Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is kids’ court,” the judge went on, looking over my head to the rows of other teenage villains whose turns were coming up, and addressing them as much as he was talking to me, “and in kids’ court we try to find a punishment that fits the crime. No one who comes before my bench will go to jail unless”—and here he paused for a meaningful half a minute as he scanned the room—“they fail to carry out the sentence handed out by this court. Do you understand that, Solstice?”

  “Yes,” I said again, and for the first time that morning, I was scared. I had been nervous when I went to bed and nervous when I woke up, but nerves are different from fear, and until that moment I hadn’t been scared of what was going to happen to me. The judge was right. He didn’t have to say it. I was counting on the fact that I stole a dictionary, not someone’s wallet or phone. That day, the day I did it, after the store security team took me from the reference section through fiction to classics and into a back office that smelled like stale coffee had been spilled in a changing room, and after the real police came, a male officer and a female officer, who sneered as they questioned me, and after I was released to my tearstained mother and driven home by my pissed-off father, the idea that I might end up behind bars didn’t seem like one of the likely outcomes of, as my father, Steve, put it, my “pointless adventure.”

  “You don’t needlessly invite the police into your life,” he lectured me on the way home. This, from a man who has never met a demonstration he didn’t like. Other fathers tell their children war stories; Steve tells antiwar stories: how he got penned in and pepper sprayed in New York during the first Iraq war demonstration; how he got shot at with rubber bullets in Seattle during the big antiglobalization demonstration of ’99; how he was part of a die-in during the 2003 Republican National Convention; how he sat in a big old tree for three months in Oregon so it wouldn’t get cut down—I’m not sure when; and how he went on a hunger strike to protest genetically modified foods and stopped only when he found out Willow was pregnant. And these are the ones I remember. There are more.

  “The last thing I want to do is send someone to juvenile hall,” the judge was saying, “but sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes it’s the only way.”

  He sounded sad. He looked sad. Then he looked at me.

  “Solstice Arkinsky, for the crime of stealing the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, I hereby sentence you to forty hours a week of community service at the Riverton Public Library, to be carried out every day during summer vacation until the new school year begins.”

  He paused, looked down, and started reading some papers on his desk. And kept reading. I didn’t know if he was done with me, and I should go, or if I was supposed to keep standing until he told me I could go. Behind me, a boy whispered, “What she supposed to do?” maybe to his mother, maybe to mine. I didn’t turn around. I suddenly got worried that the judge had found out something else about me, something bad, something that was making him reconsider. Steve is always going on about how the state knows things about you that you don’t even know about yourself and how it will use it against you if you’re not careful. The judge looked up, finally, and cleared his throat.

  “Any questions?”

  I nodded again.

  “Yes?” He sounded annoyed.

  “I don’t go to school,” I said.

  The judge looked confused, so I reminded him that he had said I was supposed to work at the library during school vacation, but I didn’t have school vacation because I didn’t go to school.

  “Not attending school is a serious offense,” he said, shifting his gaze from me to my mother and back to me.

  The court reporter stopped typing. The look on her face said, “Whoa!”

  “She studies at home,” my mother said, the stud in her tongue picking up and reflecting the light from the fixture overhead. I waited for her to explain the whole no-schooling concept, and maybe she would have, but the judge banged his gavel again, not once, but three times, like exclamation points.

  “It is the order of this court that Solstice Arkinsky serve June, July, and August of this year at the Riverton Public Library, for no less than forty hours a week. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” we said.

  “Do you agree?” he asked.

  “Yes,” we said.

  The judge banged his gavel again, and the clerk read out the name of the next kid on the docket, and the sheriff directed us down a long corridor and up a flight of stairs to an office on the next floor where there would be paperwork waiting for our signatures.

  My sneakers squelched on the linoleum as we walked, and my mother’s sandals click-clacked, and it was over, and it was just beginning.

  * * *

  One must have a mind of winter . . .

  —Wallace Stevens

  There are 1,687 Carnegie Libraries in the United States. The one in Riverton was built in 1912 when the city was a prosperous industrial hub on the banks of the Connecticut. No more. The mills that made textiles, shoes, and paper had all closed by the sixties and seventies, taking most of the downtown with them. The diner was shuttered, the display windows of Fine’s Department Store were covered with plywood, and the pharmacy was relocated to the mall twelve miles away. The library still anchored the town green, and in the evening, when the light was fading and the building’s four Doric columns, strung between a run of broad limestone stairs and a frieze that had largely worn away, were in the shadows, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a mausoleum. Still, the library’s persistent grandeur was, if nothing else, a sign to anyone passing through and everyone who lived there that Riverton had once been something.

  When she moved there, four years earlier, Kit was surprised at how dingy the place was. Most of what she knew about New England came from insurance company calendars, and there were no covered bridges, no tall-steepled white churches to be seen in Riverton, just streets of sagging two- and three-story clapboard houses near the city center and rows of brick mill buildings down near the water. This was in March. There was still snow on the ground. Dirty snow. The library job didn’t start till April. She bought a pair of rubber boots so she could walk around, but it turned out that dirty snow was more dirt and crushed rock than snow and ice and the boots were pointless. She was staying at the Travelodge out on the highway, eating cups of yogurt and pastries lifted from the breakfast buffet and watching Law and Order reruns when she wasn’t looking at real estate ads or talking to real estate agents, who were excited to have a live one on the line.

  Rent or buy? That was the question. Prudence said rent. It also said buy. She had some money. Loss was tricky that way—it turned out that a negative balance sheet didn’t always leave you in the red. That’s what she’d said to the therapist back in Michigan, who believed in positive psychology and was trying to get her to believe in it, too, urging her to find the good in things when and where she could. “See, it’s a lose-win situation,” she told him, “so it’s like semi-positive psychology.” He was not amused.

  “Come on, Kit,” Dr. Bondi, the therapist, said, urging her, she knew—yes, she knew!—to reel off lines from the script he’d been trying to drill into her in an effort to supplant the one that was currently resident. Cognitive behavioral therapy it was called, CBT. Bondi swore by it.

  “I’ve learned that I am much stronger than I thought I was!” And, “I’ve learned that even if the situation is crazy, it doesn’t mean I’m crazy!” And, “I’ve learned that the past is a story, the future is a story, and the only reality is right now.”

  She could say these things, but they were just words. Words that didn’t mean anything to her.

  “You know what’s rich?” she said, then paused for effect. “I am. Lucky me. Apparently, I won the life lottery.”

  “I understand your anger, Kit, I really do,” he said, looking at her in a way that she could only describe as meaningful. He wasn’t unattractive—she had to give him that. He was lean a
nd fit and in the nearly year they’d been meeting appeared to be permanently sun-kissed, even his hair. Sometimes, thinking about him when they weren’t together, she wondered if his presentation wasn’t part of his practice—was he trying to project healthfulness onto the sad sacks who took up residence every hour on the hour in one of the plush brown easy chairs placed strategically across from where he sat, upright and probing? It seemed possible. She knew enough herself to show up at his office clean, teeth brushed, hair brushed, in laundered clothes, so he would not think she was depressed. She wasn’t depressed, just exhausted.

  “Why shouldn’t I be angry? You think things are one way and it turns out that they are another. What’s that line? Everything solid melts into air? But the joke is that it was never solid in the first place.”

  She leaned back in the overstuffed chair defiantly. Dr. Bondi pushed a box of tissues in her direction. Dry-eyed and seething, she pushed them back.

  “I admire your resilience, Kit,” Dr. Bondi said. “I really do.”

  “And I admire your persistence,” Kit said, standing up. By now she was well trained. The fifty-minute hour was over, and soon, it turned out, they’d be saying good-bye for good.

  It had all happened so quickly. Everything was moving in slow motion, the way it does when you’re in an accident, and then, as if someone leaned over and pushed fast-forward, everything sped up. She barely remembered applying for the Riverton job. It was through one of those online things. But there was the job offer, in her in-box, and two weeks to give her answer. Two weeks to decide to pack up and leave. No—that was not true. She had to leave. It was just a matter of when she’d go and where she’d go. Inexplicably, out of the whole wide world, she’d chosen Riverton, a declining, flea-bitten city where winter began in November and didn’t disappear for a good six months. When she asked herself why, the answer was always the same: Because it was there.

  * * *

  Sunny/one book

  Everyone wanted to know why I stole the dictionary. The people at the store, the police, the judge, my parents, the other kids at kids’ court. Each time they asked, I’d say that I didn’t steal it and wait until they got the joke. Eventually they’d ask me why I had wanted to steal it, and I’d say I was tired of bothering my parents or I needed it to study for the PSAT, which is what I told the judge. But there was something more, something I hadn’t said out loud to anybody, because it was personal and I didn’t want to be made fun of. Then Kit, at the library, sort of asked me. We were down in the children’s section, just the two of us, shelving books and not talking—not because it’s a library, and you have to be quiet, but because Kit doesn’t say much and mostly keeps to herself. And then, out of the blue, she said, “So, the dictionary,” which sounded like a statement, not a question, which meant I didn’t have to answer it if I didn’t want to, and maybe I would have, but at that very moment I noticed that someone had left a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit on one of the little tables they have down there, and I got excited and said that it was one of my all-time favorites and stopped to thumb through the pages. I asked Kit if she knew it, and she said that she knew of it, but hadn’t ever read it, probably because she’d missed lots of children’s book by not having kids. I told her she should bring it home and read it, and she said maybe, which I took to mean that she was worried that Evelyn at the circulation desk would make it a point to remind her that she wasn’t anyone’s mother if she checked it out. So I skimmed through and found my favorite passage and I read it to her.

  “Listen,” I said before I started reading, “all you really need to know is that there is this stuffed animal who is a rabbit, and another stuffed animal who is an old, worn-out horse, and they are having a conversation about how you stop being a toy animal and become a real one. Okay, here goes:”

  “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

  “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

  “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

  “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

  I closed the book and put it back on the table. I looked over at Kit and saw that behind her glasses her eyes were glistening and her nose was a tiny bit red and she was pinching it at the bridge. It was a little awkward. She was a grown-up. But at that moment she seemed real to me, and I seemed real to me, and it dawned on me that one way to find out if someone is trustworthy is to read her a passage from one of your favorite books and see how she reacts.

  “So the dictionary,” I said.

  And then I stopped. I wanted her to like me. And it was odd, because she was older; her wavy brown hair was on its way to gray, and she had squint lines, like parentheses, on either side of her eyes.

  “It’s stupid, really,” I began again. “But it was this thing I read someplace, and it really got to me. It said that a dictionary is every book ever written and every book that will be written, just in a different order. And it seemed magical. You could own every book just by owning one book. I loved that. And I just had to have it.”

  * * *

  What might have been and what has been . . .

  —T. S. Eliot

  One thing Kit made sure to do before she left her old life was change her name. Katherine was common enough, so she decided to keep it, but finding a suitable new surname was trickier. She made a list and auditioned each one, saying it over to herself as she lay in bed, or when she was driving, or watching TV. Sullivan? Too Irish—it would attract attention from other Irish people, which didn’t include her. Johnson? That was her mother’s mother’s maiden name. Smith, Brown, Williams, Jones? So generic that when she said them out loud they sounded fake, like names you might choose if you were choosing a new name. It took a while—Clemmons, Shea, Cross, Peters, Roberts, and on and on, every name, it seemed, except Jarvis. That she found on the label of a ninety-five-dollar bottle of Chardonnay locked away in the premium cooler at the liquor store. Jarvis: it was distinguished enough to sound authentic, but not so distinguished that it might wave any flags in her direction. Katherine Jarvis. It sounded good, too.

  “I once helped a murderer change his name,” the affable, gap-toothed clerk at the county administrative office told her as she was handing over her name-change petition, driver’s license, and passport. “I mean I didn’t know he was a murderer. A serial killer, actually. Prostitutes and runaways. You would not believe what he changed his name to.”

  “John Doe,” Kit said at exactly the same moment he did.

  The clerk looked amazed. “How did you know?”

  “It was all over the papers,” she said. “Didn’t they interview you?”

  “They tried,” he said, “but I didn’t say anything. I could have made some money from that, too. National Enquirer, the Globe, they were all dangling cash. My wife, bless her soul, said I should take it, but I couldn’t risk losing my job. We’ve got rules about that sort of thing.”

  He studied her petition, checked her IDs against each other and then against her. Her hair was longer in those pictures and without a hint of gray, and her face was fuller and unlined.

  “That’s what happens when they let you go a decade between photos,” she joked when it seemed to be taking too long.

  “You look familiar . . .” he said at last.

  Her heart skipped a beat. She must have looked alarmed.

  The clerk let out a booming belly laugh. “I say that to all the pretty ladies,” he said. “Then I tell them they look like Angelina Jolie. Or that other one who was m
arried to Brad Pitt.”

  “Jennifer Aniston.”

  “Right, her,” he said, stamping Kit’s papers with an official seal and handing everything back to her. “But you don’t look like either of them. You look like . . .” He paused, then winked. “Katherine Jarvis.”

  Chapter Two

  6.14.10–6.20.10

  human voices wake us, and we drown.

  —T. S. Eliot

  What do you talk about with a kid who calls her parents Willow and Steve because calling them Mom and Dad “just perpetuates the patriarchy”? This question had been bothering Kit all weekend, and it bothered her now as she studied her face in the mirror, adding a touch of concealer under her eyes and a stab of blush along each cheek before declaring herself done and ready for work. “Three points for the patriarchy,” she thought, stashing her makeup bag in the vanity drawer and taking out a brush and pulling it a few times through her mostly untamable hair.

  What do you ever talk to other people about, she wondered, especially when you didn’t want to talk about yourself, since you knew if you asked them about themselves they would inevitably turn it back to you. Ask about their kids, they’ll ask about yours—unless they knew you didn’t have any, and then, without fail, they’d ask about your parents, or your dog, or some other relationship, as if a conversation was like tennis: you hit to me, I hit to you, you hit to me, quid pro quo. So what did that leave? The weather? (It was summer. It was nice out. It was . . . sunny. How many times had the girl heard that joke?) Sports? (Not Sunny’s style, or Kit’s either, for that matter, so they had that in common. Not that you could talk about something that was nothing.) Food? That should be easy—everyone eats—but no. Food was out. Food went out days ago, even before it had the chance to be in.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Sunny asked on Thursday, pointing at Kit’s ham sandwich. “Eww.”