A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin Page A

canvas bag to take home. She called her husband, but he was in a meeting.
    Teddy’s office, unlike Jane Louise’s, was large and uncluttered. The laboratories were painted a greenish white. The light was intense and focused. The halls of his workplace were quiet, unlike the offices of a publishing company, in which people could be heard yelling at one another, or barking over the telephone, or laughing in front of the coffee maker. Here radiators and windowsills were stacked with manuscript boxes, dozens of yellowing memos, and jacket sketches, and C-prints were pinned to bulletin boards. Teddy’s office seemed like a monastery in which there were no extraneous words or things, although Teddy told Jane Louise that there was enough camaraderie to keep a friendly person happy. There were football pools and, during racing season, Derby pools.
    Jane Louise imagined meetings at which sober, clean-looking scientists produced and analyzed data. This was, in fact, pretty much what Teddy described. Meetings of the editorial and design department were not like that at all.
    Every now and again when some book presented design problems, Jane Louise was hauled upstairs to the editorial meeting. There Erna presided over a squadron of eccentrics: Delphine Kolodny, a nasty piece of work known to Dita as “the Flatworm.” Dita had the sweetest lunches with Delphine and then reported that Delphine took notes on everything she said. She felt that, given the chance, Delphine would sneak into her office and copy names off her Rolodex. Delphine had confided to Dita at one of their sweet little lunches that she wanted to be a “really top editor.” Dita recounted this story with considerable relish.
    Dita’s left side was always commandeered by Jeff Pottker, whom Dita had once French-kissed in a darkened office during the annual Christmas party. She revealed to Jane Louise that his wife was preoccupied with such paraphernalia of infancy as baby shit and breast-feeding, which seemed to have put a crimp in his libido. There was Omar Majors, editor emeritus, a fine-looking old man with the head of a Roman general, whose brother had once courted Dita’s mother. And Willa Gathers, who did the cookbooks, and venerable Thomas Moss, who for years and years and years—he had never had another job—had edited poetry, art books, and history. Jim Phillipi came in three days a week and worked on an unending series of war memoirs. It was rumored that he had been on the Long March with Mao, as a journalist. Jane Louise surveyed this mostly underdressed (except for Dita) crowd, many of whom felt that designers were like cleaning personnel, while they, the editorial staff, were towering intellects.
    If she looked around the table, what an amazing amount of information she had about these people, some of whom she barely knew: Bob Lodge, senior editor (known to Dita as Blodge), was having a lunchtime affair with a dopey young woman who looked like his ex-wife when young. Little Jeannie Sprout had a terrible crush on Mike Church, head of the sales department, and so on.
    At meetings and on crowded buses, Jane Louise always had the same thought: Each of these people was born with a personality and a family history and a set of unique feelings that they were truly entitled, for better or worse, to express whenever they felt like it.

CHAPTER 11
    At dinner Teddy said: “What if we went away at Christmastime?”
    Jane Louise thought that meant to stay with Eleanor in the country.
    â€œI mean away, ” Teddy said. “To some nice place where it’s hot.”
    â€œWhat about your mother?” Jane Louise said. “We already didn’t go there for Thanksgiving. Shouldn’t we go to either mine or yours?”
    â€œEleanor’s tough,” Teddy said. “She’s feeling very liberated. All those years of struggling through Christmas. Now she’s a free woman. She jumped the gun on us and