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When I finally made it to the copydesk, it was a long time before I could once again read for pleasure. I spontaneously copyedited everything I laid eyes on. I had a paperback edition of Faulkner’s The Hamlet that was so riddled with typos that it almost ruined Flem Snopes for me. But, as I relaxed on the copydesk, I was sometimes even able to enjoy myself. There were writers who weren’t very good and yet were impossible to improve, like figure skaters who hit all the technical marks but have a limited artistic appeal and sport unflattering costumes. There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. Oliver Sacks turned out to be attached to the spelling of “sulphur” and “sulphuric” that he remembered from his chemistry experiments as a boy. (The New Yorker spelled it less romantically: “sulfur,” “sulfuric.”) Early on, I worked on a piece by Nora Ephron, a parody of frequent-flier rules titled “Dear Frequent Travelers.” The New Yorker doubles the l in “travellers,” and I doubted that an airline would—it looked more corporate without the extra letter. So I let it alone. Lu Burke came along behind me and doubled the l, probably while grumbling something about incompetent copy editors. I got no credit for being overscrupulous.
When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffeecake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffeecake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements. She approached me once in the makeup department with a proof in her hand. She couldn’t figure out how to fix something, and I was the only one around. She knew me from chatting in the ladies’ room on the eighteenth floor. I looked at the proof and made a suggestion, and she was delighted. “You helped me!” she gasped.
I was on the copydesk when John McPhee’s pieces on geology were set up. I got to copyedit “In Suspect Terrain,” which is about I-80, my I-80, a road I know well: it is the road between Ohio and the George Washington Bridge, between my parents’ house and my independence. I-80 took a long time to build. When I first came east to college, in New Jersey, in 1970, my father and I took the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We couldn’t resist the exit for Norristown, and stayed in the King of Prussia Motel and ate at a Horn & Hardart. (I loved automats, with their selection of sandwiches and slices of pie behind miniature windows that you could open yourself.) The next year, I-80 was open as far as the Delaware Water Gap. We stopped there to eat the sandwiches my mother had packed, and though I have stopped there many times since, I have never found the spot my father and I happened on that first time, with its majestic beauty by the side of the road. Either that or it never looked as spectacular to me again. Every year, I-80 stretched farther east, until I no longer had to wind down Route 46 along the Delaware River. Now, of course, I like to get off I-80 and find new routes through New Jersey.