The Borrower (4 page)

“Lucy, I tell you what you should do. First, you get out of this library job and you get a good new job. And then you write articles for all the newspapers. You are smarter than most of these librarian people, and you can write a good letter that explains what exactly is wrong with the
USA
Patriot Act. Freedom of the press!”

“Dad, people have already tried that. Thousands and thousands of people.”

“Ah, but you have a personal experience of being a librarian, and you can say how this has affected you!”

“It really hasn’t affected me at all.”

“Lucy, you are twenty-six, okay? You have to ask, what have you done in these years? By the time I was twenty-six I have had an illegal capitalist business defying the Soviets, and then I have escaped the damned Soviets, at risk of life and limb, and I have started a new life in the home of the brave, okay? So if this is home of the brave, where are the brave?”

“They’re getting ready for bed. They’ve had a long day checking out books to six-year-olds.”

“Listen, my friend Shapko the Ukrainian is needing an assistant for his real estate selling. You would be good at this.”

“Your friend Shapko who was arrested for mail fraud?”

“Not even indicted by grand jury! This American legal system is still good, until your George W. Bush gets his hands on it.”

“I believe that’s already happened, Dad.”

“Exactly!”

As we hung up I wanted to shake my head and laugh, wanted to roll my eyes at someone, but at the same time I knew it must have been horrible for my father, having risked his life to leave Russia, having chosen America out of all the countries in the world, and then watching the government tighten its clench, chip away at the promised freedoms, haul young men off to Guantánamo with no charges, no lawyers, no warning. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t happening to him personally. The very fact that people’s phones were being tapped was enough to remind him quite viscerally of pre-Yeltsin “state security.”

In May of 2002, I’d been visiting my parents in their Chicago apartment when the phone rang during dinner. It was Magda Johnson, my mother’s friend who’d grown up in Poland during World War II, and who now lived near Lincoln Park. I could hear her voice as my mother held the phone farther and farther from her own ear: “There are explosions in the street! Someone is shooting or bombing, and there is shouting all up and down the street!”

“It’s Cinco de Mayo!” I’d called to my mother. “Tell her to turn on the news. It’s just Cinco de Mayo!”

But Magda Johnson was still screaming, a five-year-old in a bomb shelter once again. For the past eight months, and maybe for the rest of her life.

And I had to remember that about my father, too: he hadn’t bargained on this. He thought he’d left it behind.

I checked the clock to make sure rehearsal would be done in the theater downstairs, and then I blasted music and vacuumed. My blood pressure was up, and since it wasn’t worth cursing an old Russian man for his idealism, I decided to take it out on my carpet. It never really did come clean, no matter what I did. Sections were oatmeal, sections were beige, and certain spots looked like details from crime scene photos. I had to angle the vacuum carefully around the stacks of books that served as a sort of second furniture, pedestals for coffee cups and mail and magazines. I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I’d feel compelled to organize the books in some regimented system—Dewey or alphabetical or worse—and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.

Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser’s case I think I was focused mostly on his name); George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was
Vanity Fair
, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copper-field, she might seduce him). Then there were various stacks of contemporary authors who I felt would get along together at cocktail parties, and there were at least three stacks of books I personally loathed but held on to just in case someone asked me to loan them a page-turner about a family of circus performers, or an experimental novel about a time-traveling nun. I’d hate to have to say that I knew the perfect book but I’d just given it away. Not that people often asked. But once in a while my landlord, Tim, or his partner, Lenny, would invite themselves in to peruse the stacks and ask the world’s best question: “Hey, what do you think I should read?” It was nice to be prepared.

These stacks were my apartment’s main decoration. I had some nice furniture from my parents, plus some standard-issue rectangular things from Ikea, but in the three years I’d lived there I’d never gotten around to hanging pictures. My bed was still a mattress on the floor. Maybe because of my father’s family stories, the idea of having to run across a border had never been far from my mind. Excepting the books, I never liked to amass more possessions than could be moved in a cartop U-Haul. You never know when the Cossacks are going to invade.

A week later, a package arrived from my parents. It contained two issues of the Holyoke alumnae magazine on which I’d never bothered changing my address, a box of Frango mints, and an editorial clipped from the
Trib
about the Patriot Act. I was flattered, really, that my father suddenly thought my job was dangerous, if not exciting. I almost wished it were true. My whole childhood, hearing stories of Russian revolutionaries and refugees, I’d been primed for a grand fight. And here I was with no one to rebel against but Loraine Best. And Janet Drake, who didn’t even know my name.

I lay on my back on the floor and read in the magazine about a former classmate, one who’d lived on my freshman hall and used to burn incense and drink wine coolers, who had started a battered women’s shelter in Maine and had recently spoken before Congress. On the next page was a girl who’d graduated just that spring and was measuring glacier melt when she wasn’t busy collecting grant money. A woman from the class of ’84 was lobbying for gay rights in California. There was a picture of her with her partner, in the nineteenth-century barn they’d restored together.

I imagined what they might write about me:

Lucy Hull, class of ’02, courageously checked out
The Pushcart War
to a ten-year-old patron today, despite the preponderance therein of peashooters and the fact that the book does not in any way contain “the breath of God.”

“It really wasn’t a choice,” said the 26-year-old Hull, who has done very little with her adult life besides stamping books, re-shelving books, and reading books aloud with funny voices. “It’s basically illegal to deny a book to someone with a library card. I’m not quite sure why you’re interviewing me.”

Hull lives alone above a theater, frequently forgets to hydrate, and has recently developed a rash on the backs of her legs from the fabric of her desk chair.

That night, I dreamed about the borrower cards. Loraine showed me a plain red book and asked me who’d checked it out. I read her the list: Ian Drake, George W. Bush, and God Almighty.

I
had to give him credit: Ian was brilliant. He came one day in November with his babysitter, after several weeks of chaperoned checkouts in which he had halfheartedly borrowed various biographies and a collection of Native American myths and legends. (“They’re all about crows,” he said when he returned it. “My review is that this book is a little too crow-heavy.”) The babysitter, Sonya, was a bedraggled Filipina woman with her own five-year-old daughter who sometimes silently accompanied them and then sat in the corner stroking the puppets. When Ian picked out chapter books, Sonya would flip them over in her hands, flick through the pages as if their appropriateness would thereby reveal itself, and then ask, “What your mother is going to say? I will show her this, okay?” Ian would invariably grab the book, shove it back on the shelf, and storm off to nonfiction.

That Saturday in November, he and Sonya came in without the five-year-old, and Ian immediately sat down at one of the computers opposite my desk—something he never did, not even to look up a book. He said, “Hey, Sonya, I’m going to play Noah’s Mission online. Want to watch?”

“Your mom say no video games at the library.”

Ian’s voice became so shrill that I knew she’d agree to whatever he said, just to get him to stop. It was a voice like pepper spray. “This is the
one
game I’m allowed to play! And you’ve
seen
me play it at home! It’s the one with Noah! You can
ask
her! You can call her right now and
ask
her, but she’ll be really mad at you for calling because she’s in the middle of her meeting, but you can call anyway!”

Sonya said, “Okay, okay, okay,” and settled into the chair beside his.

It was the most inane and slow-paced computer game I’d ever seen, with graphics out of 1988. Noah had to run around collecting two of every animal, carrying them on his head back to the ark. Meanwhile, coconuts fell on him and eagles swooped down to carry off his loot. I had to cough to keep from laughing out loud when Noah died and fell off the bottom of the screen while the computer beeped away in a suddenly minor key. It normally drove me crazy when kids came in just to play games, but this one was perversely entertaining, if only for its awfulness, and I was secretly thrilled to see that Noah had nine more available lives. Sonya must have seen it too, because this was the point when she announced that she was heading upstairs to get a magazine.

Ian stared closely at the computer screen, balancing a goat on Noah’s head, until Sonya had rounded the corner. Then he spun out of his chair and ran to my desk. “Mission accomplished! Wasn’t that awesome? I bored her to death!” He took off the empty backpack that I realized just now he’d been wearing the whole time, and unzipped it. “Fill ’er up!”

I felt like I was on that old game show where you had three minutes to race around the supermarket finding all the things on your list. I practically trampled a roaming toddler to get at
A Wrinkle in Time
, and then I grabbed
The Westing Game
and
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
and
Five Children and It
. He followed me, holding the backpack open while I dumped things in. It was starting to look full, and I didn’t want Sonya to be suspicious, but I couldn’t resist adding
The Princess Bride
. I didn’t know how long this load would have to last him. He zipped up and raced back to the computer, where Noah was still standing dumbly, goat on his head, unmarred by coconut or eagle. I went back to my own computer to enter all the books manually and check them out to my own account. I couldn’t be sure that Loraine (or Sarah-Ann or Irene) wouldn’t gladly rattle off Ian’s list of checked-out books to his mother.

Sonya returned just a minute later, the latest John Grisham tucked under her arm. “God is flooding the world yet?”

“No, this game is stupid. Let’s go.”

“You no want to check out some books?”

“I’m just not that into reading anymore.”

(In a library in Missouri that was covered with vines

Lived thousands of books in a hundred straight lines

A boy came in at half past nine

Every Saturday, rain or shine

His book selections were clan-des-tine.)

I
saw Janet Drake again sooner than I wanted, though (thank God for the invisibility of the librarian) she didn’t see me. Once a year all the librarians in the county wedged themselves into high heels, tried to pull the cat hair off their sweaters with masking tape, and smeared their lips with an awful tomato red that had gone stale in its tube, all to convince the benefit set of the greater Hannibal region that libraries do better with chairs and books and money. Late that November, as I walked into the Union League Club in a little black dress from college, what hit me was the smell of the people—dark and musty and masculine. It had been ages since I’d smelled cologne. I breathed it in and listened to the buzz of low voices.

Loraine wore a pale gold dress and waved her drink at me. I didn’t see Rocky, but then he was easily lost in a thick, standing crowd. As I waited for my gin and tonic at the bar, I watched the professional benefit-goers warming up to their first sips of wine, and the clusters of librarians huddling in corners, their hair parted straight down the middle. This was what my father imagined I’d become. And there, just a few feet away, was Janet Drake. She looked nice, her shoulders wrapped in a shimmering green shawl, but she hugged it in close to her body and her jaw muscles pulsed tightly even as she smiled toward the half-drunk conversation around her. She said something and laughed at the same time, as if it were so funny she couldn’t get it out with a straight face, but she didn’t look terribly amused. I did that myself sometimes, what I called my Daisy Buchanan laugh. It was a light, airy laugh-talk that at its best sounded sparkling and witty and at its worst sounded like a choking cat. I had picked it up from a friend of my mother who pulled it off flawlessly every time, her silver jewelry jingling along in harmony. Watching Janet, I realized that I tended to do it when I was tremendously uncomfortable. I never did it consciously, and it was never genuine.

“You look like you need that,” said someone beside me, and I realized I was still standing at the bar like a drunk, my gin and tonic half drained.

The man had curly hair the same color as his tuxedo. He was extremely overdressed.