My Grandmother’s Dictionary

When my grandmother died, the family divided her things with the gentle greed of the bereaved — the good dishes, the photographs, the ring that had been promised in triplicate to three different cousins. I asked for the dictionary. Nobody contested it. It was a 1953 Webster’s New Collegiate, cracked along the spine, its cover the color of an old kettle, and it had stood on the shelf above her telephone table for as long as anyone could remember, which in our family constitutes a geological era.

She was not, on paper, a woman of words. She left school at fifteen for reasons that were economic and non-negotiable, worked forty years in a mill office in Woonsocket, wrote letters in a hand so careful it looked engraved. English was her second language; French was the kitchen language, the rosary language, the language of her sisters on the telephone. And on the shelf above that telephone, all those years, the Webster’s — the one book in the house that was unmistakably, defiantly hers.

Here is what she used it for, and I know because I watched, on a hundred school-vacation afternoons: she read it against the crossword, she read it against the newspaper, and she read it — this is the part I didn’t understand until much later — against people. When someone on the television or in the parish used a word she suspected was being aimed over her head, she would wait, with a patience that was really a kind of pride under discipline, and later, alone, she would take down the book and look the word up. The dictionary was her tribunal. Words came before it accused of condescension, and she tried them, and either acquitted them into her vocabulary or convicted the speaker. He said “penultimate,” she reported once, of a visiting monsignor, with the flat satisfaction of a judge passing sentence. It just means second-to-last. He could have said second-to-last.

After she died, I went through the Webster’s page by page, an inheritance audit no one else would have thought worth the evening. The book is nearly clean. She was not an annotator; ink was for correspondence, and books, even her own, were public property under her roof and were treated with a formality I never learned. But three traces survive, and I have built more biography on them than the parish record holds. A grocery list, used as a bookmark, at the letter M — flour, oleo, birthday card for R. A tiny penciled x beside the word connive, meaning unknown, context lost, and I would give a good deal for the story behind that x. And one word underlined, in red pen, firmly, twice: perseverance. Nothing else in a thousand pages. Just that.

I have shown the underline to exactly two people, and both of them went quiet the way you go quiet in a church you don’t belong to. Because you cannot help reading it as a message, even though it almost certainly wasn’t one — she was likely just settling a spelling for a letter, that -ance ending that betrays everyone. But intention is not the only maker of meaning; survival is the other one. Out of every word she weighed at that tribunal across fifty years, the one that happens to carry her red ink into the future is the one that names what her whole life was made of. If it’s an accident, it is the kind of accident that makes a person religious about accidents.

The dictionary itself is an artifact of a specific faith, one I think we have mostly lost without noticing the loss. A 1953 Webster’s on a working woman’s shelf meant: the language is a commons, and I am entitled to all of it. Not the school’s language or the monsignor’s language — the whole commons, alphabetized, for anyone with the two dollars and the stubbornness. Look a word up in a book like that and you were not asking a corporation’s autocomplete what people usually mean; you were consulting the full deed to the property. She owned that deed. A woman who left school at fifteen held, above her telephone, legal title to penultimate and connive and every word any authority would ever again try to hold over her, and she exercised the title, word by word, for half a century, in a second language, without ever once calling it self-improvement or knowing she was teaching the grandchild on the braided rug the entire moral of a reading life.

The Webster’s is above my desk now, spine cracked, kettle-colored, holding its three relics. I use it, too — not for lookups; the machines are faster and the machines are always at hand. I use it the way she did, I’ve come to realize: as a verdict on the day’s language, a standing tribunal, a reminder that the commons is mine and that entitlement to words is not granted by anyone who can therefore revoke it. And some evenings, when a public voice on some screen uses six dollars of vocabulary to say fifty cents of truth, I take the old book down and I don’t even open it. I just hold it, the way you’d touch a juror’s shoulder. We could have said second-to-last, she and I. We persevere.