“Then my stepdad got on the phone. He said he knew of this cat acupuncturist in Cleveland, and he’d be willing to pay for that if I wanted them to try and keep him
comfortable until I could get out there and decide what I thought was best. He’d pay for the flight out.
“And I said no, no … please, just take him in tomorrow and put him down. It’s okay. I understand. My coming would only prolong his suffering.
“I couldn’t sleep that night. Because I felt I’d betrayed Buzz. Not by letting him be put to sleep. But because … I’d always meant to come back and reclaim him. I’d told myself that once I was settled, I’d bring him back here with me. That’s what I always used to say when I was in college. That someday I was going to come and rescue him. From Rob’s obnoxious Labrador, and from my half sister Michelle, who’s really a sweetie but who always liked to annoy Buzz, putting hats on him or tying ribbons around his neck, stuff like that.
“Buzz and I had an understanding. We always had a good thing going. When I was in elementary school, and my parents would have these terrible fights … a few times they’d come home a little drunk, and screaming at each other … I really think sometimes they’d drink to be able to stand each other, cuz neither of them drank much after they were divorced … but anyway, when they would fight, Buzz and I would hide under the covers together, staring at each other. It was like having a little brother.”
“Okay,” I said blankly. It sounded like a pretty lonely childhood to me—if her closest companion was a cat with a name like an aging construction worker.
“I’m getting to the Dan part, okay? The point is that I owed something to Buzz. But for years, I’d just been putting him off. When I was in college, and I’d come home and visit, I’d say, ‘Just a couple of years, Buzz, and we’re outta here.’ I’d thought of coming out to get him over Columbus Day weekend. But I’m afraid to fly, and 9/11 had just happened, and I was chicken. And now it was too late. I’d been making
false promises for years and now I hadn’t even been with him for his last days, or his last moment. I felt terrible all night. It was like I’d screwed him and left him to die alone. I couldn’t sleep. I cried all night. Then the next morning I went to work a little bit of a wreck. Exhausted. A little wrinkled. I’d forgotten my lunch.
“That day Dan and I were going over some practice definitions I’d done. One of the words was ‘chipotle.’ You know, dried jalapeños?”
I shrugged. “I had a fancy sandwich once with a chipotle spread. Wasn’t a huge fan.”
“I think I was pretty out of it that whole session,” Mona continued. “I felt like crap. I looked like it too. After it was over, I couldn’t remember much of what he said. I don’t know if I was really even distressed about Buzz at that point—just really tired.
“As soon as it was lunchtime, I went outside to get some air and sit on the steps. While I was sitting there, Dan comes out, looking like he’s rushing off for some errand. He runs down the steps, and is halfway to his car, and then he turns around. He says, ‘No lunch today?’ And I just shrugged and said, ‘I forgot it.’
“And he nodded, sort of absent-mindedly—you know, the way he does—and then got in his car and drove off. Which was a relief. Because all I really wanted was to be left alone. There’s this thing about being my size—being small—whenever you skip a meal or decline a doughnut or something, people notice. They like to theorize. Spotting anorectics—it’s like an American pastime.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I get that shit all the time.”
She didn’t laugh. “Okay. Whatever, Billy. So I sat out there the whole hour. And when Dan came back, he had this greasy bag in his hand. He comes to the steps and hands it to
me. ‘It’s got a chipotle sauce,’ he says. And then he says, ‘We call this experiential defining.’ Then he gives me this sad little smile and goes inside. I looked in the bag. It was a burrito of some kind.”
“Cool,” I said. “Did you eat it?”
“Yeah. I was pretty hungry. I hadn’t had any breakfast.”
“How was the chipotle sauce?”
“Actually, I don’t think it had a chipotle sauce. I think it was just a regular old burrito. That was the sweetest part about it. I think the guy just saw that I was down and out and wanted to buy me something to eat.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how Mona could read so much into a burrito when she hadn’t even batted an eye at the fancy Bellini dinner I’d made her so many weeks ago.
“That was just the first day I saw it.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “That he
sees
so much more than he
says
. I hadn’t really noticed before that. I’d just thought of him as some aging old egghead. But if you really watch him, you see that he’s always listening to people carefully. And watching them. And not in a creepy way at all.
“And occasionally you’ll see him do something like the burrito thing. Something that makes you realize that he’s not shy … he just saves himself for the right moment, I guess. It’s a kind of sadness … mixed with this odd sort of …
strength.”
The way she talked reminded me of girls talking about Holden Caulfield in English class. An uncomfortable mix of pity and lust.
“So … Did you interpret the burrito as a flirtation?”
“Not at all,” Mona said. “It woke me up to him. And after that, I kind of approached training differently. I felt like he knew when I wasn’t doing my best, so I pushed myself harder. I’d spend a couple of hours on a definition trying to get it perfect. I really wanted his praise, because I knew from
him praise
means
something. And it worked. Dan kept giving me harder and harder words. And that’s how, for the
Supplement
, he’s already giving me words like ‘drop’ and ‘come.’”
“I thought you were just unlucky,” I said.
“No, not at all. I don’t know why I didn’t want to tell you that those words were
given
to me. But I get a kind of charge out of it when he hands me one of those words and says ‘Up for a challenge?’”
I was trying not to laugh. It was probably the weirdest turn-on I’d ever heard of. “So it’s not, um, lexicographical ambition that drives you?”
“Not really.” Mona sounded sheepish. “It’s Dan. It’s wanting him to … I don’t know, to keep noticing me, I guess. As pathetic as that sounds.”
“Do you think he does?”
“Sort of … but probably not in the right way.”
“What would be the right way?”
“Oh … you know,” she said. “Don’t make me spell it all out.”
“All right,” I said.
She was right. Some things were best left unspelled.
The tattered joke book caught my
eye just as I was switching off the living room lights before bed. It was still lying on the futon where Mona had left it. I snapped the light off and headed to the bedroom, leaving the book there in the dark.
I knew I probably should have told Mona about the Hodgkin’s. She’d asked about high school, she’d asked about pot smoking, and now she’d asked about the jokes.
When did you start reading joke books?
she’d wanted to know. It was a
lighthearted question; it wouldn’t have been fair, just then, to give her the true answer, to require her to snap into a serious mood, to weigh the conversation down.
I’d skipped over telling her three or four times now. Sometimes I do get lazy like that, I’ll admit. It gets old—whipping it out, so to speak.
Cancer. Age eighteen
. People never expect it, and it always blows a big hole in the conversation. Especially with people my age. The reaction is pretty standard. They get quiet and say something apologetic, then forget whatever it was we were talking about before it came up. Then they’re afraid of me for a couple days. Don’t get me wrong—I get that it makes people uncomfortable. That’s why sometimes it’s just as well to save everybody their hand-wringing and keep my mouth shut. Mona and I had a good, natural repartee going. I didn’t want to screw with that.
We were up to the K’s
in our defining. The days before Christmas dragged on. There didn’t seem to be much happening in the K’s, although I did get to learn about a few interesting “K” terms I’d never encountered before—like
kerygma
and
kerfuffle
. Did dictionary employment give me license to add a word like
kerfuffle
to my regular vocabulary? Was this what adulthood was to mean for me?
Key
almost broke me. You would not think
key
a terribly complex word, right? But the cits were endless.
You must sign up for the workshop in advance. That is
key.
There were endless cits for this newish predicate adjective. Then there were musical uses, sports uses, a ton of verb uses, and of course all the tiny variations on the basic device that unlocks or releases something. Plus a heroin use for good measure.
How could I start disliking such a thing? Three innocent little letters, signifying something so basic, even charming: a small treasured object, a key. A tiny magical device that opens doors and old hope chests and secret diaries. Ah, and people’s hearts! The more I thought about it, the more I grew to hate it.
Key. KEY. KHHHEEEEEY
. I could imagine myself near-catatonic in a padded white room, hoarsely
repeating the word, trying to clear the syllable out of my throat like a tenacious bit of phlegm.
Once, while I was engaged in this gloomy reverie, Dan approached my desk with a tabloid newspaper.
Hit by the Ugly Stick: Beauty Queens Need Not Apply
, read the main headline.
“I thought of you when I saw it,” he said. “Since we’d talked so extensively about ‘beauty queen.’”
As I took the article, I noticed a cutline:
“Not all Johns are looking for the proverbial delicate flower,” says Madame Cassandra V
.
I thanked him and told him I looked forward to reading it. He laughed quietly and combed his fingers through his thick black hair. I was almost certain he hadn’t read beyond the headline and had no idea what the article was about.
On my third day with
key
, my phone finally buzzed.
I stared at it as it buzzed a second time, and a third. Part of me was terrified at who might be on the other line. Anyone in the world could call me, and with any question. And I, the voice of the dictionary, would be expected to have the answer.
I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Billy,” said an unfamiliar female voice. “Dan tells me you’re taking phone calls now.”
“Yes. I guess so. Is this Sheila, from the front desk?”
“Mmm-hmm. So I’ve got a guy for you on line five. He has some sentence he wants to run by us. Wants to know if it’s grammatically correct, he says.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Sheila.
Line 5. I tried to remember how to take a line. Nine-star-five? Zero-star-five? It took me a few tries before I got a voice.
“Hello?” a man’s voice replied to mine.
“Hello, my name’s Billy Webb. I’m one of the editors here at Samuelson. I’m told you have a grammatical question?”
“Yes, sir.” The voice sounded small, faraway, and old. “I have a question. I have a sentence. If I read it to you, can you tell me if it’s grammatically correct?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“‘She gave so much,’” the voice said, “‘and asked so little.’”
‘She gave so much and asked so little,’” I repeated. “Is that the whole sentence?”
“Yes.” The voice was almost whispering now.
“It sounds fine to me.”
“The engraver said it was incorrect. He said it should be ‘asked
for
so little.’
“The engraver?” I asked, with a sinking feeling. “I’m sorry if this is a little forward. But can I ask, sir, what this is about?”
“It’s for my wife’s tombstone. We were married forty-one years. The girls and I talked a great deal about this. And that’s what we agreed upon. ‘She gave so much, and asked so little.’ Because she really did give so much. And asked for so, so little in return.”
“And they told you not to put that on the stone?”
“Yes. The engraver said it’s incorrect.”
I let the phone hang loosely in my hand for a moment.
“Hello?” the man said hoarsely.
“Yes. Sorry. I’m just thinking. It’s fine, the sentence is fine, I just—”
I could have explained to him about descriptivist approaches to lexicography, grammar, and sentence structure. Or about stylistic choices being at the discretion of the writer. About the fluidity of usage.
Instead, I said, “Listen. Considering the situation here, though, I’d just like to run it by one of the bigwigs for you. Just so we can both feel absolutely sure about this.”
I took the guy’s name and number. Stephen Peterson.
Calling from God knows where. Somewhere in the United States, a little old man was sitting by his phone, waiting for me to give him the go-ahead on his own wife’s epitaph.
I wrote
She gave so much, and asked so little
on a slip of paper, and brought it to Dan’s office. The door was open.
“Dan,” I said. He looked up from his copyediting. “I don’t know if you overheard the conversation I just had on the phone. But I’d appreciate it if you would look at this sentence and tell me if you think there’s anything wrong with it.”
Dan raised his eyebrows, leaned over in his swivel chair, and took the slip out of my hand.
Looking at it, he said, “Billy?”
“I know it’s a stupid question. But it’s for some guy’s wife’s gravestone. I didn’t want to give him a glib answer.”
Dan handed it back to me.
“Big responsibility, I guess,” he said, his eyes dancing between sympathy and amusement.
“Yeah.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “But of course … I think you knew that.”
I lingered there for a moment longer. I had a thousand more questions for him. He could probably answer them all, and still I wouldn’t understand the meaning of his half-smile.
“Are you all right?” The kindly way Dan said it gave me a little twinge of sympathy for Mona. It was fairly obvious what drew her to him. Behind the gossamer bit of mystery was most likely a safe and solid place.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Thanks,” I mumbled, and hurried back to my desk.