Free Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov

pasta: “spermacetti,” like “spaghetti.” I cried briefly before taking cover in the basement of the Commerce Department building, where the bee took place, among aquariums filled with salamanders slumbering in green-tinged tanks. My tears got on national television. I appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
, a distinction I never achieved while working there.
    Since I was much better copy than the fourteen-year-old from Arizona who came in first, the Bee’s administrator offered to send my mother and me to New York to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
with the winner. We said no thank you, reminding him that the New York junket was supposed to be a special treat for the winning speller.
    I was also told the name of the proofreader’s manual from which the bee selected the words that contestants had to spell. This was, for someone at my level as a kid speller, a dead giveaway. If I returned the following year, as the man who leaked the word list source to me hoped, all the other children would be spelling words they’d never heard or seen, words such as “vigesimal,” which I had guessed correctly that week had an
s
like “infinitesimal,” instead of a
c
like “decimal.” But with that secret list in hand, I’d have no more need for guessing. I could easily memorize every possible word they’d use in the next bee. It wouldn’t matter if the pronouncer mangled every one. Only a slip of the tongue by me could keep me from the title.
    But that would have been wrong. We went back to Detroit without going on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and I never entered another spelling bee. I had retired.
    But my reputation lived on. There I was in 1954 with two other thirteen-year-olds on a Woodward Avenue bus, making a racket. A dour biddy got up and came over to me. “Everyone knows who you are,” she said. “So behave. What one Jew does reflects on all other Jews.”
    I switched to private school and escaped the community that knew my saga best. So my life as a teenager was fairly normal, but my academic résumé was stellar, and I believed in it.
    If you graduate first in your class in high school and continue on to get a summa in classics at Harvard (picking up the undergraduate thesis prize and a junior year Phi Beta Kappa key alongthe way), you can be pardoned for thinking your brain is in good working order and ought to be the tool you use to make your way in the world.
    That was my working theory of me. But as I reached adulthood and had to decide more precisely what to do with that tool, I began to doubt that my future lay in the classroom teaching Greek and Latin. I looked around myself, at the other graduate students and, with panic, at my teachers. My strings did not vibrate sympathetically with theirs. I loved Greek literature, and I had given it my best, for seven years. Now I needed a way out, and
Newsweek
came to the rescue.
    Thank God for those movie reviews in the
Harvard Crimson
, which legitimized me in the eyes of the
Newsweek
recruiter. Without them, I would now be a disappointed retired professor of Greek at some provincial university. Instead, I landed a job in big-time journalism, where destiny put me in the way of Alex Keneas, who deftly put me in the way of Charlotte Curtis, who mistook me as the answer to her urgent need to hire a food man.

Three

Food News
    “What will you be doing here?” asked the nice young woman in personnel whom I went to see after my welcoming lunch with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.
    “I’ll be handling food,” I replied.
    “Well, I’ll put you down as an N2.”
    I shrugged. As an elite news staffer, I had been put on the so-called publisher’s payroll, which brought with it special, if largely ceremonial, privileges at the bank down the block, and saved me the indignity of dealing with the weekly paychecks that were the lot of less illustrious news slaves. I was to be paid each month.
    When I finally received my first paycheck, it was suspiciously tiny,