3
I suppose there was a time when I didn’t know fonts, when I didn’t know how to mix colors, when I didn’t know the states in the country or the three states of matter. There was a time when letters were just words and signs were just directions. Obviously there was.
This is how I remember it: I was eleven and I spent all of my weekends recreating advertisements on the family computer. When I tell the story now, I like to joke that the other kids were playing house while I was playing printer. There was nothing more empowering to me at that age than Microsoft Publisher. I imagine it must be the same thrill that normal children achieve by wearing their mother’s makeup or trouncing around in their father’s loafers. I would sit on the massive office chair before the Dell laptop, wait two full minutes for the program to open, and start making text boxes. I’d pick a fill, pick a stroke, pick a corner shape. And then I’d reinvent the deal.
At first I would use fake business names, but in those days I was fresh off finishing Harry Potter and I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound like Habitha Hornsgiving’s Woodwind Warehouse. So eventually I just started copying whatever was on the desk: a funeral ad from the church bulletin, a pizzeria flier in the mailbox, a perfume insert from my mom’s magazines. I knew I had acquired a talent for it when my father tried to use one of my coupons at Golf Galaxy. It was detrimental to my ego and to the rest of my life when it worked.
It was a smaller world then, a world with 330 fonts. And to create the perfect facsimile, I would spend hours browsing the font menu in attempts to match the exact typefaces each brand would use. Almost everything I needed was already in the font dropdown menu of the PC, especially among the local businesses I was imitating. And after years of doing this, I had all of the fonts memorized. I recognized them on billboards and commercials and clothes, but I never really mentioned it, at least not any more than you mention the colors when you see them.
By reverse engineering their print output, I became familiar with all of the design tricks: How the dollar sign was always 10 percent smaller than the numbers next to it, how the small print was always in Arial Narrow because it took up less space, how sometimes you would use a punctuation mark or an asterisk from a different font because it was nicer than the one that came by default. At any point in my childhood you could have pressed “paste” on that computer and it would have spit out a trademark icon, because I was always going into the glyph menu to find it. (I wouldn’t learn until adulthood that you could just press ctrl+alt+T.)
Vince always brags that I have this passion and photographic memory for fonts. Which is wrong on two counts. First, it was never about the fonts; it was about the lying. And it wasn’t really even about the lying so much as it was about being believed. And second, I have never had a photographic memory. I memorized three hundred fonts the same way anyone memorizes anything. They were the landmarks on a path that I took every day. I learned them by accident on my way to going somewhere else.
*
I arrange myself with my legs crossed on Ginger’s bed. Leaning forward to talk to her, I can feel a burn in the back of my hamstrings. I am dressed in one of my mother’s silk shirts from the 70s, which is slightly too small on me, and I pull the brown waistband of my pants over the lip of my stomach.
“I’m almost done, I swear to God,” she mumbles, bent over her tiny mirror in the orange light of the desk lamp. I watch her flick the eyeliner brush outward, abnormally fastidious. “Fuck, that one sucked. Actually, wait, I can salvage it. Okay, yeah. We can work with that.”
“You’re fine,” I laugh. I am trying to be easy-going. She's doing me a favor. Already I agreed to meet her at her apartment, to take the train with her, to bring the bottle of wine we are splitting as our host gift. I start writing a sentence in the fibers of her fleece blanket — the quick br — but by the time my mind realizes what I am doing, I sweep a hand over to erase the whole thing.
Ginger is thirty but her bedroom still looks like it could belong to someone in high school or college. There are plastic drawers she surely bought for a dorm room and never replaced, default art prints from the Wall Hangings section of Target, and unmatching patterned blankets that cover her bed in lieu of a plain duvet. Her mirror has twin dots all over it from hairspray. There are countless stray hairs sticking out from the carpet and clinging to fleece jackets on the back of her practical office chair, which looks stunningly out-of-place in front of her makeup desk, Hermann Miller by way of Sophia Coppola. There is something embarrassing about Ginger’s apartment, but if you turn the coin over it looks like freedom. Her wrists are free from the shackles of understanding good design, and greater still, of caring what people think. (Instead they are wearing those beaded bangles with giant chunky letters, the ones that were popular six years ago on the opposite coast.)
“Dana?” She says. I realize she is standing. “Ready?” And she smiles, her lipstick always a little bit too heavy, and I have to admire how she never asked what anyone else at this party would be wearing.
We trot down three flights of stairs like horses in our chunky heels. And then we are in the dark with the January wind licking at our legs and splitting our bangs. We turn down the alley to get to the subway faster, walking beneath the awnings of metal balconies. I'm distracted by the sound of our feet on the uneven sidewalk. There's something discordant about it. I slow down to try and match Ginger's cadence, but I can't match it, so then I speed up, and I still can't. I lengthen my stride; I shorten it; I favor my heels and then toes: nothing. Eventually I have to admit that the universe contains some secret rhythm natural to her and impossible to me.
Our shoes are very loud; it bothers me the whole way to the party.