Life With Objects

German engineering. It brings to mind Mercedes. BMW. Schnitzel. But I think of a hexagonal brass barrel. A burled grip. A slender but weighty piece of machinery Rotring designed and built to do one thing perfectly: write. Draft, really, but my engineering days are long past. I write with a Rotring 600 mechanical pencil, and it, in my humble opinion, is the finest pencil anywhere. I have some very nice fountain pens, but it is my Rotring I can’t live without.

Which is why I have three. One for work, one for home, and one to carry with me snug in its leather case. Rotring has discontinued the 600 mechanical pencil. I bought my last two from some maniac in Japan who horded a small stockpile, and I wonder now if I should have snapped up more because they do have one teeny tiny design flaw. Who said it is the flaw that makes the beauty? It had to be someone, and it’s absolutely true in this case. The tip of the pencil, a tube 1 mm in diameter and about 3 mm long though which the lead protrudes, the very thing that makes this pencil so sublime, doesn’t retract. In its design, Rotring forgot that people drop things. Although this pencil will never roll off a table, not even on the high seas, dropping it on a hard surface inevitably bends that nifty tip, rendering the entire pencil useless. I have done this with great chagrin several times in the last 15 years.

So when I got home one evening from the coffee shop near my office and found my pencil case empty of its honored occupant, I freaked out. I was now down to two of my neigh-irreplaceable Rotrings. I scoured the coffee shop the next morning to no avail then wandered around for days in mourning, wondering how I had been so stupid as to leave it behind. I have a routine at the coffee shop, a routine that doesn’t involve abandoning my Rotring. I pilfered the pencil from the house to carry with me as a replacement and noticed that the tip on my third, the oldest one, drooped a little southward out of wear and tear. It’s days, evidently, were numbered. And then there would be one.

Then. Yes. And then one day, after I had reconciled myself to my loss, traversed the stages of grief, I sidled up to the counter at my regular coffee shop, the one by my house, though of the same chain, the one at which I which I sit and sip and write most evenings. The woman who looked up from the register, who hadn’t been working the last several days, recognized me and said, “Hey! Did you lose a pencil at the LaSalle shop? My boyfriend works there, thought it was yours, and picked it up. I have it in the back.”

Did I lose a pencil? No, just the peak of German engineering. But, I’ll take it.

We met at the pencil sharpener, that water cooler of the elementary classroom. Pride urged me forward with my Lisa Frank pencil, new and smelling faintly of non-toxic school supply, in hand. I held it up like it was my ticket into a world I could only glimpse in patches and wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to enter, except that it was there and I wasn’t. Though I had seen every variety of commercially licensed products in Kelly’s hands, somehow I had convinced myself that she would be impressed by my ownership of one writing implement not yellow and hexagonal.

The pencil was glossy to the touch, wreathed with glistening blue dolphins, and this comforted me when she wheeled around to watch me approach. Her face struck me as almost comically grave.

“I saw you,” she said simply. If Kelly noticed my pencil, she gave no indication. Instead, she turned back to the sharpener, plunging her own pencil into its side. She began winding the crank, her movements forceful but measured. The harsh grind of wood against metal brought an image of crunching bone to my mind.

“What do you mean?” I asked. My words came out in a whisper, barely discernable over the grinding. In the quiet room, I sensed an electric change, as before a thunderstorm.

At last she stopped and withdrew the pencil, holding it aloft, in challenge. Its tip shone, freshly polished graphite sharpened to a violent point, a perfect crease between wood and bright green paint.

I found those pencils gaudy, even at the time; found the menagerie of animals in fluorescent colors unsettlingly unnatural. But they were popular with the other third-grade girls, and so I, too, coveted them because I didn’t know how else to react to them.

“In the store,” Kelly continued. “With your mother.”

“Saw what?” I played it casual, but I could sense something in her that wasn’t a bluff.

“Your mother didn’t buy you that pencil.” It was as cutting a statement as if she had outright accused me.

I didn’t answer. I could only stare at that pencil in her hand like it held the answer by the very act of its being sharpened.

She had seen. Though I had been certain no one was looking, she had somehow seen me. And if she had, who else? Not my mother, certainly. She and the clerk had been far too preoccupied with sorting between her basket and the coupons and her money, looking for a way to make it all balance.

“I don’t think you should use that.” Kelly swept past me with a flourish of her skirt. I saw something of her power, then, power that extended beyond that of carrying the right tool.

I looked down and the unsharpened pencil in my hand repulsed me like a dead thing. I let it drop into the metal trash bin and listened to it clatter as I returned to my seat.