The Official Record

Fall 1972, Philadelphia, PA

Rummaging through the vinyl tote, Rose pushed aside the baby bottles and cloth diapers before finding the manila folder near the bottom. She froze when an open diaper pin bit into her palm. Unwilling to wake Sophie, she pressed the sting to her mouth until it passed. Learning her lesson, she went back in for the folder, this time more gingerly.

She laid the unfinished dissertation proposal across her lap. It had been three days since her disastrous session with Dr. Balis, and she was still woefully behind. She had thought about canceling Sophie’s six-month checkup, but decided against it, so here she was in the waiting room, beneath the needlepoint wall hangings, rocking the stroller with one foot every time Sophie stirred.

Rose touched the pen to the margin of her proposal, but wrote nothing. The conversation with Dr. Balis kept diverting her from the sentence she had been trying to revise. She wished she had said more than “Lucky me” when he suggested that another husband might solve her problems. Her ex-husbands were her problem. But oh, well. Better retorts always came to her hours later, sometimes days, fully formed and utterly useless.

Of course he was a bardolator.

The clipboard-carrying nurse sauntered in and called a name that was, by her count, at least three patients ahead.

Two more days before the proposal was due, and Rose she was getting nowhere. She had nothing more to say about the new campaign finance laws. Disclosures, loopholes, reforms. Nothing. She closed the folder and returned it to the bag. Out of boredom, she perused the stack of magazines on the table beside her. Life. National Geographic. Ms. Magazine. Ultimately, she decided on the Business Week dated last November. Flipping through the pages, she scanned for anything remotely related to government policy. An article titled, “The Global Economy Enters a Rougher Decade” looked promising. She had finished two-thirds of the page when her palms began to glisten.

There it was, in the second column. In bold print. In a national publication.

“Preliminary estimates put the gross product of the world at…”

Rose read the number again. Then again.

$3,834,210,541,934.

Her stomach dropped.

She knew the number. She knew it because she had made it up.

A year earlier, still keeping her pregnancy under wraps, Rose was sent by her then-boss on a particularly complex fact-finding mission. Her task was to provide the number of the world’s gross domestic product. Finding the GDP of one nation was doable. But all nations combined?

After making fruitless calls to the United Nations and the World Bank, she headed down to the Public Library on 42nd and Fifth Avenue. Following a lengthy conversation and filling out a call slip, the reference librarian fetched the latest volume of the Yearbook of National Account Statistics.

She spent hours poring through the oversized book and jotting down what may or may not have been the GDP of dozens of nations. It required a crash course in knowing the difference between GDP and GNP, official exchange rates, and how on earth to include socialist economies.

But at every page she hit a new wall of understanding. There was simply no precedent for a number like this. No standard practice for measuring the economies of world nations. At the end of her exhaustive search, she returned to her boss with the bad news. No such number exists.

“I need it by five,” she recalled him saying.

She knew it was only a matter of time before her belly started showing and she was desperate to hold on to her job until then. Not wanting to disappoint, she spent the next few hours coming up with a convincing number. She added up the mishmash of facts she had collected and added her birthdate to the end for good measure.

And now the number, her number, was printed in Business Week.

It wasn’t the first time Rose had altered the facts when necessary. Her father had insisted on it from the moment they arrived in America. “In English,” he would say whenever his mother spoke Dutch. Rose, her brother, and her mother were never allowed to bring up their old life in Holland. Not where they came from. Not their wealth. Not their history. And certainly not their religion. And when Rose was asked about her background, she simply made it up. It was easier that way.

She scanned the article for attribution. Who said it? Where did they think that figure came from? What was the source? Who had been given credit for it? A footnote? A government agency?

Zilch.

Lowering the magazine into her lap, Rose noticed the pregnant woman beside her. She quelled the urge to lean over to this perfect stranger and admit what she had done. Luckily, the woman was too busy flipping through parenting pamphlets and baby naming books to engage in conversation.

Anyway, who would believe her? And more importantly, who would care? Rose had enough life experience to realize that most people were far too willing to rely on the so-called experts of the world.

She wasn’t sure if she felt pride or shame. Rose could now take her place in the long line of contributors whose falsehoods made it into the official record. She wondered if she would have been brave enough to share what she had done with Dr. Balis. Would he have blamed her? Understood? She imagined he would quote something from Macbeth in his pleased little voice in hopes she would see the error of her ways:

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

But what, exactly, did Dr. Balis know? Made-up facts and figures slipped into the record all the time. In fact, in college, Rose had written a lengthy essay on John Payne Collier, the esteemed Shakespearean biographer later exposed for fraud and forgery.

In his case, there were so few details about the man from Stratford that Collier seemed to have taken the absence as an invitation. When the records failed him, he supplied the records.

Just like her GDP number.

And over a century and a half later, men like Dr. Balis were still worshipping this half-baked shadow of a man as the father of modern literature.

She retrieved the pen from her bag and wrote one word across the back of her hand.

Authorship.

By the time Sophie’s name was called, a new topic of her dissertation was beginning to take shape.