Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  Once she went into one of those coffee places, she thought maybe she'd meet people there. But they were very young and asking for things she'd never heard of— skim lattes, macchiatios. And they charged what she considered an arm and a leg. And the conversations were ridiculous, people talking about horoscopes: “Are you a Capricorn, that means you're a warrior, but there must be something rising, because I not only see aggressiveness, I feel gentleness as well. You're a person in conflict. Like, I see that you're really a people person but sometimes you need to be alone.” “I can't believe you see that,” the girl said. The man in his fifties with a ponytail and the girl no more than twenty-five, a lovely blonde girl. Scandinavian-looking, though she didn't have an accent. She sounded well-educated, although Florence didn't understand how a well-educated person could believe in something like astrology. “I see it completely,” the guy said. Well, girlie, I hope you see he's not interested in horoscopes, just hanky-panky, Florence wanted to say. She left the place disgusted. She would never go back.

  The only good thing she could say about the Epiphany Branch was that it was convenient to her apartment. Other than that, it had nothing to recommend it. Although she thought the name was interesting. She thought it had some kind of other meaning, so she looked it up in the dictionary. It meant “manifestation,” a sudden understanding or revelation. She loved dictionaries; she wondered if people would be surprised if they knew she personally owned four different dictionaries: a Webster, a Random House, the American Heritage, the New Collegiate. If she'd had a lot of money she would have bought herself a copy of the O.E.D. But that would be ridiculous. She wasn't that kind of person. But she very much liked looking things up in it in the library. Although she sometimes worried who'd touched the magnifying glass before her. There were all kinds in that library, all kinds.

  People you wouldn't think belonged in libraries. People who didn't even know how to be quiet. In her day, librarians were strict about enforcing quiet. And people respected them for it. They respected libraries as places of quiet. Now, people seemed to her to be making all kinds of noises left and right. When she complained about it once, the librarian said, “We think of a library as not just a place where people come to read, but a community resource center.” What the hell does that have to do with people keeping their voices down, she wanted to say. But she didn't want the librarian to turn against her. She was very good at getting things from interlibrary loan.

  But there really were all kinds. The boy who always wore one of those undershirts with the straps, winter and summer, with a kerchief on his head. Very well-built, like a lot of black fellows. Studying some kind of mathematics. But he'd say the problems out loud, and not quietly. She supposed he deserved credit for trying to better himself, but he disturbed her, and he frightened her a little, so she didn't want to move, in case he took it the wrong way.

  Some of the people in the library didn't seem completely clean to her. A couple of the men never seemed to shave, and some of the older ones gave off that smell of old men who never wash their hair. She hoped she didn't give off some kind of old-lady smell, but she showered every day, and also used deodorant and talcum power, which she was sure these types had never heard of. Or if they'd heard, they'd long ago forgotten. Some of the Chinese people looked very respectable, but she didn't know if they spoke English. Some younger people came in to use the computers, and sometimes they'd curse so loud everyone in the place could hear them. Because of having trouble with the machines. And some people just seemed crazy. They made big fusses about nothing. There was one man, a young man too, he never wore socks, whatever the weather, and he was always calling the librarians morons and idiots and saying, “Do you have to be an imbecile to work here, is it a requirement or does it just help?” She thought the librarians were very patient with him. In their shoes, she would have been tempted to kick him out for good. Forbid him entry forever. She wished they would, for her own sake. And she knew there were other people who agreed with her, but everyone pretended not to notice him, whenever he started up.

  Some people, and mostly they were older, came in, went to the bathroom, sat down with a pile of books, and fell asleep on top of them. She was very careful about never falling asleep. At her age, she thought it made a bad impression.

  No, it wasn't the best, the Epiphany Branch, but still there was a lot to learn in this world if you applied yourself. She felt she was giving herself the education she'd never had a chance for when she was younger. Now everyone went to college; there was no doubt she'd be considered college material nowadays. But then it was a big deal, especially for a girl. She was determined to make up for what she hadn't been given; sometimes she had a daydream that a very distinguished woman, someone about her age, would engage her in conversation about a book, and, after a few cups of tea, maybe a few lunches in the diner, she'd say, “Florence, even though you have no formal education, you have much more learning than many with a college degree.” She could imagine the woman very clearly. She had fine white hair that she clipped to the back of her head with a silver bar-rette. She had eyeglasses with silver frames that hung around her neck on a silver chain. She always wore gray sweaters or gray silk blouses that had a touch of lavender in them. Very well-made.

  Florence would assign herself a subject and then read a lot of books on it until she felt she'd really got it under her belt. By which she meant ten books on the subject; she wouldn't quit unless she'd read ten books, cover to cover, even if she was feeling a little bored. She'd make notes; write down words she didn't understand, look them up in the dictionary and copy down all the various meanings. Now it was the Civil War. Before that, it was Ancient Greece. The cradle of democracy. She certainly would have rather lived in Athens than Sparta, she had no doubts about that.

  She never talked to anyone at the library, but there were people that she recognized, people she thought of a better type. They kept to themselves and she kept to herself; they all seemed to like it that way. The last thing she wanted was to strike up a friendship with someone in the neighborhood who she'd never be able to get off her back. Sometimes someone looked possible at first, but she was always disappointed. Like the woman she thought looked so refined, but not stuck-up, wearing a very nice sweater set, Fair Isle, they called it. She wondered where Fair Isle was. She wondered where she could look that information up. The words “Fair Isle” kept going through her mind; she imagined it was an island somewhere in Scandinavia, but it was always green, in spite of the cold, and the ground was always covered with a light green moss and deer ate berries off the bushes there. Fair Isle. She thought she might get herself a Fair Isle sweater. Although maybe it was too late, she was too old for that. She considered asking the woman where she'd got her sweater set. That would be a good way of striking up a conversation.

  But when the woman got up and put her coat on, Florence was glad she'd never spoken up. On her lapel was a very large button that said “Lose weight now, ask me how.” Florence knew that was ridiculous. She'd never had a weight problem, but she knew that if she did she would never just walk up to somebody, some stranger with a button, tap her on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, how do I lose weight now?” Any fool would know that wasn't the way to go about it. And if the woman didn't know that, she was a fool. Or money-hungry.

  That morning she thought the older man in the plaid shirt and the tweed cap might be worth talking to. She thought he looked like a cultured gentleman; he wore tortoiseshell glasses and his nails were nicely kept. Was coming to the Epiphany Branch lowering her standards? Did she now think anyone who looked like he bathed regularly was a gentleman? Because she was wondering why this man didn't take off his cap. A gentleman wouldn't wear a hat indoors. But maybe it was doctor's orders. Maybe he had to keep his head warm at all times. Or he might have been some kind of intellectual. European. The plaid shirt and the tweed jacket, and then that tie in the abstract expressionist pattern. She had recently learned the term “abstract expressionism.” Befor
e, she would just have called it modern art. She learned it when she read that book on art by that nun. A very intelligent woman. Florence thought it was a shame she hadn't done anything about her teeth. But maybe it was against her religion. Florence was glad that in Judaism there was nothing against looking your best.

  She herself would never have mixed prints and plaids. But then she thought maybe that was the style in Europe and she shouldn't judge. She wondered if he had a college degree from Europe, maybe a Ph.D. She wondered what he had done for a living. Probably not a doctor or a lawyer, not with that kind of mixing of plaids and prints. She thought he probably was some kind of college professor. Maybe some kind of scientist. Maybe he had worn one of those white coats to work every day so he wasn't used to making choices about fashion. Maybe he was a widower, and his wife used to make sure his shirts went with his ties.

  She sat across from him when she arrived that morning; she was pretty sure he'd know how to be quiet, that she wouldn't be disturbed. As always, she was curious about what people were reading. Often she'd try to get a look, although sometimes she was sorry she did, like the time the week before when she saw the young blonde woman reading the “Alternate Therapies” section of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book. And then she had to think about the girl having breast cancer. A man came up and stood behind her, put his hand on her shoulder, and started reading along with her. Florence wondered if it would ruin their sex life if the woman lost her breast. She kept thinking of what the breast would look like on the operating table after the doctor had cut it off. What did they do with cut-off breasts? Florence had made herself go back to her book on the Battle of Antietam. It did no good to dwell on unpleasant things. That had always been her motto, and she believed that it had served her well.

  The European gentleman was reading a book called The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. So perhaps he had been a mathematician. But after fifteen minutes, he put that book down and walked around the room. She followed him with her eyes, trying not to. She saw that he went to another table, picked up a book that had been left there by someone else, and brought it back to the place where his coat and hat were, where he'd settled himself originally. This book was called Radical Walking Tours of New York. He sat down with a smile and a satisfied sigh, as if he were about to tuck into a good meal. But in about ten minutes, he got up again, walked around the room as he had before, and picked up another book that someone had left on another table. Again, he brought it back to his original place. This one was called How I Play Golf by Tiger Woods.

  Florence could not concentrate on her own book, a history of women in the Civil War. She'd been very absorbed in it before she started paying attention to the European gentleman. But maybe he wasn't a gentleman. A gentleman would not put a book down so quickly, having read so little in it, just leaving it aside for something else. She felt the disrespect in it. The way she figured it, an author had worked very hard on a book. Whatever you thought of it, it probably had a lot of information in it that someone had spent a lot of time putting together, and you had no right to put it down until you'd finished it to the very end.

  It drove her crazy to see him flitting around like that. Every time someone left a book on one of the tables he picked it up and read it. And there were a lot of books on the tables; the librarians preferred it that you leave the books on the table rather than putting them back. Too much mis-shelving, one of them, a Puerto Rican girl, had told her. There was no rhyme or reason to what he did. Sitting down, picking up one book, putting it down. It drove her crazy.

  Florence was trying to read her book on women in the Civil War. And not just nurses, either. Then she felt a call of nature. She never liked using the bathroom in the library; sometimes men didn't put the seat down and she'd have to touch the seat herself when who knows who had been there before her. She didn't know why some men didn't have the consideration. It was beyond her, that kind of mind.

  When she came back to the room, he was sitting in the chair next to hers, where her coat was, a place that was obviously still hers. He had taken the book off the top of her pile— underneath it was a dictionary of American history and one of American biography, and a book with maps of the Confederate states. He was reading her book on women in the Civil War. As far as she was concerned, this constituted a bald-faced theft.

  She was a lady, though; she had no intention of stooping to his level.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “you seem to be inadvertently reading my book.”

  He gave her a very warm smile, she thought, considering the circumstances. “It's not inadvertently, not inadvertently at all. I'm reading it precisely because it is yours. I spent a lifetime as a scholar, devoting myself to one specialty: Romance philology. Now, I'm picking up knowledge in a different way. I like to wander after people, like a kind of gleaner in the fields of knowing: I pick up what someone else has put down. I think of it as a kind of quilt made up in a community of learning. I just pick up a scrap of what someone else has taken in, and with that scrap I connect with that person. It seems much friendlier to me.”

  Florence didn't know when she had ever been so angry. Romance philology. She didn't even know what it was, but the man must have had to study for a long time to even be involved in something like that. So he had had all the advantages. Languages, probably. All those hours studying, with people who respected him, took him seriously. The greatest gift a person could be given in this world. And what did he do with it? Did he sit down and put his mind to something, his mind that had been trained like a professional's? What did he do? He picked up and put down, as if it were nothing, as if books were toys, as if learning was just a game. He was nothing but a spoiled brat. Learning was sacred, and he was treating it like a game. You didn't treat sacred things like a game, you just didn't do it in this world. Not for her money. Or he could do it if he wanted to, but he wasn't going to get away with it.

  She tried to put on her most judgmental face. So he would know she had authority. Where her authority came from she wasn't sure for a minute. Then she figured it out: she had authority because she knew what was important and what wasn't. Because she knew what was what.

  “You're nothing but a butterfly,” she said. Even though it was a library, she was thinking of the movies. She was trying to sound like Bette Davis, when she talked to a man who wasn't worthy to lick her boots.

  But in the movies, the men always seemed to be crushed; they backed out of the room, or hung their heads. That didn't happen with the gentleman from Europe. He did two things. Three things. He took his cap off. You could say he tipped his hat, or cap. And then he laughed. And then he put his cap back on.

  “And if I am a butterfly, then pray, dear madame, tell me, what are you?”

  He was trying to insult her. She knew what he was implying. Because what was the opposite of a butterfly? She tried to think. A caterpillar, no, that was a stage in the butterfly's development, it would suggest that one day she could become a butterfly, one day she could become him. And that was impossible. No, the opposite of a butterfly was something heavy, slow, and dull. That was what he was trying to suggest. That was always what people tried to suggest when they were lazy and careless and your hard work made them look bad. Well, what about the story about the grasshopper and the ant? But she wasn't buying into that one either. Whatever he had in his storehouse, the ant was still dull, still nobody you wanted to be around. She wasn't going to fall into that. Because what she had stored up wasn't just pieces of grain, it was treasure. Knowledge, learning, wasn't just something you put in your mouth to keep alive, it was gold. Shining, precious, valuable. People like the European gentleman didn't realize how valuable it was. They took it lightly; they felt they could take it or leave it. Or throw it away. Or flit around it.

  No, she knew the real value of things. Knowledge was a treasure, and it had to be guarded, fiercely guarded. Thinking about it, she felt fierce. And it came to her then: that was who she was. If he was a butterfly, she was a tige
r, standing at the gates, guarding the treasure. Maybe one of those tigers with the turquoise eyes that come from Asia, that she'd studied when she'd studied Asia. She was a fierce tiger with turquoise eyes standing at the gates of knowledge, guarding. Guarding against who, against what? She didn't know exactly. But that wasn't important. What was important was that she was on guard.

  The gentleman from Europe had got up from his seat and settled himself at another table. He was reading some book, she wasn't even going to give him the satisfaction of trying to find out what it was. He thought he was smart, but he wasn't going to make a fool out of her. She was the white tiger, standing at the gates of knowledge, keeping guard.

  And then it came to her, the words that she would say to him, the answer to his question. It wasn't just ordinary words, it was poetry. A poem she'd learned when she'd studied the poets of the romantic era. William Blake. That poem about a tiger. She'd wished she'd been able to ask somebody why tiger was spelled with a y and if you pronounced the last syllable of symmetry“try” or “tree.” Probably that was something the European gentleman knew. She shot him a look of pure contempt across the room and spat the words of the poem straight at him: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” she muttered, “In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  But he did not look up, because of course he didn't hear her. It was a library, after all, and she didn't want to disturb anyone, so she had said it low, under her breath.