Strange but True

by John Searles

  “I know,” Melissa whispers back. “And I love you too.”

  chapter 8

  ON THE SNOW-COVERED LAWN IN FRONT OF THE RADNOR MEMORIAL Library sits the crumpled, charred-black shell of a BMW, its doors punched in, its hood ripped off, its windows long since shattered. The giant block letters on the sign draped across one side read THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK AND DRIVE. The car—or rather, what used to be the car—is on display as part of a public service campaign that uses actual wrecks from alcohol-related accidents in order to bring home the point. Charlene remembers reading in the town paper that this particular wreck had been brought here from a deadly pileup at a Pittsburgh tollbooth this past New Year’s Eve. Every time she sees its buckled frame and crushed roof, Charlene has the same thought: don’t we have enough tragedies around this place without having to drag someone else’s leftovers into town? One look at it makes most people slow down, but Charlene steps on the gas and speeds up to get past it on her way into the library parking lot.

  When she finds a vacant spot and turns off the engine, a fluttery, first-day-of-school feeling fills her stomach. It has been almost five years since she has stepped inside this place, almost five years since that wretched Pilia used Charlene’s tragedy as an opportunity to pole-vault into the position of head librarian. Since she cannot bring herself to go inside just yet and let Pilia and the other librarians see what has become of her, Charlene reaches over for the plastic Genuardi’s bag on the passenger seat and pulls out the loaf of Wonder Bread she bought on the way here. Ever since she hung up the phone with Richard a few hours before, two things have happened. First, she has become convinced that he is hiding something. No matter how much Richard denied it, Charlene knows—the way a woman who was married to a man for almost thirty years knows—that his cagey, fumbling response to her questions can only mean one thing: he is keeping a secret from her. The second thing to happen is that Charlene has been seized by an inexplicable craving for a taste of the plain white bread she used to make sandwiches with back when Philip and Ronnie were in elementary school.

  As she sits in the dusty, overheated interior of her green Lexus, trying to muster up the courage to go inside, Charlene opens the package of bread, takes out the heel, and tosses it on the floor. Next, she pulls out a regular slice and peels off the crust the way Ronnie and Philip used to ask her to do. When there is nothing in her hand but a floppy, crooked white square, Charlene folds it in half and shoves the bread into her mouth. There is something about the spongy texture and tasteless flavor that works wonders to soothe her.

  Wonder Bread, Charlene thinks, maybe that’s how it got its name.

  She chews and swallows, then removes another slice from the bag, regretting ever having switched to those trendy double-seeded/nine-grain/ whole wheat/sesame/oat bran concoctions, since none of them could ever come close to bringing her the comfort of happier times the way this bread is doing. As she peels off the crust and stuffs another slice in her mouth, she finds herself thinking back to when she was a young mother, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tucking them in Philip’s Scooby-Doo and Ronnie’s Ninja Turtles lunch boxes along with an apple, a yogurt, and a box of Juicy Juice. Charlene takes out another slice, peels off the crust, tosses it on the floor, folds the bread in half, and sticks it in her mouth. She chews, swallows, and repeats the process again and again as she thinks back to when she was a young librarian and how good she used to be at keeping things in perfect order—sorting, stacking, shelving, alphabetizing, alphanumerizing, categorizing, discarding, filing, dusting, always dusting—and all of it done with a smile on her face.

  When the fog of memories of happier times finally lifts, Charlene looks down at the floor, which is littered with crusts, around her damp beige boots. On the passenger seat, the package is just about empty. She has eaten almost the entire loaf. A big part of Charlene is disgusted with herself, the way she is whenever she surrenders to her cravings. A few nights before, she had given in to an urgent, unrelenting desire for pea soup. After she rushed to the store and loaded up her carriage with dozens of boxes of Birds Eye frozen peas, two ham hocks from the butcher, and a twelve-ounce container of Morton’s salt, Charlene went home and cooked up a batch big enough to feed a soup kitchen. As she lay upstairs in her bed, eating bowl after bowl after bowl, Charlene lost herself in the same sort of nostalgic recollection. She was thinking of the days when she and Richard lived in that cramped apartment on Spruce Street in Philadelphia. Philip was still a baby, and they gave him the bedroom while they slept on a mattress on the floor in the living room. (If Philip only knew how spoiled he was as a child, Charlene had thought, maybe he would forgive her for the way she acted later.) Richard was still finishing his residency at Penn at the time, so they didn’t have a lot of money. To stretch the budget, Charlene used to make a big pot of pea soup on cold winter days, and it would feed them for most of the week. In the evenings, they’d finish eating and put Philip in his crib, then she and Richard would have sex—passionate, breathless sex, not the predictable routine they fell into later—right there on the lumpy mattress on the floor. Afterward Charlene would lie there, pressed to Richard’s warm, naked body, and dream of how perfect their life was going to be once they had a real house outside the city with lots of bedrooms, money in their pockets, two cars in the driveway, another child on the way…

  Now, as Charlene sits in her fancy car staring at that deflated bread bag and the discarded crusts by her boots, she would give anything to have those days in that shabby apartment back again. She lets out a sigh and turns toward the gray face of the library, telling herself there’s no use hoping for something that will never happen.

  All that bread seems to be expanding in her stomach, leaving Charlene with the same bloated gassiness she had after devouring the pea soup. At least, she decides, this cramping is better than the fluttery, first-day-of-school feeling she had before. And now that her nervousness has subsided ever so slightly, she thinks, What the hell do I care if Pilia or any of the librarians see me looking like this? So I’ve put on a few pounds. So I’ve let myself go. I doubt any of them look like Miss America—or in Pilia’s case, Miss Poland.

  With that thought, Charlene crams the remaining three slices of bread into her purse, next to her cell phone and collection of ballpoint pens, just in case she has a craving while inside. She snaps the purse shut, slings it over her shoulder, and gets out of the car. As she walks up the salt-dotted sidewalk, Charlene tightens her black wool cloak against the chill. She passes the overnight return drop on the side of the building, the plaque that says RADNOR MEMORIAL LIBRARY FOUNDED IN 1872, then pulls the handle on one of the glass double doors. The instant Charlene steps inside the lobby, she is overcome by one simple thing: the smell of books. The warm, familiar scent has been absent from her life for so long (excluding those stinky biographies of bad poets that Philip is always reading) that Charlene has to close her eyes and let the aroma envelop her as the door clangs shut. In the darkness behind her lids, she tries to imagine for just a moment what her life would be like had she never left this place … what it would be like if there wasn’t such a drastic distinction between the life she had dreamed of those nights on the lumpy mattress beside Richard and the one she is leading now. But she can’t seem to conjure up any sort of clear picture, so she opens her eyes again.

  That’s when Charlene spots a handmade poster on the wall that reads: “Get to Know the Great Crime Writers.” The sight of the neatly sketched magnifying glass and Sherlock Holmes cap—probably drawn by Pilia—reminds Charlene of all the posters she herself used to make. There was the one of Charlotte in her web, another of James sitting atop his giant peach, both promoting the children’s story hour she used to host. Then there was the very last poster she drew of a smiling sun surrounded by the names of the authors in the summer reading series she organized, which kicked off on her final night here. Thinking of those posters, Charlene has the impulse to pull more of that bread from
her purse and stuff it in her mouth. But she resists the temptation and steps inside the main room of the library.

  As it turns out, the smell of books and the sight of that poster in the lobby are pretty much the only details that are going to be familiar to Charlene today, because everything else has changed. The red rug speckled with tiny gold stars has been replaced with a flat, starless carpet the same cheerless brown color as a UPS truck. The door that used to say MICROFICHE on its cloudy glass window now says INTERNET. Where there had once been a large card catalog and three computers on the far wall, there is now nothing but computers. Ten of them, in fact, all lined up in a row. Where there had once been a reading area with cushioned chairs, newspapers, and magazines, there are now shelves of videos and DVDs, marked New Releases, Thrillers, Romantic Comedies, Horror, Documentaries, Musicals, and Classics.

  What is this, Charlene thinks, a library or Blockbuster Video?

  In all this time, it had never once occurred to her that the library would look any different than the night she left it. As a result, all these unexpected alterations leave Charlene feeling as though she had sold her home—given away the deed to someone she didn’t quite like in the first place—only to stop by for a visit years later and be horrified to find that the new owner had chopped down the climbing rosebush she loved so much, let a garden of weeds sprout up between the cracks of her flagstone patio, and drained the swimming pool and filled it with cement.

  Just about the only thing that is still the same is the small table by the entrance where people leave brochures and flyers for various events around town. Charlene stares down at a pamphlet for an M.S. Walkathon that must have already happened, since the date at the top is November 19, 2003, and today is February 4, 2004. If I were still the head librarian, she thinks, there would not be outdated materials lying around. Out of the corner of her eye, she studies two women behind the circulation desk whom she has never seen before. There is a young lady who can’t be more than thirty, with a blond bob, shiny skin, and a simple string of pearls. There is another woman who is much older, with dyed red hair and the kind of skin that looks so white it could be bleached except for the faint brown spots crawling up her veiny arms.

  Pilia is nowhere in sight.

  Charlene wonders if, in the midst of transforming this place, the staff finally realized the extent of her deviousness. Maybe they ganged up and ran the old hag out of town. Now that would be a welcome change. But it is probably just wishful thinking on her part, she decides. After all these years spent fantasizing about telling Pilia off or sticking a pin in her giant breasts, the thought that she might round a corner and bump into her at any moment causes her stomach to cramp. She releases a silent fart and wonders if she should simply turn and leave. No matter how desperately she wants to look up information about the likelihood of a woman getting pregnant with sperm from a deceased man, she decides that coming here was a bad idea. For all of her imagined bravado and that P.I.L.T.R.A.N.A. list in her head, now that she is outside of her bedroom and here in the very real world of her past, she feels awkward and unsure of herself. Besides, there are plenty of other places where she can go to find the information she needs. It’s not like the Radnor Memorial Library is the only library in the world.

  But when Charlene glances over at the circulation desk again, she notices a familiar face at long last. It is slow-moving, bovine Adele Blumenthal, with her lackluster helmet hair and thick glasses, wearing a short-sleeve dress the colors of a leaf pile. Charlene had trained Adele just a few months before leaving the library. In that short period of time, they had become quite chatty. Charlene had even begun to think of her as a friend. Then again, she had thought of most of the women here as her friends. After their initial condolences, cards, and flowers though, not one of them reached out to her or tried to stay in touch. And Charlene soon realized that they were not her friends at all.

  As she stands there, pretending to study that outdated brochure while discreetly watching Adele slug through a stack of returned books, Charlene thinks of that afternoon just three weeks after Ronnie died when Pilia made her move. Charlene was lying on the floor of her bedroom, staring up at the skylight, when the telephone rang. Richard was down the hall in his office, probably making secret calls on his work line to some floozy even then. Philip was off writing in his notebook, watching television, or both. Since Charlene could not bring herself to erase all the messages from the police department, the funeral home, and the church on the answering machine, it was so full that it did not pick up. When the phone reached its sixth shrill ring, it was clear that neither Richard nor Philip was going to stop what they were doing to answer it. Reluctantly, she sat up and lifted the phone off the hook. After Charlene said a quiet, hesitant hello, Pilia began speaking. In that rushed, clunky accent that broke sentences in all the wrong places, she told Charlene that she was calling to inquire about her plans to return to the library.

  “Iunderstandifyouneed,” Pilia said, “moretime. Butifyou’renotplanning. oncomingbackatall. there’saverynice. youngladywhorecentlygraduated. fromTempleUniversity. withadegree. inlibrarystudies. Shewouldbea perfectreplacement.”

  “You want to give my position to someone who just got out of school?” Charlene asked in a groggy, confused voice as she leaned her back against the wall just below one of the bedroom windows and picked at her big toe.

  “No,” Pilia said, slowing down her words for just a moment. “I would take your slot. Then we would give her my slot.”

  Charlene could still recall how infuriated she had been by Pilia’s use of that word: slot. She made it sound as though Charlene was nothing more than a book on a shelf. Take one out, she thought, put another one in its place. It had not even been a month, and already she was being treated like one of the titles nobody checked out anymore, dumped on the giveaway table, one step from the trash. Charlene was about to tell Pilia that she’d be back first thing in the morning. But as the curtain rustled above her head and the breeze moved through the gray roots that were already pushing up through her dyed brown hair, she realized that her position at the library didn’t seem so important anymore. She wondered if anything would ever feel that important again.

  “Charleneareyouthere?” Pilia asked.

  “I’m here all right. And let me tell you what you can do—” She stopped. Charlene felt something shift inside of her. For the first time, her polite, cheery self peeled away like the skin of a snake, revealing a bitter, angrier version of herself beneath. When she started speaking again, she burst forth with such resentment and hostility that her words didn’t quite make sense. “You go ahead and give her your slot, then you take my slot. That way all you sluts will be in your slots by September! Understood?”

  “Excuse me?” Pilia said. “Idon’tunderstand.”

  “Yeah, well, understand this.” Charlene slammed down the phone.

  Now, as she watches Adele’s fleshy arms jiggle while she works her way to the bottom of the return pile at a snail’s pace, Charlene does her best to put that conversation with Pilia out of her mind. She takes a breath and tries to regain her courage, then turns from that tiny table of brochures and walks into the library on her way to wherever the microfiche room is located these days. As she passes the circulation desk, Charlene braces herself for Adele to look up and see her. She can already hear her phony fussing and carrying on about how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other. As much as Charlene tells herself that she dreads an exchange of that sort, she can’t help but clear her throat—loudly—so that Adele lifts her head.

  But there is no phony fussing and carrying on to follow.

  Adele simply gives Charlene a once-over then goes back to her work.

  At first, Charlene assumes she is being snubbed, which riles her so much she makes two fists out of her hands and knocks them against her hips as she continues walking. But when she replays the moment in her mind, she realizes by the blank look on Adele’s dopey face that she simply did not recognize
her. Certainly, Charlene had put on a fair share of weight over the years and let her hair go gray and curly, but she wonders if she really looks so different that a woman she once considered a friend, albeit mistakenly, does not even know who she is.

  Let it go, Charlene tells herself, slowly uncurling those fists. It’s not like I came here to make small talk anyway.

  In the very center of the library, flanked by two new copy machines, is a narrow metal information desk. Behind it sits a man with the kind of jetblack Elvis hair that looks like it comes from a bottle. Charlene knows it is prejudiced of her, but she can never help but feel put off by the male volunteers at the library. There is something unnatural about their presence. She pegs this one as a retiree whose wife went in the ground sooner than expected. Now he’s got too much time on his hands, so he spends it dyeing his hair at home or doling out information here.

  When she says excuse me, he lifts his gaze from the thick book in his hands and looks at her. Around his neck hangs a black string with four silver keys. Keys Charlene still has copies of on the wooden key rack in her kitchen. As she stares at his placid face, his small white teeth, and his god-awful shoe-polish hair, she waits for him to ask if he can help her. But he doesn’t. She supposes that his looking up is meant to be her signal to start speaking, so she asks, “Where is your microfiche room these days?”

  “Microfiche?” He repeats the word twice like a question, as though Charlene had approached the desk and inquired about a car part. Manifold? Muffler? “Microfiche? Well, let’s see. That would be—” He pauses and puts an index finger to his chin. “Do you mind if I ask what you need it for?”

  Yes, I mind, Charlene thinks, then says, “Do you mind if I ask why you need to ask what I need it for?”

  His pasty face goes blank as he deciphers what Charlene just said. “I’m asking because no one ever uses that stuff anymore.”