Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  “Husband. Larry,” Evelyn said by way of interpretation, as Kit, knees bent and core engaged like she’d seen on a TV strength-training fitness show, supported their boss. “Came home for the weekend from the memory care unit at Rose O’Sharon—the nursing home—for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Their kids were flying in, too, even the one that’s in the Philippines. Husband’s in the army. Or maybe navy. Friday night, Barbara hears something in the house and goes to check and sees that Larry is out of his bed, roaming around downstairs. She goes to find him, and when she does he goes ballistic, starts shouting for her to get out of his house, and starts beating her up. And he’s not a small guy, especially now, eating that starchy crap they serve at that place.”

  “He didn’t know it was me.” This was Barbara, mumbling into Kit’s shoulder. She had found her words again, but barely.

  “Of course,” Kit said as she mechanically patted Barbara’s back the way she remembered being consoled as a child when something didn’t go right. This, she knew, was a different order of magnitude of not going right, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances: it had been years since another person’s body was in such close proximity to hers, and years since the tears on her neck were not her own.

  “You don’t understand,” Barbara said clearly and forcefully, abruptly disengaging from Kit. “He was surprised. I surprised him. He got agitated. It’s a real thing that happens to Alzheimer’s patients. It’s called sundowning. His doctor says that when I surprised him it triggered his fight-or-flight response and he just reacted the way his brain told him to react. It was not his fault.” She looked at them defiantly and, with two black eyes and a broken nose, like a boxer challenging them to take a swing.

  “So,” Kit said slowly, not wanting to antagonize, “what are you going to do?”

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Sunny said, stepping into the main building from the vestibule before Barbara could answer. Kit turned at the sound of her voice, not sure what to say. Barbara turned, too, but in the opposite direction, walked into her office and shut the door.

  “Loose lips sink ships,” Evelyn said to Kit, nodding in Sunny’s direction.

  “I’m pretty sure that ship is on its way to the bottom of the sea,” Kit said.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Sunny said, ping-ponging her head from one woman to the other and back again.

  “Later,” Kit said, which was either a good-bye to Evelyn or a promise to Sunny, but in either case, it was her signal for Sunny to follow her to the reference section. The library wasn’t open yet, so the reading carrels along the perimeter were empty, and Chuck’s polish job on the long oak tables in the main reading room hadn’t yet been erased, and quiet filled the room like weather. Sunny wanted to ask Kit what was going on, but she knew better, so she just walked alongside, hoping her patience would be rewarded.

  “You know what I can’t stand?” Kit said as they passed five carts of books that needed to be reshelved. “I can’t stand the words ‘reading for pleasure.’ All these parents—most of whom haven’t read a single book since high school, unless maybe they picked up The Da Vinci Code—drag their kids in here every summer and say, ‘Find something to read for pleasure,’ which just means that most of the time the message these kids are getting is that reading is not pleasurable. Do you see how that works? It’s like reading is a punishment. I hate that.”

  Sunny looked at her curiously. “Wow,” she said.

  “Wow what?”

  “Wow—I guess you really care about that.”

  “I guess I do,” Kit said, though her little outburst surprised even herself. She had spent a long time being angry, and though, over time, her anger had receded like water after a flood, like water after a flood it had left channels that could backfill and overflow quickly, without warning.

  “Anger is good,” Dr. Bondi told her. “Anger lets you know what you’re feeling.”

  “Yes,” Kit told him. “It lets you know you’re feeling angry.”

  “True enough, Kit,” he said. “It does. But it’s more than that. You know when you’re on the highway and you stop at a rest area and there’s a big map of the region and a big red dot that says you are here?” Dr. Bondi said. “That’s anger. That’s what anger can tell you. It can tell you where you are.”

  Kit thought about this as she handed the day’s New York Times to Sunny and took the Financial Times for herself, holding the closed end of its slippery plastic wrapper and watching it slide out and drop with a satisfying thud on her desk.

  “No,” she decided, Bondi was wrong. The metaphor was wrong. Anger could be like pain: you think it’s your ankle that hurts when it’s actually your knee. Anger could be referred. She pulled out her notebook, opened it to a blank page, wrote down the date, then watched as her pen stayed suspended above the otherwise blank page.

  * * *

  Sunny/wilderness

  That night, the night we left our apartment, I think we drove a long way, because when I woke up it was raining, and Steve said that even though we couldn’t see them, there were mountains all around us and did I want a cookie. This was big: Steve and Willow had different ideas about sugar, and because Willow was certain it would turn me into a hyperactive monster child, I almost never had it. Offering me a cookie meant that Steve had won whatever argument they’d had when I was asleep, which was very unusual, given Willow’s way with words. Either that, or this cookie was Willow’s idea, but she didn’t want me to know that because it would open the door to more cookies and maybe cupcakes that weren’t baked with stevia. I grabbed the cookie quickly, before someone changed their mind. It was chocolate chip, but in place of the chocolate chips there were M&M’s, and picking them out and eating them one by one kept me occupied for a long time. Every once in a while, though, I’d asked where we were going and when we would get there, and either Steve or Willow would say, “All will be revealed in good time, Sunny. All in good time.”

  At some point I realized we weren’t pulling the trailer anymore, and then I wondered if I’d imagined the trailer, and this time when I asked, one of my parents, I don’t remember which, said that we’d dropped it off back in Pennsylvania, but when I asked where in Pennsylvania, all that they said was “Somewhere safe.”

  I remember stopping once to pee on the side of the road when the rain let up, which is when we all realized I wasn’t wearing shoes and that my shoes might be back in a box in the trailer, which made Willow groan and Steve swear under his breath. He carried me outside and had me stand on the tops of his shoes and hold both of his hands with both of mine and lean back so I wouldn’t pee on him. Willow said it looked like we were contra dancing, which we do sometimes, or he was teaching me how to do a backward dive, which he never has.

  A couple of hours later we stopped again and Steve took the map from Willow, traced a route with his fingers, and declared that we were almost there. I asked again where “there” was and got the same answer as before, so went back to looking out the window, counting the few cars that passed. I could read well enough to know we were in New York somewhere and, with the fog lifting, could see the mountains Steve had been talking about. We turned off the main road onto a bumpy dirt road, then turned off that road onto an even narrower one that was so rutted every few seconds I almost hit my head on the ceiling of the car. And then we slowed and came to a stop because the road stopped. It just ended. There were a couple of other cars there, and Steve pulled up behind one of them, turned off the engine, let out a big sigh, and said, “Honey, we’re home.” Willow laughed, but I couldn’t see what was so funny or how we could be home. We were in the middle of the forest in the middle of nowhere with nothing around except big, tall spruce trees. I thought they were pine trees, but they turned out to be spruce.

  There was a path, and a sign, and a book you were supposed to write your name in to say you were there and how long you expected to stay, and I wanted to put down our names but my parents both said no at the s
ame time and kept walking. Because it had been raining, the ground was squishy and covered in soft brown and yellow pine needles that stuck to the bottoms of my feet. In a couple of minutes we came to a pond where the trail split, and we went to the right. Steve said he was going to run ahead and scout it out before we made a final decision. What this decision was, he didn’t say. Willow and I kept walking. We heard a loon on the pond and some squirrels in the branches overhead, but aside from those, nothing until we heard Steve jogging back toward us. “Found it!” he said, and had us turn around and walk back to the car to get our stuff: bedrolls, a tent, a camping stove, a bag of food from our house, and some clothes. Then we walked back along the path, past the place where we’d turned around, until we came to a tree with a sign marked #3 and a fire pit with a bunch of old burned-out beer cans in it and some split logs stacked nearby.

  “Look, we’ve got our own beach,” Steve said after we’d dropped all our junk in a heap on the ground, and led us between the trees to where the water lapped at a small patch of sand. There was nothing around—nothing but water surrounded by tall green mountains. It felt like we were the first, and the only, people who had ever been there.

  “Go ahead and yell,” Steve told me.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Just do it.” He was smiling. “Shout your name.”

  So I did, and within seconds, my own name, in my own voice, came booming right back at me.

  * * *

  All those books—another world—just waiting . . .

  —Nikki Giovanni

  In the four years that Kit had been working at the Riverton library, she noticed that most patrons fell into one of four categories. There were the retirees, all older men, who treated the place like a clubhouse. They came first thing in the morning with their refill mugs of coffee, went straight for the newspapers and magazines, grabbed a few and set up shop in the easy chairs not far from the reference desk. They’d read and sip, read and slurp, blow their noses, clear their throats, shuffle pages, trade publications, quietly discuss the merits of Randy Moss and Tedy Bruschi, Barack Obama versus John McCain, each guy having his say until they weren’t quiet anymore and Kit had to tell them to turn down the dial, which gave them the opportunity to flirt with her, which they did competitively and with panache. Kit protested and shooed them away, which only emboldened them, since they all knew her protest was a feint, Kit most of all. She had grown accustomed to them showing up every morning like the newspapers tossed at dawn onto the library’s front steps. The Four Quartet, she called them, first to herself, later out loud, and they loved it, not that they got the nod to T. S. Eliot, but because it meant she liked them even more than she let on. Over time they shortened it to the Four, as in “The Four would like to take you out,” to which she’d routinely reply, “Shh.” There was Patrick, the widowed general practitioner who was always absent on Wednesdays when he took the bus down to the casino on the Indian reservation to, as he liked to say, “enhance the kids’ inheritance—or not”; Carl, the group’s cutup, which everyone said was appropriate since he was a barber; Rich, who started as a stock boy at Derry Paper and rose to vice president; and the other Rich, who drove Riverton’s only taxi, back when Riverton had a taxi, which was back before the other Rich’s company sat idle. Like clockwork, the Four were in at 10:00 and gone by 11:30, 11:30 being the time that the cafeteria at the Riverton Mercy Hospital—the only establishment left in town that cooked food for the public and took money for it—began serving lunch.

  Then there were the unemployed. They came in, used the computers, flipped impatiently through What Color Is Your Parachute?, paid ten cents a page to print their résumés, studied the autobiographies of billionaires, and combed through every “help wanted” section in every newspaper that still had one. They were a transient, ever-changing bunch, so absorbed by their quest they rarely acknowledged they were all traveling in the same swamped boat. Someone would be there day after day for weeks, and then disappear, or come in once, or just a few times, and Kit never knew if they had gotten a job or given up or moved away. They were not all men, either. Downsizing turned out to be an equal opportunity unemployer.

  Toddlers and their caretakers were the third and fourth groups. Kit had learned not to call the adults “parents.” “Caretaker” was neutral. It didn’t imply status. If it was judgmental, it was judgmental in the right way. When she started at Riverton, Kit was amazed at how many children in this relatively poor city were brought to the library by nannies. But when she realized she was seeing those same women on the streets around her house strolling arm in arm with the fathers of the children they were bringing to story hour, it dawned on her that these were not nannies at all, they were mothers. Her neighbors. Refugees from Burundi and Somalia and Nepal and Ecuador. So much for not making assumptions.

  This cohort—“cohort” being another word, Kit had learned, from Evelyn of all people, that could not be construed as culturally insensitive—arrived just after lunchtime, for story hour. The children sat on the floor around the reader, while the adults stood behind them in concentric circles that reminded Kit of ripples in water after a rock was tossed in.

  Story hour was once a week, on Wednesdays, and now that Sunny was around, it fell to her to choose the storybooks, read the storybooks, and pick up the detritus after the tide of little children receded. “This is going to be your domain,” Barbara told her early on. “I’m sure you’ll be great.” And she was. She let the children sit in her lap. She let them play with her hair and pull on her shoelaces. And she read, as Kit’s third grade teacher liked to say, “with expression,” giving elephants deep nasally voices, or having mules stutter and frogs say “ribbit ribbit,” and when, in the story, Clifford the Big Red Dog played dead, she’d fall out of her chair onto her back and stick her arms and legs straight up in the air, as her audience howled with laughter.

  “You are quite the actor,” Kit said. “They love you.”

  “Goes with the territory,” Sunny said as patches of red bloomed on her cheeks.

  “Which territory? You’re blushing.”

  “The whole homeschool/no-school territory. Older kids and younger kids are always tossed together. No one really makes a distinction. When you’re little, you idolize the older kids, and when you’re older, the little kids idolize you, and you get used to entertaining them.”

  “Well, it’s nice,” Kit said. “You should do this more than once a week.”

  And so she did. At first it was Monday and Wednesday, then it was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then it was daily, because contrary to the law of supply and demand, the more she did it, the more popular it became. For an hour every afternoon, the basement of the library was packed with happy future readers sitting knee-to-knee, and for another hour after that, Evelyn was busy checking out The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and other books Sunny was putting in the small, clammy, eager hands of her biggest fans.

  Their parents, though, no matter how flimsy their command of English, Kit refused to call “future readers.” Kit called them “readers,” called it to their faces because many of them were just becoming literate, and calling them readers gave them a boost. “How much does it cost?” people would ask when she guided them to books she thought they might like or find helpful, and then be confused when she said the words “nothing” and “free.” “Nothing” and “free” were words they knew by definition only. The idea that they could come to this place and take whatever they wanted was crazy and fantastical and proof that America was great. Once they understood that Kit was serious, that the books on the shelves were theirs for the taking, they came to the library with plastic grocery bags balled up in their pockets and walked around the place filling them indiscriminately, like participants in a shopping spree contest with fifteen minutes to race through the store tossing king crab legs and T-bone steaks and lamb chops and whatever else they could fit into their carts. For the first time in a long time, books were flying out th
e door of the Riverton Public Library.

  “And we’ve got Sunny Arkinsky to thank,” Barbara said at the end-of-the-month staff meeting.

  “What kind of name is Arkinsky, anyway?” Evelyn wanted to know. “I’m thinking it could be Polish. One of my girls went out with a Polack once. He had a ‘-ski’ at the end of his name. But Jews have that, too, don’t they?”

  No one responded, not Sunny, and not even Kit, who knew that Arkinsky had been invented by Sunny’s parents, apostles of the Rainbow Gathering, to infuse their baby with its spirit. Arkinsky, from arc en ciel: French for “rainbow.”

  “Moving on,” Barbara said. “People are taking out lots of books, which is good, but not bringing them back, which is bad. Or when they do bring them back, they’re coming back late, and when we tell them they have to pay a fine, they tell us that you”—she pointed at Kit—“told them it didn’t cost anything to borrow books, which is technically true, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. She still had raccoon eyes, but the bandage was off her nose and the swelling had gone down and she was back to being all business. If she wasn’t going to say any more about what happened that night, and what would happen in the future, no one else would, either.

  “But our numbers are up, right?” Kit said. “Thanks to Sunny.”

  “Yes,” Barbara said. “Thanks to Sunny. But boots on the ground, as our generals like to say, are not to our advantage if we’re losing our collection and losing revenue and don’t have the funds to replace missing books let alone buy new ones.”

  “Why don’t we limit the number of books people can take out when they first get their library card,” Kit suggested. “A probation period until they prove they’ll bring them back.”

  “Good idea,” Barbara said.

  “Good idea if you’re not the one who has to be the bad guy,” Evelyn said.

  “Actually, Evelyn,” Barbara said as a sly smile infiltrated her usual poker face, “I think this plays to your strengths.”