Attend a Christmas buffet lunch at one of the offices. Fill a paper plate with ham, sweet potatoes, a gingerbread man. Employees gather in small groups, talking and eating. Return alone to your desk, carefully setting down your plate. With your plastic knife, cut a wedge of ham. Put it in your mouth. Focus on food: cutting, chewing, swallowing. Wipe your mouth with a napkin decorated with Santa. Feel invisible.
Out the window, a forest of high-rises stretches to the Loop. The pocked roof of the Astrodome, resembling the moon, darkens in the gray afternoon. Grackles swarm in the distance, though you can’t hear their raucous cries. Sounds in the office fade as well. Feel as if you occupy a monastic cell—all the windows in the buildings, all the office workers, all these sequestered faces suspended behind glass—hovering high above the earth.
The Shrouds of the Kon Tiki
Late one night awake to the clang of fire engines. Leap from bed and look out the window. Flames, from the direction of The Strand, stain the black sky. The arsonist is burning another building. Slip on flip-flops, cutoffs, hurry outside. Your lungs are heavy with humidity, your mouth smoky. Run as if you can save the building, worrying it might be your old apartment.
It is the Kon Tiki.
Pause in the alley across the street. If a building must burn, at least this one is no longer adorned with its original iron-front façade, isn’t worth much architecturally. Over the years the structure’s been decimated, reduced to stucco slabs.
But where are the patrons? Upstairs from the dance club are steam baths for the gay clientele. Probably the baths operate all night. Probably men are still up there, though hopefully, at this hour, not many remain.
Flames spire from the roof. Red paint peels off the front door. Behind windows, fire shimmers and roils. Your husband, in robe and pajamas, whom you just noticed, grabs a fireman. He points to the surrounding buildings. Probably he worries the fire will spread, will leap the alley to buildings waiting to be restored. The fireman nods before rushing off. Your husband backs away but continues to watch.
Slide down, your back against your old apartment building. The brick-lined alley is warm beneath your legs. The air pings as windows crack before shattering. Imagine water pipes bursting, nails bending. The notes on all the vinyl records warp. The Lucite dance floor blisters before it melts—red, green, blue neon puddling to black, to a char, to soot, to dust. The air smells dark, a whoosh of exhaled ether.
As if in a mirage, they emerge from cataracts of spraying water, walking single file. An orderly line of men wrapped in white sheets follow a fireman from a side door. They look like a procession of shrouds. Dazed, they pass an ambulance, trickling down the alley one by one, their forms watery, as if leaving the Kon Tiki not having found what they sought. They reach the end of the block. You can no longer see heads or outlines of bodies. Wispy sheets seem to drift on air currents, though the men’s soles leave moist footprints on hot asphalt, as they stumble toward what will be the worst decade of their lives. Perhaps their last.
Across the street, your husband’s shoulders tremble as if he is crying. Even though this building isn’t on the list to be restored, still, it’s in The Strand district, which he loves. This is his love.
Walk over to him. Hug him. Your voice would never be heard above the fiery night, but you hope he understands you are sorry. About the fire. About the blue convertible. About everything.
Imagine relationships ending like drops of water sizzling in flame.
Worn-Through Faces
One Saturday morning toward the end of March, see the entire man who lives in the rooming house across the street, not just his forearm in the window. He’s opened the door and stepped outside. How do you know it’s him? You just do. Imagine he’s a sailor, unemployed for a while, fallen on hard times. Now you’re sure he’s found a new job on a freighter bound for Venezuela. He pauses on the front stoop, a cardboard valise in one hand, a cigarette in the other, as if he’s stepping off a 1940s movie set. Crewcut hair. The leather of his western boots is cracked, but polished. He’s younger than you imagined. But perhaps an old, previous, down-and-out face has worn off, as Rilke suggests, to reveal another face, one that’s pale, yes, from his long captivity, yet now setting sail into the future. As he walks down the sidewalk watch his footsteps as if you could follow them, each step a point on a map. Direction. A destination.
The thing of it is, the moment is banal. Watching this man is the opposite of the melodrama of running away in a blue convertible. Today it is just solitary footsteps moving in one direction . . . and a new face. Today it is only the air that’s spring yellow, oleanders falling all over themselves to bloom.
The man disappears at the end of the block. Rather than feel abandoned, imagine the tether that’s lightly bound you and him together, now pulling you forward, too.
A few weeks later, almost a year after you ran away from home with the blue-convertible man, you are financially solvent. Pay off the rebuilt Volkswagen engine. Purchase new clothes. Pack them in the canvas suitcase and throw it in the backseat of your car. One of your temporary jobs has become permanent. You plan to move. You want to feel the throb of Houston, a city that grew in proportion to Galveston’s demise. Although Galveston was once the largest port on the gulf, after the Houston Ship Channel was constructed, the island slumbered, leaving blocks of Victoriana to decay.
Until your husband was hired to restore it.
Or is he really only preserving it? Preserving decay, you now think. Consider that the old buildings should remain in ruins, the palmettos and crape myrtles jungled and rampant, cypress shingles stained with saltwater, wrought-iron fences rusted. The scent of verdigris.
Consider only your own preservation.
One last time, drive the causeway linking Galveston to the mainland. Speed, as if you are levitating, leaving the low-lying barrier island far behind. Windows open. Wind caressing the tender skin of your new face.
Gentle Reader,
But gefiltes are tough to caress. So don’t get your hopes up, I’m sorry to say. Houston doesn’t pan out any better than Galveston. Not learning from past mistakes, I remarry.
After serving time in Texas, I, along with my second husband, embark upon a two-year stint in Missouri. The highlight? He teaches at a college belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. I actually believe that I belong, as well. In fact, we live in an apartment across the street from the Second Baptist church. (Recent Second Baptist Church Facebook posts: “We are loving ‘Jesus Knows the Blues’ class on Wednesday evenings.” “How has God used Scripture to shape you in the past? How is God using Scripture to shape you now?”) Back then, I would have friended their Facebook page, posting comments using the handle “gefilte-1.”
After all, it takes a shtetl.
But my husband then secures a job at another college. Once again I wash up on a foreign shore, this time in Rome, Georgia. But since inland Rome doesn’t have a shore, this gefilte journeys across dry land, legless . . . and, let me tell you, that is not a pretty sight.
By the time I reach Rome, anchored to my husband, I’m dirty and sweaty and have lost a layer of scales from all that rolling up and down highways from one very nasty, bitter state to another.
S.W.S.
The Fireproof Librarian
Can’t start a fire without a spark . . .
Bruce Springsteen
TO: All Employees
FROM: Abigail Kane, Director
SUBJECT: Regarding the Possibility of Asbestos in the Building
Some concern has been expressed that not enough information regarding the investigation into the possibility of asbestos in the library building has been disseminated to the staff. This memo/notice contains all the information I have in my possession at this time.
I approach the red-brick Sara Hightower Regional Library on Broad Street in Rome, Georgia, where I work, hoping to see a skull-and-crossbones sign nailed to the door. A modern addition mutates from the rear of this original Carnegie
library, friable asbestos molting from the ceiling. Since last December, library employees have awaited results of the “Asbestos Survey and Testing Report,” an official document to confirm exact levels and locations. Yesterday, March third, concerned about the delay, I myself called Dennis Scott, Floyd County health inspector, to determine the report’s status. He said he planned to collect samples today. When I expressed concern about the three-month delay, he refused comment. No steps to fix the problem will be implemented until this report is completed. No public warning signs will be posted until the suspicion of asbestos is scientifically confirmed.
Belle, my supervisor, head of the Fine Art Department, waits at the downstairs checkout counter, watching the door, watching for me. Wide as she is tall, Belle, today, resembles a puffy pink square of bubblegum. She has two emotional settings: perky and trouble. As I approach her, the lids of her eyes flatten, so I’m thinking trouble. Busted. Dennis Scott blew the whistle on me—whereas I’m planning to blow it on him. Shrilly.
“I heard a little rumor,” Belle says. “I’m hoping you’ll tell me it’s not true.”
Given my lowly, part-time status, I deliberately bypassed her authority by calling about the report. Caught, I confess. “But did he show up today for the samples?” I nod toward the ceiling, then walk behind the checkout counter.
“You went over my head, over Abigail’s head. That kind of behavior is . . .” She clamps her mouth shut, unable to finish her sentence. Her bleached-blonde hair, polyurethaned into a helmet, seems to tremble.
“You don’t think we should at least warn the public?” I say.
“This isn’t an asbestos factory.” She slaps her palm on the counter. Probably it’s just dust, but a few white particles spew into the air on impact. “I’m going now,” she adds. “You think you can stay out of trouble the rest of the evening? Get something done here?” I work the five-to-nine-p.m. shift.
I prop open the downstairs door for fresh air, though it’s just as likely a breeze will disturb the ailing asbestos. I breathe as shallowly as possible. The ceiling resembles drifts of fake snow or clumps of Ivory soap flakes, a niveous compound supposed to adhere to the structure. When the air-conditioning fan cycles on, however, ghostly clouds spew on books, desks, light fixtures, floors. Deep gouges pock the ceiling where books on the top shelves brush against it. Previously, unaware of the asbestos, we all simply blew the stuff off book jackets or dusted them with rags—the equivalent, perhaps, of cleaning up nuclear meltdowns with mops.
I perch on the stool behind the downstairs circulation desk, awaiting patrons. The upstairs floor of the library—fiction, reference, children’s books—is always busier. Tonight, my department is quiet. I’m relieved. I hate to check out books. They’re only returned a few weeks later to be shelved all over again. A never-ending cycle. My official title is “Fine Art evening supervisor.” Yet I’m hardly a librarian and know nothing about art. This department, however, is also a quasi-paradise for “how-to” junkies, with books on how to sail, how to train your dog, how to raise chickens, how to shoot a rifle, how to identify wildflowers, fix your plumbing and electricity, gamble, recover from cancer, nervous breakdowns, depression. All that’s missing, which is what I really want, are books on how to muckrake and scandalmong.
The library’s scent of sun-hot brick, musty paper, and chipped linoleum (probably likewise manufactured with asbestos) settles over the evening. From amid the stacks, I slide out the Chilton’s Kawasaki 900Z1 New Repair and Tune-up Guide. I’ve been studying it the past week—flaunting authority yet again—since we aren’t allowed to read while on duty. On the cover looms a black-leathered man wearing a red helmet, sitting astride a Kawasaki with a red-metal fuel tank. I don’t own a motorcycle. I’ve never owned one. But . . .
In the movie version, I grab the handlebars, heaving the Kawasaki off the stands. I press the choke with my thumb and switch the ignition. I jam my leather-booted feet on the pegs. I gun the engine, the bike’s growl reverberating through my body. The silver mufflers, shaped like horns, streak above asphalt, the drive chain spinning sparks across pavement. A camera pans my race down Broad Street. Motorists wheel toward the curb. Pedestrians don’t dare step from sidewalks. I own the street—me, peering through eye holes in red satin that masks my face. A cape—a red cape—streams behind me. Tires hiss to a stop in front of the library. I swirl through the building, the cape magically casting asbestos into black holes in the sky. The citizens of Rome cheer. Pistons firing, chains spinning, I disappear into the night.
“Who was that masked girl?” everyone asks.
A few minutes before closing time, a woman plops a box stuffed with romance novels on the counter. She wears an Atlanta Braves t-shirt, the red-and-blue logo bleeding into the white fabric. I sigh, me in my own smudged t-shirt, probably sprinkled with asbestos particles. I’m tempted to tell her to go upstairs to the fiction department, but both stations are required to check out books. Besides, I figure I’ve caused enough trouble today. So I slam the rubber stamp with the due date onto the cards, inserting them into the pockets. Covers portray women with indigo hair, crimson blossoms pinned behind their ears. The male model Fabio (or facsimile) wears a pirate shirt. He’s poised to rip bodices.
Finally the woman staggers out the door with her cardboard box of romance. I tally up the few pennies from overdue books. I turn off the downstairs lights in the Georgia Room (which houses the archives), the music room, and the windowless periodicals room. I dog-ear the Kawasaki repair manual on page twenty-seven, 629.2877 in the Dewey Decimal System. Which, by the way, is the only thing about library work I love: the exactness of each book owning a private number. It belongs here, in this one and only location, nowhere else in the universe. The back cover of the book appears scorched, perhaps accidentally ignited by an acetylene torch soldering valve refacers or sprocket teeth. I hide it in the stacks behind the Handbook of Wild Flower Cultivation (635.967) so no one will check it out. I lock the downstairs door behind me. Finally, I take a deep breath.
I switch on the engine to my sixteen-year-old green Volkswagen bug and drive down Broad Street toward home. I wonder if Belle will report me to Abigail, the library director. Probably. But I’m not sure I care. For what I did not say to Belle is that I hate this job. I did not say this job is a default plan for my life, nothing else to do in Rome, where I moved with my husband for his job. I did not say this is a second-rate library in a fading rural town, hardly Atlanta, more than an hour away. I did not say you, Belle, will never aspire to anything grander than overseeing a bunch of books laced with asbestos. I also restrained myself from saying that if I felt at home or even slightly welcomed in the library, I might not have called the health inspector in the first place. I did not say that I feel like a Yankee. A foreigner. An alien.
Or maybe none of this about Belle and Rome is true. Maybe it’s just me—bitter, confused—who is the real problem, who has brought this all on myself.
No, surely that can’t be true.
To reach the decrepit log cabin in which I live, you turn left off Martha Berry Boulevard onto the Berry College campus, where my husband teaches English literature. I pass the gatehouse, a low-tech security checkpoint, and drive down a narrow three-mile road plowed through a nature preserve, to faculty housing. Tonight, my foot barely on the gas pedal, the gear in second, I feel as if I’m pouring through a dark funnel. I follow thin tunnels of my own dim headlights, leading nowhere I really want to go. I pass the turnoff to the dirt road leading up Lavender Mountain. On top is the House o’ Dreams, a cottage once belonging to Martha Berry, the college founder. Beside it stands a fire tower, high enough to see Alabama and Tennessee. High enough to watch for trouble-making Yankees approaching.
I maneuver a hairpin turn, pull into a small clearing, and park beside the screened porch. A light burns in my husband’s study. He’s probably reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty or Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, research for a b
ook he’s writing: Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition. He tells me that it focuses on the novel’s representation of an ekphrastic art form as a reflexive device of mimetic self-definition, exploring how a shift in realist paradigms has taken place in this century from an empirical, correspondence theory of signification to a foundational model emphasizing discourse and a coherence theory of meaning.
It’s virtually impossible to imagine such an incomprehensible book, with its own Dewey Decimal number, sitting on the shelves of Sara Hightower Regional Library. Certainly I myself do not, on any level of my being, understand what it’s about.
I’ve been married to this second husband—and all his obtuse sentences—for only a few years. I met him at the University of Houston, where he taught an adult education class I took. Initially, I was impressed by his eclectic knowledge, his collection of classical records, only belatedly realizing we have little in common. I, after all, love disco—undeconstructively, I might add.
Now, I quietly close the car door, so he won’t know I’m home yet. I sit on the front stoop. The humid night dampens the scent of pinestraw and of Floyd County’s paper mills, slightly acrid with chemicals grinding bark to pulp. I almost hear the whoosh of bats, the twitch of white-tailed deer, the rustle of wild turkeys. Through breaks in the trees, the moon rounds the sky—a thin Necco wafer, an old-fashioned candy belonging to the past. Even though I’ve lived in Georgia only a few years, perhaps it is the regretful past of the South I sense. Do I myself feel the chafed hopes of elderly widows—dusty African violets in their windowsills—attired in floral dresses for Southern Baptist church services? Afterward, they gather at Shoney’s for breakfast . . . widows sprinkled with carnation talcum, dusting themselves with dreams of long-ago summers. I feel this, as if I am an abandoned widow lady, too.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 11
