The men in makeup (they were all men in those days) were pragmatic, and they gave the problem some thought. They knew that they were not going to get rid of Ed. He had been doing this job for some thirty years. Nor were they going to change the handwriting habits of a lifetime by persuading him to bear down more on the pencil. What they could change, though, was the pencil. Joe Carroll, the head of makeup, came back to collating with a couple of boxes of No. 1 pencils, probably purchased from Graham’s, the stationery store in the lobby where I had been fitted for my rubber thumb. In the pencil-lead-grading system, No. 1 is a very soft lead, so even if Ed didn’t put his back into it, this new pencil would make a darker impression.
My problem was the opposite of Ed’s: I bore down on the pencil, and my handwriting was erratic—I’d had complaints about it since third grade—so I often had to erase something and try to neaten it up. The erasures came through on the fax, creating something like a palimpsest. Although I learned a lot in collating, from transcribing the corrections of eminent grammarians, the job of a “scribe” in the medieval sense was probably not ideal for a person who struggled with her handwriting. Mine is a combination of a lot of other people’s handwriting: for a while, I affected the G in George Harrison’s autograph; I permanently adopted the big top loop and slim descender of a friend’s J’s. I read somewhere that if you print your M’s, making sharp twin peaks of them, it means you hate your mother, and, sure, Mom drove me crazy for much of my life, but I wasn’t willing to make that my signature. Somewhere else I read that detached letters showed creativity, and I felt bad that my handwriting betrayed a stodgy flow. The only detachment I had was with the letter z, and that was because I’d forgotten how to form a cursive z—mine looked like a y—and I had to stop and print it. As a teenager, when I entered a contest saying in twenty-five words or less why I deserved to win, say, an eye-makeup kit, or when I wrote a fan letter to Paul McCartney, it was my handwriting as much as my words that I was relying on to charm and captivate. Paul would fall in love with the tail of my racy capital R’s. Later, as a graduate student, teaching composition, I noted that the student with the neatest handwriting often wrote the dullest prose.
In the old days at The New Yorker, when your pencil point got dull, you just tossed it aside and picked up a new one. There was an office boy who came around in the morning with a tray of freshly sharpened wooden pencils. And they were nice long ones—no stubs. The boy held out his tray of pencils, and you scooped up a quiver of them. It sounds like something out of a dream! Even then I think I knew that the office boy and his tray of pencils would go the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Later, there were boxes and boxes of both No. 1 and No. 2 pencils stacked in the supply closet: all I had to do was grab a box of a dozen, sharpen them up (I used an electric pencil sharpener at the time), and fill my pencil cup. It was downright luxurious. I spent so many hours dutifully copying changes with a No. 1 pencil that I grew accustomed to the feel of the softer lead. Sometimes an editor, walking around with pencil in hand, would use my desk for a moment to make a change, and leave the pencil behind. It would get mixed in with mine, and if I accidentally took up a pencil that had migrated in this manner, I could feel the difference. I’d take a closer look and, sure enough, there it was embossed on the shaft: No. 2. Writing with a No. 2 pencil made me feel as if I had a hangover. It created a distance between my hand and my brain, put me at a remove from the surface of the paper I was writing on. I would throw it into the desk drawer.
Years later, when I had apparently used up every No. 1 pencil in Times Square, I asked the person in charge of office supplies to order some for me, and she said they weren’t available. “What do you mean, they’re not available?” I asked. “They’re not in the catalogue,” she answered. She showed me a thick catalogue of office supplies and told me to choose. I was horrified. The office-supply catalogue reminded me of the catalogue for a vacation club that a friend received when she bought a time-share in Cozumel. She could swap it for any place in the catalogue. But what if the place she wanted to go wasn’t in the catalogue? I have always known where I wanted to travel, and always had an overambitious itinerary: London, Canterbury, Dover, Rye, Wye, Swansea, Tintagel, Dublin, Kilkenny, Galway, Mayo, and back to London, with a daytrip to Oxford. Athens, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Samos, Chios, ?anakkale (Troy), Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Skiathos, Delphi, Mycenae, and back to Athens, with a side trip to Sounion to see Byron’s graffiti. How could she restrict herself to the places that were in the catalogue?