The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Read Free Book Online

one o’clock. My bedroom’s floral wallpaper made me feel oddly old and infirm.
Bean poles
and
bean sprouts
and
bean threads
snaked around in my head. Some animal—probably a cat—kept making a painful sneezing-crying sound from somewhere behind the house. It would stop occasionally and I’d start to drift off—and then it would begin again.
    At about 2 a.m., I dragged a sleeping bag out to my livingroom and sacked out there instead. The old octagonal Victorian room had huge, curtainless front windows. I pulled up all the blinds so all of the headlights could roll over me as the night traffic shushed by. Crashing on my futon, I felt like an overnight visitor in my own apartment. It was this sensation that tricked me into sleep.

CHAPTER THREE
    “Guess what?” Mona demanded, sticking her little head into my cubicle, forgoing hello. As if we’d spoken just the day before. As if we were buddies.
    “What?” I said. It seemed her hairstyle had loosened a little in the past month. There was something softer about it, and less slick. Her face didn’t seem pulled so tight. I wondered if this had happened gradually or all at once.
    “I found another one,” she said.
    She shoved a citation under my nose. I took it from her.

blow-dryer
    I switched off the stove and picked up the phone. By the time Scout answered, I’d lost it. I was crying. He wanted to know what was the matter, nearly yelling the question after I couldn’t answer his first couple of tries. I couldn’t form sentences, or even meaningful one-word answers. He hung up. A few minutes later, he was there, at my door. His cheeks were red from rushing there in the cold. His hair, usually so carefully styled with a round brush and
blow-dryer
, was tousled in all directions. He had never looked so cute. He had never looked so powerless. I wanted to hug him, for strength, and then pushhim back out the door. I was glad to have him there, but suddenly acutely aware that he couldn’t save me from anything. He followed me into the kitchen and watched me pour tea water from the pot to the sink. He wanted to know if I was all right. I said no. No, I said again. I’m crazy. You wouldn’t believe how crazy I’ve become.
    Dolores Beekmim
The Broken Teaglass

Robinson Press
14 October 1985
23
    “This one is more bizarre than the first,” said Mona.
    “How’s that?” I asked. “It’s funny, cuz I’d forgotten all about—”
    “The subject matter, for one. Obviously. Also, most cits are about three sentences. The sentence the word is in and then just enough of what’s around it to give you a little context. Look how long this one is. What the hell?”
    “Yeah, it’s odd,” I said. “But I’ve seen longer ones.”
    “Usually you make a long cit for a
reason
. What kind of idiot cites practically a whole page of text just for a word like ‘blow-dryer’?”
    I thought of Dan cringing at my first couple of attempts at research-reading.
    “Maybe it was a poor, lowly editorial assistant who didn’t know what he was doing?”
    “I don’t think so, Billy. Look. You want to know what else is weird about these cits? They both have an exact date on them.
The Broken Teaglass
is supposed to be a
book
. Books don’t give an exact day of publication. Usually you just get the year.”
    “Pretty weird,” I agreed. “So you think a typist is messing around, sticking bogus stuff in the citation files?”
    “Maybe not a typist. Maybe anyone. But yes, that’s what I’m thinking.”
    “Why would anyone do that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe they just really wanted ‘blow-dryer’ to make it into the dictionary,” I suggested.
    “Right. And there’s no more covert way to pad the evidence for a word than to make up citations with dictionary editors as characters.”
    “This one doesn’t have dictionary editors as characters.”
    “How do you know? The narrator in this citation’s probably the same as the one in the first.”
    “Unless it’s a short