The Book Borrower Page 4

  Emma still couldn’t read. Ruben was exhausted that night. Maybe it was a mistake. Emma couldn’t do it.

  The next time, Ruben was afraid to look, but when she did there were five women at the table. She threw her bag onto the table to celebrate and the table shook and everyone laughed. Emma kept coming. She hugged Ruben often. She couldn’t learn.

  Deborah was huge. She hugged Ruben, too. In the cold, Deborah and her girls came to Ruben’s house and they ate grilled cheese sandwiches. Deborah took over the stove because only she knew how to make the sandwiches so her girls would eat them. She made sandwiches for herself and Ruben, too. She buttered the bread inside and outside and Ruben could feel them both grow fatter. Deborah said, Toby, you aren’t fat, you’re gorgeous.

  —Nonsense.

  —It’s true.

  Ruben considered herself. Red hair, center parted. Slightly fat. Glasses. Not beautiful, not that it mattered, not the sort of thing she thought much about.

  —Did you ever sleep with a woman? Ruben said.

  —No, did you?

  —Never. Did you ever think about it?

  —Of course. Let’s, some day, said Deborah.

  Deborah stood behind her as she ate at her kitchen table, and Squirrel lay back in his white slanting plastic chair and roundly looked at them from the middle of the table. Rose and Jill played with pieces of sandwich and talked to slimy babies that were apple slices, dancing them up and down. Deborah kissed Ruben’s scalp and ate a bite of Ruben’s remaining half sandwich. Ruben did not turn around. She could feel Deborah’s pregnant belly against her head, warm and firm. The window faced south and the winter sun came in behind her and around them both, through a stained-glass yin-yang sign in green and blue, coloring a white macrame hanging she’d tacked above the table. She felt sun on her arms. Rose climbed into Ruben’s lap and jumped apple slices over Ruben’s arm. Were Ruben and Deborah becoming each other? Toby Ruben hugged Rose and noticed the grain of her own oak table, which lay in such a delicate curve that she had to trace it with her forefinger. Something else beautiful: Rose’s ear in the sunlight.

  A brace of ladies, they walked, that fall and into winter. It grew dark and Rose wept. Once, miles from home, Squirrel cried unceasingly in his stroller. Ruben stuck her hand down his pants to check his diaper pins.

  —Use Pampers, said Deborah. You tape them with masking tape.

  —Yuck. Ruben hated the feel of Rose’s plastic diapers.

  —You want pins sticking in him?

  —They’re not. Squirrel kept screaming. Deborah shrugged as she stretched past her belly to propel a long stroller made for two, in which Jill was asleep and Rose sang mournfully to herself.

  —When we walk, said Ruben, where will you put the baby? They laughed, not that anything was funny: it was cold, twilight, they were far from home with their backs toward home. Partly their laughter was guilty. Squirrel still cried. The houses leaned at them, wooden simple houses with three stacked porches. Skimpy wreaths hung on doors, early, or could they be from last Christmas?

  —We ought to turn around, Deborah said.

  —Are you tired?

  —No.

  —Nobody else would do this with me, said Ruben.

  —Everybody else would call the Child Abuse Hotline. At last they turned. When they reached Ruben’s house, they turned again and walked to Deborah’s house. Squirrel was asleep. Outside Deborah’s house he cried again. Ruben picked him up and rocked him in her arms. The little girls climbed out of their stroller and ran up on the porch in the dark. Ruben’s knees hurt with cold and tiredness. Her breasts hurt. Can I nurse him in the street, standing up?

  —Doctor, doctor, I have frostbitten nipples! Come inside.

  —I’d never get going again. She nursed him, standing, in the street.

  —When is the test? Emma asked, at every class. When will I get my equivalency?

  The others were afraid of the test and shushed Emma.

  —I keep coming, said Emma. I’ve come every time. Now I want to take the test.

  Ruben kept changing the subject. When she talked on the phone to Deborah, she told her about Emma.

  —So?

  —So what?

  —So schedule her for the test.

  —How can she? None of the others are taking it yet. She couldn’t possibly pass it.

  —So?

  —What do you mean, so? It would be irresponsible.

  —Do what she wants, said Deborah.

  It was a way of looking at things, it had nothing to do with Emma. It made Ruben angry. She’ll fail, said Ruben. Everybody will think I’m a bad teacher.

  —Oh, is that it?

  —No, said Ruben. She’ll be unhappy when she fails it. She’ll blame me.

  —Toby, I can’t think about that. I’m four centimeters dilated. I haven’t slept in a week.

  —Maybe you should stop teaching.

  —Oh, I bring magazines and read to them.

  —Not really, said Ruben, who spent hours late at night planning lessons.

  —Somewhat really, said Deborah.

  —What do you think Deborah meant? she said to Harry, but Harry didn’t care. They were in bed. He’d learned not to touch her breasts, which were just kitchen appliances these days, so he ran his fingers through her pubic hair and began to touch her inside. What did Deborah mean? she said again, but for the first time since she’d had Squirrel, she liked the feeling, she wasn’t just giving herself lectures about it.

  When Deborah had to go have her baby, Jeremiah showed up on Ruben’s porch with the little girls. She had seen him only once before.

  —Do we have one of those friendships with husbands? she and Deborah had said to each other. But Jeremiah was nice, and Harry was nice, and once they had all stood on a corner in the wind—strollers, husbands—and talked. Now Jeremiah, a short man, glittery-eyed from fucking to work songs or for some other reason, stood and laughed on the porch because his wife was having a baby quite soon, two weeks early, and Ruben gathered the little girls into her house and talked to him shyly through the partly opened door. It was windy.

  —Quick or slow? Ruben asked, through the doorway. What do you think?

  —Quick or slow what? said Jeremiah, and she felt herself blush as if he’d caught her in a double entendre, when all she meant was labor. The birth.

  —Oh, quick, surely.

  —Better hurry then, which was also embarrassing, as if she was throwing him out.

  This strange husband smiled and stood. Jill had breakfast, he said, but Rose wouldn’t. It was early in the morning. Harry was still asleep.

  —I’ll feed her.

  —She likes—

  —I know what she likes. Grilled cheese sandwich. Butter on the outside. Cut into strips. Handled till it’s gray. She wanted him to know that she knew.

  Harry met her, carrying Squirrel. Didn’t Deborah have friends before you?

  —I don’t mind! Ruben was proud to be the one.

  —I didn’t mean it that way. I was curious.

  —Her other friends are boring.

  She baby-sat perfectly. Harry left, Squirrel napped, and she made cookies with the little girls, letting the rug stay dirty. She lifted the heavy daughters onto her kitchen chairs, saying in a perfectly casual, adult voice—just as she planned to speak later to Squirrel—Oh, Jill. Maybe you could dump in this baking soda? She guided Rose’s hand. The phone rang.

  —Toby, we’ve got another kid!

  —Healthy?

  —Oh, healthy, yes, of course!

  —Girl or boy?

  —Oh, girl. They’re always girls.

  —What’s her name?

  —Mary Grace.

  Ruben’s eyes teared. She would have to kidnap the whole family, maybe even glittery Jeremiah. She would keep them in her bed, all five of them, and take them out to look at them, now that they were perfect, now that they had given that old-fashioned, believing, innocent name to their third little daughter. But
if she kept them in the bed, Harry would discover them. Where would she keep them? They would be her secret plea-sure. She hung up the phone and turned, blushing and grinning, to the untidy yellow-haired girls standing on her chairs. Then she cried and hugged them.

  —Doesn’t it need more baking soda? said Jill.

  They baked the cookies. Ruben ran out of creative activities long before Jeremiah came. That night she climbed into bed as soon as Squirrel slept. Harry watched television. She’d been reading a library book, but she had finished it. Before that book, she’d read books her students might like, and books about teaching such students. Now, at last, she could read the book Deborah had lent her. Seeing Jeremiah had made her re-member it. She was a little afraid he’d ask for it, but of course he didn’t. Tired as she was, she got out of bed and found the book in a pile on the dresser.

  The wintry fog wrapped itself around the union hall, as if to hold tight within its grip the men and women gathered there. I’m inventing this. I wasn’t there. I’m looking around that room in my imagination, and I have to admit: it’s a crowd of decent people. Some look naive, some look foolish—of course their clothes are old-fashioned to me as I write this in 1964—but there’s plenty of intelligence and goodness. The leader, whose attention everyone is trying to get, is my sister Jessie’s old flame, William Platz. He’s got curls on his fore-head and a skinny nose that looks elegant profiled in the lamplight. He’s obviously noble, smart, fearless—maybe too fearless? He’s suddenly distracted and when I look around I see that my sister has stepped decisively into the room, looking squat and determined: not sexy, but maybe sexy after all, because of her directness. He hasn’t gotten over her, though he’s gone back to his wife. He’s pointing to a chair. Jessie sits. At first she has a hard time paying attention because she, too, has felt something, once again, between herself and William. Also she’s thinking of—what on earth?—me. We’d had a quarrel. We’d met before work in the morning. I’d told her the strike would be just as successful or unsuccessful without her as with her. Now I see how angry and nasty a remark that was. I was suggesting she wasn’t a leader.

  Jessie shook off any thoughts about her uncomprehending sister Miriam and anything else besides the business at hand, and listened attentively, raising her eyebrows as if ideas could be made clearer that way. The discussion was about the trolley strike that had taken place just a few months earlier in Denver. After death, injury, and terrible property damage, the workers returned to their jobs, merely requesting that the scabs be run out of town. The union leader said, “You do not know what this shooting, this loss of life, has done to me. I am a different man. I would do anything to end this bloodshed.” The gathering in Boynton considered these words seriously, with strong disagreements. Some thought the Denver union leader was a hero, others that he had betrayed those he was supposed to lead.

  Jessie rose to her feet. “If we decide now,” she shouted, “in exactly which circumstances we’ll surrender—” She paused. “If we say now that we could surrender—well, we might as well give up. We might as well go home.” She was hoarse, as she often was when she made a speech: her voice wasn’t naturally loud. Her eyes bulged, I imagine, and hairs escaped from her small brown bun. “I’m not going home. I’ll do what’s needed. If someone dies, I will mourn. But I will mourn then, not beforehand. If the rest of you want to go home now—well, then, it will be quiet enough in here that I can think of a plan and know what to do. I hope you reach shelter, all of you, before the snow.”

  The speech became well known around town. Nobody left, of course.

  This group, a combination of anarchists, Communists, Socialists, and the leaders of the trolley men’s union, first planned to persuade people to boycott the trolleys during the strike. “Once the public understands what is at stake,” said William Platz, “it will demand justice in order to keep the lines running!” There was applause and shouting and happiness, but of course they were kidding themselves, and, in fact, plans were also being made to intimidate potential passengers and keep them off trolleys run by scabs.

  It hadn’t been my sister’s first speech. She literally stood on soapboxes. Mostly people ignored her or laughed at her; some-times they got angry. Jessie knew that speeches weren’t going to keep anybody off the trolleys. The Denver strike, which they’d avidly read about, had been bitterly violent. A newspaper account I’ve found says that at least five people were killed and thirty injured. Mobs stoned the Denver Post building, destroyed the business offices, and tried to demolish the presses because the paper was against the strike. A passenger was struck by a brick. Strikers and sympathizers marched on City Hall screaming “Wreck the Hall.” The response was even worse: armed volunteers joined the police, and federal troops arrived to put down the disturbances. The New York Times reported on August 7, 1920, that “armored tank cars mounted with Browning machine guns capable of firing five hundred shots a minute are patrolling the streets.” The Times continued, “Fearless men, aroused by the menace to life and property created by the riots, are armed with sawed-off shotguns and have orders to shoot to kill if necessary.” It was in this situation that the strikers gave up and the leader declared himself a changed man.

  I’m as staunch an old lefty as anybody, mind you. I’m not siding with the police and the army and the reactionary press against the strikers. I just think the strikers in Denver were stupid: What did they think was going to happen? And given the example of Denver, just three months earlier, what, may I ask, did the trolley men of Boynton, Massachusetts—aided and abetted by my sister—think was going to happen to them?

  “Jessie.” William Platz caught up to her as she was step-ping outside into the night. “May I walk you to your trolley stop?” Heavy irony, here. He’d seduced her three years earlier—taken her virginity. The two of them are about to try to close down the very trolley system to which he is demurely escorting her. Nonetheless comes this invitation that I’m imagining or remembering. Jessie told me about something like this. She liked his solicitude. Already, though she was so young, she had lost any claim to protection from men, and ordinarily she didn’t want it. But William Platz jammed his cap on his head and pulled it off again to run his hand through his curls, which the sooty wind blew into tangles. The heavy brown cap was thrust onto his head again. Jessie hadn’t tied her veil in place and the ashy breeze nicked her skin. They walked silently together. He knew where she was going—to the Crampton line. It ran into the slum where Jessie had rented a room when she and my father quarreled so badly she had to leave.

  Walking up the long hill, they didn’t talk. They waited together at the trolley stop and Jessie began to wonder why he didn’t make his own way home. Then the trolley came and they got on. As usual, they were surrounded by tired workingmen in gray or brown coats, all of them shaking in their seats with the car’s movement. William sat next to her and Jessie took in the slightly damp smell of his woolen coat. She felt a renewed awareness of his body next to her own, as if the inch of air closest to him had its own texture, mixed rough and smooth, and its own dark, pleasant smell.

  He touched her, inadvertently or not, and she got the idea that he was going home with her. She thought he’d changed his mind. He’d seduced her and had been her lover for months, and then he’d told her he’d made a mistake, that de-spite the ideas of anarchism he wished to be faithful to his wife. Now Jessie’s feelings were engaged—and hurt a second time. Maybe William Platz had still another lover, who happened to live on this trolley line. Whatever the reason, he jumped up, shook hands with Jessie, and disembarked three blocks before her stop. Jessie went home alone and I think—I indulge myself with thinking—that our lives were changed that night as her heart beat faster, but then more slowly and angrily, defiantly. She studied the motorman’s back during those last three blocks. He was a man our father’s age, with, she decided, a simple, vulnerable look to his head and shoulders. The motorman needed her. He and she were in the same army.

  Ruben s
topped reading and slept. But the baby woke in the night, and after she nursed him, she couldn’t fall asleep again.

  Lest the reader think it was always night in Boynton in 1920, with a gritty wind blowing, let me say that the Sunday after Jessie’s dinner at home was sunny and clear, with cold white clouds moving swiftly across a cold sky. A light snow—the first of the season—had fallen the night before, and a scattering covered fields and roofs. Where dry reeds from the previous summer still stood in the open places, they rustled with ice. Sarah and I looked out the trolley window at the open countryside, on our way to have Sunday dinner with Edith Livingston and her family. I stared at the crisp brown grasses near the right of way until I was lulled by the rhythmic progress of the trolley and no longer saw them.

  Sarah chattered about how she imagined Edith might look. “Does she have dimples? I picture her with dimples.” I felt shy, and wished I hadn’t agreed to go, and to bring along my unpredictable little sister. Once, the trolley stopped because of ice on the overhead line, and the conductor climbed up on the roof and knocked it off with a pole. Sarah was excited about that, too, though she’d seen it done before. It was she who recognized Edith’s house from the description I’d been given, and, sure enough, the next stop was Hale Road, where we were supposed to get off, and where Edith, who had no dimples, met us.

  All I remember of the walk to the house with Edith, so many years later, is that we saw a dead sparrow on the frozen ground, and Edith, who had a volatile disposition, squatted and stroked and cooed along with Sarah, while I stood by: I was irritated at their sentimentality, and also cold. I was envious, too. My dumb but darling little sister, I thought, would soon be a closer friend of Edith’s than I was. Edith was sharp and funny when she wasn’t crying over something, but I watched her admire Sarah’s broad pink face and easy smile. And Sarah was admirable. I see her smiling up at Edith and me, all but smiling through tears, when Edith had stopped looking at the bird and Sarah was still crouched on the ground. Sarah was smiling at her own foolishness and naturally nobody could resist that. She had on a pretty blue coat that my mother had made. She looked particularly charming in the country. We took a shortcut across a field.