The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,4

and carved shakily into the left blade was the word COPYBOY.

He was born to the editor of a small town’s newspaper in the South in 1941 and began writing for the Courier as a freshman in high school. When he was sixteen, he was caught skinny-dipping in the community pool, and his punishment was to write the article detailing the event in the crime log. He was unmerciful; he used the word “lascivious”; his father, the editor, was proud.

My father met my mother at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she began freelancing and eventually established herself as a fixture. She was tall and everything about her was long; the vertical-striped black-and-white pants she wore frequently that spring further contributed to the impression of a woman who went on forever in every direction. This hint of forever, not just in the length of limbs but also in other dimensions, was probably what initially attracted him. He had hit forty without realizing it: instead of measuring by years, he’d counted his life by the love affairs he’d had in Europe, the red convertible he’d wrapped around an olive tree in Spain, the antiwar riots on college campuses that he’d been lucky enough to witness and report on, the year he’d spent in Hawaii and the volcano he’d watched erupting from his window. Whether there was panic inside him before he met her, or it was meeting her that spawned it, he knew my mother was to be his last conquest; he was confident she was enough to witness for the rest of his life.

She didn’t give in at first. She had met many men with bright smiles who tried to equalize her with nicknames, who respected her work but more so respected the vision of her balancing two phones against her cheekbones in a busy newsroom, the way her fingers moved on a keyboard, the top button of her white linen dress that she wouldn’t notice had come undone.

He called her “champ” and “scoop,” made efforts to be well-informed of her story assignments. He stopped by her desk with coffee, which she smiled and drank, but when he offered his help—I know a guy who such-and-such down at the so-and-so who could really—she was curt and unreceptive.

After four months of working there, she finally agreed to have a drink with him and some other guys from the paper in celebration of the triumphant finish of a particularly rough deadline. He made the mistake of guessing her drink—surely a woman looking like her wanted something that suggested it tinkled and didn’t stain—she snorted. What then, Scoop, he joked, scotch? She accepted, and my father and the two other reporters watched in silence while she took the full brown body in her mouth in one swallow. As my father tells it, that sealed the deal then and there.

It was another month before my mother agreed to go out with just him. My father felt, for the first time in his life, unsure of his approach with a woman. She seemed unaffected by the traces of his drawl that so many females adored (the way he, for example, still called his days “Sundee,” “Mondee,” etc.), the pointed dress shoes he kept polished but not gleaming, the well fitting corduroy blazers with leather patches on the elbows, the ever-present pencil placed jauntily on his ear and through his thick wheat-brown hair, the perfectly delivered wink. Maybe the third time he asked her out and flashed his famous perfect smile, she had replied: What? I’m supposed to congratulate you on your big old teeth? (But the way she said it, he insists, was somehow not derisive. It was even, almost, pleasant.)

It was Friday. They were to go for dinner after work. My father was unusually transfixed by the glow of the Xerox machine, spilled coffee in the break room and took extra time to clean it up, returned to his station and made all the calls he should have, and still there were hours left in the workday. Usually, from a diagonal across the newsroom, he could see a sliver of her desk from his, but today there was some obnoxious cat figurine or mug that blocked it. When it was finally six, he crossed the newsroom. The people remaining were typing frantically; the cartoonist had his curly head down, bits of eraser flying violently off his station with quick brushes of the stubby, ink-stained hand.

His heart sank when he reached her desk. She was still enmeshed.