Joe Carroll was the head of makeup. He pulled out a chair for Helen and made us coffee. Johnny Murphy, second-in-command, was the joker of the crew. He carried a briefcase with his lunch in it. Bernie McAteer was small and wiry, a bachelor, mostly bald. Bill Fitzgerald looked like Walter Matthau. There were two apprentices, both Irish, John and Pat, and a messenger named Carmine. It was cozy in the makeup room during the blizzard. They reminisced about the blackout of ’77, just the summer before, when an editor named Gardner Botsford had marshaled everyone into the makeup department and organized the evacuation. It was February 6, 1978. I remember because the next day was my birthday. It was still snowing, and the office was closed again. At lunchtime, I tromped up Fifth Avenue to Scribner’s and bought myself a book I wanted: Caught in the Web of Words, a biography of James Murray, the first editor of the OED.
As Helen and I were leaving that night, an editor named Pat Crow got on the elevator at the eighteenth floor with us. I noticed his boots—big mud-green rubber boots—and said, “Those are the kind of boots we wore in the cheese factory.” He looked at Helen and said, “So this is the next stop after the cheese factory?”
When I came up out of the subway at the City Hall station, intending to stop at the store and buy myself a cake and some ice cream (I was going to skip the candles), fireworks were drifting over the snow at One Police Plaza, muffled but dazzling. It was Chinese New Year, the Year of the Horse. It felt like a good omen: soft fireworks for an entry-level position at The New Yorker.
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That was more than thirty-five years ago. And it has now been more than twenty years since I became a page OK’er—a position that exists only at The New Yorker, where you query-proofread pieces and manage them, with the editor, the author, a fact checker, and a second proofreader, until they go to press. An editor once called us prose goddesses; another job description might be comma queen. Except for writing, I have never seriously considered doing anything else.
One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. In the hierarchy of prose goddesses, I am way, way down the list. But what expertise I have acquired I want to pass along.
My fondest hope is that just from looking at the title you will learn to say fearlessly “between you and me” (not “I”), whether or not you actually buy the book and penetrate to the innards of the objective case. Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes. Regularly, my grasp of the subjunctive slips, and I need to visit the grammatical equivalent of a chiropractor. On my way out of the house one morning, I grabbed a usage manual to read in the car while I waited for the street cleaner to go by, in the street ballet called alternate side of the street parking, during which New Yorkers who own cars but are too cheap to park them in lots or garages compete for a legal spot. “The subjunctive sounds scarier than it is and has a tendency to fill people with horror,” I read. Uh-oh.
You use the subjunctive mood when something is contrary to fact. A classic example is “If I were a rich man.” The subjunctive almost always follows “as if” (“She looked as if she were frozen behind the wheel”) and may also be used in wishes: “I wish I were home in bed.” Where I get twisted up is when there’s a negative involved, as in “If it were not for these stupid street-cleaning rules, I would be home in bed.” Does the negative cancel out the contrary-to-factness? It does not. There are those stupid street-cleaning rules.
Just then a woman rapped on my car window and said, incredulously, “Miss, are you studying grammar?” (She had a strong New York accent, so it came out more like “Miss, you studyin’ grandma?”) I nodded. “My grammar is terrible,” she said. “Is that a good book?” Yes, I said, and showed her the cover: My Grammar and I . . . Or Should That Be Me?, by Caroline Taggart and J. A. Wines. It was published in the States by Reader’s Digest, and is easy to read and digest.
The woman read off the title and the authors’ names to fix them in her memory, thanked me, and went on her way. Only then did I notice that it was ten o’clock: the street cleaner had never come, and all the other parkers had gradually slithered across the street and taken spots and were locking their cars and leaving. Every spot on the block was taken. I was going to have to pay to park my car in a lot. Driving away, I felt happier than I’d have thought possible after being skunked out of a parking spot, and it was because of that woman, because she was interested in grammar. I wished I had given her my copy of the book. But I didn’t. So this is for her and for all of you who want to feel better about your grammar.
Chapter 1