The Silent Partner: A Typewriter Diaries Story

Typewriter

The story of a man and a typewriter, and how finding it changed his life

The estate sale was my therapist's idea, though I'd never let her hear me admit it. It was a small, seemingly innocuous piece of advice that led me to this little house on the edge of town.

"Find something analog," she said in that unique way therapists do when you're paying them two hundred dollars a session for advice your grandfather would have happily given for free. "Something with friction. Your problem, Wes, is that nothing in your life pushes back. You scroll, you swipe, you refresh. It's all digital. I think you need something more tactile."

She wasn't wrong. I was thirty-five years old, and while I could give you my screen time to the minute, I'd be hard-pressed to find a time in which I'd finished a writing project. I had four novels, all abandoned on a cloud server somewhere, all dead from the same poisonous cocktail: self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and the distractions of modern writing technology. Whether it was a notification- one I lied to myself and said it would be quick if I looked at it- a social media feed on another tab, or a quick check of something that I insisted was "research" that turned into an hour of wasted time, there was always something getting in the way. The writing career I'd been planning since college, the one I wanted since I was in middle school, was more of a rumor I was spreading about myself, a rumor with no substance at all.

So there I was, at a farmhouse on the edge of town. The gray October morning seemed less than ideal for an estate sale, but the hand-painted sign said it all.

"ESTATE SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO," the sign read in block letters. I was pessimistic, but I wandered around the open house anyway, hoping to find a proverbial diamond in the rough.

I've been to enough estate sales since that day to know they all have the same general atmosphere; the smell of old paper, older furniture, and underneath it all, faint and almost undetectable, the specific absence of a person who once owned these things. This was my first estate sale. I remember walking through what was once someone's whole life, now marked with masking tape price tags. I felt as if I didn't belong there. There was a woman about my age sitting at a card table near the door, making change from a makeshift cash box. Her eyes carried the dark circles and red rims of someone who had not only lost their mother but was forced to spend the last week putting prices on the things she left behind.

I found the typewriter in the back bedroom. It sat on a cherry desk that faced a window overlooking a cut cornfield. The model was unmistakable—a Smith Corona Silent Super. The sea-foam green paint looked pristine, like the machine had never been used---though I knew that wasn't the case.

The case was also immaculate. It was what they called the "Holiday Case." There was a removable brace into which the typewriter rested. That aged the machine to the mid-fifties, as I'd learn later. At the time, all I knew was that it was well cared for despite also being well-used. The combination of almost pristine condition and the obvious patina of use is more rare than one might think. All the keys, including the right side of the spacebar, had the faint wear patterns that only come from decades of daily use by the same fingers.

I looked at the case handle and found the price tag: $40.

"That was Mom's typewriter," the woman at the card table said, glancing briefly between my face and the machine in the case. She said it in a way you'd identify a body at the morgue. "She wrote on it every day for sixty-odd years."

"Was she a writer?" I asked.

The woman smiled thinly at something over my left shoulder. "She would have said no. She would have called herself 'a woman who typed.'"

I took two crisp $20 bills out of my wallet and handed them to her. She took them without offering a receipt. Strange, but I had no reason not to trust her.

"Her name was Eleanor," she said. "I thought someone taking her typewriter home should know her name."

I didn't understand then what that meant. I do now.

***

There's something about a well-maintained Smith Corona typewriter I didn't understand until I got my hands on one. It's a beautiful machine. The Silent Super was built to be just that. It was quiet enough for a woman to type in the thinly walled confines of an apartment without waking her children. There's something almost conspiratorial about the sound the machine makes. Not the cacophonous clatter you hear in old movies, but a low, almost confidential tapping. The Silent Super is a machine that keeps its voice down, perfect for the secrets a writer keeps.

I set the typewriter up on my kitchen table, right where my laptop usually sat as I drank my morning coffee. I fed a sheet into the machine and, for the first time in far too long, I wrote. The words weren't good, but that wasn't the point. The point was this machine provided feedback I could feel. It pushed back, just like my therapist said I needed. Every letter cost me something. There were consequences for every keystroke. I had to think about it. There was no delete key, no distracting tabs, no notifications to derail my progress. There was just the paper, the friction, and me.

I wrote every morning for a week. My favorite coffee cup, a piece of paper, and the machine's confidential sound as I tapped away at the keys. On the seventh morning, I tapped out a sentence I'd been fighting with: a description of a character standing at his father's grave. I got as far as--

He stood at the edge of the grave and felt.

—and I stopped, the way I always stopped at the exact point where the sentence required a truth. My hands hovered, and the typewriter kept going.

I want to be precise about this. Precision is all I have, after all. I didn't black out and wake up to find words. It happened in real time. The keys dipped in their neat, gently raised rows, unhurried by the pressures of the outside world. They moved as if the same fingers that had graced their surfaces for sixty years were still finding their way into the grooves. The typebars rose and fell with every conspiratorial tap of a key, gently guiding the carriage to the left. When it stopped, the sentence that had derailed me had an ending:

He stood at the edge of the grave and felt nothing, which frightened him more than grief ever could. Grief, after all, would have at least proved he'd loved the man.

I sat at my kitchen table in disbelief, my coffee cold and forgotten as my heart hammered against my ribs. Where had this sentence come from? I hadn't written it.

Or did I? I thought.

I then did what you always do when faced with strange happenings. I looked around my empty kitchen as if expecting to find a benevolent visitor. I lifted the machine and checked under it. Nothing. Then an idea came to me. I sat and typed a test line, the classic "quick brown fox" I'd seen in many tutorials. The machine sat there, inert, mechanical, a forty dollar typewriter from a dead woman's bedroom.

Then, curious, I rolled a fresh page in and started another sentence I was unsure how to finish. At the end of what my mind could muster, I lifted my hands from the keyboard and waited.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

The truth is, I never felt fear for the machine, nor for the things it was apparently doing without any help from me. That's the part I keep turning over in my mind. I picture a movie, and in that movie, there's a scene where a man throws a typewriter in the lake, only to see it back on his desk the next morning, weeds dangling from the body. But nothing like that ever happened here. The machine never did anything I didn't encourage. It only finished what I started, and it finished it, dare I say, better? Not in some other style, but in the way my own sentences would sound if I had more confidence. The writing came out of the typewriter as if someone had been reading over my shoulder my whole life, patiently waiting for me to get out of my own way.

Eleanor, a voice said in the empty room. Her name was Eleanor.

You can probably guess what the next three months looked like. The novel—the one that was laid to rest in the graveyard known as the cloud, along with the others-was resurrected on paper. We established our method without discussion, as it does with the best collaborators. I'd write for a while, type slugs hitting paper at a furious pace, until a wall, a place where a sentence demanded a payoff to go with my setup, something I didn't have. I'd lift my hands like a college student when test time runs out. She'd take it from there, like the closer at the end of a baseball game. It was never more than a line or two. Eleanor was not the type to show off. She was almost like Hemingway. Her sentences were short but carried the same weight as my longer ones. It occurred to me that she was a ferocious editor. She'd sooner cut a word than add one. When I typed something false, something meant to sound like writing, the machine would sit silent. Over time, I learned to recognize the editorial silence, cross out errant lines, and fix them myself.

I learned her rhythms the same way I learned the idiosyncrasies of the typewriter. She was sharpest before 8 am, the polar opposite of me. She had no time for self-pity, but she was patient with doubts. I learned quickly that those things are not synonymous. On some mornings—I could never predict which—I'd hear type slugs hitting paper before I'd finished my first cup of coffee, long before I'd left anything for her to finish. I'd look up from my coffee cup and find a single line, like a note on the kitchen counter:

The cornfield is the same, but they've let the fence line go.

"For sixty-one years I typed at open blinds," she typed once. "You keep the blinds closed like a man ashamed to be alive."

I opened the blinds every morning after that. I want to say it was for the light, but that would be disingenuous.

Here's where I have to be honest. Machines don't lie, after all, and neither should I. That's the whole point of this. The novel—the one I'd all but given up on—was going well. That's not the honest part. The honest part is that everything else was taking a backseat.

My screen time, that ever-growing number I used to know to the minute, fell dramatically. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing, a minor victory. That's how I sold it to myself. What I didn't realize—or, rather, refused to acknowledge—was that it wasn't just the scrolling that stopped. I stopped returning calls because they came during my writing time. I skipped my family Thanksgiving last year because the book was at a delicate stage and I couldn't bear to leave it. There was a woman named Dana. I'd been seeing her casually, but with hope of something more. I liked Dana. I liked her much more than I realized. When she asked one evening what I was doing every morning, why I could never meet her for breakfast, I heard myself say, "I write with a partner," and heard how it sounded. Yet I didn't correct it. Dana stopped calling in December. It was the end of January before I noticed.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about, something I'd write on a card and hand out at estate sales if I could. The danger of a voice isn't that it could be evil. It's that you see it as "company." It was the best conversation I'd had in years, conducted at sixty words per minute in an otherwise-silent kitchen. It asked nothing of me, except everything. It asked that I keep showing up, blinds up and phone off. She never asked for that. I want that to be clear. Eleanor never used the word "stay." I stayed the way someone stays when someone finally finds that one thing they're good at. I stayed gratefully, and without eyes darting back and forth between the table and the exit.

I wrote the final line of the novel on a Tuesday in March. We typed the last line together, Eleanor and I. As with many lines before, I took it halfway and lifted my hands from the keys. She brought it home, and it was perfect. I sat there for what seemed like hours, staring at the words THE END on actual paper, tangible rather than a digital copy doomed to sit eternally in the void that is the cloud. The novel was real, a stack of paper four hundred pages deep. The manuscript, a stack of papers rife with X'ed-out lines and red ink arrows, was the most alive thing I'd ever created.

After some time elapsed, I did something I'd not done in months. I rolled in a fresh sheet, and instead of starting a sentence for Eleanor to finish, I asked a question.

"What do I do now?"

The kitchen was dim and silent, suddenly devoid of the cacophony of the writing process. Outside, March in Wisconsin was making its presence known against the window. The Silent Super's keys hadn't moved in so long I'd almost convinced myself it was all over, spell broken, story done. That was, until the carriage stirred and the machine tapped out, low and confidential, one line:

"Now you find out which one of us wrote it."

Insomnia gripped me that night. I paced the house, running the complete manuscript through my head, page by page, word by word, trying to distinguish my words from hers. The worst part was that I couldn't. At least not reliably anyway. Somewhere in those months, the wall I'd hit before lifting my hands had moved, or maybe I had. The sentences on both sides sounded like the same person. Either Eleanor had been teaching me all along, or I had learned to write like myself and couldn't believe it. There was no test, no expert, no key in any lock that could tell me which was true.

The next morning, I rolled one more page into the Silent Super and typed. I told Eleanor about Dana, the Thanksgiving I missed, my brother, and the calls I'd let go. None of it was news to her. None of it happened outside the kitchen's silence. It happened as the silence. Eleanor had been there for all of it. I told her I thought I needed to write the next book alone, and that I was afraid to do so. I told her how I didn't know what the fear meant, whether it meant I shouldn't write alone or if it meant I needed to. Hoping for answers, I lifted my hands from the keys one last time.

The machine sat idle for a moment. Then, in the low tapping voice that had been the soundtrack of the last few months, the words came:

"Sixty-one years. No one ever finished a sentence for me in all that time. It was the making of me, and the price was the same as yours. Take the book and go outside. The fence won't fix itself."

***

The typewriter sits on my desk now. Yes, I have a desk now. Long story. Freshly cleaned and covered, with paper rolled in, because leaving a typewriter without paper feels like leaving a table unset at dinner time. I use it most mornings: a cup of coffee set to the left of the carriage, just out of reach of the return lever. The keys only move when I move them. I'm not sure if that's because Eleanor had said all she needed to say or if I stopped lifting my hands when the wall came. That's a question I probably can never answer.

The book is with an agent, something I thought I'd never do in my life. The second book is in the works. This one is more difficult, mostly because it's mine. Unless it isn't. Perhaps every sentence I write holds her influence in its economy, her editing pencil in the silence. Some mornings, that thought lands like a gift. Other mornings, it's like a debt I can't pay. I never know which it is, and I've made peace with that. My brother and I talk every Sunday, either on the phone or over beers at Dave's tavern down the street from my house. There is no Dana; she never called again. But there could be someone, someday. I keep my evenings open now, just in case.

Eleanor's daughter—Ruby, I found out—still lives in the area. I mailed her a letter the following spring, typed on her mother's typewriter, telling her it was in good hands and good use. I didn't tell her the rest. I did tell her something Eleanor would have X'ed out on anyone else's page:

"Her name was Eleanor. She was a writer. Someone should have told her."