Portable Childhoods Page 20

  I am almost done mopping when she appears in the doorway, wearing my sweatpants (rolled up a bit) and a clean, dry sweatshirt. “I want to rent Pirates of the Caribbean,” she says quietly. “And while you’re out getting soup, would you mind buying some plain old cough drops?”

  10 Dancing at Dusk

  I marvel at the way the child moves, unconscious of her body, or maybe so conscious that it’s all in synch. She is limber, flexible, runs like the wind and sleeps in any position she wants, reads lying flat on her belly with her head propped up in her hands, and she’s not stiff when she gets up.

  My neck has been sore for a week, from typing and bending over piles of papers. Even with a good desk chair and an ergonomic keyboard rest and all the other pseudo-orthopedic office furniture, my neck is constantly stiff.

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table, sipping at a glass of wine, waiting for the Advil to kick in, watching the child not know that she’s being watched. It is seven in the evening, late spring, and the light in the back yard is soft, golden, deepening into shadows where the houses block the setting sun. Twilight always seems thicker and richer than ordinary light, magic somehow.

  And the child is dancing in it.

  I envy her fluidity and her confidence. Not in the present—I’m relatively confident of the things I do well. But the nine-year old I once was is a shy child who spent most of her childhood reading, because books were safer than other people. And that shy child envies the confidence of this beaming one. Envies the ease in which she inhabits her body, the ease with which she accepts praise as an ordinary gift.

  The radio is on, tuned to the light classical station—wind-down, end of the day music. The sliding door from the kitchen to the back yard is open, and the music wafts gently out into that soft light. It is an ethereal setting, and the child is dancing.

  Her eyes are closed and she floats and spins and dips across the grass. She is not a willowy child. She is as short and sturdy as everyone else in my family. But she is so graceful it makes my heart ache, makes my eyes sting with not-quite-shed tears.

  Am I crying because she is beautiful? Or because in my own childhood I was told that I was not? I don’t want her to turn from this fairy child dancing at dusk to the stiff adolescent I’m afraid she will become, as if my past is a legacy, genetic and inevitable.

  She is dancing with the cat in her arms now, not as if the cat were a partner—the cat would never tolerate that for a moment—but as if it were a baby, a treasure. Cradling it as she continues to pirouette across our tiny patch of lawn.

  If time could compress like an accordion, would the bookish nine-year-old I once was play with my own child? Would they like each other? Would the then-me come over and dance in the setting sun, or would she linger at the edge of the yard, all bound feet and bound soul?

  Baggage left unattended will be confiscated. Oh, if only that were true.

  A tear runs down my cheek and I wipe it away. I don’t want the child to think I’m sad, that anything’s wrong. I couldn’t explain to her that she’s so beautiful it makes me cry without eliciting an embarrassed, slightly grimacing, “Ah, jeez…”

  The light is fading now, and the child is hugging her arms to herself. Getting chilly. She will come inside soon, into the warmth and smell of spaghetti cooking on the stove.

  After dinner, I will read to her. I’ll sit next to her in the big overstuffed chair in the sunroom, feel the weight of her body against mine, her head resting on my shoulder as the chapter goes on and the lithe dancer turns into a sleepy little girl. I will put my arm around her, my face in her hair, breathe in the aroma of girl child and sunlight and spring breezes.

  And just for a moment, by magic or osmosis, I will dance inside myself, unfettered.

  In the House of the Seven Librarians

  ONCE UPON A TIME, the Carnegie Library sat on a wooded bluff on the east side of town: red brick and fieldstone, with turrets and broad windows facing the trees. Inside, green glass-shaded lamps cast warm yellow light onto oak tables ringed with spindle-backed chairs.

  Books filled the dark shelves that stretched high up toward the pressed-tin ceiling. The floors were wood, except in the foyer, where they were pale beige marble. The loudest sounds were the ticking of the clock and the quiet, rhythmic thwack of a rubber stamp on a pasteboard card.

  It was a cozy, orderly place.

  Through twelve presidents and two world wars, the elms and maples grew tall outside the deep bay windows. Children leaped from Peter Pan to Oliver Twist and off to college, replaced at Story Hour by their younger brothers, cousins, daughters.

  Then the library board—men in suits, serious men, men of money—met and cast their votes for progress. A new library, with fluorescent lights, much better for the children’s eyes. Picture windows, automated systems, ergonomic plastic chairs. The town approved the levy, and the new library was built across town, convenient to the community center and the mall.

  Some books were boxed and trundled down Broad Street, many others stamped DiscarD and left where they were, for a book sale in the fall. Interns from the university used the latest technology to transfer the cumbersome old card file and all the records onto floppy disks and microfiche. Progress, progress, progress.

  The Ralph P. Mossberger Library (named after the local philanthropist and car dealer who had written the largest check) opened on a drizzly morning in late April. Everyone attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony and stayed for the speeches, because there would be cake after.

  Everyone except the seven librarians from the Carnegie Library on the bluff across town.

  Quietly, without a fuss (they were librarians, after all), while the town looked toward the future, they bought supplies: loose tea and English biscuits, packets of Bird’s pudding and cans of beef barley soup. They rearranged some of the shelves, brought in a few comfortable armchairs, nice china and teapots, a couch, towels for the shower, and some small braided rugs.

  Then they locked the door behind them.

  Each morning they woke and went about their chores. They shelved and stamped and cataloged, and in the evenings, every night, they read by lamplight.

  Perhaps, for a while, some citizens remembered the old library, with the warm nostalgia of a favorite childhood toy that had disappeared one summer, never seen again. Others assumed it had been torn down long ago.

  And so a year went by, then two, or perhaps a great many more. Inside, time had ceased to matter. Grass and brambles grew thick and tall around the fieldstone steps, and trees arched overhead as the forest folded itself around them like a cloak.

  Inside, the seven librarians lived, quiet and content.

  Until the day they found the baby.

  Librarians are guardians of books. They guide others along their paths, offering keys to help unlock the doors of knowledge. But these seven had become a closed circle, no one to guide, no new minds to open onto worlds of possibility. They kept themselves busy, tidying orderly shelves and mending barely frayed bindings with stiff netting and glue, and began to bicker.

  Ruth and Edith had been up half the night, arguing about whether or not subway tokens (of which there were half a dozen in the Lost and Found box) could be used to cast the I Ching. And so Blythe was on the stepstool in the 299s, reshelving the volume of hexagrams, when she heard the knock.

  Odd, she thought. It’s been some time since we’ve had visitors.

  She tugged futilely at her shapeless cardigan as she clambered off the stool and trotted to the front door, where she stopped abruptly, her hand to her mouth in surprise.

  A wicker basket, its contents covered with a red-checked cloth, as if for a picnic, lay in the wooden box beneath the Book Return chute. A small, cream-colored envelope poked out from one side.

  “How nice!” Blythe said aloud, clapping her hands. She thought of fried chicken and potato salad—of which she was awfully fond—a Mason jar of lemonade, perhaps even a cherry pie? She lifted the basket by its round-arched handle.
Heavy, for a picnic. But then, there were seven of them. Although Olive just ate like a bird, these days.

  She turned and set it on top of the Circulation Desk, pulling the envelope free.

  “What’s that? ” Marian asked, her lips in their accustomed moue of displeasure, as if the basket were an agent of chaos, existing solely to disrupt the tidy array of rubber stamps and file boxes that were her domain.

  “A present,” said Blythe. “I think it might be lunch.”

  Marian frowned. “For you?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s a note…” Blythe held up the envelope and peered at it. “No,” she said. “It’s addressed to ‘The Librarians. Overdue Books Department.’”

  “Well, that would be me,” Marian said curtly. She was the youngest, and wore trouser suits with silk t-shirts. She had once been blond. She reached across the counter, plucked the envelope from Blythe’s plump fingers, and sliced it open it with a filigreed brass stiletto.

  “Hmph,” she said after she’d scanned the contents.

  “It is lunch, isn’t it?” asked Blythe.

  “Hardly.” Marian began to read aloud:

  This is overdue. Quite a bit, I’m afraid. I apologize. We moved to

  Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it

  up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I

  know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of

  fairy tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be accept

  able. I always loved the library. I’m sure she’ll be happy there.

  Blythe lifted the edge of the cloth. “Oh, my stars!”

  A baby girl with a shock of wire-stiff black hair stared up at her, green eyes wide and curious. She was contentedly chewing on the corner of a blue book, half as big as she was. Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

  “The Rackham illustrations,” Blythe said as she eased the book away from the baby. “That’s a lovely edition.”

  “But when was it checked out?” Marian demanded.

  Blythe opened the cover and pulled the ruled card from the inside pocket. “October 17th, 1938,” she said, shaking her head. “Goodness, at two cents a day, that’s…” She shook her head again. Blythe had never been good with figures.

  They made a crib for her in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, displacing acquisition orders, zoning permits, and the instructions for the mimeograph, which they rarely used.

  Ruth consulted Dr. Spock. Edith read Piaget. The two of them peered from text to infant and back again for a good long while before deciding that she was probably about nine months old. They sighed. Too young to read.

  So they fed her cream and let her gum on biscuits, and each of the seven cooed and clucked and tickled her pink toes when they thought the others weren’t looking. Harriet had been the oldest of nine girls, and knew more about babies than she really cared to. She washed and changed the diapers that had been tucked into the basket, and read Goodnight Moon and Pat the Bunny to the little girl, whom she called Polly—short for Polyhymnia, the muse of oratory and sacred song.

  Blythe called her Bitsy, and Li’l Precious.

  Marian called her “the foundling,” or “That Child You Took In,” but did her share of cooing and clucking, just the same.

  When the child began to walk, Dorothy blocked the staircase with stacks of Comptons, which she felt was an inferior encyclopedia, and let her pull herself up on the bottom drawers of the card catalog. Anyone looking up Zithers or Zippers (see “Slide Fasteners”) soon found many of the cards fused together with grape jam. When she began to talk, they made a little bed nook next to the fireplace in the Children’s Room. It was high time for Olive to begin the child’s education.

  Olive had been the children’s librarian since before recorded time, or so it seemed. No one knew how old she was, but she vaguely remembered waving to President Coolidge. She still had all of her marbles, though every one of them was a bit odd and rolled asymmetrically.

  She slept on a daybed behind a reference shelf that held My First Encyclopedia and The Wonder Book of Trees, among others. Across the room, the child’s first “big-girl bed” was yellow, with decals of a fairy and a horse on the headboard, and a rocket ship at the foot, because they weren’t sure about her preferences.

  At the beginning of her career, Olive had been an ordinary-sized librarian, but by the time she began the child’s lessons, she was not much taller than her toddling charge. Not from osteoporosis or dowager’s hump or other old-lady maladies, but because she had tired of stooping over tiny chairs and bending to knee-high shelves. She had been a grown-up for so long that when the library closed, she had decided it was time to grow down again, and was finding that much more comfortable.

  She had a remarkably cozy lap for a woman her size.

  The child quickly learned her alphabet, all the shapes and colors, the names of zoo animals, and fourteen different kinds of dinosaurs, all of whom were dead.

  By the time she was four, or thereabouts, she could sound out the letters for simple words—cup and lamp and stairs. And that’s how she came to name herself.

  Olive had fallen asleep over Make Way for Ducklings, and all the other librarians were busy somewhere else. The child was bored. She tiptoed out of the Children’s Room, hugging the shadows of the walls and shelves, crawling by the base of the Circulation Desk so that Marian wouldn’t see her, and made her way to the alcove that held the Card Catalog. The heart of the library. Her favorite, most forbidden place to play.

  Usually she crawled underneath and tucked herself into the corner formed of oak cabinet, marble floor, and plaster walls. It was a fine place to play Hide-and-Seek, even if it was mostly just Hide. The corner was a cave, a bunk on a pirate ship, a cupboard in a magic wardrobe.

  But that afternoon she looked at the white cards on the fronts of the drawers, and her eyes widened in recognition. Letters! In her very own alphabet. Did they spell words? Maybe the drawers were all full of words, a huge wooden box of words. The idea almost made her dizzy.

  She walked to the other end of the cabinet and looked up, tilting her neck back until it crackled. Four drawers from top to bottom. Five drawers across. She sighed. She was only tall enough to reach the bottom row of drawers. She traced a gentle finger around the little brass frames, then very carefully pulled out the white cards inside and laid them on the floor in a neat row:

  D I N S XYZ

  She squatted over them, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, and tried to read.

  “Sound it out.” She could almost hear Olive’s voice, soft and patient. She took a deep breath.

  “Duh-in-s—” and then she stopped, because the last card had too many letters, and she didn’t know any words that had Xs in them. Well, xylophone. But the X was in the front, and that wasn’t the same. She tried anyway. “Duh-ins-zzzigh,” and frowned.

  She squatted lower, so low she could feel cold marble under her cotton pants, and put her hand on top of the last card. One finger covered the X and her pinkie covered the Z (another letter that was useless for spelling ordinary things). That left Y. Y at the end was good. funnY. happY.

  “Duh-ins-see,” she said slowly. “Dinsy.”

  That felt very good to say, hard and soft sounds and hissing Ss mixing in her mouth, so she said it again, louder, which made her laugh, so she said it again, very loud: “DINSY!”

  There is nothing quite like a loud voice in a library to get a lot of attention very fast. Within a minute, all seven of the librarians stood in the doorway of the alcove.

  “What on earth?” said Harriet.

  “Now what have you…” said Marian.

  “What have you spelled, dear?” asked Olive in her soft little voice.

  “I made it myself,” the girl replied.

  “Just gibberish,” murmured Edith, though not unkindly. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  The child shook her he
ad. “Does so. Olive,” she said, pointing to Olive. “Do’thy, Edith, Harwiet, Bithe, Ruth.” She paused and rolled her eyes. “Mawian,” she added, a little less cheerfully. Then she pointed to herself. “And Dinsy.”

  “Oh, now, Polly,” said Harriet.

  “Dinsy,” said Dinsy.

  “Bitsy?” Blythe tried hopefully.

  “Dinsy,” said Dinsy.

  And that was that.

  At three every afternoon, Dinsy and Olive made a two-person circle on the braided rug in front of the bay window, and had Story Time. Sometimes Olive read aloud from Beezus and Ramona and Half Magic, and sometimes Dinsy read to Olive, The King’s Stilts, and In the Night Kitchen, and WinniethePooh. Dinsy liked that one especially, and took it to bed with her so many times that Edith had to repair the binding. Twice.

  That was when Dinsy first wished upon the Library.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE LIBRARY:

  Knowledge is not static; information must flow in order to live. Every so often one of the librarians would discover a new addition. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone appeared one rainy afternoon, Rowling shelved neatly between Rodgers and Saint-Exupéry, as if it had always been there. Blythe found a book of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings in the 294s one day while she was dusting, and Feynman’s lectures on physics showed up on Dorothy’s shelving cart after she’d gone to make a cup of tea.

  It didn’t happen often; the Library was selective about what it chose to add, rejecting flash-in-the-pan best-sellers, sifting for the long haul, looking for those voices that would stand the test of time next to Dickens and Tolkien, Woolf and Gould.

  The librarians took care of the books, and the Library watched over them in return. It occasionally left treats: a bowl of ripe tangerines on the Formica counter of the Common Room; a gold foil box of chocolate creams; seven small, stemmed glasses of sherry on the table one teatime. Their biscuit tin remained full, the cream in the Wedgwood jug stayed fresh, and the ink pad didn’t dry out. Even the little pencils stayed needle sharp, never whittling down to finger-cramping nubs.

  Some days the Library even hid Dinsy, when she had made a mess and didn’t want to be found, or when one of the librarians was in a dark mood. It rearranged itself, just a bit, so that in her wanderings she would find a new alcove or cubbyhole, and once a secret passage that led to a previously unknown balcony overlooking the Reading Room. When she went back a week later, she found only blank wall.