The World’s Strongest Librarian

by Josh Hanagarne

  “That’s a lot of forbidding.”

  “You think I don’t know this? I was teacher. We are not stupid. Some of us are teachers. My husband. Teacher. You Americans.”

  I shake her hand, say it was nice to meet her, and watch her walk toward the stairs. “Stay dry out there!” I say.

  She turns, glares, sets her bag down. “What is mean by ‘stay dry’?”

  “It means that it’s snowing out there and don’t get your hair wet.”

  “There is only one meaning of this phrase?”

  “Are you really asking?”

  “You are saying I am drunkard, yes?” She tips her thumb toward her mouth as if she is stumbling intoxicated through the streets of a Primorye province village, as I’m apparently implying.

  “No. Don’t get your hair wet. That’s all.”

  “If…if I find there is more than one meaning for this phrase, I will return.” She looks at me over the top of her glasses. She points at me. Her eyebrow wriggles with her disapproval.

  “I will verify…I will. I hope that you are honest tonight.” She leaves.

  The snow didn’t stop until late the next afternoon. It was a beautiful storm.

  “Josh, I’ve found the perfect girl for you. Her name is Janette.” Mom was home from church looking triumphant.

  “No thanks.” I was done with dating. Jennie had taught me that modern females didn’t consider weepy, frail men the ultimate aphrodisiac. Besides, who had time for dating with my busy life? Since I hadn’t returned to school, I now had a breakneck schedule of weaning myself off my medications, napping, visiting the Joyless Healer to surrender my voice, and staring at the walls. I rarely left the house. The days slogged by.

  Maybe Mom was right. Maybe dating would shake me out of this no-life. On the other hand, Mom’s track record with “perfect girls” for me was blemished. She’d never actually set me up with anyone, but she floated trial balloons.

  “You know, I sure do like the Wallace girls. Are they dating anyone?” Or “That Kimberly sure is getting pretty.” I acknowledged and ignored.

  “Okay,” I said an hour later. “How can I meet her?”

  “She’s singing in our ward next Sunday so you’ll have to come.”

  Ugh. One upside of the previous year was that Misty didn’t want me going to church. She wanted to stay home and watch movies or read. This placed my soul in jeopardy, but I never felt like I was missing much. Still, I had to go the next Sunday if I wanted to meet Janette Watts.

  That morning I put on my suit and went to church with my family, where I watched Janette on the stand—the area behind the pulpit where speakers sit before rocking the mic like there’s no tomorrow. She was five-eight with brown hair. She wore a pale-blue dress with a lace collar. She wore little makeup. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped, and soft. Her natural expression looked to be a contented smile. She looked kind. I flipped through the hymnal during the opening songs. Since I couldn’t sing anymore, I spent the time looking at the names of the composers and lyricists. There were tons of Ebeneezers. But wait! One hymn had been composed by none other than “H. S. Thompson.” My first exposure to Hunter S. Thompson had occurred a few weeks earlier when I bought a copy of The Great Shark Hunt at a thrift store. And now here he was in the LDS hymnal. But no. The dates were wrong. The song was composed way back in 1770, stupid. It wasn’t Hunter.*

  When Janette started singing, I forgot about it. Her voice was a clear, confident, lovely soprano. I’ve never paid attention to a hymn the way I did to that song. I couldn’t listen to her sing and be cynical or pessimistic. Suddenly life felt so precious and full of possibilities that I wouldn’t have been surprised if a butterfly had landed on my wrist as a baby deer walked in to lick my face.

  After, my mom raced up to tell Janette how wonderful she was. Then she nudged me forward and said, “This is my son Josh.” I shook Janette’s hand and nodded hello.

  “It’s really great to meet you,” she said, and she gave me a smile that seemed genuine. I grinned like a fool. “You too,” I whispered, jerking my head down and to the left, twice. Smooth operator.

  “She’s a folklorist,” a mutual friend named Amy told me later. “She knows lots of stories. You’ll get along great.” We made plans to go to a barbecue at the home of some of Amy’s relatives.

  That evening I did push-ups until I collapsed. The next morning I ran two miles, then went to the gym in Elko to lift, the first time I had done so in months. I couldn’t get myself back in shape for my date with Janette, which was three days away, but it seemed like a good time to get over the hernia and get back at it.

  Janette picked me up in a white Buick Century, “the least fancy car in existence,” she said. Now that I had her up close and could get a good look at her, she had the loveliest eyes I’d ever seen—a strange mixture of warm orange and icy green, depending on the light.

  “Well, we can’t all drive Honda Civics,” I whispered.

  She was easy to talk to. By which I mean, she was easy to listen to, since I couldn’t say much. But she laughed at my whispered jokes.

  “What do you like to read?” I asked.

  “I just read a book by Mary Higgins Clark. I can’t even remember what it’s about, but it starts with this woman buried underground and she’s supposed to have a string in her coffin. When she pulls the string the bell above ground rings so everyone will know someone’s buried alive. It scared me because the bell didn’t have a clapper. So I quit reading and all night I felt like someone was looking in the window at me.”

  I adored mysteries. Since reading Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, I’d read everything by her. “What does someone being buried alive have to do with your window?” I asked her.

  “Plenty.”

  “What’re you doing in Elko?”

  “I started working at the Western Folklife Center as my first job out of grad school.”

  “Did you have to write a thesis?”

  “Yes. I wrote about an old cemetery.”

  “Do men get intimidated by you because you’re so smart?”

  She blushed and smiled. “I bet you ask all the girls that.”

  Yeah. All the girls. “And you probably pretend you’re not a genius with all the men you date.”

  “I don’t date much.” Had it been the wrong thing to say? Her shirt had an American flag on it. “Would you consider yourself insanely patriotic?” I asked, pointing at it.

  “No. I like America, though.”

  “What do you like most about it?”

  “Barbecues.”

  “Good answer. So let me just get this out there: Would you ever marry a twenty-three-year-old?” I would turn twenty-three later that year. “Just checking.

  “There’s no wrong answer,” I added. “It could be any twenty-three-year-old, so don’t think I was asking about myself.”

  “No,” Janette said finally. “I think I need a man with a….” She squinted into the depths of her soul. “With a…401(k).” Then, horror-faced: “I can’t believe I just said that. I don’t know where that came from.”

  “Are 401(k)s the ultimate aphrodisiac?”

  “Only for perverts. New subject. What are you reading?”

  “You know the Harvard classics?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “When I thought I wouldn’t be able to go to school anymore, I thought about how else I could get some education. I was getting addicted to eBay, but I never bought anything. I saw a listing for the Harvard Classics once. It’s these fifty-two books that take up about five feet and if you’ve read them you’re supposedly as educated as anyone, or something. I got them for Christmas and made this goal to read one each week this year and then I’d be done and a genius.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Bad. I made it through the first three weeks. Don’t read The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A guy makes some stuff out of silver. That�
�s it.”

  “Hasn’t there been anything good?”

  “Don Quixote’s always good. I got through The Inferno by Dante. I nearly died trying to read Robert Burns. I’m not big on poetry.”

  “What about cowboy poetry?”

  “I’m not sure. I got to recite a poem that I wrote in sixth grade with my best friend at the cowboy poetry gathering. It was about a feud. But I’ve never really read any of it. But the only other Harvard books I finished were two books of quotes. Something by a Quaker and a bunch of sayings from Epictetus. I just can’t ever see myself getting into the science papers of Charles Lyell, but we’ll see.”

  Janette turned the car into a driveway. When we stopped, I got my guitar out of the trunk as Janette went and said hello to Amy.

  “What did she say?” I asked Amy when I got her alone.

  “She said you’re better looking than she expected.”

  “What does that mean? She saw me on Sunday.”

  “And she said she told you she wanted a man with a 401(k). I told her you don’t have one.”

  “But she saw me at church,” I whispered.

  “She said the light was weird there. Are you going to play for us?” She nodded at my guitar.

  “Uh, yeah, maybe. I told her I played and she said to bring it.”

  After we ate, Janette said, “Play a song for me.” Suddenly everyone else was outside and Janette and I were alone. I’d been playing a lot of folk instrumentals from various countries. With the loss of my voice, my playing had changed. Without my vocals providing the melodies, my fingers had to. I was more interested in finger-style guitar with complicated melody in the upper register and bass notes played on the thicker bottom strings. The song was called “Sakura Variations.”

  “That’s beautiful,” said Janette.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  When I got home, my parents mobbed me. “Well?” said my mom.

  “It was good,” I said.

  “How good?” said my dad. “Good as in—”

  “And you’re going to see her again?” said my mom.

  “Yeah.” My mom’s not much of a smirker, but whatever was going on with her face at that moment said, “I knew it. I was right!”

  My dad is a smirker. So he smirked. But he looked happy.

  The next weekend Janette and I hiked around Silver Lake.

  “You’re as nimble as a mountain goat,” I told her as we walked the shallow incline around the lake.

  “I practice,” she said. “At home I build little obstacle courses and I see how many hours I can spend without touching the ground. My best is four days.”

  “Really? Pippi Longstocking did that.”

  “No.”

  Thanks to the Botox, I didn’t have to worry about whether I’d scare Janette with hoots and whoops. But without the noises to define the “real” me, I didn’t know exactly who I was. At first, I exhausted myself whispering getting-to-know-you small talk into Janette’s ears. The longer we talked, though, the more I listened. I wasn’t just learning who she was, but also who I was when we were together. I thought, We’ve already seen each other three times. She was spending her free time with me. She could have been crocheting, which she loved, or reading Mary Higgins Clark, or practicing with that lovely Siren’s voice. Instead, she was with me, laughing and talking about nothing.

  At some point we started holding hands. We looked at our interlaced fingers. She smiled. I snapped my teeth together and whistled two notes. When I’m touching someone, the tic often molds itself to wherever I’m touching. Because I was holding her hand my own hand tensed up and gave her an abrupt, but not painful, squeeze.

  “I like you,” I said.

  “I’m glad.”

  A week later I agreed to come to her family reunion that summer.

  One night she said she’d “made peace with being alone.” This is a very Mormon way to feel if you are a single woman past twenty-two years old, and she was twenty-nine. So many students at church college campuses are engaged or married by the time they’re in their early twenties.

  “There were always girls that looked better,” Janette said. “My friends are all my age. They all look about the same way I do. They’re all single. None of us has ever even been kissed.”

  It bothered me that Janette didn’t see herself as being as worthy as all the other women out there. The ones who weren’t “her age” or who “looked better” or who were getting kissed because they were better somehow. I knew that any guy who knew her like I did would be as smitten as I was.

  The phone rang. It was her dad. With a worried look she gave me the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi! This is John Watts. I just wanted to say that we’re looking forward to meeting you. Janette’s a great woman. See you soon. You’ll fit right in. I can tell.” When I hung up, I handed Janette the phone.

  “You won’t be alone,” I said. “It might not have anything to do with me, but I don’t want you to feel that way.” Before she could protest, I kissed her cheek.

  The night before the reunion Janette asked if I wanted to play Phase 10, a card game in which players race each other to make ten different card combinations.

  “I’ll play,” I said, “but we should play for something.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  “If I win, you have to kiss me.”

  “I knew you were going to say that. Okay, but what if I win?”

  “You won’t. Ready?”

  She dealt the cards. By the time Janette was on Phase 6, I was still stuck back on 3.

  “Is it my imagination, or do you look slightly despondent as you win yet another round?” I asked.

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Then followed a rally that had never been seen before, and will never be seen again. Somehow, by the time Janette was at Phase 7, I was on 6. By the time I got to 8, I had caught up.

  “My willpower is changing your momentum,” I said.

  “Why would you waste your powers on something like this?”

  “If you’re really asking then you don’t know how attractive you are.”

  I won. When I set the last card down and said, “I’m out,” Janette stood and began pacing. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen someone wringing her hands, but she was doing it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Ah.” She looked at me. Wring wring wring. “So?”

  “So?” I said, standing. “So now you tell me how you want it.” She blushed and laughed. Her hands fell to her sides and I kissed her.

  Just like that, things were different. We were something different, and she had been kissed. “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “I feel nervous about you meeting my dad.”

  “Really? He seemed so nice on the phone.”

  “Oh, he’s nice. That has nothing to do with it. Go. Sleep. I’ll be ready when you get dropped off tomorrow.”

  I kissed her again. She didn’t wring her hands this time.

  Janette grew up in Sunset, twenty-five miles north of Salt Lake City. She was tense by the time we got to Wendover, the midpoint between Salt Lake and Elko. By the time we got to Salt Lake she was grinding her teeth.

  “I need to tell you some stuff about my dad. He goes to these mountain man rendezvous ever year,” she said. “He’ll probably introduce himself to you as Flintstriker, which is his mountain man name.” From what she said, his mountain man experience was limited to Boy Scout Jamborees; he’d been serving in Boy Scouts for most of his adult life. Every year he’d go to a Jamboree—a gigantic campout with scouts from the region—and wear his leathers and fire his black powder rifle.

  “We don’t call him Flintstriker,” she said. “And he shoots his rifle in the middle of the night on New Year’s. He’ll tell you everything he’s doing in church right now. He’ll probably mow the lawn at five in the morning tomorrow. Our backyard’s always covered
with deer hides that he’s tanning. And he goes to DI”—Deseret Industries thrift stores—“and buys snowmobile parts and then puts them in the backyard and they just sit there forever. Drives my mom nuts. And…” She looked to see if I was reaching for the door handle, but I couldn’t wait to meet him. Would he greet us in a coonskin cap? Would he demand that we leg wrestle on the lawn? Would he give me some manly test to prove that he was superior to me, like asking me to locate the spark plugs in his car?

  When she pulled into the driveway, the front door opened and John Watts stepped out. You can tell that some people are friendly from a block away. He was about five-ten with the roundest belly I’d ever seen. Suspenders pulled dark green pants up over the belly to meet a maroon T-shirt. He shook my hand and squeezed hard. “Welcome!”

  Five minutes later I threw a tomahawk; it twirled end over end, and struck the “throwing stump” with its handle, which then splintered. John nodded. “Not bad.” Then he threw his own hawk, which missed the stump and clattered against the fence. And, yes, stretched across the fence was a deer hide that he’d tanned himself. I retrieved our axes and returned to the throwing line.

  I was delighted to be at Janette’s parents’ home, throwing pieces of metal at a piece of wood with a man who indeed called himself Flintstriker. He even showed me a wooden box with his mountain man name scrimshawed into its lid. I hadn’t had a chance to say one word about myself. John jabbered on about everything while Janette caught up with her mom, Linda. Linda looked exactly like what you’d picture if I told you that she was sixty-five years old, with glasses and white hair, and looked really nice. She laughed after everything anyone said, including herself.

  After her parents went to bed, Janette showed me my room. “This was my room growing up. It shares a wall with the bathroom. That was exactly as glorious as it sounds.” There was a chest of her old toys. “I loved Strawberry Shortcake, but my mom never had enough money to buy me the accessories, so I made them.” She dumped a few yarn-haired dolls onto the bed. I recognized their faces—my sister Megan had loved Strawberry Shortcake. Someone had obviously made them new clothes. And each doll wore a backpack. “That’s not even the best part,” said Janette. “Open their backpacks.”