The Book Borrower

by Alice Mattison

  Berry lived in a small two-story house with aluminum siding, in a dilapidated neighborhood. Peter drove Berry’s big old green Ford into the driveway. She’s home? Ruben said. She doesn’t mind?

  —She’s always home. And I don’t know what she minds.

  A yellow dog came to the door when Peter turned the key. He looked like Mac, but he was a somewhat bigger, younger dog, with a slightly different expression. He licked Ruben’s hand solemnly. He had made his way around something and he blocked the door. Ruben pushed him to enter. A shape as tall as she stood just behind the door, so it couldn’t open all the way. It was a stone carving, almost abstract, of a man’s head. Ruben said, I didn’t think they’d be so big.

  —This one was outside for a long time. In a garden of a private school in Pittsburgh. When the school closed, they told Cooper she could have the sculpture if she’d come and get it. She drove down there and got people to help, and put it on her truck.

  —She has a truck?

  —She used to.

  The head was so big that its bigness—in the ordinary room with its two windows side by side and broken Venetian blinds—was more noticeable than whether it was good. Ruben had a feeling it was good, because it stirred her. She wanted to touch it. She wanted the huge stone tongue, which protruded slightly, to lick her.

  Now she heard sounds. Berry was coming down the stairs. She came in saying, Is this the day? She was in the familiar green smock and sweatpants, and her hair stood straight up.

  —The day? said Ruben.

  —No, Peter said. It’s two weeks off. She means visiting your class.

  Berry looked doubtful, and Peter said, Come off it, Coop. Stop pretending you’re senile. It won’t work with me.

  Ruben said, I came to see your sculptures.

  —Big enough for you? she grinned. She slapped the head affectionately. Berry looked powerful, but she was short, smaller than what she’d made. Your mother has new glasses, she said to Peter. They were Ruben’s new metal-frame glasses.

  —Is it all right to touch them? Ruben asked.

  —Sure. Kids climbed on this one. Berry slapped it again and looked at it critically. I don’t like the left nostril, she said.

  Ruben looked. The nostrils were cone-shaped indentations in the stone of the nose. They were at different angles from each other. She said, Your left or the head’s left?

  Frank. I call him Frank. Frank’s left. But maybe it’s all right. Maybe it is effectively disturbing. Ha! She gave a half laugh, half snort.

  Ruben looked at the two other sculptures in the room. There was no furniture. Berry said, I used to rent this place. The land-lord was afraid my stuff would break through the floors. So I said, Shut up—I’ll buy it.

  —The floors look all right, Ruben said.

  —Of course they are.

  —Of course they are not, said Peter. You know you were warned about that. He spoke as if he’d been with her for years, as if he’d always partly been Berry’s. It was a relief.

  The other two sculptures weren’t quite as large as the head. One was painted in wide orange and green stripes. It looked like a big orange and green rock. The other was blue, a big uncontrolled shapeless thing. Ruben loved it, for some reason. The surface was pitted like something you might see in a planetarium, and Ruben wondered if all the holes and marks had been made by Berry’s chisel. The dark blue paint must have been poured over it, because in some places it didn’t quite cover and in other places it had pooled. It was hard not to try and stick one’s fingers into the paint-filled holes. I love this, Ruben gasped, and giggled a little. She felt love for the sculpture in her abdomen, in that sore place that was always worn out from crying, and she hoped she was not going to cry again. It was April by now. She was tired of constantly feeling terrible.

  She looked again at the less dangerous orange and green rock. It had been painted with a careless wide brush; she could see the ridges the brush had left. Some of the stripes overlapped and made strips of brown. Ruben looked around, not knowing what to say about the orange and green rock and the sad little brown strips. She could see into the next room—more sculptures; several more heads. She went to look. They looked like Easter Island sculptures and made her uncomfortable in just the way those always did: she was afraid of being screamed at by the maker. In the case of the Easter Island heads, it seemed that the sculptors, hidden for millennia, would emerge and pro-test all this crappy staring and photographing. She thought Berry might object to her looking, too, as if the heads were secrets.

  She and Peter and the dog toured all the sculptures in the room while Berry stayed in the front room, poking and muttering. Peter said, There are more upstairs, and they went up-stairs, too. The rooms seemed dustier and more disorganized, as if the sculptures there had been left half done and Berry still meant to get back to them.

  —Are these newer?

  —Mostly.

  —I don’t like these as much, Ruben said.

  —Most people don’t, said Peter, but these got her a lot of notoriety. He ran his hand along a heavy metal tube. There were many of them, laid in piles or fastened together with rivets, in heaps like huge piles of pick-up sticks.

  —They look like gun barrels.

  —Yes.

  But before Ruben had finished looking, Peter became restless. I have to go, he said. I have to meet Mary Grace. She thought he didn’t want her to see the back rooms of the second floor, where Berry lived. She followed Peter down the stairs and out of the house. Shouldn’t I go and thank her? she said, as if Peter was any authority on etiquette.

  —No.

  —Doesn’t she need to be carried up the stairs?

  —No. She just does that for show.

  They got back into Berry’s big car. As he backed it up, Berry Cooper appeared on the porch, hands in the pockets of her green smock, and called clearly, I’ll need a slide projector.

  —Fine, fine! Ruben shouted eagerly back. Thank you! But they were already in the street.

  Peter drove fast. About Mary Grace, Ruben said tentatively as they drove. All this with Mary Grace .. . I love Mary Grace. . . .

  —You don’t know what it is to love Mary Grace, Peter said. He glanced toward his mother, just a long enough look to make her worry about his driving. She looked away and scanned the quiet street, which had no traffic at all. It was Sunday morning. Peter looked sensible and serious, older than he was, with his beard and narrow face and gray shirt collar under a blue corduroy jacket. She always forgot he was less than a year older than Mary Grace because he had been alive all that winter while Mary Grace had been Deborah’s pregnancy.

  —Mom, I’m going to marry her. She’s my wife.

  —You haven’t already married her?

  —No.

  —Sweetie, she’s twenty-one. You’re twenty-two. She’s a mess. Can’t you watch out for her, a little?

  —Will you shut up? said Peter. They’d reached their house and he swung the car to the wrong side of the street, so she’d be nearer the curb, reached across her, and opened the door.

  —Shouldn’t—but he was getting ready to drive away. She got out, angry with herself because she wasn’t angry enough with him. She didn’t see him for days after that. Then came brief sightings. Cold cereal. She hoped he was eating something, someplace, in addition to cold cereal. A lot of his clothes were gone. He’d moved out, apparently to the Laidlaws’. She didn’t see Mary Grace or Berry. Sometimes she came home and found Peter in the kitchen reading the paper, standing next to the counter with it spread out in front of him. Sometimes she thought he came home simply to read the paper, although surely Jeremiah got it.

  On the morning of the last class, with mixed feelings about sharing this odd group the last time she’d see them, she drove to Berry’s, not knowing if the old woman would have remembered or taken her seriously, but there she was on the porch with a big old tote bag. They went out to breakfast, as promised, and Berry had a big omelet. Ruben wanted to talk about Pete
r, but they didn’t talk much. Ruben tried to tell Berry about the course and the students.

  —Grown women, Berry said. I approve. In the car on the way to the college, Ruben said she hadn’t seen much of Peter lately, and that reminded Berry, who sat forward in the passenger seat, playing with the clasp of her shoulder harness, of the time she’d told off a gallery owner because the gallery was never open, and what he’d said to her. One of my pieces could be seen through the window, Berry said. Just a corner of it. And that was all.

  —Do you mean all I can see is a corner of Peter? Ruben said, laughing, but Berry didn’t answer.

  Finally, as she ushered Berry out of the parking lot and into the classroom building, Ruben said, Now, Peter’s doing his job, isn’t he?

  Berry stopped and faced her, her huge toothy smile indul-gent. It will work out, she said. I’m not so bad off, you know. I don’t need pity.

  —Of course not! said Ruben. Of course not.

  As they walked through the corridor, Berry stuck her hands in her smock pockets and wedged the canvas tote bag under one arm. It slipped out, and folders of slides fell on the floor. She stood and grinned at Ruben, hands still in her pockets, while Ruben knelt and gathered ancient envelopes and folded papers and plastic slide covers as well as naked slides in card-board frames. Some seemed to be from sets that Berry had bought—or stolen, Ruben found herself thinking—while some looked as if she’d made the photographs herself. Berry continued to smile, as if everyone knew her hands were fastened into her pockets. Maybe she couldn’t bend. Ruben feared she’d brought a mad, incoherent speaker.

  The students were subdued, for them. Some found the setting up of the slide projector, which had to be tilted over a book so it would aim properly at the screen, hilarious. A boy set it up. Ruben had forgotten this college included young boys, but during the week, presumably, there were crowds of them.

  —I almost stopped twice, Berry announced, by way of an opening, marching to the front of the room. The students organized themselves, and one or two scooted back where they belonged, having been visiting their friends across the semicircle of chairs. The chairs had attached desktops, and some of the students could barely fit into them. They were a fat group, and they stuck out their big behinds to make jokes. Now two of them, Rosemary and Lorna, scooted backwards, behinds thrust out, to their chairs: a kind of apology.

  Berry waited. Then she said, When I was young, my husband died. I had to have money. I could have stolen it, but that would have been a crime, so I worked in a restaurant. Carving stone is costly.

  The students looked baffled. They were probably surprised that Ruben hadn’t greeted them and introduced this old woman, and Ruben was surprised, too.

  —But the second time, Berry said, was different. I was al-ready old. I wasn’t too weak to make things, although, you know, you have to be strong. She raised her fist to show off her muscles. But I had a son in trouble.

  She stopped.

  —Excuse me, I don’t see the connection, Maddy said, but Berry ignored Maddy.

  —I decided to do something else. I didn’t know what. Maybe I’d work in a restaurant, except I was too old to be hired. They want you young and cute. She grinned at them. Her grin made Ruben, who was leaning on the cold radiator at the side of the room, think of a skull, of Deborah.

  —I would go away, Berry said. I could put my belongings in one of those storage places.

  The students nodded. They knew about storage places.

  —I would go to Wisconsin, where I’d never lived. If I stayed around here, I’d have to work. I would answer the phone and it would be the gallery owner. Berry paused. This is how much I loved my son.

  Norma was nodding vigorously. Ruben thought Norma might stand up and kiss Berry.

  —Did you do it? said Norma.

  —No, I didn’t, she said.

  —And what happened to your son? someone asked.

  —He died, said Berry. He stole a car and died driving it. He had robbed a gas station and the police shot him as he was trying to drive away.

  The class stared at her, and Lorna hid her face in her hands.

  —Slides, Berry said. Deirdre stood and pulled down the window shades. Everyone looked at Deirdre, and beyond her, through the three windows, at the Science Building opposite. There was just a small square of grass far below, between the buildings. They met in the Humanities Building because they were human, one of them had said. The Science Building was just like theirs: five stories high, with big windows. They were on the fifth floor, and just exactly opposite, quite close, a scaf-fold hung from the roof of the Science Building, and on it a window washer, arm working up and down, was vigorously and in a somehow lonely way washing the big mindlessly shiny windows of the Science Building. He was hidden when Deirdre closed the first shade.

  —Now that was a work of art, someone said.

  —He had a nice butt, said June.

  The third window had no shade. The room was less bright than before, but not dark. Ruben felt bad about the missing shade, whose absence she’d never noticed. With annoying slowness, Berry prepared her slide show. The student who had set up the projector offered to run it.

  The slides went by. Sculpture is three-dimensional, Ruben now remembered, and the slides were two-dimensional and faint, worse in the incomplete dimness. She undertook to ask questions. The students, for once, had turned shy. When was that made? she said. Who made it?

  —Hepworth, said Berry. 1928.

  Ruben exaggerated what she felt for the students’ sake. I don’t know how to look at it. Why do you like it?

  —Because it makes me feel sexually aroused, said Berry.

  —It’s porn? came June’s saucy voice.

  It was a rounded thing, really a big rounded rock.

  —All art is pornography, Berry said impatiently, while lowering her arm to signal she wanted the next slide, which resem-bled the previous slide. Ruben noticed that Berry’s arm had come down on Louise’s shoulder and Louise was rubbing her shoulder.

  —No, said Maddy. Art is uplifting. At least, that’s what Mrs. Ruben taught us this year.

  —Well, maybe she taught you wrong. Three more slides rap-idly went by as Berry’s arm worked up and down like a hatchet.

  —I have had three husbands and innumerable lovers, said Berry. And then she said, So far, with perfect comic timing— and Ruben felt the students swoop over to old Berry’s side, at least for the moment. Berry went on, But the best orgasm I ever had was while looking at a show of paintings.

  —Who painted them? said Rosemary.

  —Willem de Kooning, Berry said.

  The ways in which nobody in the room could respond to that were many, and nobody responded.

  This is a piece called Three Forms, Berry said now. No, that is wrong. It is called Three Uprights with Circles, Mykonos. I am fond of it. The slide showed three vertical slabs of what looked like white marble. They had holes in them, and were visible through one another. Even the imperfect photograph made Ruben want to walk around and see how they’d look from another direction.

  —Is that porn? said Rosemary.

  —No, said Berry slowly. She stared hard at it. Not porn. No arousal.

  —Then why do you like it?

  —It’s good, said Berry. Can’t you see that.’ Maybe you can’t, just seeing the slide. Didn’t you go to the Hepworth show at Yale? She stared at them. They looked uneasy. Ruben had not gone, either.

  —New Haven is less than forty miles from here. I walked there to see it, Berry said.

  —Surely you didn’t, said Ruben.

  —I did. But I suppose none of them is terribly bright. I don’t think this college has a lot of terribly bright students, she said conversationally to Ruben.

  At that Frieda stuck her legs out, leaned back in her chair, and laughed hard, and soon everybody else had decided to be amused rather than offended.

  —Giacometti, called Berry cheerfully, as the slides went by again. Moore. I like
abstract sculpture, don’t you? she said chummily to the class, and now they nodded happily. Maybe they did. You know, said Berry, it’s not supposed to be any-thing? Suddenly, after she’d insulted them, she was the students’ great friend, and they were full of questions, sharp and naive both.

  At last came a slide that was easy to see; it happened to be a dark piece, and it showed up on the screen.

  —Is that Barbara Hepworth again? Ruben said.

  —No, that’s mine, said Berry. It won a prize.

  The sculpture was a tall perforated disk. A tree stood near it, so they could see how tall.

  Berry slapped her stomach. Let it in and see if it wants any-thing, she said. See if it makes you feel good. And the students began slapping their stomachs and joking.

  —That one tastes good, said Lorna.

  —Tastes! Louise said.

  —For me, everything is food, Lorna said in the half dark. Did you see in the paper? An old man with three or four kinds of cancer wanted to die, so he asked his doctor for medicine to die. The doctor said no, he’d go to jail. Then the doctor said to the old man, Some people starve themselves, and the old man says, But eating is my greatest pleasure.

  Berry ignored her, but three or four of the women commented on the morality of physician-assisted suicide and the pleasure of eating.

  —I mean, said Lorna, he didn’t want to die at all!

  Ruben wasn’t sure. She didn’t know. Would Deborah have— Oh, enough about Deborah.

  The students began asking Berry questions. She was sitting now, on one of the desks, a dim slide forgotten behind her. They wanted to know how she worked, and Berry talked about carving stone and casting bronze. These days she sometimes fooled around with cardboard and string. You can make garbage sculpture, she said.

  —I think sculpture must be fun, Deirdre said.

  Berry looked happy for the first time. Oh, it is fun. It is fun, she said, almost kindly. She said, Resistance. Resistance is fun. Garbage, wool—that’s all right when you’re old. But when I was young! Well, you see, I had no money when I was young. I worked—I was even a prostitute, she said. A whore.