The Pink Ghetto Read Online Free PDF Page A

with my freebies. Wendy found a baggy family saga in the pile that piqued her interest. “I love stuff like this.”
    “I thought you didn’t read romance novels,” I said.
    “I don’t,” she said. “I just like these.”
    Fleishman went straight for the category romance novels; he seemed more interested in the camp factor of it all. “Look at this! The Fireman’s Baby Surprise! ” He sniggered as he leafed through the front pages. “Is that what women fantasize about now? Having babies with firemen?”
    “Don’t ask me,” I said. “I just fantasize about having a paycheck.”
    Fleishman stole away with a little hoard of books.
    Wendy shot the manila envelope a look of concern. “What’s that? Homework?”
    “It’s an editing test. I have to edit a chapter of a manuscript and bring it back to them.”
    Wendy tilted her head. “Do you know how to do that?”
    “Oh, how hard can it be?” Fleishman piped up from the futon sofa. Then he turned back to his book. “The fireman’s name is Chance. Are there actually people in the world named Chance?”
    “Coming from a man named Herbert Dowling Fleishman the Third, I don’t think you have room to sneer.”
    He glared at me and sank down on the couch. He always hated it when I reminded him of his name. There was a good reason he went by Fleishman.
    “What are you going to do?” Wendy asked me.
    “I guess I’m going to treat myself to a crash course in editing.”
    For the next two days, I was a slave to the Chicago Manual of Style. I went through two red pencils marking up that manuscript. And in the meantime, I read several of the books. I read The Fireman’s Baby Surprise, Beauty and the Bounty Hunter, and I skimmed a long book that was a retelling of Cinderella set in Scotland in the 1700s called Highland Midnight Magic. I steeped myself in romance.
    I don’t know what I was expecting. Hilariously purple prose, I guess. And it had been a long time, maybe forever, since I had heard a man’s sexual organ referred to as his manroot. But for the most part, the thing that surprised me was that the books were so not focused on sex. At least the little modern ones weren’t. (The Scottish book was half sex, half clan war.) The fireman had firehouse politics and an arsonist to deal with, along with his paternity dilemma. The bounty hunter was chasing an heiress wrongly accused of jewel smuggling—so that was a big mess to have to work out. Every step of the way, these poor people had problems, and they were falling in love.
    By the end of the week I was beginning to see the appeal. If some schmuck has time to find an arsonist, expose his boss for corruption, find good daycare, and fall in love with a sassy local news reporter, the authors seemed to be saying, there was hope for us all.
    I must have done something right, because the day after I turned in my test Kathy Leo called me to tell me to come in again, this time to talk to someone named Rita Davies.
    When I was led back to Rita’s office, I was struck at once by the mess. If Mercedes’s office was disorganized, Rita’s could have qualified as a Superfund site. Manuscripts piled up precariously in teetering Seussian columns. I counted six different in-boxes, and all of them were full. Rita was a blousy, heavy-lidded woman with frizzy red hair. She looked up at me when I walked in and took a sip from one of the three coffee mugs on her desk.
    “Do you smoke?” she asked by way of greeting.
    I was a little taken aback. Was this a trick question? I took a deep breath and sensed a definite smell of tobacco. “Uh…not really. I mean, occasionally I’ll bum one at a bar or something…”
    She cut off my answer with a wave. “Because if you want, we can go outside.”
    It was drizzling outside. And cold. It wasn’t yet March. “No, I’m fine here.”
    “Okay, great. Just a second.” She opened a drawer, tossed out several old pens, what looked like an ancient bagel wrapped in wax paper, and a