by Sue Halpern
Kit laughed. Chuck’s voice box rattled. Evelyn, who didn’t know if this was a compliment or an insult, said, “If you say so,” and got up to pour herself a cup of coffee.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Barbara said. “About the coffee: from now on, we each have to put in five dollars a month. The library can’t afford to subsidize it anymore.”
“We’re that poor?” Kit said.
“We’ve got some serious budget deficits,” Barbara said. “Every little bit counts.”
“You can say ‘little bit’ again,” Evelyn said.
Barbara sighed. “I’m all ears if you—if any of you—have suggestions for how we can trim costs. We’ve already cut back the acquisitions budget.”
“And no one’s gotten a raise in two years,” Evelyn said.
“Let’s charge,” Chuck said.
Barbara frowned. “It’s a public library, Chuck. Public. We don’t charge.”
But Kit, who had a hunch about what he was getting at, said, “That’s not what he meant.”
Chuck gave her a grateful, friendly nod, then turned up the volume of his voice synthesizer so they could hear him more clearly. “It’s like when you get a burger,” he began, and even Kit looked at him skeptically. “The burger costs $6.95, but if you want cheese it costs more, and if you want cheese and bacon it’s even more than that.” He paused for a moment, caught his breath, continued. “Or pizza. Plain is $12, but add pepperoni and it’s $14 and $16 if you add pineapple and ham.”
“I never understood why people like Hawaiian pizza,” Evelyn said. “I don’t think anyone does. Not even the Italian people in Hawaii.”
“Are there Italian people in Hawaii?” Chuck asked.
“Okay, okay,” Barbara said, “thank you, Chuck. I think I see where you are going with this.”
“To dinner, obviously,” Sunny said.
Everyone laughed. It was after six. There used to be snacks at the staff meeting, but not anymore.
“Seriously,” Barbara said. “What are—as Chuck says—our toppings? What can we charge for and still keep to our mission as a public institution?”
“Computer,” Chuck said.
“I don’t think so,” Barbara said. “The library is the only place a lot of people have access to the Internet. And it’s the other thing that keeps our numbers up, which is important when we go to the city council for funding.”
“Using the computer, fine,” said Chuck. “But all day?”
Everyone knew what he meant. For the past three days they’d watched as a man none of them had ever seen before showed up around 11:30, just as the retirees were leaving, and parked himself in front of one of the library’s four computers and stayed there until right before closing. He was polite enough, making sure to say “good morning” to Evelyn as he walked in, and nodding to Kit and Sunny or Chuck if he was around, asking for nothing. He seemed to be on a mission. He was in his mid- to late thirties, carried what Kit knew to be an expensive messenger bag, and wore a charcoal pin-striped suit with a blue spread-collar dress shirt, like he was coming from a business meeting. His auburn hair was long in the back for a businessman, though, overhanging his collar by half an inch, and pushed back from his tanned, unreadable face by a pair of black Ray-Bans planted on the top of his head. James Bond, Evelyn started calling him. She was sure he was a spy.
“Who would send a spy to Riverton?” Sunny asked her.
“You never know,” Evelyn said. “Don’t forget, there’s been all that weird stuff going on at Culvert Medical over in Sandown.”
“Yeah, I heard my parents talking about that. The animal testing and the people who want to shut it down.”
“Precisely,” said Evelyn. “Precisely. Remember, spies don’t usually look like spies. They look like you and me.”
“Maybe you’re a spy, Evelyn,” Kit said.
“Maybe I am,” she replied.
“I don’t think so,” Sunny said. “But maybe because I don’t think so, you are. This is really confusing.”
That was a few days ago, and the man—who had what was either the start of a beard or a well-tended five o’clock shadow—kept coming back and using the computer for much of the day, and none of them was any clearer about what he was doing or why he was doing it in their library.
“The thirty-minute rule only holds if someone else wants to use the machine,” Barbara said. “Otherwise it can be used indefinitely, so I don’t think that could be a source of revenue.”
“Then change the rule,” Chuck said. “Easy-peasey. Thirty minutes free, ten bucks an hour after that. Or twenty. That place at the corner of Phelps and Spruce that has Wi-Fi in the back of the store charges a dollar a minute.”
“That’s because guys go there to look at porn,” Evelyn said. “They can charge whatever they want.”
“How do you know?” This was Sunny. They all turned to her, waiting for one of the others to respond.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Kit said, causing everyone to look away from Sunny and at her. “I don’t understand how a city that has so little money for its public library can afford such a big Fourth of July celebration.”
Everyone said, “Yeah,” or nodded their head. And it was true. Riverton’s fireworks were famous. They drew people from all over, who lined the waterfront, squeezing shoulder-to-shoulder to get what they thought was the best view. The mayor defended the expense, said it brought people to town who ordinarily would avoid it, and those people brought money—which, as the Four pointed out, would have been a reasonable argument if those people had anywhere in Riverton other than the Dollar Tree to spend it. Or if the city had enough police to issue enough fines for public intoxication and disorderly conduct and parking violations to raise sufficient revenue to pay, at least, for the street cleaning the next day.
“So are you going to watch the fireworks?” Kit asked Sunny as the meeting broke up.
“I don’t think so,” Sunny said. “Steve says fireworks are a display of military might in disguise. We don’t believe in them.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s not a matter of belief,” Kit said. “How can you not believe in them when they are so loud they make your brain shake?”
“You have to know Steve,” Sunny said. “His father was in the army all his life and Steve grew up on military bases, and now he doesn’t like anything that reminds him of all that. He says that fireworks are all about bombs bursting in midair and are a way that the government tricks people into supporting unjust wars.”
“Well, if he says so, but seems a little extreme to me,” Kit said. “I think most people think they are kind of magical—all those designs that just appear out of nowhere. From the top of my house you can see the fireworks in the sky at the same time you see them mirrored in the river. It’s spectacular.”
“Can I come?” Sunny asked.
* * *
Sunny/#3
Steve said that even though the days were long, we should set up camp before it got much later, but Willow said we should eat something first so our blood sugar didn’t drop and we didn’t get grumpy. She pulled out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that she must have made sometime the day before and dealt them out like cards, one for Steve, one for me, one for her, one more for Steve, a half for her, and a half for me. Steve paced while he ate his, looking for the perfect spot to pitch the tent, but Willow and I sat on a big rock that she said was a glacial erratic—a rock that had been left behind when the glaciers retreated—and watched a red-tailed hawk making wide circles overhead. I patted the rock, which was warm, and Willow said it was warm because it was a thermal sink, which at the time I thought was hysterical, because it was a rock, not something you’d find in a kitchen or a bathroom. She said if I was interested, we could do a unit on rocks, but only if I was interested, which I said I was.
“Why don’t you start a rock collection?” she said, and told me to look around and see if I could find ten different kinds of rocks whil
e she and Steve were setting up camp. She gave me a bag, and I set off to the pond, where there were so many rocks it was hard to decide which to choose, especially because when rocks are wet they are so shiny and colorful, and I kept on thinking I was going to find something rare and valuable that had been hidden from view under the water. By the time I was done, my bag weighed a ton and I could barely lug it down the path.
Back at #3, the tent was up and Willow and Steve were trying to stake it to the ground, but the ground was barely budging. “It’s like cement,” Steve said to me over his shoulder, and went back to pounding the tent stake with a rock. Nothing. Steve gave the cable attached to the stake a little slack and poked around in the dirt to find a softer spot. He pushed on the stake and it went in maybe the distance between his fingernail and his knuckle. Then he started pounding again.
“You don’t want it to break,” Willow cautioned. She was using her soothingest voice.
“No kidding,” he said.
“Maybe it’s time to take a break,” Willow said, which was a very Willowy thing to say. “Let’s see what Sunny has found.”
It worked. Steve put down his rock to come look at my collection, which I pulled, one at a time, from the bag. By then the wet rocks had become dry rocks, and there was no way to tell them apart and no way for me to say why I thought most of them, which had become dull gray, were special. But parents can be surprising. I’d show them a rock, and they’d take it from me and turn it over and over, and then say something like, “Very cool, check out all the mica in this one,” or “This one has lots of feldspar in it,” and before I could ask what feldspar was, one of them said, “Did you know feldspar is the most abundant mineral on earth?” which caused the other of them to dig through a duffel bag filled with books and come back with an old field guide that confirmed it. Then we had a discussion about the difference between rocks and minerals, which had something to do with rocks coming from the earth’s crust, which made me think of bread and pie and pizza, and then Willow handed me the book and told me to use it to try to identify the rest of my collection while she and Steve went back to work.
This time the tent stakes stayed in the ground, and they had no trouble attaching the rainfly or zipping on the very cool vestibule with plastic windows on both sides. When that was done, Willow disappeared inside, bedrolls hung around her neck and balled up in her arms, and when she came out she started taking clothes from our suitcases and bringing them into the tent, one armful at a time. Steve, meanwhile, was a few yards away from #3, throwing a rope into a tree. He’d toss it up and it would come back down, then he’d toss it up and it would come back down. It looked like he was playing catch with it, but from the expression on his face, I was pretty sure he was not.
“What are you doing?” I said, leaving the rocks and the book on the ground and going over to him.
“We need to hang our food,” he said. “Because of the bears.”
“Bears?”
“They’re only black bears. The only thing they’re interested in is food.”
“Bears?” I said again. I had read Blueberries for Sal and knew that you didn’t want to get between a bear cub and its mother.
“Once the bears figure out that there is no food here for them, they will move on,” Steve said, as the rope flew from his hands and caught in the branch of an old birch tree. Big sigh. He gave a tug and the rope came down and so did the tree branch, which crashed and bounced and landed a few feet from us.
“Step back, Sunny,” he told me, kicking the branch to the side.
He stood there, not moving, staring at it. I would have asked him what he was doing but knew he’d say, “Thinking,” so I stood there and thought about that. All of a sudden he reached down and broke off a small piece of the branch and tied it to the end of the rope. He said it was like putting a weight on your fishing line so it would sink to the bottom.
He tossed it up; it came down. Tossed it up; it came down. Tossed it up, and it curled around a high branch and dropped over on the other side.
“Bingo!” he said. And, “Persistence, Sunny.”
He told me to go over to our pile of stuff, get a sack and pack food in it, and bring it back to him when it was full. When I got back, he took the bag from me, clipped it on to the end of the rope, and hoisted it into the air till it was hanging there like a piñata. Then Steve took the end he was holding and tied it to one of the lower branches. He looked very pleased.
“No PB and J for you, bears,” he said.
“But what if they are hungry?” I asked.
“Bears need to eat bear food, not human food,” he said. “It may not seem like it, but giving them human food is just plain cruel. It upsets the natural order of things.”
Back at the campsite, Willow had arranged everything so that it was very (unnaturally) orderly. She had put puddle boots and rain jackets on one side of the vestibule, and books on the other, and the doormat from the apartment where we’d been living less than twenty-four hours before in the middle so we didn’t track dirt into the tent itself. It was a big tent that Steve said was supposed to fit six people, though four was more like it if they weren’t planning on living in it—really living in it—like, I was starting to realize, we were. My underwear and socks were stacked next to my jeans and shorts, which were stacked next to my tops. Same for Willow’s and Steve’s, on the other side of the tent. Willow had piled a mess of quilts and pillows in the middle, and hung lanterns through loops in the ceiling. She asked if I thought it looked cozy, and I said it did and, to prove it, dove into the blankets and rolled around and promptly fell asleep. The next thing I knew, rain was pattering overhead, and it was getting dark outside, and I couldn’t see either of my parents and was just about to shout for them when I heard Willow’s voice and Steve’s laugh and went out to see that they were just a few feet away, sitting under a tarp, on the folding chairs we got at Walgreens that summer to take to the beach in case we went to the beach, which we never did, drinking beers.
“Have a seat, Sunny,” Steve said, patting the ground.
* * *
The grave my little cottage is . . .
—Emily Dickinson
Kit jumped. At least it felt like she’d jumped when Sunny asked to come over. The last person besides herself to walk into her house was the exterminator, and he came when she was at work. Children sometimes knocked on the door selling raffle tickets and chocolate bars for school trips, and campaign workers showed up around election time, but none of them ever crossed the transom. On Halloween she retreated upstairs and drew the curtains and sat in the glow of her computer screen as trick-or-treaters bypassed the darkened house. In her old life there was plenty of socializing. In her new life, blessedly, there was almost none.
“I thought you didn’t believe in fireworks,” Kit said when Sunny asked. This, she realized later, was a mistake, an opening.
“Maybe I should make up my mind for myself,” Sunny said, smiling slyly.
“What about your parents?”
“They have plans that night, and they wouldn’t even have to know.”
“No,” Kit said firmly, but if Sunny heard her, she didn’t let on.
“I could just say I’m going to your house for supper. Or to spend the night.”
“No,” Kit said again. And then: “You cannot spend the night.” It was another mistake, another opening.
“So I can come over for supper?” Sunny said. “And then we can watch?”
She was looking at the older woman eagerly, like a puppy anticipating a walk. Despite her best efforts, Kit was not immune. She found the girl strange, but oddly appealing.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “Let me think about it.”
Kit thought about it. That night, pacing her kitchen, she thought about how strange it would feel to have another person sitting with her at the table and how unsettling it would be to have to consider what she might like to eat. Since Kit had moved to Riverton, she had lost her taste for food. N
o—that happened before she got there. Food was fuel. That’s what Dr. Bondi kept telling her, not that she didn’t know this. She knew it and stopped eating for a while anyway, waiting for the thrum in her head to slow down and shut off, the way her car did when it ran out of gas. When, sevens pounds lighter, she explained this—rationally, she thought—Dr. Bondi said, “No, it doesn’t work that way, not eating makes it worse, the engine revs up and your thoughts spin out of control.” He also might have said, “It’s dangerous. You can crash and burn,” but her head was spinning like a top and she’d stopped listening to anything but the sound of her pulse in her ears, as if she’d been running. She had been running.
“It’s a metaphor,” Kit said, out of the blue.
“What’s a metaphor?” the doctor asked.
He had kind eyes, Kit decided. She wondered what it would be like to look into the mirror and have eyes like that looking back at you.
“Running,” she said.
Kit left his office and went to the drive-through and ordered a chocolate milk shake and sat in her car working the cold, viscous sweetness up the straw into her warm mouth, where she held it awhile before releasing it down her throat. After that she started to eat again. People she didn’t know said she looked good. People she did said she looked better. But she was neither good nor better, just less withered, less like a plant someone forgot to water. Dr. Bondi suggested she read the cooking section in the New York Times every day to jump-start her appetite, so for a while she read about the right way to braise pork chops and considered the benefits of brining a turkey and learned the difference between Belon and bluepoint oysters, and it all made her tired. Soup from a can, grilled cheese, tortellini, anything else she could throw into boiling water for a few minutes—food was fuel. She would say no to the girl.
* * *
Sunny/broken
Even though Steve didn’t like the family bed, he had no choice when we were living at #3. That’s what we called it, then and now, when we talk about old times. Steve says nostalgia is a waste of energy, that it’s bogus because people are always fashioning the past to fit whatever reality they want to believe, but even he likes to reminisce about our time at #3, when the three of us slept like puppies, burrowed among the blankets and quilts, me in the middle since I was the only one who never had to get up in the middle of the night to pee. Willow said that living at #3 suited me because children were meant to live close to the land, in nature. “Shoes deform the foot, and houses deform the spirit,” she would tell me sometimes when I asked when we were going to move back to our apartment. Until the first snow, none of us wore shoes.
