Chapter 3
Outfitted in my sister’s finest pink-and-brown twill suit, I stood outside The Washington Digest looking up at the building.
It wasn’t an impressive structure, and the sign hadn’t actually winked at me Friday—the neon in the e was clearly on its last legs.
The sidewalk rumbled slightly under my feet, indicating that .
. . something . . . was happening deep in the bowels of the edifice.
Or it could have been my own excitement that I was practically vibrating with.
It became increasingly clear as my first morning on the job progressed, however, that no one else knew I was destined for journalistic greatness.
Starting with the fact that I hadn’t yet been issued a security pass.
The security guard lumbered over when I walked in.
“You in the typing pool now?” he asked. He was probably over sixty, and wasn’t tall, but was broad shouldered in a way that gave him a bulldoggish silhouette. His nametag read “Frank.”
“I am,” I said, holding out a hand. “Judy Greenberg.” He didn’t shake my hand.
“Make sure they give you a badge,” he said gruffly, heading back to the chair he had been sitting in when I entered.
Not the most auspicious start, but I went to the elevators, pressed the button, and waited for the doors to open. Patricia greeted me as I stepped out into the typing pool.
“Miss Kelly told me to get you set up,” she said, taking me toward a desk a few over from hers.
“This is where you’ll be working.” She pointed to the sterile wooden surface that had a typewriter, a ream of paper, and a box of number 2 pencils sitting on it.
I glanced at the other desks around me to make sure that bringing in some personal touches would be allowed.
Most had framed pictures. A few had flowers or plants—though I assumed those were fake as the only windows were on the far wall and the fluorescent lights that flickered intermittently as the building rumbled weren’t exactly conducive to life, plant or otherwise.
“What is that?” I asked on the third or fourth combination of vibrations and flickering.
“What is what?” Patricia asked, looking around.
“When the building wobbles?”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “You’ll get used to that. It’s the presses warming up for the evening run. Wait till they start printing around five—the whole place feels like a Magic Fingers motel bed.”
“A what?”
Patricia laughed. “How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-two—I graduated last month from the University of Maryland.”
“And you haven’t spent time in a motel? Oh, honey, you have a lot to learn.”
I glanced at her, suddenly shy, to make sure she wasn’t mocking my lack of experience, but her expression was friendly. “Strict parents,” I said with a shrug. “And Miss Kelly said no fraternizing—”
Patricia took my arm and pulled me into a closet by my desk, shutting the door firmly behind us and tugging on the cord to a single lightbulb that hung in the center of what I could now see was a supply room, lined in floor-to-ceiling shelves with paper, scissors, rubber cement, typewriter ribbons, correction fluid, and oh-so-many pencils.
“Listen,” she said. “No fraternizing means don’t get caught. And definitely don’t get knocked up.”
My eyes widened. “So the girl I replaced . . . ?”
Patricia nodded. “A diaphragm is your friend. And whatever you do, don’t mess around with the married ones. Louise wasn’t the first to learn that lesson.” She leveled a finger at me. “If you’re smart though, she’ll be the last.”
“I’m just here to get experience and move up to being a journalist. I don’t have time for boys anyway.”
She chuckled. “Well they’re going to make time for you—these reporters love the fresh-off-the-farm new girls. Just do try to be clever about it. Miss Kelly has eyes in the back of her head.”
“I am not fresh off a farm. I live in Silver Spring!”
“Which, compared to the city, might as well be Kansas.” She peered at my face as the building rumbled again. “I’m not being mean—just warning you, that’s all.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. And I did. But I also meant what I said: I wasn’t here to meet men—and based on Patricia’s description of the newsroom’s proclivities, even my mother was going to agree with Miss Kelly.
“Great,” Patricia said, reaching for the cord and plunging us into brief darkness before she opened the door again.
“So when you run out of paper or need anything else,” she said loudly as we exited the closet, “this is where you get it. Just make sure you sign the sheet by the door. They account for every pencil here.” Without even looking at her, she then added, “Good morning, Miss Kelly. I’m getting Miss Greenberg situated like you asked. ”
I turned around, straightening my posture—I wasn’t sure how Patricia knew Miss Kelly would be standing there. The woman had materialized out of thin air. But I decided to take that as a lesson: Miss Kelly was everywhere, and I should be prepared.
Miss Kelly nodded crisply. “She says she can type ninety words a minute. And she has a journalism background so she should know editing symbols. Get her started on Don Withers’s column for tomorrow.
” She didn’t acknowledge my presence beyond that and turned on her heel, marched right over to another girl’s desk, yanked the sheet of paper out of her typewriter while she was still typing, balled it up, and threw it away.
“Editorial just cut this one. Go grab another.”
“Tyrant,” Patricia muttered. “Come on. I’ll show you the assignment board.”
She walked me over to a large bulletin board organized in columns by urgency.
Articles, covered in penciled editorial markup, were tacked to it, with a set of wire boxes, organized by when the articles were due, for finished articles to be placed in.
I had never seen anything like this—at my college newspaper, we were responsible for typing and retyping our own articles.
Patricia handed me Don Withers’s latest column, which was a misogynistic mess about the foolishness of sending daughters to college, with instructions to type a clean copy according to the markup provided by the editors upstairs. “Then it goes to print?” I asked.
“Depends—they usually go through a few rounds. But it’s worth proofing your work before you turn it in. If they’re on deadline, you don’t want to be responsible for a typo.”
I skimmed the page in front of me—a list had an Oxford comma between the last and second-to-last items, which wasn’t used in journalism unless absolutely necessary for clarity. “What do I do if there’s a mistake they haven’t caught?”
Patricia shook her head. “Leave it. Type everything exactly how it’s marked. You don’t want to be the reason they print a mistake. We’re expendable down here—to them anyway—and if they can prove you made a change, you’re gone.”
I chewed the inside of my bottom lip, contemplating this. I was right about the comma. While it was likely that The Digest had its own stylebook, that was universal. I’ve got to start somewhere, I thought, sitting down at my desk. Even if that somewhere was just removing an errant comma.
I had the article typed and ready to go back to Editorial in under ten minutes. I placed it in the finished bin, and a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen grabbed it promptly and then left the room.
I went to Patricia’s desk. “What next?” I asked.
She looked up at me, confused. “Finish the column.”
“I did.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “Okay, second important lesson of the day—don’t work that fast. At least not if you want any friends here.”
“But—”
“Yeah, I know, you think they’ll see how great you are and give you a writing assignment. It doesn’t work like that, doll. You’re just making everyone else look bad.”
I was torn. I wasn’t here to make friends, just like I wasn’t here to find a man.
And the harder I worked, the more they had to see that I was overqualified for the typing pool.
But I had been in a sorority, and I knew how easily a group of women could ignore the best of intentions if they felt slighted.
“Sorry,” I said, shrugging meekly. “I’m just excited to be here. ”
Patricia pulled a cigarette from a Pall Mall box on her desk and then offered me the pack.
I shook my head as she placed her cigarette between her lips and lit it.
She took a drag, turned her head to blow out a plume of smoke, and removed the cigarette, which came away with a ring of red lipstick that matched the nails on the fingers it was held between.
“See if you’re still saying that by the end of the day.
For now, go look at what’s next on the board.
You never want Miss Kelly to see you without work at your desk.
Just cut the pace some, huh? No one is counting your words per minute here. ”
By lunchtime, it felt like I had typed half the newspaper’s articles, even at my reduced speed.
What I had learned so far was that a lot of socializing, nail filing, and smoking happened when Miss Kelly left the third floor to go speak to Editorial.
The conversations dried up, the files disappeared under desks, and the cigarettes were stubbed out when she returned.
Everyone worked hard when she was in the room.
But I wanted her to see that I worked hard even when she was gone—without alienating myself from the other women, who were eyeing me with curiosity at best.
“You’re new here,” a male voice interrupted both my thoughts and my typing as I keyed his words in the middle of a sports piece about how a record-breaking fifty-four single-day home runs had been hit league-wide in baseball the day before. It was clearly a slow news day.
I blew out an annoyed breath, plucked the tainted article from the typewriter, and rolled a new sheet into it, preparing to start over. “No,” I said grumpily. “Been here for months. You just never noticed.”