22 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
similar stack of my early work. They
had sensed a vacuum in my house and
rushed in to fill it.
M
y sister’s friend Megan and her
eight-year-old daughter, Char-
lotte, came to visit as I was nearing the
end of my project. Megan and Char-
lotte were driving a loop from Min-
neapolis to the Great Smoky Moun-
tains and back, hiking and camping
along the way. They were spending
the night with my sister, and Heather
brought them over to see me. By that
point, I had only a little bit of the base-
ment to go.
“I told Charlotte I’d show her your
bathroom,” Heather said.
“She loves seeing other people’s bath-
rooms,” Megan said.
And so we went upstairs, the four
of us. As Megan was walking by my
office, she stopped. “Oh, Charlotte,” she
said. “Come look at this. Come see what
she has.”
The child walked into my office and
immediately clapped her hands over
her masked mouth to keep from scream-
ing. I switched on the light. She was
staring at my typewriter, a cheap elec-
tric Brother I used for envelopes and
short notes.
“You have a typewriter!” Charlotte
started hopping up and down.
“What she really wants is a man-
ual,” Megan said. “We’ve looked at a
bunch of them but they never work.
Once they get old, the keys stick.”
There were two manual typewrit-
ers in the closet right behind us. One
was my grandmother’s little Adler, a
Tippa 7 that typed in cursive. She’d
used it for everything, so much so that
if I were to type a note on it now I’d
feel as if I were reading her handwrit-
ing. I wasn’t giving the Adler away. I
also owned a Hermes 3000 that my
mother and my stepfather had bought
for me when I was in college, the most
gorgeous typewriter I could have imag-
ined. I wrote every college paper on
it, every story. In graduate school, I
typed at my kitchen table in a straight-
backed chair that my friend Lucy had
bought at the Tuesday-night auction
in Iowa City. Draft after draft, I banged
away until my back seized, then I
would lie flat on the living-room rug
for days. A luggage tag was still at-
tached to the Hermes’s handle—Pied-
mont Airlines. I’d brought the type-
writer home with me every Christmas,
even though it weighed seventeen
pounds. Such was my love for that
machine that I hadn’t been able to
imagine being separated from it for
an entire holiday vacation. The sto-
ries my mother and my sister had re-
turned to me: they were all typed on
the Hermes.
My mother and my stepfather, my
darling Lucy, college, graduate school,
all those stories—they made up the
history of that typewriter. It waited
on a shelf in the very closet where the
dolls had been kept. When I was
cleaning out the closet, I didn’t con-
sider giving either of the typewriters
away, but I don’t think I’d used them
once since I got my first computer,
when I was twenty-three. I took
Megan aside. “I’ve got a manual,” I
whispered to her.
She looked slightly horrified. “You
don’t want to give that away.”
I told her that I’d sleep on it, that
she shouldn’t say anything to Char-
lotte. I told her to come back in the
morning.
I didn’t need the glasses or the sil-
ver, those things that represented who
I thought I would become but never
did, and I didn’t need the dolls, which
represented who I had been and no
longer was. The typewriter, on the other
hand, represented both the person I
had wanted to be and the person I am.
Finding the typewriter was like find-
ing the axe I’d used to chop the wood
to build the house I lived in. It had been
my essential tool. After all it had given
me, didn’t it deserve something better
than to sit on a shelf?
(Yes, I accept that this is who I am.
I was thinking about what a typewriter
deserved for its years of loyal service.)
In any practice, there will be tests.
That’s why we call it a practice—so
we’ll be ready to meet our challenges
when the time comes. I had loved a
typewriter. I had believed that every
good sentence I wrote in my youth had
come from the typewriter itself. I had
neglected that typewriter all the same.
Kent, the cosmic monk, had lami-
nated his prayers. He’d laminated pic-
tures of his daughters, his granddaugh-
ter, his dog. He’d laminated good re-
views of my novels. After he died, Tavia
found two laminated cards. One said:
I Have
Everything I Need
And the other:
All that
is not Ladder
Falls away
He needed both prayers in order to
remember. We had tried the world on
for size, Kent and I, and, one way or an-
other, we would figure out how to let it go.
I took the Hermes down from the
closet shelf, unsnapped the cover, and
typed I love you iloveyou. The keys didn’t
stick. I looked online to see if replace-
ment ribbons were available.
They were. I watched a video of
Tom Hanks, that famous champion of
manual typewriters, replacing a ribbon
on a Hermes 3000. “No typewriter has
ever been made that is better than a
Hermes,” he said in a salesman’s voice.
Well, that was the truth.
That night, while Karl and I were
walking the dog, I told him about Char-
lotte. I told him what I was thinking.
“As much as I loved it, it would be
wonderful if someone could use it. How
many little girls are out there pining
for manual typewriters?”
“So give her mine,” he said.
I stopped. The dog stopped. “You
have a manual typewriter?” There were
three manual typewriters in the house?
Karl nodded. “You gave it to me.”
I had forgotten. I had given Karl an
Olivetti for his birthday when we were
first dating, because I was used to dat-
ing writers, not doctors. Because I didn’t
know him then. Because I saw myself as
the kind of woman who dated men with
manual typewriters. I had bought it new.
Twenty-six years later, it was still new.
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket
he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went
over and took the ram and sacrificed it as
a burnt offering instead of his son.
O.K., it wasn’t like that. But I had
been ready to let the Hermes go, and
now I didn’t have to let it go. There was
another typewriter caught in the thicket.
When I gave the Olivetti to Char-
lotte the next morning, she thought I’d
given her the moon. She had imagined
herself as a girl with a typewriter. And
now she was.
