The Book Borrower Read online

  THE BOOK BORROWER

  A NOVEL

  ALICE MATTISON

  Dedication

  For Susan Bingham and Sandi Kahn Shelton and in memory of Jane Kenyon

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alice Mattison

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  THOUGH she was pushing a baby carriage, Toby Ruben began to read a book

  On a gray evening in late November 1920

  and the wheel of the carriage—a big, skeletal but once elegant Perego she’d found in somebody’s trash—rolled into a broken place in the sidewalk. The baby, tightly wrapped in a white receiving blanket, glided compactly from carriage to sidewalk. He didn’t cry. Like his mother, the baby would be troubled more by missed human connections than by practical problems; also the three-second rule held: as if he were a fallen slice of bread, Ruben snatched him up and ate him. Kissed him passionately and all over, dropping the wicked book into the carriage. She put the baby back where he belonged and picked up the book, but she didn’t read for at least a block. Then she did read.

  On a gray evening in late November 1920, an observer who happened to be making his way up the hill from Dressler’s Mills to the streetcar line that ran to the principal square of Boynton, Massachusetts, might have noticed a sturdy young woman hurrying through the mill’s gates. The air was full of cinders, which must have been why she reached up to tie a veil over her face, though she did so with a gesture so casual, so obviously

  Ruben had to cross a street. She closed the book. It was thin, with black covers, not new.

  —Want a book? a woman in the park had said.

  The woman wore a blue-and-white-checked dress like a pioneer’s, but sleeveless. A wide neckline bared her freckled chest; with good posture she chased serious, muddy daughters in pink pinafores. Ruben’s baby, Squirrel, was three months old.

  —Go, Squirrel, go, Ruben shouted, just so the woman, sweeping by, would speak.

  —What? Sunny hair rose and settled.

  —He’s trying to put his thumb in his mouth.

  The woman leaned over to look, her hair over her face, and Squirrel found his thumb for the first time. Excellent, said the woman, Deborah Laidlaw, straightening, then giving a push to the small of her back. She left her hand there. When their conversation, skipping some subjects, arrived at sex and husbands, Deborah said, Jeremiah has intercourse only to music.

  —Any music?

  —Folk songs.

  It was 1975.

  —Fuck songs! Ruben was surprised to have said that. Her hair was dark red but thin, and she was shorter than this impressive Deborah. In the songs, Ruben supposed, people built dams, harpooned whales, or cut down trees, while Jeremiah penetrated his wife.

  —History. He’ll read any book about history, said Deborah, but mostly trolleys.

  —Trolleys?

  —Streetcars. He’s obsessed with the interurbans. But there aren’t any songs about trolleys.

  —Clang, clang, clang went the trolley! sang Ruben, flat— who never sang for anyone but the baby.

  —Doesn’t count. Want a book?

  Jeremiah had found it in a used bookstore. He had begged Deborah to read it, but she only carried it back and forth to the park in a striped yellow-and-white cotton tote bag.

  —I am not interested in trolleys, said Deborah. Jeremiah has a theory about the person in the book. I don’t care.

  —It’s history?

  —A woman writing about her early life. About her sister.

  —It sounds interesting, said Ruben politely.

  —Good. You read it.

  Ruben took the book: Trolley Girl, by Miriam James.

  —You can’t keep it, said Deborah; Ruben was embarrassed—but they’d meet again. The daughters were Jill, who talked, and Rose, a big baby. Jill collected sticks and demanded to throw them into the river, a narrow glinty stream visible through trees. So Deborah carried Rose on her hip, striding away from Ruben, down a wooded slope where the carriage couldn’t follow. Ruben watched: the back of a muscular woman walking in sandals, her dress disheveled by a child on her hip, and an earnest child running carefully, turning every few feet—this way!—as if only she knew where to find the river. Ruben had never been in this park, though she’d lived in the city for most of a year, busy being pregnant. Forever she would have to remind herself that Deborah hadn’t made the river.

  She pushed her glasses up her nose and started for home. How snug and well-outfitted she would be when the Squirrel could ride on her hip, leaning confidently against her arm— one short leg in front and one behind her—pointing like Rose, who used her mother as a friendly conveyance. Now he was only a package. At the sidewalk she opened the book. Then came—terrible to think about—the broken place, and then, when she’d just begun the book again, the street to cross, and a dog she looked at. But now.

  reached up to tie a veil over her face, although she did so with a gesture so casual, so obviously ineffectual, that the observer—if he had any reason to watch her at all—might have wondered what occupied her mind enough to distract her from the imminent risk of a cinder in the eye. Perhaps she was afraid of missing her trolley. She walked steadily and energetically uphill, though her skirt—modestly long for a woman in that experimental year—was twisted around her legs by the wind at each step. The girl yanked it free and hurried toward the main street.

  When she reached it she turned the corner, and if our on-looker has kept up he would now notice another girl leave the shelter of a shop entrance—a milliner’s, closed for the night—and hurry toward her. “Goosie, your hat’s crooked,” said the newcomer, looking irritated. Under the light of a gas lamp she reached up to untie and retie the other’s errant veil.

  “Goosie” said the other girl, a little contemptuously.

  “I’ve called you that since I was a baby.”

  “I know. But we’re not babies now, Miriam Lipkin.”

  Jewish? thought Ruben.

  “I wish we were babies.” They weren’t beautiful. They looked like a pair of nicely brought up Jewish sisters. Our onlooker, even in Boynton, even in 1920, could discover business more rewarding than the scrutiny of these two—and since their streetcar is approaching anyway—let’s forget the observer. I’m going to follow them onto the trolley myself. I’m Miriam, who forty-four years ago was the girl in the doorway of the milliner’s, and the one climbing the hill is my sister Jessie, or Gussie, or Goosie—names were fluid in those immigrant days—a clerk at the mill. She’s now facing me with her back to the hill she’s just climbed, like a cutout figure in front of a complex diagram: triangles upon triangles, trapezoids here and there. The sloping mill roofs, in shades of gray and black, are grouped behind her as if she’s an icon of American labor. And she’s climbing onto the trolley. Trolley girl, someone called her, not many months after this moment. The name makes her sound like an ingenue in a gay straw hat taking the streetcar to the fair, but Jessie was frivolous only as a joke. On the cindery day in November I’m recalling, Jessie had been a member of an anarchist cell for several years. She’d once had urine thrown at her while she made a speech on the Boynton common.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be good for the hair, Miriam?” she’d asked me that night as I walked her home, loyally trying not to mind the smell. Jessie’s hair was stringy. She wondered if the urine might give it body. At home, our father screamed at her for an hour. Our mother cried. Mother al-ways cried. She wasn’t go
od for much besides crying. I sound angry and I am. After all this—all that I am about to describe—was over, I escaped from the millinery shop and eventually I went to college. I studied Latin. “Miriam” is al-most an anagram of “I am ira.” I am anger. My widowed mother lived with me in my rent-controlled Manhattan apartment for twenty years. She died two months ago, and now that her nagging voice is no longer in my ears, maybe I can pay attention to what I remember, what I am still so angry about.

  —Squirrel’s mommy!

  —’quirl mommy!

  Ruben stuck the book between the mattress and the side of the carriage, as though Deborah and her girls didn’t know about it. It was a foolish, old-fashioned book. The little yellowhaired girls caught up, Jill running, Rose tumble-running.

  —Do you want a job? called Deborah. I forgot. I told someone I’d—

  Irritating. Did she look so poor?

  —Doing what?

  —Teaching. You said you were a teacher.

  Had she? Presumably. She said, Maybe I’m no good. Ruben thought of her old, faraway teaching job, of standing in comfortable sun saying Paragraphs! to young people: then for some reason all laughed together, teacher and students.

  —You don’t have to be good. The pay is terrible.

  But Ruben was good. Now they took telephone numbers. Deborah taught child-care workers preparing for the high school equivalency exam.

  —Is it math? I can’t teach math.

  —Sure you can. Mostly it’s English. Teach what you want. They’ll never take the exam no matter what we do.

  Ruben was lonely and slightly miserable, home alone all day with Squirrel. In her pregnancy she’d done nothing but read, here in a new city where she had no friends and had come only because her husband had been hired as assistant budget director in the public works department. All week Ruben pictured him talking on the phone or, seen from behind, pacing a corridor with windows, sun at his left, though she wasn’t aware of any such corridor in his office.

  Sweat was on Deborah’s face and chest above the blue-and-white dress. Her skin was freckled and flushed. She wore eye makeup. Her shoulders were broad. She looked as if she could drive a stick shift or put on a party. Ruben, who hated to drive, couldn’t even push the carriage properly.

  —I pushed the carriage into a hole because I was reading. The baby fell out.

  —Is he all right?

  —Because I was reading that book.

  —Jeremiah’s book? Well, nobody forced you.

  —I’m not blaming you!

  Deborah Laidlaw picked up Squirrel and held him before her, hands around his chest. Squirrel—without a neck at the moment—blinked. The receiving blanket dropped to the ground. Deborah ignored it. He and she stared, Squirrel’s eyes finding something to look at—the gold cross at Deborah’s throat?—and Deborah put him back into the carriage, now picked up the blanket. She said, You must never read while pushing the carriage. Said it as if Ruben were so young or so stupid she might not know.

  Never mind what Ruben lacked. Her mother hadn’t said the right things; or was dead; or had never existed, so that Ruben had to be made by committee from glossy scraps of magazine ads. She blinked like her son because her eyes stung, took the rebuke, liked it.

  —I do want a job. But when Deborah turned away again, Ruben thought of her mother, who had existed, but was dead. Not her favorite inner story, the story of her mother’s death: a story of temper and its consequences. Ruben did not tell it to herself just then, but she opened the book.

  My parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine.

  So were Ruben’s grandparents. Maybe they knew one another.

  I have a feeling that nobody in our family had followed the kosher laws for generations. I once saw a photograph of a shtetl in Russia, including a pig. The caption pointed out that the pig proved that Jews and non-Jews lived in close proximity, but I think it may have proved that my great-grandparents were somewhere around. On the High Holy Days my parents dressed up and went to the movies, where my father translated the subtitles into Yiddish for my mother. They wanted the neighbors to think they were in the synagogue. Not that they didn’t consider themselves Jewish; not that they didn’t do half a dozen Jewish things—well, religiously. We dressed up on Purim. My mother cooked matzoh ball soup. We ate no bread on Pesach. My mother fasted on Yom Kippur until shortly before lunchtime, while my father screamed about hypocrisy and superstition. Then she had a cup of tea and a dry roll, complaining that it was too dry. An hour later she had another roll, with butter.

  I had two sisters. Jessie was two years older than I, and I was three years older than Sarah. My first memory is of my sister Jessie telling me a story to distract me from my mother’s screams during Sarah’s birth in the other room. It was the middle of the night and we were sitting on the cold kitchen floor. I couldn’t believe we could get away with such an infraction, but nobody objected. The story Jessie told was about cockroaches who grew to be the size of people and be-came teachers in school. Until I went to school and even after, I was afraid my teacher might be a cockroach. Much later I read the famous Kafka story.

  Our apartment was full of Yiddish shouting. I remember wishing they’d all speak English, but I’m imposing a memory from much later; when I was little, I myself didn’t speak English. In this account, I’m going to write what I remember, even if it could not be true, and I’m going to write about what happened to Jessie when I wasn’t present, as if I were Jessie at times. When we were teenagers, we argued about memories and couldn’t agree whether some of them were mine or hers. Who was it my father kicked in the head, the one time he lost his temper that badly? We each remembered that he did it to the other. We were both sure it wasn’t Sarah. Maybe it never happened. Maybe it happened to Sarah.

  —Where is God? said Deborah.

  —I don’t know anything about God.

  —Nobody knows anything about God. Don’t you think about that all the time?

  —Never, said Ruben. They were pushing Deborah’s daughters on the baby swings while Squirrel slept in his carriage. It was raining lightly.

  —Then what?

  Ruben tried to think what she thought about. Death.

  —I too, I too, said Deborah. It was the third time they’d met. Maybe the fourth. You have children, you think about death. I’m pregnant.

  —I didn’t know!

  —I’ll show soon. I’d show now in tight clothes.

  —When you have more than one child, said Ruben, do you worry less about death?

  —Each one is your whole life. Which is not good. There are already too many people I can’t do without. My friends . . . now another one.

  Ruben didn’t know if she meant another child or another friend. To pull their talk back to its odd already customary place, she said, What do you mean, where is God? Isn’t God supposed to be everywhere? Do you mean where physically?

  Deborah pushed the swing and Jill said, Higher, higher! Deborah ran under it, faced Jill and kissed her, and pushed the swing back, all the way back, running under it again. Then she turned and began pushing in the usual way. She said, I believe in one God, father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. . . . Then she said, It’s not just that bad things happen. Where is God then? Out to lunch? But it’s more than that. I want to know—well, I want to know about bad things, but I can’t know that. What I want to know for everyday occasions is, Where is God when I push Jill on the swing?

  —Aren’t you still nursing Rose? said Ruben.

  —I’m trying to wean her. Besides, she pinches me. She nurses from one breast and pinches the other. Mine, mine. How’s she going to like having a liddly?

  —A liddly, said Ruben.

  —No moozum, not even once this time, Deborah said.

  —What’s moozum?

  —Oh, it’s my word for menstrual blood.

  At night Ruben said to her husband, Harry, also called Ruben, Oh, this Deborah!

  —What does she look like?


  —Medium-sized breasts. Well, medium large, but she’s nursing. And pregnant.

  —Breasts aren’t all I—

  —She wears sandals. She looks like an adult. She has fluffy light hair and big arms full of daughters.

  —Breasts make me think about your breasts, said Harry.

  —They’re too tender and sore.

  —I don’t want to touch them, just to see them.

  —You see them constantly. I nurse this kid all day.

  —Could you take off your shirt and your bra and walk around a little?

  —I’m not wearing a bra. Can’t you tell? She shrugged off her shirt and cooked supper, scared she’d spatter something hot on her breasts. But she liked his look, his quiet.

  Deborah in maternity clothes, two weeks later, made Ruben want another baby. Ruben had worn peasant smocks with embroidered trim, but Deborah went in for classy gray tunics she wore to the park with straight skirts and panty hose. Pregnancy makes me want to dress up, said Deborah. I don’t know why. It’s a nine-month festival.

  —Shall we have another one? Ruben asked Harry.

  —I love Peter, said Harry, a small man with wrinkles in his forehead, more wrinkles when he was happy. Now he wrinkled up like an old man, watching her cook, in her shirt this time. Sure, another Peter.

  —Probably we should think of a different name.

  —Peter II.

  —Vole. Squirrel and Vole.

  —Vole is good, said Harry. More than half the time, when she said something, Harry understood. Possibly seventy percent for jokes, and he generally knew the size of a joke, didn’t look around for more. But the baby is hard, he said. You said you didn’t want another one.