The Borrower (9 page)

“Okay,” I said. “What books would you suggest for a ten-year-old boy who needs some indirect support on some sexuality issues he might or might not have?”

“Oh.” He picked a red bathrobe out of the box and tossed it across the ancient avocado green sewing machine in the corner. “There’s tons of good stuff out there now, but it’s mainly for older kids. Is he a good reader? Pick out some costumes. Pretty much anything. We have, like, sixty-five people, I swear to God. I didn’t know Lenny had friends.”

I pulled the Hats bin from its shelf. There was an Abe Lincoln near the top, which I figured was as good as anything. I took it out and put it on the table. “The thing is, it has to be innocuous. His parents would have a fit if I gave him, like,
Come On Out of the Closet, Bobby
.”

“An excellent piece of literature, if I recall.” He was draping both his shoulders with piles of what looked like housedresses. “Seriously, I can answer this question.” He pointed his finger at me and squinted. “ ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ That’s what you want.”

“No,” I said. “This kid is ten. And
smart
. He’d laugh at me.”

“Okay. Then what you want is definitely the Oz series. The whole thing, not just the first one.” I started to agree, but he kept talking. “
Because
, here’s the thing about Oz.” He emptied the whole Sparklies bin onto the table, then scooped it all back in again. He put the bin in my arms and set the Lincoln hat on top of it. “Because you know there’s this whole rabid gay cult following, right? Which is only partly due to Judy Garland.” He grabbed two shiny Elizabethan-looking tunics off the clothes rack, picked up the red bathrobe, and opened the door. “Two things: in the whole series, no real love stories. Can you grab the light? There’s only these really farcical ones. So it’s like this realm free from hetero love. And there’s even a boy who turns into a girl. Just, poof.”

“Right. Ozma,” I said.

“And second, everyone is so
weird
, but they’re all completely accepted. It’s like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy’s made of tin, and you’re a talking chicken, but what the hell, let’s do a road trip.”

Lenny met us in the upstairs hall, looking as drunk as Tim. He grabbed the dresses off Tim’s shoulders, shouted “Costumes!” and flung them into the apartment. People were already putting them on over their clothes as we came through the door. Beth Hopkins, the red-haired actress whose photos I’d helped desecrate, ran and grabbed the Sparklies bin from my arms and started tossing the glittery headbands and scarves and earrings around the room.

“Everybody, you know Lucy!” Tim shouted. “We love Lucy! She puts up with everything!”

Beth wheeled around and grabbed my shoulder. “You were a fantastic bride! A beautiful bride!”

I laughed. “How long did it take you to figure it all out?”

“Oh my God, like, two weeks! Literally!”

I ended up watching the party more than participating in it. The Lincoln hat was placed on my head at one point, and I settled into the love seat with a beer Lenny got me. Most of the men put on dresses to become Republican housewives, some of the women lounged around as prostitutes, others were various Shakespearean characters, and Tim slouched in a big chair with the bathrobe and shouted racial slurs across the room. Lenny turned up the TV as the president stepped to the podium and the white-haired men behind him stood to applaud. The point of the party seemed to be to react to the address in a manner appropriate to your assumed character. Lenny, in one of the Elizabethan tunics, would scream and cross himself whenever the space program was mentioned. For the most part, Tim and the Republican housewives shouted encouragement at any hint of bigotry. Whenever the president said “nucular,” everyone was obliged to take a drink.

I leaned my head back and stared at my president, his satellite-dish ears and stern eyes. He spoke into the camera about preserving civilization. “We are all ambassadors,” he said, “spreading the good news of America abroad. American values, American freedoms. And we will fight for those values. And we will
preserve
those values.”

“Yeah, he
gem
ony!” shouted Tim, tossing his empty beer bottle towards the bookcase.

“Hail Caesar!” shouted a prostitute.

Someone started singing “O Canada.”

I wondered, as I sat there, if there were ever moments of unadulterated reality in Tim’s life. Every time I saw him he was either drunk or wearing a costume or both.

I watched him now undoing his ponytail and pulling his blond hair straight down around his face. “I’m John Lennon!” he shouted in a British accent. “I’m bloody confused by all this shit. Who the bloody hell is this large-eared bloke? Hey! Abraham Lincoln! You’re bloody silent! What do you make of this president?”

I tried to think of something Lincolnesque to say. Parts of the Gettysburg Address went through my head, but that wasn’t exactly funny.

“Give him a break!” the stage manager shouted for me. “He’s
dead
, for chrissake!”

“Well so am I!” wailed Lennon. “We’re two bloody
victims
, we are!”

The president told a man in the front row to stand up. This man had been laid off two years ago, and now because of business growth he enjoyed a new job managing an assembly line. He could feed his six children now. The man looked left and right like a nervous squirrel. He didn’t seem sure when to sit down again. I always hated the presidential speeches even when I liked the president, hated their upbeat transparency. Our national actor, hired to tell us it would all be fine.

“You are lucky,” my father would often say, “that you can make fun of your president this way. You know what happened if you made jokes about Stalin? If someone wanted to tell you a joke about Stalin, he took you first in a dark closet and checked for wires. People died all the time because of jokes. Most men who were dragged away in the night, it was because someone overheard their stupid joke. Have I told you the one about the cat and the mustard?”

Around midnight, Tim came over suddenly and sat beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “There’s another thing,” he said. “About Oz.” He looked very drunk, but he didn’t sound it. “I think part of the appeal is that there’s this guy who can
fix
everything for you. They all go to the wizard to be
normal
, you know? That’s what draws some kids in. But then it doesn’t work out, and the book totally sucker punches them with the humbug thing. And that’s what
resonates
, because it’s what they knew all along in their gut.” And then he belched and laughed at himself.

I fell asleep fast that night with beer sloshing in my stomach, and slept like I always do, with my right arm straight up under my head like I’m the Statue of Liberty, like clueless me is trying to light someone’s way.

A
nyone who’s heard this kind of story before, the kind where someone does something rash and throws away everything she has, will be looking for what I was running away from. Because surely I was running away from something, too. Surely I must have been deeply dissatisfied with my life. Or I had a failed and embarrassing affair, or I didn’t want to face that I was subconsciously in love with Rocky, or I felt like a fake because I was, believe it or not, illiterate. Yes, there you go. I was an illiterate librarian, who needed to run away because I’d stolen money from Rocky after he broke my heart by having an affair with Loraine.

No. There was nothing. I wasn’t at a boiling point; I’d just been simmering along. Granted, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with my job. I’d always thought that by twenty-six I’d be doing something a little more glamorous with my life. Hannibal was a little stifling. I was fairly bored. None of those qualifies as a reason, an excuse, or even a motivation for doing what I did. If that makes me seem somehow selfless, like everything I did was for Ian, it shouldn’t. I was more hapless than selfless, and dumb luck had a lot to do with it.

Hapless, clueless, directionless. Selfless only by default. A Hull, through and through.

So there it is: I had no particular reason to leave, no particular reason to throw my life away. But I didn’t have much holding me there, either.

The rash on my legs and back had turned to thick red scabs. After the fifth prescription lotion failed to work, Dr. Chen told me to get more sleep. “And drink more water,” she said. “Sometimes our bodies are just trying to tell us something.”

The snow was a crust on the grass that March, but the parking lots were brown slush. Every morning, I thought of calling in sick.

Rocky and I hadn’t been to a movie in two months. When I asked how things were going, he’d say something like “Lots of Nora Roberts.”

“Yeah, but how are
you
?”

“Superb.”

Ian came downstairs one afternoon, his eyes red around the rims like he’d either been crying or rubbing his face on a cat. He called hello on his way to the new science fiction display that I’d decorated with tinfoil aliens, and then said, “Mr. Walters says to send up staples.” Mr. Walters was Rocky, and I wondered why he hadn’t phoned down or e-mailed. When Ian checked out
The Little Grey Men
ten minutes later (or rather, when I checked it out for him under my own name and watched as he shoved it halfway down his pants), I handed him a box of staples and asked him to take it up. Ian hadn’t been staying long, lately. His fingernails were half gone from biting.

“Is Mr. Walters your boyfriend?” he asked. He balanced the staple box on top of his head, and stuck both arms out for balance.

“No. I have a different boyfriend.” I didn’t like that it felt so urgent to set the record straight.

“You should have Mr. Walters be your boyfriend. He has a red cross.”

“A what?”

Ian turned and the staples fell onto the floor. He put them back on his head and held them there with one hand as he walked to the stairs. “I forget what it is,” he called back. “A red something. I’m a Nigerian woman, and I’m crossing the Sahara.”

“Good luck with that.”

When I went up to get lunch across the street, I thought I’d ask Rocky if he knew what Ian meant about the red cross, but both when I left and when I returned, Rocky was back in the office. I got the feeling he wanted me to ask what was wrong, but I didn’t feel like playing that game.

And this is where the story should end, and sometimes, sitting here, pressing the top of my knee against the bottom of the table, listening to the shallow keystrokes of the graduate students at their laptops, waiting for the sun to sink into the window frame and blind me with red light, sometimes I think this
is
where it ended, that everything that followed was a dream. That maybe I’m looking back now, imagining what might have happened if only I’d done something. When really I did nothing. When I spent the next five years sitting peacefully in Hannibal, watching Ian turn eleven and then twelve, then realizing he hadn’t been in to see me for a while, then seeing him only a couple of times a year as I drove past him on the sidewalk and wondered how his life was going, not wanting to embarrass him by rolling down my window and calling out.

But no, it did happen. The only thing up for debate is whether it happened
to
me, or whether I made it happen.

“M
EE,
MAY
,
MAH
, MO, MOO!” sang Tim’s wall at six o’clock on Monday morning.

“TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE!

“To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock, awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

“eeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee!”

“Oh my God,” I said to Tim’s wall through my pillow at six o’clock on Monday morning. “Oh my God, shut up.”

“Eaaaaiiiiouwah, eyoe, ae,” said the wall, which was Tim practicing his lines minus all the consonants.

Outside, a dark midwestern storm was barreling in, the first of the year, and the growing thunder sounded something like Dumpsters scraping on gravel or God chewing rocks. The wind was almost as loud as the thunder, and I wasn’t always confident that my windows wouldn’t crash out of their rotted frames. I thought of turning on music to go back to sleep, but couldn’t bear adding to the noise level.

I let myself put on old jeans and hiking boots and spent three minutes scratching my back against the corner of my dresser like a psychotic cat. It was only a matter of time before I really broke the skin, before someone approached me on the street and asked why the back of my shirt was soaked in blood. I headed to work early to get the summer reading flyers finished, and to see what damage Sarah-Ann had done yesterday, closing up by herself. It was pouring rain by the time I got there at seven, and branches were down all over the neighborhood. I shook myself off in the lobby and wiped my feet and locked the door again behind me. I’d have two hours alone.

Maybe because of the quiet, I was more tuned in to details that morning—always a problem for me, since in stories and movies, a focus on little details tends to indicate imminent disaster. Someone in a movie unlocks his door, checks his mail, turns on his light, and you know he’s got about thirty seconds to live. So I was irrationally filled with dread that morning, as I often was when I entered the library early and alone and the only sounds I could hear were my fingers on paper or my purse sliding into the desk drawer.

I sat in the darkness for a moment, then got up to turn on the downstairs lights, all six light switches, one after the other, different walls and display cases dramatically announcing themselves. I was still soaking wet and cold from the rain. I probably made some noise, as I tend to do in silence—humming or whistling or popping my lips. I went behind my desk and sank again into the soft, spinning chair, when a sound like crumpling paper came from the end of one of the fiction aisles. My stomach turned liquid and I pulled my feet up on the chair. I’d only ever had one mouse in my apartment, but it bothered me so much, the idea of some little thing invading like that, that I’d stayed late at work every night for a week until I was sure it was poisoned and gone. Now I banged my fist hard on the desk to scare this one away. I lowered my foot and kicked the drawers and listened for more scampering.