The Borrower (3 page)

In those moments of small-town pettiness, in those moments where I realized I’d forever be on the responsible adult side of the Halloween candy exchange, in those moments where I looked down and saw myself wearing sensible shoes, I might have cursed my ending up in Hannibal. I could have been living in a loft in Brooklyn, or backpacking across Spain with my father’s money, or finishing a PhD. But I didn’t regret it, at least not totally, because the randomness—the anonymous and insipid randomness—was the appeal. My father would have hooked me up with a hundred good jobs, or at least “good” in the monetary sense. He would have paid for the most self-indulgent, nonfunded
MFA
in filmmaking at the most expensive university in the country.

But four years earlier, finishing up my English degree, I had stubbornly refused to tell him if I even had a job lined up at all. That April, I’d walked across campus to the Career Development Office, on the top floor of the student center, and sat in a soft plastic chair until a woman I’d never seen before—a woman with lacquered white hair—welcomed me into her office and asked me a series of increasingly perplexed questions about what I wanted to do with my life. She had a hard time believing that a student graduating magna cum laude could care so very little where she went next. She ended up having her secretary print out a fifty-page list of the addresses and job titles of all the alumni in the database whose careers were considered to be somehow “in the field of English.” These people, presumably, would look out for one of their own and help me find a job. I was a little disappointed, after deliberately turning my back on my father and his connections, to be handed fifty pages of additional connections. But at least they were
my
connections, not his. The people on the list were teachers, technical writers, tutors, translators, and journalists. Loraine Best, class of ’65, was one of the only ones with a library job, but this wasn’t why I wrote to her. I simply started e-mailing every alum in alphabetical order, until it was time for midterms. I got from Aaronson to Chernack, and then I spent three weeks studying and drinking beer and breaking up with my boyfriend and waiting. Going alphabetically and without discrimination made it seem less like milking the connections and more like leaving it up to chance. We Russians have always been good at roulette.

I had no library science degree and no experience, but Loraine happened to need a children’s librarian fast, after the old one was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. She hadn’t even had time yet to advertise the job, and so when my letter arrived she took it as an answer to her prayers and hired me over the phone. I was offered the job while sitting on the top bunk of my dorm room, wearing underwear and a Violent Femmes T-shirt and wooly socks. Kate Phelps had died from the cancer by the time I rolled into town that June.

And of course Loraine threw it back in my face every few weeks: “I hired you sight unseen because I knew I was getting a Holyoke graduate, and I thought that guaranteed a certain work ethic.”

When I told my parents I’d be working the children’s desk at a small library in a small town in Missouri, my father said, “This is because of some boyfriend? There are a million good boys in Chicago, and many of them are Russian. At some point you are wanting to be an
adult
librarian, no? I say this because you need a challenge. There are university libraries where I can pull on the strings.”

My mother said, “At least you’ll be in driving distance.” When she didn’t add anything else, I realized this was the kindest thing she could think to say.

Later that same fall, Ian entered the children’s fiction contest. Five minutes before the deadline, he came downstairs alone to hand me his story, in a cover made of purple construction paper and decorated with a bright yellow hand cut from a Cheerios box. It was called “The Nothing Hand.” He pushed his sweaty hair back and bounced up and down as if he expected me to read it right then.

“This looks great,” I said, and thumbed through the typed pages for his benefit. I looked up at him leaning over my desk, at his hair that was now stuck straight back with sweat, and at the strange marks I’d never noticed before above his left eyebrow. There were four little pink indented dots, all in a straight row, evenly spaced a few millimeters apart. Could that have been from a fork? I’d heard that teachers had to keep files on any suspicious bruises or wounds, and I wondered if I should start doing the same. I was thinking also of Emily Alden, with that huge bruise on her neck last winter that she claimed was from her brother hitting her with a snowball.

“It’s about this hand,” Ian was saying, “that’s totally invisible, and it’s detached from any human body. It’s kind of like a Greek myth, but there’s a mortal at the end, and it’s on its own separate page. So at the end of the story, you have to guess what the mortal is, and then you can turn the page and see if you were right.”

“So there’s a
moral
?”

“No, a mortal, because of how it’s inspired by Greek myths. Get it? It’s a joke. Also, I forgot page numbers.”

“I’ll bend the rules for you,” I said. I already knew it would win first prize for the fifth grade, because the only other entry was about some kind of ninja battle. I read the beginning as soon as he left. He’d printed it out in dark blue:

THE
NOTHING
HAND

by Ian Alistair Drake Grade 5

There once was a hand that was made of nothing. It was invisible to all of your senses but it could do whatever it would like. Here was its life:

Day 1: Steal doughnuts and hide.

Day 2: Eat the doughnuts it stole, through a special mouth that it had.

Day 3: Get revenge on bullies through using trickery.

Day 4: Hide under rocks in the forest, waiting for trouble.

I flipped to the end to see the moral.

Mortal: Don’t tell even the rabbits where you’re hiding, because rabbits can’t keep a secret.

I wondered why an invisible hand would need to hide. The first year I ran the contest, a very fat little boy had handed in a story about children who could shrink themselves to two inches tall and ride around in toy cars. I remembered thinking that children’s imaginary worlds were so closely connected with desire, how that poor boy had so obviously wanted to shrink. So what did
this
mean, coming from a child who was loud and omnipresent and somewhat demanding—this wish for double invisibility? Although, come to think of it, it wasn’t a coincidence he spent all his free time in a quiet room below ground, his face buried in biographies of Houdini. To the town of Hannibal, he was half-invisible already.

I’d become friends with a woman named Sophie Bennett who was my age and taught fourth grade at Hannibal Day, and I decided to ask her about Ian the next time she came in. She poked through nonfiction for an hour almost every weekend, checking out whole armloads of books about Aztecs or mushrooms. That Sunday afternoon she sank loudly into one of the child-sized computer chairs near my desk.

“I am so fucking sick,” she said. She put her big canvas bag on the floor beside her and looked around the room to see who was there. She hated running into her students. A little girl who had come in by herself was coloring at a table, an older boy was playing computer games, and a couple of middle schoolers were working quietly with tutors. “I think I’ve had twelve healthy days since I started teaching. And now all my kids have lice. Seriously, don’t touch anyone. Don’t even touch their coats.”

I laughed and walked in front of the desk so we could talk more quietly. “I have a question for you,” I said, sitting next to her in one of the computer chairs. She took a big plastic hair clip out of her bag, put it in her mouth to hold it, and started gathering a ponytail.

“Hmm.”

“Okay, Ian Drake. He’s in fifth grade. Did you teach him last year?”

“No,” she said, “I think Julie Leonard had him. But his family is legendary. Big nightmare.”

“I actually had this whole confrontation with the mother. She comes down here, and she goes, ‘My son needs to read holy books!’ I’ve always had this whole speech prepared for that kind of occasion, where I single-handedly defend the First Amendment. And then she comes in here and the whole thing is just so
silly
, and I go totally blank.”

“Yeah, no, they’re fucking nuts.” She looked around the room again, just in case. The little girl had her crayon lifted above her head and was apparently drawing in the air. “Very religious, which you might have gathered. The mother I think has had some psychiatric problems, and she’s very definitely anorexic.”

“I didn’t notice,” I said. I tried to think back. Her boniness had just seemed part of her personality.

“I mean, the good thing is Ian doesn’t seem affected by it. He can be
very
moody and melodramatic, but that’s just his big act. He’s really the happiest kid in the world. He got up there last year in the spring musical and they have this cancan line, of all things, and he’s the worst person in it, knocking everyone over, but he has this huge showbiz smile on his face. Totally into it. He’ll do fine no matter what. Shit will hit the fan when he announces he’s gay, but he’ll get through it.”

I laughed. “My God, people need to
stop
that.”

Though to be honest, my indignant insistence that Ian wasn’t anything-sexual wasn’t entirely sincere. The question had crossed my mind plenty of times, particularly during his phase of reading books about furniture history, and I’d always imagined that someday he’d come visit me with his partner and his adopted Chinese daughter, and I’d get to ask him what it was like growing up in Hannibal, and he’d tell me that reading had saved his life. And even if he wasn’t gay, he’d come back and visit me anyway, with his cute wife and his twin boys who looked just like him, and then for some reason the “reading saved my life” part was still there.

Three girls came downstairs right then with backpacks and waved, giggling, at Sophie. She raised her eyebrows at me and bit her lip: we should stop talking.

“Okay,” she said once the girls had settled in by the series shelf, “so what I need is books about lying. Picture books, folktales, whatever you got. We’re having a little epidemic.”

I found her some Abe Lincoln stories and a Chinese folktale called “The Empty Pot.”

“Seriously, I think he’s okay,” she whispered as I was stamping the books. “You should see the dad, though. I think
he
’s gay. That’s why the mother’s miserable. He’s so far in the closet he’s, like, back in fucking
Narnia
. Do I owe money?”

“Of course you do,” I said, handing her the books and her receipt.

“Thanks, babe.” She grinned and jingled her keys and headed upstairs.

My father called that night, quite worked up. “There are librarians on the Chicago news! They are yelling about this
USA
Patriot Act!” My father has a Russian accent that I don’t register in person, but can catch the edges of over the phone or on my answering machine or when he tries to pepper his speech with strained American expressions like “I’m eating humble pie.” It gives me something to do when I don’t want to listen to what he’s saying. To everyone else, apparently, his accent sounds fairly thick. “Lucy, tell me about this: does the George W. Bush government come and ask you questions?”

“I don’t think the government is too interested in picture books.”

“Let’s say if a man with swarthy skin and a dark beard checks out a book about the making of bombs, does your boss telephone the FBI? Is the
FBI
already in the computer?”

I was sure that if the government contacted Loraine, she’d be one of the only librarians in the country who was thrilled to cooperate. “I wouldn’t know. If they ask you for records, they simultaneously slap you with a lifetime gag order.”

“Lucy, listen. This is Soviet-style tactics. If you have a head with your shoulders, you get out of this library business right away. This is how the trouble starts.” I’d heard the
KGB
comparison a lot lately, most notably from Rocky, but hearing it in a Russian accent made it sound like an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. (“In Soviet Russia, library book checks
you
out!”)

“I agree,” I said. “But they really don’t care who’s borrowing the Dr. Seuss.”

“These librarians on the news were shredding all their documents and erasing computer files. This is not a good idea, either. You trust me about this, as a victim of the Soviets. So you are damned if you help them and you are damned if you fight against them. This is not a good time to work in a library.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “Because of the enormous paycheck. I’ll just keep my head down.”

Although, sure, I’d have been happier if we still just used the borrower cards in their little paper pockets. Those could have been burned in an emergency, could have been tossed out the window as the Feds approached, or swapped with the card in the back of
Misty of Chincoteague
. I was all for catching terrorists, but not at the cost of turning the libraries from temples of information into mousetraps. Perhaps because I had no library science degree, I tended to overcompensate by taking the First Amendment a little more seriously than some other librarians. And of course I’d internalized my father’s fear of Big Brother governments.

There was a nostalgia element for me, too, wishing for those borrower cards. Quite a few of my older books still had them, left behind when we went to computer in 1991. They chronicled all the children who read a book in the months or years or even decades before that time, but then they just stopped, as if civilization had come to an abrupt end. I always read the names as I re-shelved, and I’d discovered that certain ones popped up on hundreds of the lists. Allie Royston, for example, who must have been about ten years old in 1989, seemed to have read every horse book ever written. Another child checked out
Ellen Tebbits
six times in two years. These lists catalogued the best minds of each generation—the self-motivated, the literate, the curious, the insatiable. If we still used them, Ian’s name would be in half the books.