“What does that mean?” whispered Pearl.
Nichols said in a low voice, “It means you wouldn’t get approval for building something out of those materials today, so sometimes you can’t rebuild it at all.”
Yoiks nodded, as if grateful for the interpretation. “So what are the library’s options? Is this going to speed things up?” he asked carefully. Pearl knew what he meant: “How bad is this for the library?”
Mr. Dozer said, “There’ll have to be an inspection, and when there is, the city’s going to have something to say.”
“What are they going to say?” Pearl couldn’t stop herself from piping up.
“They’re going to condemn the building, hon,” said Mr. Dozer.
Condemn it? If the building was condemned, they wouldn’t be able to stop the construction people from turning it into whatever they wanted, Pearl knew. They could knock it down, wrecking ball and everything, if they wanted. A condemned building was unsafe for everyone around it.
A Sidebar About Truth
You might as well tell kids what’s going on. They’ll find out anyway.
—M.A.M.
The silence among the adults was awful. It was the silence of adults waiting for harsh reality to hit a child.
“No,” said Pearl. She wasn’t yelling it. She wasn’t saying it angrily. She was refusing.
“No, we can’t allow that.”
There was a little frustrated sigh of adults realizing that a child was not about to accept reality. Mr. Dozer went out the door; Pearl wasn’t his problem.
“Coming up with more drama’s not going to help, Pearl,” said Bruce.
Nobody else said anything. Everyone was looking at her. She knew she was meant to feel insulted, but she didn’t. She just said, “Well, what are we going to do?”
Then they all glanced back and forth among themselves. All this time, since the spiral staircase had cracked, Mom had stood watchful and silent, holding back her reaction, not offering her opinion about the questions raised by the journalist and the builders and the head librarian and the reference librarian and the page and the patron (Nichols).
But when her own daughter, the librarian’s child, asked, Mom spoke.
“We’ll do anything we can, Pearl,” she said. “We’ll do everything we can. And then we’ll see what happens. And then, when we have to, we’ll move on.”
“Move on?” shouted Pearl. “Move on where?”
“It’ll be okay, Pearl,” said Nichols.
Bruce, across the room, said softly, “Come on, Pearl.”
Nobody else said anything. This time they didn’t even look at each other. They looked at their feet or over their shoulders or across the room.
“I’m not moving on,” Pearl announced. “There’s got to be a way to fix it. There’s got to be a way to get it ‘to code.’” She thought of the raccoons in the basement and what could happen to them, and it gave her even more fighting energy. “Grown-ups give up too easy! I’m not going to! This whole neighborhood’s at stake—everyone who lives here! The school and the stores and the apartments and the raccoons and everything else.” She stood there panting, teary.
“Nothing is permanent, Pearl,” Jonathan Yoiks said softly.
Pearl couldn’t let herself hear that. It was as if darkness fell around her as she ran for the foyer, crashed through the front doors, and blasted down the steps.
It was the first time in Pearl’s life that she had run from the library.
Pearl was not there on Thursday morning when the city inspector arrived. She was not there to follow him past circulation and into the reading room, to watch his face as he examined the deterioration of the spiral staircase and the fracturing of its supports, then the rest of the bookcases, mezzanine floor, and balcony rails. She was not there to hear him laugh a weary laugh as he ran a hand over the roses embossed on the iron bookcase ends and railings and saw flecks of rust fall through the morning beams of light. She was not there to hear Alice sniff as she watched from the children’s room doorway through the 800s to the mezzanine. She was not there when he filled out the form, slid it into a plastic sleeve, and posted it on the front door. But she couldn’t avoid it forever. It was firmly up when Pearl came home from school.
And CONDEMNED was on it.
But.
“It’s only the reading room,” said Simon. “And the spiral staircase, of course.” In short, anything with cast iron. And it counted the glass floor of the mezzanine that had long since been roped off from the public out of common sense—and was now officially closed.
It meant that the library could be open as long as the entrances to the spiral stairs from below and the mezzanine from above stayed off-limits.
“It’s one more strike against us,” said Simon.
“One more item on the budget,” said Bruce.
And Pearl knew, without needing Ramón or anyone else to spell it out for her: one more nail in the coffin.
The condemned notice was an unthinkable, unspeakable change. Pearl let out a roar. She flung herself toward the back hall, crashed through the garden door, and slammed out.
Everything in the garden waited silent and unresponsive around her. The pines and yews stood there dark and evergreen, and Vincent just stood there with her empty neck, her empty hand.
The sun went down behind Oleg’s apartment building, and the garden turned cold and dark. Nobody came looking for Pearl—not Francine, not Nichols, not Simon, not even Mom or Ramón or Alice or Bruce. She sat alone with her back against the only remotely warm place at the stone base of Vincent’s pedestal, the grass under her bottom cool and dampening, the lights going on in the apartment windows, the trees darkening from green to blue to black as the evening grew.
Pearl sat with her fingers laced through fading grass and lavender on either side, combing through the fronds, crumbling the old blossoms. It felt as though her fingers were the only things holding her to Earth.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she suddenly noticed movement, something small coming toward her through the grass. Mary Ann.
Pearl felt in her pocket for a pen and found a Sharpie, but couldn’t find anything to write on. Mary Ann shook her head, a motion that seemed to say, That’s all right. She sat like a cat, forepaws set neatly together, rounded back in a hump, tail curled around herself, on the chilly rocks beside Pearl. The two of them waited there together.
Waiting for what? Pearl asked herself. She didn’t have an answer.
When at last Mary Ann rose and trundled toward the back of the library, Pearl stood up, too. She was stiff and cold. Mom was standing at the back door looking out for her.
Mom pulled Pearl in. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Pearl. It was a lie, of course, told by a child to comfort her mother.
38: THE DAMAGED DEN
OCT 21–22
It got warm that weekend, sunny and beautiful, maybe the last gasp of summer. As Pearl walked through her neighborhood that weekend, she considered her neighbors, all the people going to school, to work, to home, to the store. She looked at all of them—the old ones, the young ones, the in-between ones. She heard the different languages and laughing and crying and whining and arguing and screaming and yelling and singing, and she thought, What would happen if every single one of these people came to the library and took out a book? If Vincent really could point each person to the one perfect book, would they be hooked for good? She got so lost in thought that she passed her usual turn off toward Beep Street and wound up at the other end, and found herself walking the way she usually didn’t, past the house she now knew was Mrs. Mallomar’s.
There was the little mail slot, easier to see now that the early-autumn cold had destroyed some of the ivy. Pearl examined the garden. It was full of kitschy-cute pastel plastic fairies, little tables and chairs, and a sun-bleached resin frog holding a washed-out pastel sign that said
DON’T PISS OFF THE FAIRIES.
Smart: Mrs. Mallomar
really lived here, but her front yard was made of things designed to make it look like imaginary creatures lived here instead, like whoever resided at 22 Beep Street was a bit of an eccentric. It was a ruse—a perfect way to fool regular people into never dreaming that anyone actually inhabited 221/2, much less a raccoon.
A Sidebar About Dumpsters
They have high metal sides and they can be lethal.
They can have great stuff inside with the potential to change your life, or your art.
Don’t get into one if you don’t have a plan for how to get out—unless you’re trying to create some drama, because that’s what you’ll get.
This sidebar is dedicated to the fine work of artists everywhere, and also to my brother, Arak L. Mallomar.
—M.A.M.
That gave Pearl an idea that was so fantastic, she couldn’t stop grinning. She left, giggling down the street.
The lights were on in Francine’s windows, and here came Granny, pulling her wagon. What luck! thought Pearl, and she marched right up to her.
“I have a problem,” Pearl said. “And I think you’re the right person for the job.”
Granny snorted. “Thank you, but I’ve got plenty of jobs.”
“I’ll do the work,” said Pearl.
“Help me do this work first,” said Granny. Together they carried the full wagon into the building and up the stairs, Francine opened the inner door, and they rolled the wagon into Granny’s studio, which was also her and Francine’s bedroom.
Talk about a rat’s nest! Things were sorted into stacks and shelves and tables: discarded lampshades, lamps that didn’t go with them, chair legs, baby doll legs, balls, toys, tree branches, tiles, broken mirrors, ruined books, a hose, plastic flowers, chunks of concrete, curtains, wire, on and on. Beyond them were some of Granny’s sculptures, posts with objects sticking out every which way as if pointing the direction in some kind of trash paradise.
“It’s a different world, isn’t it?” said Granny.
“This is just what I was hoping for,” said Pearl. “I need to make clues to a raccoon world. Nobody can know but us. Here’s what I want to do . . .”
Granny’s eyes sparkled. Francine stepped closer, her tap shoes clicking.
Saturday’s midnight Moon featured the following article and request:
READING RACCOONS TO BE
ROUTED BY DAMAGE TO DEN
A crack appeared in the spiral staircase of the Lancaster Avenue branch of the New York City Library, headquarters to the dynasty of reading raccoons who write, edit, and publish this special midnight edition of the Moon. It is the opinion of one reporter for this edition that the fate of the dynastic den rests on the shoulders of the human occupants of the library. There is one person—one person with two assistants—with the potential to inspire the neighborhood and the city to come to the aid and support of the library. We reading raccoons recognize the power of being a special, elite, intellectually superior population, and for the first time, we realize that this power is more important than the power of invisibility.
Recently, this paper has become aware of the theatrical gifts of certain human children, and so it announces an open call to our own kaboodle of kits. The parents of raccoons with charisma (or who have ever wanted a moment in the moonlight) should reply to—
—M.A.M.
Mary Ann was kept incredibly busy, to the point where she and Pearl worried she might be overwhelmed by responsibility. Her to-do list included:
Write Rax Rex, short for Raccoon Recommendations, a new column of books to read. (How I like a catchy column name!) The first list included such gems as The Kissing Hand,1 Treehouse Chronicles,2 and even Nuts to You,3 which was about those other tree-dwellers, the squirrels, whose own reading abilities were sadly lacking.
Cover her beat—writing her regular pieces for the paper, reporting on neighborhood developments.
Give Pearl editorial input on the even more expanded and even more dramatized story for the Halloween Howl.
Audition young performers for their own Great Masking performance. (As is often the case in the arts, it’s all about who you know.)
1 The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, illustrated by Ruth E. Harper and Nancy M. Leak (Children’s Welfare League of America, 1993).
2 Treehouse Chronicles: One Man’s Dream of Life Aloft by S. Peter Lewis and T.B.R. Walsh (TMC Books, 2008).
3 Nuts to You, by Lynne Rae Perkins (Greenwillow, 2014).
39: THE READING RACCOONS
OCT 22–23
A Sidebar About Uniforms
Uniforms make everyone look the same.
If people all look alike, you can’t be singled out, so you’re less likely to get hurt. Uniforms give you something to wear that isn’t your own, so people can’t judge you by your own clothes. Fur, for a raccoon, is its own uniform. As far as humans are concerned, we all look the same.
This doesn’t mean that there is not occasionally an item of clothing that I would like to have; for example, Tallulah’s soft velvet hat with sewnon sequins, the color of a raspberry. There’s nothing I would like more. Or so I thought until I saw the Reading Raccoon caps.
They are a kind of uniform, but different. They are not so much like the school uniform, clothes that smooth out the differences in privilege between students. The Reading Raccoon caps made everyone who wore them part of something—part of a neighborhood known for readers. Now that humans wanted to wear those caps, somehow we—the humans and the raccoons together—we were all on the same team.
At first, when Pearl started this whole campaign, I was afraid people would come looking for us. Instead, this strange thing started to happen: People started to consider themselves one of us.
One afternoon, there was a small package on the basement stairs: three miniature yellow caps—small, medium, and large—with ear holes cut out. You might think they were from Pearl. You might think they were from Francine or her granny. You’d be wrong.
They were from Khadija. “I don’t know if I believe you about your little raccoon friends,” she told Pearl. “I just couldn’t resist making miniature hats.”
As for me, I couldn’t resist wearing one.
—M.A.M.
“All these kids here getting reading ‘rex’ from the ‘rax’ are going to make it very bad public relations for the mayor to recommend against the library,” said Alice to Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer.
Like everyone in the library, Alice had been reading the copies of the midnight Moon that the raccoons left in the reading room each night. Now Alice did a very simple thing—she scanned each Rax Rex column and sent it two places:
1. To Jonathan Yoiks, via email, and
2. To the school, via a printout delivered by Pearl, for Ms. Judge to copy and hand out.
Pearl’s mom made a plan to borrow copies of the recommended books from other branches in order to have extras on their shelves to meet the new demand, and Danesh, Alice’s husband, promised to drive around and pick up the books.
Alice was tired just thinking about everything. It was a month from her due date, and she’d had it with being pregnant, had it with the tension of not knowing what was going to happen with the library building, the neighborhood, her job.
“You make us sound like vultures,” Mr. Dozer told Alice.
“Aren’t you vultures?” asked Alice.
“What do you know about vultures?” asked Mr. Bull.
“They hang around where something is going to die and they eat it—sometimes even before it’s dead,” Pearl said.
“What if there weren’t vultures?” asked Mr. Bull. “We’d all be knee-deep in corpses.”
“This library is not a corpse!” said Mom.
“Neither are the buildings we repurpose,” said Mr. Dozer.
Simon entered then, carrying a big box.
“Package for you, Pearl!” said Mom. The return address on the box was Gully’s Buck-a-Buy.
Pearl took a deep breath and pulled the tape off the box. A case
of yellow baseball caps, and beneath it, a box containing twelve dozen black Halloween eye masks.
“What’re those for?” asked Simon.
Without a glance at Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer, Pearl said, “They’re to save the spiral stairs.”
Later last night in Granny’s studio, after they’d finished their construction of the raccoon world, Francine and Pearl had moved on to their next project: the baseball caps. They’d argued about what to write across the bill of the cap. Francine wanted the whole thing spelled out, but I’M A READING RACCOON was too much to write legibly, and READING wasn’t much of a message. They settled on:
“What if they don’t know what it means?” Francine said.
“Then they’ll ask,” said Pearl. “And I’ll say, ‘The two Rs stand for Reading Raccoons.’”
Francine said, “And they’ll say, ‘What are Reading Raccoons?’” “And then we’ll tell them,” said Pearl.
That was the plan. Even Gully was in on it. And by the end of the night, they’d made more than a hundred Reading Raccoon caps.
They wore the hats to school. When kids said, “Where’d you get the cool hat?” Pearl and her friends just said, “Gully’s Buck-a-Buy.” He was selling them on special for $2—the only thing in his store that cost more than a buck.
“Twice-a-buck, twice-the-luck,” said Gully to the kids who shopped for caps. For the moment, he wasn’t anybody’s enemy.
Soon enough, kids in the other grades were after them, too. Even Ms. Judge herself asked for one, and Pearl made hers a special pale pink, so she would stand out from the crowd. After a few days, Bruce told Mom she was going to have to relax the “no hats in the library” rule or they’d have to buy some more coatracks.
Meanwhile, Mom, Alice, and Ramón were churning out library cards to meet the demand of Ms. Judge’s giant pile of applications. Pearl’s plan was working: As kids stopped by with their parents to get their library cards, sign the register, and take the oath, they couldn’t help buying a cap across the street.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 24
