet.

“Is he gonna help you with that?” the waitress asked as she placed the sundae on the table. Mona seemed to bliss out for a moment, fixing her gaze on the cherry-less white peak in front of her.

“Nope,” I said, answering for Mona. “It’s all hers.”

“I don’t know about that. Where’s she gonna put it all?” The waitress examined Mona and chuckled at her own joke. “You guys need anything else?”

“No, I think we’re all set,” I said.

Mona was silent.

“What a snatch,” Mona said as soon as the waitress was out of earshot.

“She was just trying to be friendly.”

“Waitrons should never refer to the size of their customers. Large or small.”

Mona began working her way through the mound of whipped cream in silence. I puzzled over her use of the word
waitron
, which came out of her mouth without a trace of irony. Perhaps a vestige of her PC girls’ school education. A weird accompaniment to her first designation for our waitress.

After a few bites of chocolate ice cream, Mona said, “Maybe ‘snatch’ was a little harsh.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway. The bottom line is I’m a sucker for a juicy story, and this looks like it might be one. And if we’ve seen two in just a couple of months, there must be more.”

“Interesting logic. Those two could just as easily be the only two that exist.”

“Right. But c’mon. I don’t think so. And I want to figure out how to find more of them.”

“Well, that’s simple. You go to the first file drawer. You start at ‘aardvark,’ and just start flippin’ your way through—”

“That’s ridiculous. I have a lot of free time at the office, but not
that
kind of free time.”

“You tried the editors’ library. And Amazon. And, what else? Library of Congress? Where else are you going to look now but in the cit file?”

“Yes, but there must be a way to do it intelligently. I think the only way to do that is to look closer at
these two cits
.” Mona waved the cits dramatically as she spoke.

“It looks to me like you’ve already been spending a little too much time looking at those things.”

“What I’m getting at … if you will listen carefully … is that you can’t refer to citations and the painfully quiet office and not expect anyone to ever notice, can you? On some level, whoever’s doing this
wants
the cits to be noticed.”

“Okay. Maybe. Probably.”

“All right.” Mona licked her lips, and said, softly, “And then what?”

“What do you mean, ‘and then what’?”

“What,”
she said ominously, “does this person expect to happen next?”

“I don’t know. Get fired, maybe.”

“No. You’re getting ahead of yourself. When an editor first notices a fishy cit, what …
what…
does the bogus cit writer expect the editor to do about it?”

“Get irritated. Maybe be annoyed that he can’t figure out who the scoundrel is, poisoning the sacred cit file with some dumb game. If he’s—or she’s—a really diehard dictionary person, I guess, maybe he’d even report it to the boss.”

“And if not?”

“Maybe he’d expect that editor to do just what you’re doing. Try and find more of the citations so they can be in on whatever the joke is.”

“Right. So if this is a subversive kind of thing, like a private
joke between editors, don’t you think the person who wrote this stuff would want to give another editor a way to find more than just one passing cit?”

“A way to find more phony cits?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a casual thing. A one-time ha-ha passing across your desk. A little clean fun between dictionary nerds.”

“But why so cryptic, then? You might be right, but I’m hoping you’re not. That’s why I want you to take these cits.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with them?”

“Just
look
at them. I think maybe the cits themselves somehow can tell us how to find more. Look. These two cits are weird. We’ve already talked about that. They’re too long. A book with an exact day’s publication date, and a nonexistent publisher? Whoever wrote them wasn’t trying to make them seem like real cits. But I can’t figure out what exactly we’re supposed to see in the cits. Maybe it’s something I’m just not seeing. So I want you to try to figure it out. Maybe all it needs is a pair of fresh eyes.”

I looked down at the cits on the table. “You want me to take these from you? Are you sure about that?”

“I’ve made copies. Besides, I’ve read them so many times, I’ve got them memorized. Take another look at them and think about it. What else do they have in common that I haven’t thought of?”

“I don’t know if this is such a great idea. You might have tons of free time for this kind of thing, but I’m still pretty slow with the defining.”

“Just look at them, Billy. A few minutes here and there, maybe at home.”

“And I just
got
this job—”

“We’re not doing anything wrong.
We
didn’t write the
cits. And Dan doesn’t—Dan wouldn’t care. Dan doesn’t care what the hell we do as long as we produce a reasonable amount of work in the seven working hours we’re there each day. Did you know that Raymond Shelling spends a couple hours a week browsing bottles of vintage wine on eBay?”

“He’s the tall bald guy who’s always reading
Wine and Spirits?”

“Yeah. And he’s a real efficient definer. So no one gives a crap what’s in that thermos of his. Just do your work, avoid any public mental breakdowns, and no one at Samuelson cares whatever else you’ve got going on. Certainly not Dan.”

I sighed. “All right. What do you have so far?”

Mona steepled her hands and leaned forward. “They’re both nouns, for one. That’s not much, obviously. Also, both cits are a little long, but have nothing else marked, just the one noun. I noticed that other words
could
have been marked. I might have marked the extended use of ‘warmblooded’ in the first cit, and I definitely would have marked ‘lost it’ in the second cit. So I looked up those words. I thought there might be something there. But nothing. It was a long shot, anyway.”

“You went looking for more cits that said
‘Broken Teaglass’
?”

“Yeah.”

“The title might have some kind of significance,” I said.

“Well, if there is, maybe you can figure it out. Really, I don’t expect us to figure it out
now
. When you’re at your desk the rest of this week, contemplating the weave of the cubicle wall fabric, just pull yourself away for a while and give these cits a little thought.”

“Okay. Sure thing. But a newbie like me probably isn’t
going to crack the code. It might be some highly elevated lexicographical trick.”

Mona laughed and licked happily at her final spoonful of hot fudge. “There’s no such thing, Billy. Lexicography is a drone’s work. There are no tricks. Are you ready to go?”

So it’s probably fairly obvious that
I was humoring Mona at first. I thought she was kind of cute with her little sleuthing project.

The morning after our ice cream date, I read over the suspect cits a couple of times.
I wanted to hug him, for strength, and then push him back out the door
. Yuck. Talk about melodrama. I suspected Mona was suspending disbelief for the sake of entertaining herself. If she could do it, I probably could too.

Content aside, Mona was right that the
blow-dryer
cit was particularly peculiar for its length. So many sentences marked just for a word like
blow-dryer?
I wasn’t sure how long blow-dryers had been around, but it seemed to me that by 1985 people would be so used to the device and the term that editors wouldn’t be noting it anymore.

Editrix
, on the other hand—I’d probably mark that word if I saw it in a magazine. Such a weird word. The kind of word someone would use only to sound odd or old-fashioned, maybe to perplex his audience. And
-trix
wasn’t exactly an everyday kind of suffix. Maybe it was a fairly new suffix that had never quite taken. Why would anyone use it, when
-ess
could be used much less conspicuously? Would anyone ever say “waitrix” or “actrix”? I looked up
-trix
and
-ess
. They were both pretty old. Both Latin, and
-ess
went back to Greek. So much for my suspicion that
-trix
was some snappy new variation on
-ess
. I felt silly for even pondering
the idea. Mona Minot probably already knew all about the origins of
-trix
and the like from her very expensive classical education.

“Office poll.”

I looked up, instinctively shielding the two suspect cits with my hand. George, the young pronunciation editor, was standing over me. I’d seen him skulking around the office before. The wide flatness of his face made me think of a steamrolled character in an old cartoon. Usually he wore a sport jacket over some incongruous T-shirt. Today it was a navy blazer over a yellow T-shirt with a large reproduction of a Mr. Goodbar wrapper on it. In one hand he was holding up a pink slip of paper that said
BRUSCHETTA
on it. In the other he held a little notepad.

“What’s this?” I asked.

George let his eyes fall closed for a second.

“You’re supposed to just say the word,” he said.

“What?”

“Just pronounce it for me.”

“Okay. Uh. Brew-shetta?”

George started to make a mark on his pad, but then stopped and lifted his eyes.

“Is that a
guess?”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t have a clue, you’re supposed to say ‘Pass.’”

“What if you think you know, but you’re not sure?”

“Then you say it,” he replied, in a tone that made me feel as if he’d just flicked me off like a booger. He was gone before I could thank him for his clarification.