A Few Notes on the Type
1. For some time, she blamed the year she disliked reading on the attic of a house she once shared with her husband. Together in an effort to salvage the marriage, they papered the attic in cabbage roses and furnished it with shabby reading accoutrements chosen to romanticize the starving artist aspect of her personality. There was the threadbare loveseat that came from the living room she grew up in, on which she had first learned her alphabet. Also the pilled, worn blanket of murky, even suspect, provenance, the wobbly table for the balancing of mugs of tea, and a thick pair of socks for when she kicked off her clogs. Although the wallpaper was new, the showy cabbage roses on their charcoal background, gritty with wallpaper paste, put her in mind of the chilly Italian flat in which the writer, Katherine Mansfield, penniless, consumptive, once rationed the gift of an orange someone gave her, a segment a day, to make it last ten days, and tried to chafe enough warmth into her knuckles to roll the meager cigarettes that soon after, killed her. In addition to the loveseat there was a dormer with no window, and a window with no dormer, while from the heavy black varnish on the wide plank floor, a sheen of lamplight beckoned toward the next, stolen hour. In theory the wife passed more hours in that attic than she passed there in reality, and years later it felt like less than a minute. By all accounts she read just two books in there: And the Band Played On, and a collection of Alice Adams stories including one about a swimmer that caused her to feel, when she was swimming, as if she were reading, and vice versa. But the marriage perished, anyway. For instance he accused her of losing his wallet. Suffused with an illiterate, aqueous yearning, she was sitting there reading the Alice Adams story, the tea lukewarm in the ill-balanced mug, when in he barged. They’d gone grocery shopping that afternoon, or rather he pulled the car to the curb at the Pick n’ Save store, the boys remaining safely buckled while she ran in for milk. “My wallet it’s missing you careless bitch! Tomorrow’s ruined I’ll be on the phone calling credit cards all day you don’t give a shit what I have to do all day for you as long as you have your books.” Spitting, seething (he must have known there were other, bigger things to be mad at her about) he drove to his office to prep the taxes, recalculate the HSA, and perform other red-tape tasks he liked reminding her she’d fall apart if she needed to do them herself. The boys were sleeping downstairs when the wallet went missing, so they didn’t have to hear him. It wasn’t the name-calling that was the last straw, since she was, arguably, appropriately described by most of the names he called her, the pilled blanket providing only the most threadbare evidence of her perfidy but the sneaked cigarettes and her infinite, tearful, postprandial walks confirming it. Still, the wallet ended up not being her fault, for it was lying on the floor of the bedroom closet from when he’d kicked off his jeans. His apology was nearly on bended knees. They even flew to San Francisco to work things out, except things wouldn’t have worked out anyway. For instance she liked to walk past the home of a new widow she knew of and pretend she lived there, the boys gorging themselves on the fried onion topping from the green bean casseroles well-wishers left on the doorstep.
2. Later she blamed the year she disliked reading on her boyfriend, Chuck, who when she first met him lived in a house filled with lawnmower parts amid burlap walls decorated with row upon row of nailed-up baseball caps. Chuck tended to employ his assortment of sports magazines as antipasto plates. Fragments of hardboiled eggshell littered the Swimsuit issue, and on Field and Stream some membranous spines of a sliced bell pepper would have long dried out. With trepidation she carried the magazines, like a week’s assortment of unwashed dishes, into the kitchen, smeared the bell pepper seeds and the apple cores and the potato peelings into the over-flowing trash, carried the magazines back to the living room, and, after sweeping the myriad salt grains off the ruins of the coffee table, spread the magazines neatly back out in such a way under the lamplight that the knife marks wouldn’t show on the glossy covers. The tv would be on to Law & Order Special Victims Unit, but since she liked Chuck’s company, she didn’t go upstairs. Besides, there wasn’t an attic in that house. Soon she lifted the top book off the stack she’d checked out at the library, read maybe three pages of it, slid the book into the bottom of the stack, like balancing leftover foreign coins, and got up for a can of diet Coke. She took a too vigorous swallow and read a page or two of the next two books. A poet she knew, Ralph*, calls the brain a receptor, “like a dream machine. It receives impulses and it receives image upon image upon image upon image, but the mind craves meaning.” On tv lay a corpse but the actor was breathing, the chest rising and falling and an eyelid barely twitching, but when she looked at the book, the book was dead. The only live thing in it was her finger sliding over the or in stories. She shouldn’t need to be grabbed by a story right off, she reminded herself. She’d never been that kind of reader, the kind that needs for a story to fling itself open in front of her. She liked a less perceptible overture, a shrugging off of her guard but not all at once, a magnetized holding at bay of a story, as if by an opposite pole of herself. She didn’t feel that at all, the year she disliked reading. She flipped through cookbooks instead and whole Lobster Gram catalogues start to finish. Though she remembered how important they must once have been to her, she regarded her towers of novels, memoirs, and short story collections with a startled antipathy, as if coolly recalling leaving her husband. Feeling guilty and cruel but clear-eyed already and resolute, she shoved away Ishiguro and regarded Law & Order Special Victims Unit, assessing, as had become her habit, the artful way they applied the eye make-up on the tall, slender prosecutors with the sexy voices. Then, in a house they moved into together, Chuck built the most astonishing wall of bookshelves—black shelves arranged in a squared-off arc across an apricot background—and eventually he took up reading again at just before bedtime, near midnight most nights if there was nothing on television. He read mainly biographies of American presidents in chronological order. For Christmas she bought him John Quincy Adams, and for his birthday, Andrew Jackson, who died of old wounds and dropsy. Here is a line from Ann Beattie’s story collection Park City, of which she read a page or two while lying next to Chuck in bed the year she disliked reading: I started at Ben Franklin as a substitute. But here is how it looked to her: Maybe Chuck would like a biography of Benjamin Franklin this year at Christmas, even though Franklin wasn’t a president. Or was he? Another line from the same book of stories read: They had discussed her, but what it looked like to her was: It disgusted her they only hired actresses with deep-throat voices. By then she would have switched off the reading lamp, hexed by the halo around the bulb. All lamps cast halos, like muddled ghosts, the year she disliked reading, and the headlights on cars made two ghosts at once, which made the prospect of driving terrifying, even if she was already there.
3. Not infrequently, she blamed the year she disliked reading on the books themselves, and by extension on authors, agents, editors, publishers, critics, bookstore owners, bloggers, tweeters, librarians, reviewers, professors, book club members, and all other purveyors of literature. At the library one morning, searching for something she couldn’t find, she typed the words, “Fuck This” in the search box on the catalogue monitor, and seconds later a librarian jogged to her side, her key ring necklace jingling, to ask was there a problem. The books just weren’t any good, or if they were, they were too good, like brush marks not showing on oil paintings. Even after she conceded to the problem being hers, not theirs—some fault line inside her that ruptured the space between her and the book, creating a divide between her and the opposite plane of the page, where the story resided, and which had once been her territory—she held others to blame, for steering her in too many wrong directions. For some months, the Notes on Type alone satisfied her, since to read through a string of them, even if slowly, like over four commercial breaks interrupting Law & Order Special Victims Unit:
The text of this book was set in Garamond, a modern rendering of the type first cut by Claude Garamond whose distinquished romans and italics first appeared in Opera Ciceronis in 1543-44,
and,
This book was set in Bembo, a typeface based on an old-style Roman face used for Cardinal Bembo’s tract De Aetna. Bembo was cut by Francisco Griffo in the early sixteenth century. The Lanston Monotype Company of Philadelphia brought the well-proportioned letterforms of Bembo to the United States in the 1930’s,
and then,
This book was set, via computer-driven cathode-ray tube, in Caslon, a modern adaptation of a type designed in 1734 by the first William Caslon. The first copies of the Declaration of Independence and the first paper currency distributed to the citizens of the new-born nation were printed in Caslon,
and finally,
This book was set in Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and produced by the Adobe Cooperation specifically for the Macintosh Personal Computer, and released in 1990,
was not unmoving, just as scanning any history of human industry of peoples’ public doodlings, their shy ingenuities, their march toward the next paradigm shift—was not unmoving. If not for her annoyance over the scarcity of female inventors of typeface, which reminded her of the shopkeeper of the bric-a-brac shop on Merritt Avenue’s refusal to sell her the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas to be shelved in her sons’ new, post-divorce playroom all because it was missing the S volume, she might have stuck with the notes a while longer. Instead of the Britannica, the shopkeeper sold her a Stanford University football. Some people ascribe to motherhood “a dependable set of responses,”** but others don’t “accept the notion that mothers or children behave in predictable ways.”*** Once, attending a Badgers game with Chuck and the in-laws, she found she was watching the event as if it were words unscrolling on tickertape instead of something really happening. Skeins of unbidden sentences accompanied every part of the experience, so when she sat in the bleachers, the line, “She found a place on the bleachers nearest the aisle, so if she needed to go the bathroom she wouldn’t need to climb over Chuck’s dad’s lap,” barged into her mind. And when the crowd cheered, the sentence, “She again missed the touchdown, thinking instead of the old man’s politics and the mortifying question of how much Chuck agreed with him,” distracted her. Meanwhile those same sentences, if they had been printed in one of her library books, would have struck her as having no connection whatsoever to the world of lived experience, and would be deemed unworthy of the vast half-minute she might have wasted in deciphering them. Like when Gandolf says to Bilbo, “The world is not in your books or maps. It’s out there,” she would have thrown down the book but then instead of launching off to find her adventure, lain gazing at the set of porcelain cow creamers, one delft, one dun, that stood on the end table in the TV room. A group of hand-me-down teapots sat below the arched bookshelves. Nobody ever looks at teapots or cows expecting to see right through them and discover urgent meaning on the opposite side, the way you look at the typeface if you’re a person who likes to read. Nor do people who like reading expect to be exhausted by the letters themselves, like when on weight- lifting day at the YMCA she found herself too weak to unscrew the cap from the magic marker hanging at the sign-up board. Plus there was something about the term, end-table, like endgame, that discomfited her.
4. Her mom too was blamed, for having read too much. Whole hours, whole days, not on the loveseat but in the orange chair with the matching ottoman, since even when her mom was sitting she would have rather lain down. And when the orange chair was empty, and if there wasn’t some fine, chicken-y smell drifting out of the kitchen (although the cooking fell off a bit after Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room) it meant her mom was in the bedroom with her jaw saddled up in the canvas sling of the neck-stretcher, since her neck hurt from bending over book or stew pot, and if she wasn’t in the neck-stretcher, she’d be in bed, “resting,” singing along with My Fair Lady—I’ll never know what made it so exiting, why all at once my heart took flight, I only know that she—that was for weeks at a time on the record player.
5. She understood she was required to revise her selves. The inner private self, and the outer, more sociable self, and the self that was so-called professorial—all three needed editing, maybe even deletion. No longer a person who enjoyed reading stories, much less whole novels, much less writing them, or talking about writing or reading them, or reading about writing them, or talking about reading about writing them, or writing about reading about writing about talking about them, or even thinking about them or so much as looking at one of them, she would need to find another way of moving through time, another purpose for being, though she’d been lax, she now saw, in devising a contingency. Not even on divorcing had she labored to imagine a new way of living, nor when she had cancer nor even when her sons grew up and left town and got jobs and were married. A man she once knew who dropped out of pre-med filled out a questionnaire in hopes of being advised what to make of himself, and was told he would make a fine clam-sorter, so with him in mind one afternoon, she pulled up to the Fed Ex shipping center on Jackson Street and filled out a job application asking how many pounds she was able to hoist (Approximately sixteen to twenty-eight? she answered) and could she operate a forklift. Being a nurse was another idea, since whenever she was hospitalized, she envied even the orderlies for being paid to be there. Not even falling ill again would be so awful, she thought, for she’d be happy for a chance to learn more about medicine without needing to read more intern and pediatrician memoirs, which had once been a staple of hers, like rice. The things she’d loved about reading—the leaps of consciousness, the joining with another’s, or an other, consciousness, the texture impressed by language on consciousness—might be had, if not in books, in human friendships instead, and in the stewardship of dogs, but that sensation she’d relied on while reading of passing through mirrors, of decoding the topography of shadow and gleam in a hall of mirrors, of being lost and then found within a den of trick mirrors, would be more difficult to come by. The narrator of a story of which she managed to read the first half one night who no longer liked reading, regarded books as coffins, “shabby or ornate,” **** but still she plunked down the book once she’d finished that line, leaving the rest of the volume unread. Some people like to think of animal tracks as being earthly, primal narratives*****, but to her it only ruined her snowshoeing to imagine she was reading the badger tracks rather than barreling past or across them, tiny amid the bulk of her snow-clothes, the muddy odor of deer scat gentling the chill of the fragrance of snow. And what of walking along on a city street, like some people claimed was like reading, too******? Nonsense, she thought, since even if she sensed she was being followed, like a character in a book, remaining just out of reach of the man pursuing her—the ground they walked on, pursuer and pursued, spanning distinct, sovereign chronologies like the twinned, daily timelines of reader and story—there was no thug in print who came close to duplicating the flesh and blood oaf who stood in the pool observation deck watching her swim and later phoned her at home to remark on her crawl and to wonder how fast she thought she was going. Geese crossing the sky—dark fonts against a vast, dun background—sufficed some days to make up for not reading, since they struck her as being, like the earliest pictographs, animate as well as abstract, and no less legible when they were passing in flocks as when they flew by themselves. Serif-like, their wings pleased her more than any alphabet.
6. Two duck hunters drowned in the lake one day. High school pupils, they took out a small boat against a strong November wind. It’s nuts to go out in strong winds in November on Lake Winnebago, of which the maximum depth of just twenty-one feet (by comparison, Lake Eerie, smallest of the Greats, is ten times deeper) causes the biggest waves to ricochet against the bottom and thrash only more violently on regaining the top. But rough winds make the best condition for hunting, since the ducks are in flight instead of paddling around where the whitecaps would pummel them. But out the young hunters motored, intending to beach at an island or shoot from the boat. Their dog is the only one of the three of them who made it back to shore, but then the dog too died, incredibly, hit by a car where it waited on the road near the teens’ parked truck. The whole winter would pass before their bodies were found. On certain nights if it’s snowing, freezing outside, the ghosts still join her in her car when she is driving home from Fit-for-Life class at the Y, not the ghost of the dog but the ghost of the boys, and they plead with her again as they have pleaded before to drive them home to their mothers. “I’m sorry I can’t I don’t know where,” she objects, and when they plead again she echoes, “I’m sorry I can’t I don’t know how,” but no louder this time than the time before, and although for a moment the scent of the leave-on conditioner she combed into her hair after showering appears to mollify them, when they depart, they depart unhappily, disappointed with her. Had she read this in a book the year she disliked reading, this tale of the ghosts of two hunter boys joining her in her car after Fit-for-Life class, she wouldn’t have believed it. Even had she read it while driving her car with the two drowned hunter boys sitting right behind her, she wouldn’t have believed it, since she never believed what she read anymore, not a word of it, not even in books of made-up stories, the year she disliked reading. A friend imagined the teens standing upright in their waders all that winter underwater, swaying like weeds, but even that, had she read it in the pages of a novel, would have been more difficult for her to believe in than that there are ghosts for real in her car. On paper they’d be gibberish, the words appearing to be sequenced arbitrarily. But in the car they are real, their lonesomeness actual if twice as big by virtue of there being two of them. Louder this time, since the ghosts aren’t obeying, and she being a mother herself, if not theirs, she tells them, “Go now go home to your mothers I can’t bring you I’m stupid I’m sorry please leave me alone.” And like the best typefaces, which are the “ones where readers do not notice the font. Only the message*******, the ghosts float out when she rolls open a window. Snow drifts in. Several nights over several years, this happens.
7. Other names of other typefaces are: Grotesque, Requiem, Transitional, Seagull, Perpetua, Hobo, Droid, Dragonwick, Dingbat, and Scribble. At the mirror some days, regarding her self—the fading of the eyebrows in particular until she colors them in, at which they sometimes do but most often do not regain the full, carnal, womanly sweep that once brought definition to the face she showed the world —reminds her of them.
8. In the mail came the usual yearly postcard from her ophthalmologist informing her it was time for an eye exam, but instead of going back to that particular doctor, not liking his office politics so much anymore, for instance they were pitching lash extension treatments, plus when she said, “Lash Extension?” they asked if she thought she was losing her hearing and maybe wanted the audiologist too, she went to another doctor instead, a tennis partner of Chuck’s who didn’t know Chuck by name, only by serve, and who informed her right away she had cataracts. “Cataracts?” she asked, “Could that be why I can’t read?” “You can’t see,” he said, and sent her off to the local cataract specialist who turned out to the same one she’d been to before. His plaid pants, cut too high, and the blandness of his face reminded her of a kid named Ed in the third grade whom she’d admired desperately even though he picked his nose, because she knew that, when grown, he would be the editor of a glossy magazine, since that’s how magazine editors signed their names when responding to the Letters to the Editors: Sincerely, Ed. When the surgery was done she could count the blades of grass on the humane society’s Frisbee-playing yard across the street from the ambulatory surgical center, and next day from the weight room at the YMCA she could see across the courtyard to read the Hate Free Zone poster in a social worker’s office. As for letters on paper in library books, she found herself able to look through them again instead of just at them. And although she approached the stacks of new fiction with the feeling she’d once had in science class when it was her turn to demonstrate that an egg cannot be shattered by squeezing it one-handed, she did find herself liking, well enough, reading again, if not as thoughtfully******** as before, and was entertained not just by the books themselves but by the fact that in the year she’d disliked reading, she had never once imagined that the problem was her eyesight instead of her view of things generally. No wonder most people don’t read, she thought. Their eyes unaccustomed, the typescript is never transparent to them, so in order to reach the message they must first battle with the medium, the letters and the words, those pesky ramparts on the page.
9. Nevertheless, even following the year she disliked reading it is never unhelpful to be paid while doing it, paid in crisp new twenties that appear to be ironed at the BioLife Plasma Services clinic on Witzel Avenue in exchange for her twice weekly plasma donation appointments, eighty minutes on Mondays and eighty on Thursdays unless her iron count is low and she needs to drive home to eat mollusks and chocolate and lentils and nuts in hopes of boosting her test results back up for next time. A novel about Walt Whitman she slogs through gladly enough while lying on the treatment bed at Biolife, and then one about the Triangle Shirt Waist fire, the books already open on the palm of her hand before the tender phlebotomist readies her arm for the burn of the saline, as if prepping her not for the giving of plasma but for the outpouring of words from her library book. He didn’t go home though home was the rightful place for him he went instead to Broadway where I had an idea about another door sometimes the bosses went in and out this other door we were never allowed to go out that way on the weekend every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you are not guilty to me nor stale nor a silence passed but I saw a ladder that was there and it was going up in the ceiling and if only the machine hadn’t taken Simon if only I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it*********, she reads, at the same time providing another human being the chance to go on breathing.
10. Hopeful as always, she ponders other things she once loved doing, like sex, that she doesn’t love doing so much anymore, like sex, since it hurts so much, intercourse, and not because she’s practically her mom’s age already but because of too much scar tissue from so many surgeries, a problem that might be corrected, for all she knows, by simply making an appointment with a third ophthalmologist. The difference between no longer loving sexual intercourse and no longer loving books is that she does wish she still loved sexual intercourse but she doesn’t wish she still loved books. She’s not even entirely certain, yet, if she likes liking them again. She had liked not liking them. For one thing it had made her more normal than usual, not to be the kind of wallflower who sneaks home early from parties in order to secure three quarters of an hour for reading in bed, and for another, it had set her apart from her ex, who used to read all the time inappropriately like in the bleachers at their son’s tennis matches and while standing in line at parent teacher conferences, and it had rescued her too, not loving books, against despair about the ones she had written herself or was writing or filing away in a drawer. They don’t talk of such despair, she and Chuck, because he already knows it instinctively. Plus, thank god, Chuck has a low libido. He’d confessed this to her on their first date, and although she’d understood him to be telling the truth, it was clear certain parts of him didn’t concur. Tonight he’s outside on the deck, smoking, so he doesn’t have to hear her murmured solicitude, her stern attempts at being motherly to the ghost on the stairs, the young son of the woman who owned this house before she and Chuck bought it. The boy had cancer in his leg and they had got a good deal on the house because of it, since the money was needed for doctor bills, but then he’d died shortly after the house changed hands. Always when she sees him she on her way to pee, having paused in her reading to make her break coincide with the break interrupting Law & Order Special Victims Unit, and if at first she doesn’t notice the blurred spot of white-wash in the corner of the landing, soon she senses the ghost’s resentment of how weary it had made him to watch his brothers scrub the house in preparation for moving, and how even to rummage through the kitchen desk drawers, which had been his special, assigned, less taxing task, to be sure the desk was empty of certain mementos, like the pot pipe and the bracelet of Lampwork beads, had wearied him, and how her arrival on the doorstep on moving day to deposit her bedrolls and her boxes of cooking pots wearies him even in retrospect, since he had needed to leave home before he was ready, which is why he’s still hanging around here now. And though she knows he really isn’t, she believes in him. She has the year she disliked reading to thank for that, for the way she gazes into the shape of him to offer, “I didn’t know you had cancer or I would have postponed moving I would have given you a few extra months in here,” but in the way of ghosts he doesn’t exactly accept her apology, only comes back tomorrow to ask for more. She pours herself a glass of Silk, then some water for the dogs then pulls off her thick socks, taking sweet time or stalling, since it’s important, still, that she yield herself only reluctantly up to the book she is reading. She slides the bookmark on the table under one of the cows and assesses the pretty DA on television. She really wishes she knew how on earth to do that. Really. With her eyes. Look. See. Like that.
* Ralph Angel
**Lia Purpura in her essay On Aesthetics, p. 10 in her book, On Looking
***VQR Appreciations, Michael Cunningham on Alice Munro
**** from Alice Munro’s story, Carried Away.
***** David Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous
****** Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
*******urbanfonts website
******** from Martha Southgate’s novel, Salt, line about not drinking and reading “thoughtfully”
********* assorted lines from Michael Cunningham’s novel, Specimen Days, and Katherine Weber’s novel, Triangle.
Bio:
Abby Frucht’s most recent book of stories is The Bell at the End of Rope, out with Narrative Library. A new novel, A Well-Made Bed, on which she collaborated with her friend and colleague, Laurie Alberts, will be published in 2016 by the LA-based Red Hen Press. Abby lives in Wisconsin, has taught for twenty years at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a two time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has family in Santa Fe and is happy to be part of Shadowgraph, which also has its home in that beautiful city. A Few Notes on the Type is one of a series of related essays in progress.