by Ninie Hammon
Gradually, the heaving stopped, my breathing returned to normal and I jogged away from the stink of my vomit down the street to the tall, white, scary-looking structure I used to think looked like a haunted house out of a movie. Now, I knew it really was full of ghosts.
I showered, then dressed in Anne’s Official Uniform—a T-shirt, jeans and moccasins without socks. When I turned on my blow dryer, it tripped a breaker and the electricity in the bedroom and bathroom blinked off, so I went outside and sat in Bobo’s porch swing to let the warm morning breeze dry my hair.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Wreek-wreek. Wreek-wreek.
The grating sound felt soothing somehow. White noise.
In the past 24 hours I’d experienced freeze-dried life. Just add water and stir and a whole world is served up for you that wasn’t there a few minutes before.
My mother was a drunk. An alcoholic.
No!
I wanted to argue that it wasn’t true, but, of course, it was. I remembered it. And it explained so many minor mysteries in my life.
Those men and women at her funeral, the scraggly, worn-out, beat-up looking people. I couldn’t imagine where my mother could possibly have met people like that when she worked for a stock broker. Now I knew. She’d met them at Alcoholics Anonymous.
When we first moved to Louisville, Mama had taken a ceramics class that met for an hour three times a week. I always wondered why I never saw the first piece of pottery from that class, not so much as an ashtray.
Mama wasn’t making coffee mugs; she was going to AA!
The more I thought about life with Mama, the more I could see that this was the missing piece that made the rest of the puzzle fit together tight and snug.
She hovered over Joel, overprotected him, sacrificed for him like a religious zealot because she knew what her drinking had done to him. Guilt was the canvas on which every one of her days was painted.
And now—finally—I understood why Mama never did anything about what was undeniably an industrial strength case of post-traumatic stress syndrome in me. She was glad I’d forgotten my childhood because I’d forgotten her secret along with it. That’s why she taught me to fear and distrust psychiatrists—so I’d never seek professional help to remember.
It all made sense now.
Sense. Intellectual sense. Rational, reasonable, Aristotelian logic sense. But on a gut level it made no sense at all. My mother was a lady, not some boozed-up floozy. The woman I knew was as different from that screaming drunk as… as I am from the little girl in braids who picked up a tarantula.
Julia opened the front door and stepped out on the porch. “I thought I heard the swing squeak.”
“Needs some WD-40.”
She grinned. “The phone’s for you.”
As I walked in with Julia, I told her about the power outage in my bedroom, and she waddled off to reset the switch in the breaker box, hidden behind a picture somewhere in the house.
The caller was Dusty.
“I’ve heard from my psychologist friend about those pictures.”
“Did they tell her anything?”
“Told her a lot.”
“What?”
“Have dinner with me tonight?”
“Huh?”
“Have dinner with me and we can talk about what Karen said.”
I was too thunderstruck to speak. When he heard nothing but silence, he started to laugh.
“My intentions are honorable. I’m not inviting you to go snipe hunting or cow tipping or back to my place to see my etchings.”
Don’t do it. Make up an excuse. You’re sick. You’re tired. Your left leg just fell off. Something! Say no.
“Yes, I’d like that. Having dinner, I mean.”
“You do Mexican?”
“I don’t know—”
“Because it’s either Mexican or the steak house. Or we drive to Amarillo or Lubbock. And it’s OK, I don’t mind driving if that’s what you want to do.”
“No, no, Mexican is fine.”
“What time’s good for you?”
“Maybe half seven.”
“Half seven? What’s that, three-thirty twice?”
“I’m sorry, I mean seven-thirty. The British, that’s how they … well, they put things differently.”
“Half seven it is.”
When I answered the ding-dong song that evening, I was expecting the sheriff. He didn’t show up; Dusty came in his place. He was out of uniform, wearing a Western-cut shirt, jeans and boots, and he held a well-used, gray Stetson in his hands.
Over the course of the afternoon, I’d tried on every garment I’d brought with me to Texas, while a stupid robot yelled, “Danger! Danger! Danger!” in my head. I greeted Dusty wearing a pale blue hand-knit sweater from Harrod’s Department Store over dark slacks, with earrings and a matching necklace from Ireland—Celtic crosses.
And it was instantly obvious that I was overdressed. I prayed fervently that lightning would strike me dead where I stood.
“I like your hair down,” he said.
I’d pulled the hair around my face back into two small braids clipped together behind my head. The rest hung free down my back.
“Of course, you’d look more normal to me if all of it were in braids. That sweater from England? It’s a beautiful color.”
He opened my car door and kept the conversation going on our way to the restaurant with minimal input from me. He drove to a hole-in-the-wall place on one of the few side streets off Main Street in Goshen, and was greeted—in Spanish—by the manager and the servers like he was family.
The restaurant had more charm than I was expecting, nestled as it was between the State Farm Insurance Agency and the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor. The small room was festive, red walls and yellow tablecloths, each with a cactus centerpiece and napkins of blue and red neckerchiefs. Piñatas hung suspended from the ceiling and huge, colorful sombreros and painted sets of maracas adorned the walls. The waitresses were dressed in full, layered skirts like flamenco dancers; the manager wore a poncho.
When the waitress came to our table to hand us menus, I tensed. I hadn’t a clue what to order. But Dusty had already thought of that and waved her off.
“My friend doesn’t eat a lot of Mexican food,” he said, “so just bring us the sampler platter. We’ll share.”
She headed to the kitchen, and Dusty turned his attention to me.
“OK, so tell me about England.”
I hated it when people said that. How can you condense a country and a culture into a couple of pithy sentences? I was always tempted to respond in a one-breath stream, like Harold Hill’s Trouble in River City.
Well, you got rain, my friends, right here, I say rain right here in all of England—you got Stonehenge-Shakespeare-Big Ben-Robin Hood-Windsor Castle-Mary Poppins-London Bridge-John-Paul-George-Ringo—and rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.
“It’s kind of damp,” I said.
“How did a little girl from Goshen, Texas, wind up in London?”
“Oxford. I live in Oxford. Lived in Oxford.”
“How did you wind up in Oxford then? Your work take you there?”
Where should I start in a description of my work history? Did I tell him about the abysmal failure of my first attempt at employment out of college?
He just sat, waited patiently. No pressure. It occurred to me that he was treating me like I treat Bobo: don’t squeeze the soap. The suspicion that I was being “managed” ought to have offended me. It didn’t. It felt considerate.
“The story starts with the abysmal failure of my first attempt at employment out of college. Are you ready for this? I minored in art, but I majored in elementary education.”
His smile broadened. The statue can join more than one or two words together in a sentence after all. Well done.
“And that was a bad choice because … ?”
“How could I possibly expect to teach a classroom full of children when I never was one? I ha
d no childhood, remember?”
“None at all. You don’t remember anything at all?”
I studied the hem of the red neckerchief that served as my napkin.
“I didn’t tell you and Amy the whole story. The truth is, I don’t just have a few holes in my memory. I’ve forgotten everything.”
“How much everything? A little of everything? A lot of everything. Most of everything?” He wasn’t exactly making light of my plight, but he wasn’t taking it in somber, death-knell terms either.
“All of everything.”
I struggled for an analogy that would help him understand.
“It’s like a house that’s just under roof. There are outside walls, but when you go inside there’s nothing but the concrete floor and a wooden framework where rooms are going to be—and you can see all the way through from one end to the other. I know the bare framework, what happened, the people who were there in my childhood because I’ve been told about it. But I don’t actually remember it. My memories start when I was 11 years old.”
“You were 11 when you were in the car wreck.”
“That’s the first memory. Kneeling in the dirt on the roadside with the burning car in the gulley.”
How did we get here? I don’t want to talk about the worst moment in my life over dinner.
“So, without a childhood, I found it a little difficult to relate to a bunch of seven-year-olds.”
I could tell Dusty wanted to know more about the construction site of my first decade and how it happened. But he didn’t go there.
“You got all the way to a classroom before you found that out?”
“Yep. It was awful. The worst year of my life.” I decided to give not-taking-myself-so-seriously a try. “Well, maybe the worst year of my life. How would I know?”
He grinned. “So what did you do then?”
“I became a librarian.”
“A librarian?”
“Books don’t talk back. They don’t stick their tongues out at you, kick you in the shins, Super Glue your desk drawer shut or set fires in your trash can.”
“They didn’t!”
I shook my head oh-yes-they-did.
“Sounds like elementary school has changed since you and I were there!” he said. There was a beat, and then we spoke in unison.
“But how would you know?”
“But how would I know?”
The laughter felt like holding cold fingers in front of a fire.
“Connect the dots for me. How did Miriam the Librarian end up in London, I mean in Oxford?”
“It wasn’t my idea!” The intensity of my response surprised him; he didn’t realize how absurd that would have been. Anne Mitchell decides to pick up and move to England, leave everything safe and secure behind and strike out on a grand adventure and a new life?
I don’t think so!
“I didn’t ask to go. I was sent there. I didn’t have any choice. Did you know that the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is the third largest library in the world, second only to the British Library in London and the Library of Congress?”
The waitress brought our drinks while I explained how the Louisville Public Library system became Oxford’s “sister library,” like cities become sister cities. How one librarian out of the whole Louisville system was selected to be part of a staff exchange program with the Oxford University library.
“And that one librarian was you.”
“Uh-huh.”I ripped open the little white sugar packet and poured it into my steaming tea. “Mere words cannot describe how badly I didn’t want to go!”
He laughed. He tried not to, but the chuckle bubbled out in spite of his efforts to stifle it.
“So they duct-taped you to the mast of a ship, and—”
“It’s not funny!” But of course it was; I just never thought so until now.
I stirred the sugar into my tea and took a small sip. “Ahhhh. Nectar of the gods.”
Then I gave him the ten-cent tour of the Bodleian Library.
“It has 110 miles of shelves and seven million books, and every year they have to add another two miles of shelves.”
Dusty whistled softly. “Where in the world do they put it?”
“In underground tunnels. The library was built in 1320, and the Bodelian guy who funded most of it had two rules: No book could ever leave the library, and there could never be fire of any kind, either for warmth or light, anywhere on the premises. So we’re talking sunlight— which is in short supply in England—to read by, and no heat.” I took a sip of my tea. “And don’t think you can just waltz in there today and check out a book. They still won’t let a single volume leave the library.”
“Really?”
“A system of conveyor belts delivers books through the tunnels to 29 reading rooms in the various library buildings. Believe me, they know the exact location of every volume, down to the chair where the reader is sitting.
“And there are grates in the sidewalks in Oxford where the air’s vented from the tunnels below, so when you walk over them you can smell the old book smell.”
I thought of the first time I stood on the sidewalk, drinking it in, and I smiled. “I’d forgotten how much I loved that smell. The first time I stood … “
Suddenly, an astonishing realization hit me: I was doing all the talking! I stopped in midsentence and color flooded my cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to, I’ve been monopolizing the conversation … “
“No, no, it’s OK. I wanted to know. It’s fascinating.”
But my systems were shutting down. Doors slammed, bang, bang, bang.
“Don’t stop now. I want to know how Oxford led to Filbert.”
He was doing his best to put me at ease, but I had strayed too far out of my comfort zone and the electric fence around it had given me a nasty shock.
“Tell me about Filbert. Please!”
“I sat beside the art director for Bristlecone Publishing on a flight back to the U.S., and he noticed my drawings of a frog,” I told a lot of story in a few words. “He liked them and offered me a job.”
Silence.
“I read the book you gave me.”
So what did you do at the next red light?
“I thought it was great. It’s like you wrote it for kids but it was speaking to adults. I’m not sure how you managed that.” Pause. “They say deep calls out to deep, and I had the sense there was a whole lot going on under the surface of that simple story.” Bigger pause. He finally ran out of gas and just looked at me helplessly. “It was very good.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you liked it.”
I was safe inside again, with the drawbridge up. Dusty sensed it. I was grateful that the food arrived just then because he looked like he was preparing to swim the moat.
Beans, meat and cheese enchiladas, flautas, chile relleños, quesadillas, tortillas, tacos, and sopaipillas with honey.
By and large I liked the flavors. The jalapañoes were horrid. I took one bite and drank all of my water and half of Dusty’s. I liked the tacos best.
Our conversation centered around the food. Surface. Not threatening. When I was sure the red had drained all the way back down out of my cheeks, I turned the tables on Dusty.
“OK, you heard my life story. Let’s hear yours.”
I caught him off guard, and he sort of half smiled, wiped his mouth and drank what was left of his water. He was stalling.
He’s deciding how much he’s going to tell me, how deep he’s going to go.
“Well, let’s see. School here in Goshen, graduated dear old GHS.”
“Sports?”
He cocked his head to one side. “Now, do I look like a basketball player?”
“Well, you could have played something else … golf, maybe.”
“I was in the marching band. While the big guys are out there on the field pummeling each other, the puny little guys are in the stands playing the Star Spangled Banner.”
<
br /> He picked up the straw he hadn’t used in his drink and began to bend it into shapes. “Then came the military and that changed everything.”
“The marines were looking for a few good men.”
“Yeah, they were and I wasn’t one of them. I joined the army, became a military policeman. And I figured out real quick that playing the alto sax wasn’t much of a preparation for cracking heads, so I started lifting.”
“And after the military, you went to college and studied law enforcement?”
“After the military, I went to seminary.”
“Seminary! As in … seminary?”
“Dallas Theological Seminary.”
I blurted out, “What for?” before I could stop myself, and he laughed so merrily I wasn’t even embarrassed that I said it.
“Don’t you know you’re in the Bible Belt? Church on every corner?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I went to seminary because I genuinely believed God was calling me into the ministry.” He said it as simply as reading the assembly instructions on a backyard barbecue grill, but there was a profound intensity in the softness of his voice. Then he stopped, maybe gauging whether or not to go on. “And I got married.”
“You’re married!”
“I was married.”
“Oh.”
“Divorced. She … uh … left.”
“Another man?”
“No, she didn’t dump me for somebody else.” He fixed his attention on the straw he was twisting in his fingers. “Actually, it was the other way around.”
Other way a—? Oh.
“Worst mistake I ever made—and I do remember. It ended my ministry and blew my whole life apart.”
He fell silent; I backed up emotionally so fast, I ran into myself behind me. Anne Mitchell didn’t engage in painful conversations; she didn’t get within rock-throwing distance of that kind of intimacy! This was way above my pay grade.
Dusty read the look on my face and reached over as if to touch my hand, then thought better of it. “You look like you just stepped on a land mine. I shouldn’t have dumped all my dirty laundry out on you like that. I said too much. I’m sorry.”
