Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  They were in the staff room, just the two of them, which is how it was going to be for the rest of the summer. Sunny and Kit. Kit and Sunny. Or, as Evelyn had taken to saying each time they passed her desk, “Kit and her little bundle of sunshine.”

  Kit examined her sandwich, turning it over in her hand. It looked all right. A little mustard had leaked through one of the holes in the bread, but other than that, it looked fine, like a ham sandwich was supposed to look.

  “What?” she said, waiting for an answer before putting it in her mouth.

  “It’s a pig,” Sunny said. “You are about to eat a pig.”

  “Well, technically, yes,” Kit said. “Ham does come from a pig. So do pork chops and spare ribs.” Sometimes, Kit was learning, it seemed best to pretend Sunny was a visitor from another country who was unfamiliar with local customs.

  “Pigs have a face,” she said.

  Kit was confused. “Yes,” she said, still poised to take a bite. “So do you. So do I.”

  “Right,” Sunny said. “I wouldn’t eat you, and you wouldn’t eat me.”

  “That’s why we don’t eat each other?” Kit said. Was this fifteen-year-old logic? We didn’t eat each other because we had faces? More likely it was thirtysomething-year-old logic that Sunny had picked up from her vegan, nonpatriarchal parents. Say what you will about parents called “Mom” or “Dad,” she thought, in her experience they never made you feel guilty for eating a ham sandwich.

  “It’s one reason,” Sunny said. “And anyway, who are we to have power over other animals? Why do humans get to do that?”

  Kit felt a shiver of recognition quickly snake up her spine. She knew that Sunny was making a statement, not asking a question, but even so, there was, in fact, an answer: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

  The words slid off Kit’s tongue like orange Jell-O at a church supper, though she hadn’t learned them in church, but in her “Bible As Literature” class, sophomore spring, many years before.

  “It’s from the Bible. The book of Genesis. Some people take it as the word of God,” she said as Sunny grimaced and let out a short groan. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that that’s where they got the idea.”

  “Well, it’s a bad one,” Sunny said. “Like a lot of other things in the Bible.”

  So that’s what they could talk about if they had to talk, Kit decided, grabbing her keys and bag and heading out the door. Theology.

  * * *

  The door may open, but the room is altered.

  —Adrienne Rich

  Monday mornings were so reliably slow at the library that Evelyn used the time to do that day’s crossword puzzle, calling from the foyer to the reading room when she was stuck on a clue. “Who said ‘I pity the fool’?” she’d call out, and when no one answered, she’d say, “Three letters”—silence—“come on, people.” And if Kit, or Chuck, or Barbara, or one of the handful of patrons didn’t yell out, “Try Mr. T,” she’d dial up the station house and ask Jeffrey or Jack. When they didn’t know, she’d say, “Well, tell me something you do know,” and ask them who had been hauled in for DUI over the weekend, and who was sleeping it off in the drunk tank and did their mother know.

  “Aren’t there laws about that?” Kit asked Chuck the first time she heard this, and the handyman rolled his eyes, covered his throat, and let out a metallic “Ha!”

  When she first started at the library, Kit would arrive on Monday morning freshly showered and ready to do something—anything—only to be greeted by her own footsteps echoing off the worn linoleum floor. Bored and worried that she’d be out of a job as soon as someone realized Riverton didn’t need a reference librarian after all, Kit busied herself by roaming the stacks looking for books that were out of order.

  The bookcases were tall and made from the trees that used to fill the forests outside town, forests that were now given over to the tract homes just outside of town. Maple and oak, planed by hand and bleached by time and the sun, they stood in long rows, one after the other, like sentinels. Kit would run her fingers over the wood, tracing the path of all the fingers that had come before hers, more than a hundred years of fingers, whose cumulative touch had worn the varnish bare in spots. She thought of the people whose fingers those were—mill workers and mill owners, shopkeepers, teachers, students, immigrants—not bothering to wonder where she fit in, knowing that she didn’t.

  Fiction, nonfiction. Biography, memoir. Science, psychology. History. Everything had its place. That was the beauty of libraries. No surprises except when someone screwed up, or was lazy, or was a thief. On those first Monday mornings, when Kit would patrol the stacks on the lookout for disorder and not find the third volume of a six-volume set, or notice that there was a second copy of a book that didn’t have a first one, she’d fill out a missing book form and put it in an expanding accordion file, until Barbara Goodspeed took her aside one day and told her to stop. “Our funding depends on the size of our collection,” she said, meaning that none of those books was going to be replaced—there was no money for that and there would be even less if this fiction wasn’t maintained.

  Kit retreated to her desk in the reading room, content to peruse the Sunday papers from cities she’d never visited and, if it was an especially slow morning, comb through the copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry that she’d found on the giveaway rack. It was the same edition she’d had in college, only this one’s spine was not cracked in so many places the binding was flaking off. She’d open the book randomly, looking for something she couldn’t quite describe, some combination of wisdom, solace, companionship, and voice, as if it were a Magic 8 Ball, or a prayer.

  Then Sunny showed up, and the poetry book was left in the desk drawer, and it was back to busywork, anything to keep the girl occupied and at arm’s length, even though Kit could recognize something in Sunny that, while mirroring her own reticence, was fighting it, too. She was an odd duck, that girl, but so was she, as if one were a merganser and the other a bufflehead, alike enough in their differences to know they were related. What did it matter? Sunny would be gone in twelve weeks, then eleven, then ten, and the quiet of Monday morning would settle over Kit again like the falling motes of dust illuminated by the windows ringing the perimeter wall.

  * * *

  Sunny/co-sleeping

  Willow says that one of the great disappointments of her life is that I did not nurse past when I was out of diapers. When you’re part of the homeschooling/no-schooling movement you run into kids like that, big kids who stick their heads under their mothers’ shirts and come out a few minutes later with milk on their chin and burp really loudly. My teeth came in early and sharp, and I guess I used them enough that Willow gave up and switched me to solid food before I turned one. “That’s when I knew you’d be different,” she likes to tell me, and what I am pretty sure she means is that’s when she knew I’d be different from her.

  Everyone who meets her loves Willow. She’s that kind of person. When she meets you for the first time she gives you a big hug and looks you in the eye and tells you how happy she is to know you. The thing is it’s not for show. She really is happy to know you. She’s that kind of person, too. I’m more like my father: act first, ask questions second, which is why I don’t think he should have been as angry as he was about the dictionary. Willow calmed him down. She usually does. Her voice is soothing. Steve calls it “snake charming,” as in “Are you going to snake charm me into giving you my cinnamon toast?” Well, yes.

  Willow’s snake charming couldn’t keep me in the family bed, though. The family bed is when the whole family sleeps together. It’s very popular among the homeschool/no-school contingent. Maybe we have more time to spend in bed than families that have to get up to go to school. Co-sleeping, which is also what they
call it, is supposed to encourage bonding between parents and children, but in our family it was just the opposite. When my parents rustled the sheets I’d sit up and want to know what was going on, and when I heard them whispering I’d want to know what they were saying and then I’d get angry if they said “grown-up stuff.” Then Steve would get angry, and Willow would be caught in between us, literally, since I was on one side of her and Steve was on the other. She would talk in her snake charmer’s voice and try to get us to do her special breathing, and most of the time I would fall back to sleep but Steve wouldn’t, and then he’d be grumpy the next day and yawn a lot so we would know how tired he was. For my fourth birthday, they got me my own bed. They made like it was a big deal—“a big kid’s bed,” they kept calling it—and Willow had tears in her eyes when she said it.

  “It’s not like she’s moving away,” Steve said.

  “No,” Willow said, “but I can see it now. This is the beginning. My duckling is fledging.”

  She buried me in a big hug. Then Steve hugged her, which meant hugging me, too.

  “Family sandwich,” he said. “Tastier than a family bed because Sunny’s the cheese!”

  He and Willow squeezed tighter. Somewhere above me, I could hear them kissing.

  * * *

  the river / Is a strong brown god . . .

  —T. S. Eliot

  Kit bought a house. How could she not—they were giving it away.

  “It’s the economic downturn,” Daisy, the anxious, perfectly coiffed real estate agent told her each time they went to a showing. “Their loss is your gain.”

  And Kit could see it in the abandoned swing sets and hot tubs and tree forts and gardens, evidence that whoever lived there before had left in a hurry, pursued, she figured, by loan officers and collection agents. People who planted hostas and daylilies and echinacea—perennials—assumed they were not going anywhere. People who attached guy wires to a Little Tikes playhouse were planning on staying put.

  “Their loss is your gain,” Daisy said for the four hundredth time.

  “I get that,” Kit said, surveying the neighborhood.

  “It’s a buyer’s market,” Daisy said.

  “So you say,” Kit said.

  The house in question was a four-bedroom town house in a formerly gated community about twenty minutes outside of Riverton. It had granite countertops in the kitchen, cherry vanities in the bathrooms, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere but the foyer (which was terra-cotta tile), skylights and energy-efficient windows, and a two-bay garage, and resembled every other town house on the street and on the streets that snaked behind and around it, many of which had for sale or foreclosed signs displayed on their still-trimmed lawns.

  “It seems a little lonely here,” Kit said.

  “Maybe,” said Daisy, “but this house is a steal, and as soon as the economy turns around this place is going to be hot again. You know what they say, ‘buy low, sell high.’ Also,” she added, “the unit comes with a key to the clubhouse.” She pointed to a low-slung white brick building down the street.

  “What happens at the clubhouse?” Kit asked.

  “That’s the thing,” Daisy said. “Anything you want.”

  Kit could feel Daisy’s desperation. It was making her tired. “I don’t need four bedrooms,” she said, and before Daisy could explain how she could turn one of them into an exercise room and another into a sewing studio, Kit was walking toward her car.

  * * *

  And then she went and bought a house that had more than four bedrooms. It had five, though three were tiny, no bigger than monks’ cells, built for the serving girls who worked for the mill owner whose palatial residence stood a few acres back until it burned down decades ago. 1635 Coolidge was a two-story carriage house with rotting window sashes and plank floors that doubled as the ceiling upstairs. No one had lived there in years. One bathroom reeked of mildew, and the toilet in the other was filled with brown rusty water; there were spiderwebs hanging off spiderwebs and random piles of mouse droppings, little cairns in a forest of decay. The street itself was in similar disrepair, potholed and lined with cars and houses that had seen better days. But there was a park, now, where the mansion had been, and she could see the river from the upstairs bedroom, and Kit could imagine lying there in the morning watching the rising sun reflected on the water, or, even better, climbing to the belvedere up top and watching it go down.

  “I like it,” Kit said as Daisy tried to talk her out of it. But she already knew it was nutty: the wiring was old, the plumbing was older, the one tree out front, an ancient elm, was threatening to take the whole place down. But it felt like where she was supposed to live. Inexplicably, this shell of a house felt like home.

  * * *

  Sunny/notebook

  There are mysteries everywhere. Willow says you have to be open to them because that’s what makes life precious. She is often pointing them out to me, but I’ve gotten good at seeing them myself. The mystery of the morning: Kit. I don’t mean only this morning. I mean every morning. Every morning I get to work and she’s there first. That’s no mystery—she walks to work and I have to get a ride because we live nine miles away. It’s been the same each morning when I walk in the door: Evelyn is counting the petty cash she’ll use for fines, Chuck is making sure that the trash cans he emptied the night before are still empty, Barbara is in her office with the door closed, talking on the phone to her husband Larry’s caretakers—he has Alzheimer’s and lives in a “home”—and Kit is at the reference desk, reading the newspapers and jotting things down in a small spiral notebook.

  Like today, when I said hi to Kit and she looked up, startled, and said, “Oh, wow, I didn’t know you’d be here so early.” And I said, “The judge says I have to work nine to five, and it’s nine o’clock.” Actually, it was 9:13. Technically, I was late. There is something wrong with the starter on our Subaru, according to my father, who has been trying to fix it himself because he thinks you shouldn’t own things if you don’t know how they work, though in this case he does know how it works and can’t seem to fix it anyway.

  “What are you doing, exactly?” I asked. I’d been wondering before but was too chicken to bring it up.

  Kit closed the notebook and dropped it in her bag. “Reading the paper,” she said. “The papers. That’s what I do before I put them out on the racks.”

  “And you take notes?” I asked. This was the mystery. Who takes notes when they read the newspaper?

  “You might say that,” Kit said in a way that made it clear she was not going to say anything more about it. “Here,” she said, pushing a copy of the New York Times in my direction. “Read it.”

  “What am I reading it for?” I wanted to know.

  “What do you mean, what are you reading it for? You’re reading to know what’s going on in the world.”

  Was she angry? She seemed a little angry. I hoped she wasn’t angry. At home Steve was already calling Kit the “boss lady.” “She’s not like that,” I told him, but how could I really know? It was just a feeling I was getting. Kit was cool. Cool like a little distant, and cool like the kind of person who just seemed to know things, things she could just pull out of the air, like knowing why there were steps leading up to the front door of the library, or that Bible verse. Even though her hair was a little wild and she wore Birkenstocks, she wasn’t like any of my parents’ friends. I couldn’t imagine Kit at one of their potlucks or scavenging fallen apples to make cider. Don’t call them hippies, though. “Hippie” is a historical term from the sixties, according to Steve, who was born just over the line, in 1973. “We are not hippies,” he likes to say. “We’re alternatives. We live an alternative lifestyle.” In other words, we don’t eat meat. We oppose factory farming. We reuse, reduce, recycle. Willow says that hippies basically wrecked the world. According to her, once hippies turned thirty, they cut their hair and started wars and developed GMOs and industrial agriculture, and that’s how we got to the mess we are
in now, even if we do have a black president.

  And yet, people often call us hippies, especially at the mall. “Go see what the hippie family is selling today,” they say. It’s embarrassing. I know they don’t mean anything. I’ve done it myself. When I was little I called an Amish family selling wood-peg clothes racks on the side of the road hippies because they looked a little like us. (Men with beards. Women in long dresses.) I probably said, “Let’s see what the hippie family is selling today,” since I’d heard it so many times myself. Which was not half as bad as when I was seven and there was a very short woman at the playground who was somebody’s mother and I asked Willow why her little kids were taller than she was and I didn’t use my indoor voice. Willow, being Willow, said, “Well, Sunny, that is one of life’s mysteries.”

  And now Kit was one of life’s mysteries, too. Was she angry? Did she like me? What about that notebook?

  “I just thought, since you were taking notes, there was some other reason we were reading the paper,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Nope,” says Kit, hardly looking up from the Wall Street Journal she had spread out on the desk. “Just read.”

  So I sat down at the table opposite her and skimmed the front page. Oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico because an oil rig had exploded, Germany beat Australia in the first round of the World Cup, and Afghanistan was rich in minerals but that might not turn out to be a good thing. An article called “Do Kids Still Matter to Marriage?” was on page C3 and I read it all the way through. The gist was that fewer and fewer people think children are necessary to have a happy marriage, and that children are “less central” to our lives. Ha! Not in our house. In our house, I’m the cheese. In our house, I’m the sun around which my planetary parents revolve, as they have told me all my life. If it weren’t for me, they might not still be together. This they’ve never said, not to me, but you hear things when your bedroom shares a wall with your mother’s workshop. You hear things that you’d like to ask someone about, but the only people you can ask are the people who will get mad (Steve) or weepy (Willow).