The Society Editor doesn’t know
how to write headlines or design
the society page so that will be your
job, the white-haired editor tells me,
along with writing news and features.

How did she get the job? I ask.
She helped her mother, the former
Society Editor and when she died
she still kept coming in. Let that
be a secret between you and me.

No problem, I say as I watch
her sitting at her desk, gray
hair tucked under pink pillbox
hat chatting with a pony tailed blonde, 
for my plan is to teach her how.

But she has other plans. Reaching 
for her purse, she says:
Let’s go to lunch. My treat.
I point out it is only ten am.
Well then, let’s go to brunch.
.
In our hose, heels and dresses,
we walk through the brightly lit lobby
of the Hotel Finlin, where JFK and Nixon
once stayed, to the restaurant lounge.
She gulps one Scotch on the rocks
after another. Our secret, she says.

Before they bring our sirloin steaks,
she falls face down in her salad.
With vinegar dripping from her hat,
she wobbles as the Maître ‘d 
and I prop her up and pour 
her in a cab. I hop in beside
her and the taxi driver and I help
her to bed. Our secret, I promise. 

Where’s the Society Editor?
the women ask as papers
pile on her desk like the snow drifting
outside. I find her under her desk,
passed out, an empty flask
at her feet and bring her cups
of black coffee until she is sober.
It’s our secret, I promise.

I keep a secret of my own.
After two years of babysitting
the soused society editor
and inhaling scotch fumes,
I am leaving on vacation
and not returning. I call in my
resignation from a payphone
at a Texaco along the Interstate.

You can’t quit, the editor says.
I just did, I say and hang up the phone
and all the secrets evaporate in the fog.
                        

sits at the typewriter,
spine stick straight
writing news stories
that I assign her.

When we decide to go
to dinner and dancing, 
she calls a taxi in 30 below
zero temperatures and charges

our ride to the company
that writes our checks,
boldly penning her signature
with swirls and slants 

that stand for success
and a long life. Even though
I fear a pink slip, I am
powerless to stop this intern.

She graduates summa cum laude,
lands the job of society editor
and calls me long distance
to tell me she is a wife and mother.

I am powerless to stop
her more than a decade later 
when as I take notes
in a city council meeting

thousands of miles away, 
she writes a goodbye note
with the same swirls and slants
before slitting her wrists.