Free My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff Page A

Slope, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, a nebulous square off Flatbush that we would eventually learn to call Prospect Heights, and, more than anywhere else, my neighborhood, Williamsburg, and its neighbor to the north, Greenpoint, areas so densely populated with friends, and friends of friends, and distant acquaintances, or simply the loose network of Oberlin-Bard-Vassar-etc. that I couldn’t buy a cup of coffee at the L without running into several people I knew. Often, when I went out for breakfast on Sunday morning, at the Mediterranean place around the corner, I was seated by a dancer who’d been a year ahead of me at school and waited on by a painter who’d been two years ahead. At night, Don and I could meet Lauren for Thai food, or Leigh and Allison for gin and tonics at the Rat Pack–era bar on Bedford and watch an alternative circus, which involved one college friend of mine eating fire, another clowning in the style of Jacques Lecoq, another riding a unicycle and playing trombone. For me, this was heaven, heaven that could only be improved by Jenny moving in down the street.
    For Jenny, though, it turned out this was hell. She had cast off such childish things. Heaven was, she told me, eyes shining, driving to a large supermarket and unloading a week’s worth of groceries directly into her apartment from her designated parking spot. Like me, Jenny was a child of the 1970s—her mother an Afro-sporting feminist who published poetry in
Lilith
and ran a women’s shelter—but she seemed to be morphing into a housewife from the 1950s, by sheer force of will. Her wedding, at the Central Park Boathouse, was to be a royal affair.
    One unseasonably warm day toward the end of March—the sort of day when you realize that spring might actually arrive at some point, that it won’t be winter forever—I walked across Forty-Ninth Street, to Sixth Avenue, checked in with security, took the elevator up to the umpteenth floor, and met Jenny at her cubicle, which was large and white and newly constructed, at the center of an enormous open room filled with dozens and dozens of identical cubicles, their interior walls lined with pinned-up photos of boyfriends or husbands or smiling children, with postcards from faraway places. Jenny had a photo of Brett and one of her sister, Natalie, smiling goofily. But her cubicle was dominated by work: alongside the photos were printouts of e-mails. She gestured to these, made a monster face, and moaned, “BLARGH!”
    “What?” I asked, laughing.
    “My boss has decided that our office is going to be completely paperless,” she explained.
    “How is that possible?” Now this sounds like a ridiculous question. But in 1996 it truly did seem impossible to eliminate paper from an office. Especially an office devoted to the production of
books
.
    “Well, we’re going to do everything by e-mail. No more interoffice memos.” She pointed to her desk. “It’s driving me
insane
. Every two seconds I get ten new e-mails about NOTHING. She’ll send out something that I need to look at whileI’m working—like updated style sheets—and I just have to print it out, but there’s no printer on this floor, so I have to walk downstairs or upstairs to the printer, and half the time someone has taken my printouts accidentally, so I have to come back here and print them again, then go back downstairs and AGH!”
    This didn’t sound like such a big deal to me, but I said nothing. I worked in an office that considered the photocopier a newfangled invention. What did I know.
    “But what’s really driving me crazy is that
no one
talks to each other anymore. At all.” She widened her lovely brown eyes and stretched out her mouth. “So, my boss is just right there”—she pointed across the room to an empty cubicle identical to her own—“but instead of getting up, walking the fifteen feet over to my desk, and saying, ‘Hey, Jennifer, how close are we to being done on the Mexican immigration