Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

168 Pages·2015·0.88 MB·English

by  Mary Norris

BETWEEN YOU & ME
Confessions of a Comma Queen
MARY NORRIS
For you and you and you.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Confession of a Comma Queen
Chapter 1. Spelling Is for Weirdos
Chapter 2. That Witch!
Chapter 3. The Problem of Heesh
Chapter 4. Between You and Me
Chapter 5. Comma Comma Comma Comma, Chameleon
Chapter 6. Who Put the Hyphen in Moby-Dick?
Chapter 7. A Dash, a Semicolon, and a Colon Walk into a Bar
Chapter 8. What’s Up with the Apostrophe?
Chapter 9. F*ck This Sh*t
Chapter 10. Ballad of a Pencil Junkie
Epilogue: The Million-Dollar Copy Editor
Acknowledgments
Notes
Appendix: Some Books I Have Found Particularly Helpful
Index
Of course, when you correct the errors of others,
do so with kindness, in the hope that later writers will be as kind when they
correct yours.
—Francis A. Burkle-Young and Saundra Rose Maley,
The Art of the Footnote
BETWEEN YOU & ME
Introduction
CONFESSION OF A COMMA QUEEN
L
ET’S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT right from the beginning: I didn’t set out to be a
comma queen. The first job I ever had, the summer I was fifteen, was checking
feet at a public pool in Cleveland. I was a “key girl”—“Key personnel” was the
job title on my pay stub (I made seventy-five dollars a week). I never knew what
that was supposed to mean. I was not in charge of any keys, and my position was
by no means crucial to the operation of the pool, although I did clean the
bathrooms.
Everyone had to follow an elaborate ritual before getting into the pool: tuck
your hair into a hideous bathing cap (if you were a girl), shower, wade through a
footbath spiked with disinfectant that tinted your feet orange, and stand in line to
have your toes checked. This took place at a special wooden bench, like those
things that shoe salesmen use, except that instead of a miniature sliding board
and a size stick for the customer’s foot it had a stick with a foot-shaped platform
on top. The prospective swimmer put one foot at a time on the platform and,
leaning forward, used his fingers to spread out his toes so that the foot checker
could make sure he didn’t have athlete’s foot. Only then could he pass into the
pool. I have never heard of foot checkers in any city besides Cleveland, where
their presence was taken for granted, and can only speculate that at one time
there was an outbreak of athlete’s foot on the shores of Lake Erie, and a
crusading public health official, determined to stamp it out, had these benches
knocked together and hired people to sit at them, checking feet.
I am not particularly nostalgic about my foot-checking days. Nor do I wish to
revisit my time at the Cleveland Costume Company, where I worked after
graduation. I had gone to Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers
University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and I had returned ignominiously to
the nest because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. The costume company
was fun for a while: renting props to local TV shows, putting together costumes
for summer-stock productions of Restoration drama. On my first day, a young
black woman, Yvonne, was setting Santa beards in rollers so that they would be
curly by Christmas. An older black woman worked in the kitchen, starching and
ironing the clown ruffs and nuns’ wimples. She changed from street shoes into
bedroom slippers when she got to work, and said things like “My dogs is killin’
me.” The boss was Mrs. Pizzino (“P as in Peter, I, double Z as in zebra, I, N, O,”
she would say, spelling her last name out over the phone), and under her tutelage
I learned to repair big papier-mâché animal heads and not to paint the panther’s
eyes blue.
Halloween had always been my favorite holiday, and I borrowed a costume
from work—a hooded green corduroy robe like something a fairy-tale dwarf
would wear—and threw a party in my parents’ basement. It featured copious
amounts of alcohol and candy. One of the guests came as a penis; another as a
Ku Klux Klansman. Initially, I was sorry that Yvonne declined my invitation, but
not anymore. When the party was over, I decided that my career at the costume
company had peaked and I was going to quit. Accordingly, I slept in the next
day, and was awakened by my mother, saying that Mrs. Badina was on the
phone. (Mom never got Mrs. Pizzino’s name straight.) I explained to my boss
that now that Halloween was over I thought I’d quit. Her response was “Get in
here.” There is just as much to do at a costume company after the holiday as
there is in the weeks leading up to it. I stuck it out through the Christmas season,
and, after all the Santa suits had been cleaned and put away and Yvonne was
rolling up the beards again, I started looking around.
I called a local dairy and asked whether there were any openings for milkmen.
I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm. I liked cows: they led a
placid yet productive life. I’d gone to Rutgers partly because it had a renowned
department of dairy science. I’d taken one mini-course in how to judge dairy
cattle and learned the differences between Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, and
Brown Swiss cows. “We’ve never had a lady drive a milk truck, but there’s no
reason not,” a man said, and he agreed to let me come in and talk. The plant was
all gleaming stainless steel, heated milk undercut with a bracing whiff of
ammonia. It was the first time I could be completely honest in a job interview. I
didn’t have any experience, but I was sincerely interested in the dairy industry.
On a frigid morning in February, I went along with a milkman on a route in
Fairview, a suburb west of Cleveland. The milk truck had two sets of pedals, one
with the standard three for a stick shift, for driving sitting down when you were
going long distances, and the other for driving standing up, when you were
hopping between houses. This second set had just two pedals: the clutch and the
brake were combined in one. When you needed to slow down or shift gears, your
left foot squeezed down through the clutch to the brake on one pedal, and you
had to lift your right foot off the accelerator and balance on one heel.
The route was available, and they gave me the job. A generous friend lent me
her car for a crash course in how to drive a stick shift. The foreman who was
training me noticed that I handled the truck better standing up than sitting down.
The seat was designed to fold up and swing around to the side, where it could be
stowed out of the way. All that folding and swinging had loosened it up, so when
I turned the steering wheel the seat swung in the opposite direction, and I would
find myself facing out the side instead of in the direction the truck was going, as
if I were on some disorienting amusement-park ride. At the foreman’s
suggestion, I was driving back to the plant standing up, on Brookpark Road, out
near the airport. I went through an underpass, on the far side of which was a
traffic light, and I was almost under it when I saw that it was red, so I had to
slam on the brake and try to steer while gripping the steering wheel and
balancing on one heel, and I lost control. The truck crashed into a concrete
barrier. The foreman was thrown into the ice-cream freezer, and I landed on the
floor. He was OK. I was bruised and humiliated. The plant had its own tow truck
and mechanic, and I rode back with the mechanic, wanting to bum one of his
unfiltered Camels. The foreman got blamed, because the boss said he shouldn’t
have had me driving standing up, and I got another chance.
I had some really nice customers—there was a couple who bought only a pint
of half-and-half once a week for their coffee—and I had some deadbeats, the
kind of people who knew that if they ever paid their bill in full you’d drop them.
There was a man who rehabilitated coin changers, those contraptions with
barrels for quarters, nickels, pennies, and dimes; we wore them on our belts. The
houses had milk chutes, or boxes beside the door, or you put the milk between
the storm door and the inside door, and shouted “Milkman!” I wasn’t a man, but
I didn’t like the word “lady”—it seemed not feminist—so I wouldn’t holler
“Milklady!” and “milkmaid” was a little too fanciful. I settled for “milkwoman,”
which was a bit too anatomically correct and made me sound like a wet nurse. I
muffled the last syllables.
I had half a mind to stay in Cleveland and try to marry the boss’s son (he
raised beef cattle), but I gave up the milk route to accept a fellowship at the
University of Vermont, where I had applied, too late, the year before. While
pursuing a master’s degree in English, I kept up my interest in the dairy industry
—UVM had an agricultural school and a famous ice-cream program. I even
learned to milk cows, though they were university cows (Holsteins—big
producers). My first job once the academic life had worn me down was
packaging mozzarella on the night shift in a cheese factory. A team of women,
wearing white rubber aprons, yellow rubber gloves, green rubber boots, and
hairnets, pulled bricks of mozzarella out of vats of cold salt water, labeled them,
bagged them, sealed the bags, boxed the cheese, and stacked the boxes. I had a
secret yen to operate the forklift truck. The Popeye-style muscles I developed in
my forearms atrophied soon after I moved to New York. Sometimes, on the sides
of trucks making deliveries to pizzerias, I still recognize the logos of cheese
wholesalers—Vesuvio, Cremona, in red, white, and green—whose labels we
slapped onto loaves of mozzarella in Vermont. I don’t suppose that I will ever
belong to the Brotherhood of Teamsters again (though I maintain my chauffeur’s
license) or have calluses on my palms from handling a stainless-steel carrier full
of half-gallon milk cartons.
_______
I started reading The New Yorker in graduate school in Vermont. I sometimes
visited my brother in New York. He had gone to the Art Students League, where
he made friends with a woman in his portrait class named Jeanne Fleischmann.
She was married to Peter Fleischmann, the chairman of the board of The New
Yorker. His father, Raoul Fleischmann, had been the co-founder of the magazine,
with Harold Ross. On one visit, I picked up a copy of the magazine. It was dated
February 24, 1975. Eustace Tilley was on the cover, and the contents included a
piece by E. B. White: Letter from the East. It was the anniversary issue—The
New Yorker’s fiftieth anniversary.
Eventually, I met the Fleischmanns. I was doing research for my master’s
thesis, on James Thurber, and while Peter was away on business he let me sit in
his office and look through bound volumes of the magazine. At the Morgan
Library, in an exhibit of books that had belonged to writers, I found a grammar
mistake on the wall label accompanying Thurber’s copy of Hemingway’s Green
Hills of Africa, in which he had made pencil drawings of Papa and Memsahib on
safari. I was given permission to examine the book. (I made freehand copies of
the illustrations and appended them to my thesis. My examiners were not
amused.) In Vermont, I kept two stacks of magazines on my lobster-crate coffee
table, one of Hoard’s Dairyman and one of The New Yorker.