The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  I asked Cori what was up with this behavior, and she said the words that drive ice into the hearts of librarians around the world: “Sorry, Mom, but I just hate reading.”

  It was a dark day.

  The next morning I felt like the gauntlet had been thrown. It was the day of the week that I had Open Books—a study hall when several kids who had tested into the lowest-level reading groups came in and diligently slaved away at, for example, Romeo and Juliet, knowing full well that their friends in the next room over were breezing through Hamlet. It was through their eyes that I saw our dilemma: there was stigma to low reading levels, despite our euphemisms, and no other way of challenging many different students at the same time than to assign leveled reading. I started pulling titles from our New Releases shelf and combing through them. They were generally way too easy to be considered scholarly. No one, not even the Romeo readers, would be making any literary progress on half these books. But they might enjoy them. They might even become engaged with them. Was that nothing?

  The Hamlet readers—they would probably only be challenged by a fourth of them. The Othellos would be almost bored if the content weren’t so fun and juicy. And what made them juicy? They all had such wonderfully youthful themes. Search for identity. Science fiction and speculation. Social justice. Rebellion.

  In fact, those were the exact themes I had been trying to stress in my choice of the school’s reading canon.

  But thinking of Cori, I realized somewhere I had gone wrong.

  I stewed over it for weeks. During that time, Cori made it through Lord of the Flies (rebellion, speculation) and started wading through The Good Earth (identity, social justice). She took absolutely no joy in any of this reading. She began to internalize her position at the bottom of the lowest-level reading group and to describe herself as a bad reader. Her for-fun reading—weepy YA romances, generally—started to taper off. This was the end, I suddenly realized. This was my last chance.

  And then in a burst of inspiration it came to me, fully formed and all at once. I had figured out how to make the leveled reading groups virtually invisible to the students—by making them group themselves by choice.

  And I had the perfect guinea pig: my very own daughter.

  —

  I click onto the next PowerPoint slide. It’s a picture of Cori gazing into the screen of a small dedicated black-and-white e-reader. I’ve just told a lecture hall full—ok, not full, but pretty close for nine a.m.—of library science people how I came to the idea of something I’ve come to call the Flexthology. Everyone is listening. Clutching their coffees from the hospitality table for dear life, but still, listening.

  “So at this point I thought of the themes that were most meaningful to my students, picked the most popular four, and chose four books for each theme. One is below grade level, two are at grade level, and one exceeds grade level. Now, if you want to do this in your classroom, you want your spread to be the same as the spread of your actual students. So if fifty percent aren’t reading at or near grade level, then maybe pick two below or two above or whatever makes sense for your class.” I look at the large clock in front of me. It’s taking me so long to describe this thing. I only have half an hour left to show my results and take questions. I know I’m supposed to hate public speaking, according to all librarian clichés, but once I get going it’s hard for me to stop.

  “Right. So you’ve got your sixteen-book selection right there, all loaded up on the class e-readers ready to go. Perfect, right? And then from there you present the e-readers to your students and assign the first chapter or fifteen pages or whatever is most reasonable for your readers from each of the books within your given theme. And at that point, that’s all that’s unlocked on the e-readers you distribute, so even if they want to read on, they simply cannot until you go forward. Each student selects his or her favorite work and is grouped with the other readers who chose the same work, and then they study that book for the rest of the unit. And boom, just like that, reading-group levels become invisible. Students are reading at the interest and ability level that best suits them, and they are invested since they chose the book—and maybe even the theme—themselves.”

  A hand shoots into the air. “Excuse me,” a man says before I can call on him, and for a moment I have to remember that these are adults, not children, and I cannot therefore tell him to wait for his turn. “But why wouldn’t students just all gravitate toward the easiest book?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know exactly what the mechanics are, but they haven’t done that at my school. Here, this next slide”—I click over to a spiderweb graph Joe had to help me make—“shows the way the student choices were distributed over four Flexthology units I ran last year. As you can see, the reading levels were pretty evenly distributed among the three choices. In unit two, only three students out of twenty-nine chose the higher-level titles, but then, in unit two, the state-testing results for that class report only ten percent of classmates reading above grade level. So self-selected reading levels, at least in this small sample, worked.”

  The interrupter looks satisfied. My next slide is a list of titles for the four units. “This shows which titles I chose and the number of students who chose each as compared to standardized-testing results for the class. This illustrates the second benefit of the Flexthology. Not only do we get kids invested in their own reading choices and teach them how to pick books for the rest of their lives, but we also get data on what works for kids as generations change.”

  The next person with a question raises his hand and waits. I look at him, a square-jawed fortysomething man with Asian features and brown skin. I believe this is someone Kathryn would call a potential “Hot Librarian of the Year.”

  “Do you have a question or comment?” I ask him.

  “I do,” he says. “I was loving this idea, but when you listed the titles you chose, my heart sank. Maybe they’re fine for a private school in farm country. But I teach in New York. My readers are generally the perfect storm of reluctant and underserved. We’re talking three levels below grade sometimes, and with a social distrust of academics. You’ve got a list of dead white guys a mile long writing about repressed feelings and politics. My kids won’t give two shits. Pardon my French.”

  The class laughs, and I blush. I feel, suddenly, incredibly white and incredibly daft. Then I remind myself I had the same concern and was faced with the stark reality.

  “Now, here’s the major downside of the Flexthology system,” I say. “Since it’s just a wild hair from a private school librarian in farm country”—my questioner gives me a polite nod at my reference to his dig—“and not, say, funded by a million-dollar NEA grant, I had to choose only from books in the public domain—books with no copyright that are free to download. It’s not a ton to go on. My students are largely wealthy—and yes, they have e-readers from the school—but even so, there is no way I can afford to purchase sixteen new e-books for thirty readers every two months and then just dump half the books unread. Expensewise, private or public, almost all of us have budgets for only one active copyright at a time for each student—that’s if we’re lucky. And it’s the same book year in and year out. That hardly allows for any variety or growth.

  “But that said,” I add as an afterthought, “it wouldn’t be so hard to put any book into this format, if you could afford it.”

  The hot librarian tilts his head. “So you’re guessing this system can work with any books, but you need a huge budget to include anything relevant to a diverse student body,” he concludes.

  “Or a medium budget and a very forgiving publisher,” I say woefully.

  “Bummer,” he says.

  “But maybe still worth a try?” I say.

  “Maybe,” he says reluctantly.

  The rest of the class goes on. I get lots of very enthusiastic questions and come away feeling generally like the Flexthology idea could work in oodles and oodles of classrooms. But the concerns Hot Librarian presented linger on a
s I receive one-on-one questions from the shy contingent after the presentation is over. This being a librarians’ conference, there is a large shy contingent.

  And then there he is again. The hot librarian. Standing a head taller than me and waiting patiently for his turn. I feel nervous and fairly sure that whatever question he might have for me next will be the one that breaks me. But instead he says, “Hi, I’m Daniel.”

  “Hi. I’m Amy,” I say.

  “I know,” he says, and I blush.

  “I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee,” he tells me.

  Now I really blush.

  “Real coffee,” he says, dismissing the tureen of institutional dishwater on the hospitality table. “Maybe something sweet too.”

  I can’t think of what to say, so I half smile awkwardly.

  “Are you doing anything right now?”

  “Uh . . .” Am I? What was next? Oh, right, a roundup of new nonfiction for young readers. Behind us, the panelists are already taking their places. Soon the hot librarian and I will be standing in the middle of the next presentation.

  “I . . . ,” I start to say.

  “I’m also free at two p.m. today, if that works better,” he supplies.

  “I think . . .”

  “We’d probably better get out of the way here,” he says, and he touches my arm.

  I freeze up like an old desktop that’s been asked to run too many programs at once. He’s touching me. When was the last time a man touched me like this? I am standing in front of a room that is filling up with people again. Did he like my presentation after all? What am I wearing?

  “Let’s do two,” I finally manage. “At the coffee cart outside?”

  “Perfect,” says Daniel the hot librarian. “We can take the coffee to that little square and sun ourselves like lizards. Enjoy the panel,” he says and leaves me standing there, confused and shy and stammering. I guess I am a true librarian after all.

  —

  Six months after John left, after the broken tooth that nearly killed me, and after I learned the annoying truth of the old maxim—that which doesn’t make you kill yourself will probably make you tough as an old grizzly and twice as mean—I found out about Marika.

  It was Facebook, of course. Marika “liked” a photo of John’s and Joe’s school pictures side by side that I had posted almost a year earlier, and I thought, Who the hell is this person? It soon became clear from her photo stream that she was dating my absent husband and had been for at least a couple of months. From there, it was easy to extrapolate that she was prettier and younger than me, that she had no kids, and that she made John feel like god’s gift to womankind—something I certainly had not been able to do anymore.

  This was my very first “fuck him” moment. Forgive my French if you can; that is simply the only way I can describe how I felt when I looked at a filtered photo of a lissome thirty-year-old in a bikini gazing at my chubby, pasty, hairy husband like he was Sexy Jesus Incarnate. Fuck that guy.

  And just like that, I reached the anger stage of my abandonment. It was wonderful. I sent a scathing message to John in which I criticized the quality of his erection. I told John’s mother the truth about what he had done to us, instead of feeding her a “He needed to find himself and focus on his work” line one more time. After one particularly large glass of wine, I PMed Marika and told her that there was no reason to worry that John would ditch her when her breasts fell from nursing, just because he had done it to me.

  Hell had no fury.

  And as if it would somehow punish John from a distance, I went on a date with a man who had long been interested in me and pursued me, quite shamelessly, even when John had been around.

  The guy in question was Terry Brans, this borderline-sleazy friend of John’s from college who sold real estate and had gotten us our house in a very successful negotiation. His “game,” such as it was, was to occasionally call and schedule a visit to “reassess the market value” of our house and to “guide our improvement decisions” but mostly just to have dinner and drink our wine. Every single time, he’d make some of those “How’d a nice girl like you end up with a loser like John” comments, and every single time, we’d laugh politely until John got genuinely mad roughly ten minutes into dessert. Terry would apologize and pour John another glass of wine, and then we’d all simmer down. And every single time, utterly unabashed, Terry would clear the plates and insist on doing the dishes, knowing full well that I couldn’t sit there and let him do all the cleaning up by himself, and knowing also that John could.

  So it would be me and Terry in the kitchen. Terry would talk about his recent big sales, joke about the personalities that clashed in the purchase of four-thousand-square-foot manses, complain that he was running out of reasonable ways to spend his money, wish aloud he was the kind of guy “insecure enough to spend a hundred grand on a car,” and talk about how much he regretted buying his boat. It was a one-man pissing contest, and I was supposed to be impressed. Which I never was, but oh, how I was flattered that someone took an interest enough to make such a fool of himself.

  After a week of fuming over Marika, I called Terry and told him I could really use some advice about the best updates to make in our house for maximum return on investment. I remember thinking, after I said it, Is it our house anymore? but of course, I didn’t tell Terry what was going on. Even if I hadn’t been embarrassed, I wouldn’t have wanted the pressure.

  He came over two nights later when the kids went to a high school basketball game. I wore something cute but approachable—a jade-green cotton jersey dress from Kohl’s that hadn’t yet been washed enough times to lose its springy, flattering shape. I cooked something. Probably pasta. I remember when I opened the door, he said, “Mmm, something smells wonderful,” and then leaned in to smell my neck, and I said, “Cool it, Pepé Le Pew,” and he laughed hard.

  It occurs to me now, much later, that Terry’s ability to laugh at himself and be rejected repeatedly and still keep flirting was exactly why asking him to come over seemed like such a good plan. I thought I wouldn’t have to give him a thing—no encouragement, no physicality, not even a low-cut shirt—to receive the ego boost I so desperately craved and spite John in the same night.

  But I was wrong.

  “Where’s John?” he immediately asked, the moment he had finished telling me how much better my front door would look painted bright orange.

  I told him, “John and I are . . . separated. We’re working on some problems.” Like the problem that John wanted to pretend our life and our two kids had never happened.

  Terry’s face shifted quickly. “What?”

  I only shrugged. I didn’t want to say the same lame lie twice in a row.

  “Did that loser hurt you?” Terry asked sharply.

  “The loser you’ve been friends with for twenty years?” I asked. Terry only arched an eyebrow. “No,” I answered feebly. “We’re just at a crossroads.”

  Terry frowned. “I’m very sorry to hear it,” he said. Then he sighed laboriously. “I guess that explains why you called.”

  I blushed pink. I had been hoping my tiny come-on would go unnoticed. But he only said, “So are you planning to sell, then? I have the perfect buyer for you. Actually, three perfect buyers. One of the families, though, you would really love—”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I am going to try to keep the house for now. I just . . .” I thought about saying I wanted to spend some time with him. Or wanted to try an evening with a man not my husband. Or wanted to have sex with him and then have him tell John out of spite. “I just wanted to talk the house over with you, figure out what my options were, figure out what it was worth.”

  Terry nodded. “Smart. Smart. I assume since you’re an at-home mother, you’ll keep the house in a divorce?”

  I thought about this. Seeing as John was in love with a woman in Hong Kong, the chance of a battle over PA real estate seemed low. “I assume so,” I said.

  “
In that case, I need to go take a look at your powder room. Last time I think I remember mentioning how inexpensive it is to gussy up a powder room? I have the perfect handyman to refer. He could throw up some nice wallpaper in there, maybe do a floating vanity? Easy equity; buyers love it.”

  Terry disappeared down the hall. I almost fell over from relief the minute he left the room. Spitefulness or no, I didn’t want this man here in the house alone with me. I had wanted to feel adored, but only by my husband. I didn’t want to be intimate with anyone but John, and I couldn’t imagine ever feeling any other way. As angry as I was, I still loved John, a feeling so real and so inexplicable it was like an itch on an amputated limb. I got through dinner with Terry that night, which was easy, since now that I was available he seemed to have zero interest in flirting, and then I vowed that that would be my last attempt at dating until at least one of my kids was in college.

  But now I seem to have made a date. And I am not dreading it at all. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

  —

  It is 1:50 p.m. in New York City.

  I have talked to my children twice today already. Given a fairly successful presentation to a large audience. Had a calamari salad and a glass of white wine for lunch. Walked through several shops without buying anything. Gotten six continuing ed hours. Seriously considered a quickie manicure and then come to my senses.

  It is while I am circling the coffee cart waiting for my, well, my date and pretending to look like I am going somewhere that I run into Kathryn, of last night’s wine reception. She is looking a little softer today—maybe from a good night’s sleep, or maybe because I now know she doesn’t bite—but her manner remains as refreshingly sharp and familiar.