I'm Your Girl

by J. J. Murray

  Say something. Let him know you’re awake.

  “Really?”

  “I couldn’t believe it, and since peepers are going for eight dollars a dozen up there in Ontario, I put that peeper on my hook, cast out…”

  He’s going to say, “bam!”

  Shh.

  “And bam! I caught me a little two-pounder. Two fish with the same peeper.” A pause. Rrrr-rrr around my ears. “And the darndest thing was, that first peeper was still alive, so I let him go. He swam right over to that little island.” He spins me around. “How’s that?”

  The man staring back at me looks almost like Dan Pace.

  You need an earring and a curling iron burn on your butt.

  Did Dan wear an earring?

  He did in the first draft.

  Oh, yeah.

  And Noël’s curling irons might make an X.

  Shut up.

  “It looks fine,” I say.

  Mr. Underwood removes the gown, carefully corralling my hair and shaking it out onto the floor. He whisks away some hairs from my forehead, ears, and neck.

  “How much?” I ask.

  The sign says ten dollars, Jack.

  He had to cut off a lot of hair. Maybe it’s extra.

  “No charge,” Mr. Underwood says.

  “Huh?”

  He looks down. “It took me a little while to remember, but as soon as I got to cutting, I remembered why you haven’t been around.”

  It was just down the street.

  It would have been a hot topic in this barbershop.

  I pull out a twenty, but Mr. Underwood holds up his hands. “No, that’s all right, Jack. Next time.”

  “Take it,” I say. “Use it to keep your magazine subscriptions going.”

  He still won’t take it, instead turning and sitting in the chair. “Next time, Jack.”

  I shove the bill into my pocket. “Thanks.”

  Mr. Underwood returns to his newspaper. “See you in a few weeks.”

  “Right.”

  That was nice of him.

  I didn’t need his pity.

  Maybe it was sympathy. Mr. Underwood doesn’t wear a wedding ring, and he’s old, so…maybe he’s a widower, too. He never talks about his wife.

  It’s a barbershop. Men don’t talk about that stuff in a barbershop.

  Maybe they should.

  Parking is scarce around the library today, and I find a space at All-Rite Parking across the street, which costs “$3 first hour, $1 every hour after.” I stand at the kiosk with all the slots to prepay, and I only have a twenty.

  You’re only going to be here for a few minutes, right? Get change inside the library.

  I fold and slide the twenty into the slot, tapping it until it falls completely in.

  What’d you do that for?

  Maybe I’ll walk home. I’m good for eighteen hours, right?

  You’re strange.

  You know it.

  I take my books to the circulation desk, and a different woman greets me, her name tag proclaiming that she is “Francine.” She smiles. “How are you today?”

  Does she really want to know?

  She’s just being friendly.

  I want to ask Francine where Diane is so I can thank her for her suggestions, but I don’t. “Fine.”

  Maybe it’s her day off.

  Yeah.

  And then I just…stand there. I don’t know why.

  “Do you need any help?” Francine asks.

  “No.” I look up the stairs to the periodicals section. I smile at Francine. “Thanks.”

  I take the stairs one at a time to the top and walk past several men of varying ages and races reading newspapers.

  What are you doing here?

  I see a stand of magazines, and one magazine stands out.

  You’re going to read that one again?

  It helped the last time.

  I suppose it did.

  19

  Diane

  Just once, I’d love to walk into the public women’s restroom and not see the hot water running in the sink. What do these folks think we’re running here, a laundry? And look at all these fools saving fifty cents reading the newspaper—

  And there’s a white man reading Essence. What is this world coming to?

  By the time I get upstairs to the reference desk, I already have a patron waiting. I put on my fake smile and ask the woman waving a Harrison Ford video in my face, “How may I help you today?”

  “I brought this in late, and they said I had to pay, and I’m not about to cuz I couldn’t get out in the snow, you know?”

  That wasn’t snow, I want to tell her. That was just some white fluffy dust that stopped Roanoke dead in its can’t-drive-in-snow tracks. I could tell her about the time last year when Kim made me drive through real snow—almost six inches—to make sure the CLOSED sign was up in the window. “Um, Kim,” I had said, “who’s going to go out in this snow to the library?” She had replied, “It’s our policy, Diane.”

  “So, can you help me?”

  I smile more broadly. “You’ll want to talk to Kim Cambridge. She’s the director.” This, too, is policy.

  “You’re not the director?”

  I should be, but…“No, ma’am. I can page her for you.”

  “They told me down there that she was up here.”

  It’s a big library. “I’ll page her.”

  I dial Kim’s pager and put in the number 2, a code for Kim to report to the reference desk. We’re all supposed to wear our pagers, but I don’t. I’m where I’m supposed to be (most of the time), and the buttons are bad enough. Up in Indianapolis, we wore buttons that said, “YOU DON’T SCARE ME—I WORK IN CIRCULATION.” I kind of liked those. The ones here, though? Forget it. They say, “GET IT AT THE LIBRARY.” Now I know from something I read that the library is in the top ten for “best public places to have sex,” but the buttons are going too far. We had a pregnant, part-time volunteer get so much grief from patrons—

  Ah, here’s Kim, and now it’s time to watch her bend over backward for this woman who can’t get enough of Harrison Ford’s dimpled chin.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kim says. “How may I help you?”

  The woman, who smells oddly of onions and bananas, explains her case, Kim nodding and putting on her “I’m-so-concerned-for-my-patrons” look.

  “I completely understand, ma’am,” Kim says. She takes the video. “I’ll personally take care of this.”

  As the woman walks away, Kim turns to me. “Where’s your button, Diane?”

  Shoot. “I forgot it.”

  Kim smiles. “I have extras. I’ll bring another to you.”

  “Kim, don’t bother,” I say. I pull out an “extra” button from the drawer. “I found it.”

  “Great.” Kim walks away.

  I clip the button to the hem of my skirt. I’ll wear it, but nobody is going to see it.

  I open up The Da Vinci Code and read a few pages before a snot-nosed child bounces up to the desk. “Yes?”

  “Why are you reading?” the child asks.

  “Because I can,” I say.

  The child runs away. They seem to do that a lot when I work the reference desk, for some reason.

  I get one more paragraph read when a horny-looking man—I can tell, something about his eyes—approaches the desk. “Yes, sir?”

  “Um, I’m looking for a book called Satanic Nurses.”

  A few other folks line up behind him. It’s going to be one of those days. “Are you sure you don’t mean Satanic Verses?”

  He blinks. “No, it’s Satanic Nurses.”

  It sounds like a triple-X movie to me. “Are you sure it’s a book and not a video?”

  He blinks. “It’s already in video?”

  “I’m sure we don’t carry it if it is,” I say. “Why don’t you try one of the video stores on Williamson Road?”

  He blinks. “I did. They’re all rented out.”

  And you thought the lib
rary would have X-rated movies to check out? “Well, we don’t carry those types of videos, sir.”

  He frowns. “Well, could you maybe see if the book is here?”

  I point to the stairs. “Try circulation, sir. They can help you.”

  “Okay.”

  The next man asks, “I need to know all the Revolutionary War battles that were fought on national park sites.”

  What battles weren’t? “Sir, most if not all of those battlefields have become national parks.”

  “They have?”

  “I’m sure of it. Try running a simple search for national parks, and I’m sure you’ll find all of them.”

  “Okay.”

  What? No “Thank you”? I’m used to it.

  The Essence-reading white man cruises by, still carrying the magazine, and is that a steno pad?

  “Excuse me,” a teenaged girl says.

  “Yes?”

  “I need a color photo of Moses for school.”

  I don’t laugh. I want to, I really, really do. “I don’t think we have any photographs of Moses, but I can direct you to some paintings of him. Will that help?”

  Shrugs. “I guess.” She cracks her gum. “Where is it?”

  I’m not leaving my stool, missy. “Run a search, typing in ‘Moses’ and ‘art.’ I’m sure you’ll have several reference books to choose from.”

  She cracks her gum and rolls her eyes. “Okay.” She slinks away.

  I want to yell, “Next!” but this is a library.

  A young black boy steps up, looking so cute in a black down jacket that cost more than my entire wardrobe. “Um, can you help me find this book for me?”

  “Which book?”

  “Um, I was reading it yesterday, and, um, it was big and green and orange, and I found it on the top shelf.”

  That narrows it down. I want to help him, but there are others waiting in line. “What was it about?”

  “Amphibians.”

  Ah, a future biologist. I wink. “I’ll find it.” I run a quick search and come up with a list of books, and print them out. I tear off the list and hand it to him. “I’ll bet it’s one of those.” After directing him where to look downstairs, I smile. “I know you’ll find it.”

  He walks away, looking back and saying, “Thank you.”

  That boy had some home training. It makes me want to hug his mama.

  Not all the kids who come in here are like him, no, sir. The kids today lead such pampered little lives. So did I, for that matter. My parents’ and grandparents’ generations, though, they had it tough. And I’m not talking about their trips up the hill both ways in four feet of snow on their way to milking the family cow or goat without Gore-Tex gloves or mittens or Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion before putting bituminous coal in the one-room schoolhouse’s only Franklin stove while wearing paper-thin PF Flyers and a sweater knitted by the nearly blind but lovable Aunt Edwina, all the while being truly thankful that they had unboiled, frothy brown well water to wash down their dirt sandwiches, brown bananas, and melted Moon Pies.

  That’s not what I’m talking about. Sure, I heard my share of back-then-it-was-so-tough stories, and sometimes I got tired of hearing them. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve respected my parents and grandparents so much more.

  I respect them for surviving their childhoods. They were all denied the privilege of attending day care. They actually had to stay home and learn how to bake or sew or whittle or clean or wash dishes or hang their own laundry outside on the line to dry gloriously in the wind. They rode in cars without seat belts or air bags and often rode in the backs of pickup trucks with the family dog, Max, the flea-infested, flea-collarless pet whom they often let lick them in the face. They ate Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies that had more calories per square millimeter than any other foodstuff known to humanity, wonder-less bread with one hundred percent real butter, and drank soda laced with lethal doses of pure sugar, yet they were rarely obese because they were outside playing—which the kids today must think is too dangerous or something. They even shared sodas with their friends—from one bottle or one straw—and no one actually died. They would spend hours building rolling contraptions out of scraps of wood ripped from Flexible Flyer sleds, construction sites, and real red wagons only to roll down the hill to realize they had concocted no way to stop until they hit bushes, curbs, or someone’s cement block front porch. They fell out of trees and skinned knees and lost teeth and got into fights and soaped windows and threw eggs and got bitten by the neighbor’s arthritic Chihuahua Felix because they were baiting Felix with a stick, and—get this—there were no lawsuits. They actually took responsibility for their actions. Imagine! They even ate worms and ants and grasshoppers and honeysuckle and dandelions and buttercups and watermelon seeds and pennies and anything anyone dared them to eat—and they got sick, but they somehow survived.

  And they were so much more active than the kids I see come in here to sit all day at a computer or play on a Game Boy. They often left home in the morning to play all day long, and as long as they were inside the house before the streetlights came on, they wouldn’t get grounded. Not a single one of them had a cell phone or a pager, a vial of pepper spray or a Taser. And instead of spending all day and night on the phone or on the Internet, they actually went over to friends’ houses and knocked on the door or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Imagine! Walking over, knocking on a door, and talking to someone in person! That little boy, as well mannered as he was, wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

  And my parents and grandparents were never as bored as easily as these kids seem to get. They often had to sit through the movie at the movie theater, and none of them had PlayStations, Nintendo, Xboxes, Game Boys, Walkmen, Palm Pilots, cell phones, personal computers, chat rooms, MTV, e-mail, Dolby Surround Sound, DVDs, microwaves, microwave popcorn, satellite TV, or the mall. All they had were four channels that required something called rabbit ears to tune in, their friends, their little transistor radios, and their unconventional imaginations. They actually made up games that often involved no more than a ratty old tennis ball borrowed from Felix the Chihuahua, a broomstick, half a block of street, and manhole covers or their own shoes for bases. When they played dodgeball (also known as “murder ball”), the ball actually hurt, because no one had a working bicycle pump and needle and no one had invented Nerf balls yet. They were even cut from Little League or other sports teams if they weren’t good enough. Just imagine the incredible blows to their collective self-esteem! My goodness, they’d actually have to suck it up and try harder the next time!

  Yeah, I’m from a wimpy generation, all right, and it all started with my schooling. My parents and grandparents actually went to school during snowstorms, floods, wars, and police actions, and that taught them perseverance, pride, courage, patriotism, and fortitude. They actually had to take tests that weren’t curved and sit in un-air-conditioned classes where their grades weren’t weighted. And if they didn’t make the grade, they actually got held back and had to repeat the same grade. I wonder where the lawyers were when that was happening. They didn’t even have calculators to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. They actually had to learn how to do math longhand using nonmechanical pencils that they had to sharpen with their own hands! And when they had a book report to do, they actually had to read the book! They couldn’t rent the movie, they couldn’t read CliffsNotes, and they couldn’t even find the book on tape. Imagine the horror of actually having to turn the pages! Oh, the humanity! Oh, the paper cuts! Some of the kids who come in here simply refuse to crack a book unless they can “flip through it” on the computer.

  The kids these days…I don’t know what to do with them. They’d much rather watch movies like Jackass or shows like American Idol or pierce something new or tattoo themselves green or get their nails done or hang out until all hours doing absolutely nothing or play eye-hand coordination games in their rooms or blame others for their failures and problems.

 
I look up at a man holding a little girl’s hand. “May I help you?”

  “Does your globe have Australia on it?” I have to actually show the man that, indeed, Australia does appear on our globe. “And do you have a map of Australia to scale?” he asks. I try to explain what “to scale” means, but he’s not hearing me. “I need the biggest map you have.” I leave him with the biggest atlas we have.

  Maybe kids are messed up today because of their parents!

  And after “Australia Man,” my day travels quickly downhill.

  “I need an A-to-Z encyclopedia” is next. I ask, “You mean a dictionary, right?” I get a nod. And this was from a grown woman! Stupid parents equal stupid kids!

  “Can you help me find information on genital arthritis?” After stifling a howl of laughter, I convince this kind, gentle old man that he means “congenital arthritis.” Though as he walks away, I wonder…

  “Do you have a copy of Romeo and Juliet in English?” I could direct this child to the circulation department or a computer, but I don’t. I take the child to the very edition I used when trying to decipher Shakespeare. I show him the left side, and his eyes bug out. “That’s English?” Then I show him the right side of the book, and his eyes relax. “This is what I need! Thanks!”

  Two “thanks” in one morning. A record.

  But when an older black woman asks me where we “hide” Waiting to Expire, I feel like expiring right then and there. And I’m only halfway through my shift. I direct her to the fiction section without correcting her, see no one in line, and put up my “I’ll Be Back in a Minute” sign.

  It’s time for my lunch.

  I slide off my stool and walk around the counter, nearly colliding with a patron.