Pat Boone Fan Club (11 page)

Or is he really only preserving it? Preserving decay, you now think. Consider that the old buildings should remain in ruins,
the palmettos and crape myrtles jungled and rampant, cypress shingles stained with saltwater, wrought-iron fences rusted. The scent of verdigris.

Consider only your own preservation.

One last time, drive the causeway linking Galveston to the mainland. Speed, as if you are levitating, leaving the low-lying barrier island far behind. Windows open. Wind caressing the tender skin of your new face.

The Fireproof Librarian

I approach the red-brick Sara Hightower Regional Library on Broad Street in Rome, Georgia, where I work, hoping to see a skull-and-crossbones sign nailed to the door. A modern addition mutates from the rear of this original Carnegie library, friable asbestos molting from the ceiling. Since last December, library employees have awaited results of the “Asbestos Survey and Testing Report,” an official document to confirm exact levels and locations. Yesterday, March third, concerned about the delay, I myself called Dennis Scott, Floyd County health inspector, to determine the report’s status. He said he planned to collect samples today. When I expressed concern about the three-month delay, he refused comment. No steps to fix the problem will be implemented until this report is completed. No public warning signs will be posted until the suspicion of asbestos is scientifically confirmed.

Belle, my supervisor, head of the Fine Art Department, waits at the downstairs checkout counter, watching the door, watching for me. Wide as she is tall, Belle, today, resembles a puffy pink square of bubblegum. She has two emotional settings: perky and trouble. As I approach her, the lids of her eyes flatten, so I’m thinking
trouble
. Busted. Dennis Scott blew the whistle on me—whereas I’m planning to blow it on
him
. Shrilly.

“I heard a little rumor,” Belle says. “I’m hoping you’ll tell me it’s not true.”

Given my lowly, part-time status, I deliberately bypassed her authority by calling about the report. Caught, I confess. “But did he show up today for the samples?” I nod toward the ceiling, then walk behind the checkout counter.

“You went over
my
head, over
Abigail’s
head. That kind of behavior is . . .” She clamps her mouth shut, unable to finish her sentence. Her bleached-blonde hair, polyurethaned into a helmet, seems to tremble.

“You don’t think we should at least warn the public?” I say.

“This isn’t an asbestos factory.” She slaps her palm on the counter. Probably it’s just dust, but a few white particles spew into the air on impact. “I’m going now,” she adds. “You think you can stay out of trouble the rest of the evening? Get something done here?” I work the five-to-nine-p.m. shift.

I prop open the downstairs door for fresh air, though it’s just as likely a breeze will disturb the ailing asbestos. I breathe as shallowly as possible. The ceiling resembles drifts of fake snow or clumps of Ivory soap flakes, a niveous compound supposed to adhere to the structure. When the air-conditioning fan cycles on, however, ghostly clouds spew on books, desks, light fixtures, floors. Deep gouges pock the ceiling where books on the top shelves brush against it. Previously, unaware of the asbestos, we all simply blew the stuff off book jackets or dusted them with rags—the equivalent, perhaps, of cleaning up nuclear meltdowns with mops.

I perch on the stool behind the downstairs circulation desk, awaiting patrons. The upstairs floor of the library—fiction, reference, children’s books—is always busier. Tonight, my department is quiet. I’m relieved. I hate to check out books. They’re only returned a few weeks later to be shelved all over again. A never-ending cycle. My official title is “Fine Art evening supervisor.” Yet I’m hardly a librarian and know nothing about art. This department, however, is also a quasi-paradise for “how-to” junkies, with books on how to sail, how to train your dog, how to raise chickens, how to shoot a rifle, how to identify wildflowers, fix your plumbing and electricity, gamble, recover from cancer, nervous breakdowns, depression. All that’s missing, which is what I really want, are books on how to muckrake and scandalmong.

The library’s scent of sun-hot brick, musty paper, and chipped linoleum (probably likewise manufactured with asbestos) settles over the evening. From amid the stacks, I slide out the Chilton’s
Kawasaki 900
Z
1
New Repair and Tune-up Guide
. I’ve been studying it the past week—flaunting authority yet again—since we aren’t allowed to read while on duty. On the cover looms a black-leathered man wearing a red helmet, sitting astride a Kawasaki with a red-metal fuel tank. I don’t own a motorcycle. I’ve never owned one. But . . .

In the movie version
, I grab the handlebars, heaving the Kawasaki off the stands. I press the choke with my thumb and switch the ignition. I jam my leather-booted feet on the pegs. I gun the engine, the bike’s growl reverberating through my body. The silver mufflers, shaped like horns, streak above asphalt, the drive chain spinning sparks across pavement. A camera pans my race down Broad Street. Motorists wheel toward the curb. Pedestrians don’t dare step from sidewalks.
I
own the street—
me
, peering through eye holes in red satin that masks my face. A cape—a
red
cape—streams behind me. Tires hiss to a stop in front of the library. I swirl through the building, the cape magically casting
asbestos into black holes in the sky. The citizens of Rome cheer. Pistons firing, chains spinning, I disappear into the night.

“Who
was
that masked girl?” everyone asks.

A few minutes before closing time, a woman plops a box stuffed with romance novels on the counter. She wears an Atlanta Braves t-shirt, the red-and-blue logo bleeding into the white fabric. I sigh, me in my own smudged t-shirt, probably sprinkled with asbestos particles. I’m tempted to tell her to go upstairs to the fiction department, but both stations are required to check out books. Besides, I figure I’ve caused enough trouble today. So I slam the rubber stamp with the due date onto the cards, inserting them into the pockets. Covers portray women with indigo hair, crimson blossoms pinned behind their ears. The male model Fabio (or facsimile) wears a pirate shirt. He’s poised to rip bodices.

Finally the woman staggers out the door with her cardboard box of romance. I tally up the few pennies from overdue books. I turn off the downstairs lights in the Georgia Room (which houses the archives), the music room, and the windowless periodicals room. I dog-ear the Kawasaki repair manual on page twenty-seven, 629.2877 in the Dewey Decimal System. Which, by the way, is the only thing about library work I love: the exactness of each book owning a private number. It belongs
here
, in this one and only location, nowhere else in the universe. The back cover of the book appears scorched, perhaps accidentally ignited by an acetylene torch soldering valve refacers or sprocket teeth. I hide it in the stacks behind the
Handbook of Wild Flower Cultivation
(635.967) so no one will check it out. I lock the downstairs door behind me. Finally, I take a deep breath.

I switch on the engine to my sixteen-year-old green Volkswagen bug and drive down Broad Street toward home. I wonder if Belle will report me to Abigail, the library director. Probably. But I’m not sure I care. For what I did
not
say to Belle is that I hate
this job. I did not say this job is a default plan for my life, nothing else to do in Rome, where I moved with my husband for
his
job. I did not say this is a second-rate library in a fading rural town, hardly Atlanta, more than an hour away. I did not say
you
, Belle, will never aspire to anything grander than overseeing a bunch of books laced with asbestos. I also restrained myself from saying that
if
I felt at home or even
slightly
welcomed in the library, I might not have called the health inspector in the first place. I did not say that I feel like a Yankee. A foreigner. An alien.

Or maybe none of this about Belle and Rome is true. Maybe it’s just me—bitter, confused—who is the real problem, who has brought this all on myself.

No, surely
that
can’t be true.

To reach the decrepit log cabin in which I live, you turn left off Martha Berry Boulevard onto the Berry College campus, where my husband teaches English literature. I pass the gatehouse, a low-tech security checkpoint, and drive down a narrow three-mile road plowed through a nature preserve, to faculty housing. Tonight, my foot barely on the gas pedal, the gear in second, I feel as if I’m pouring through a dark funnel. I follow thin tunnels of my own dim headlights, leading nowhere I really want to go. I pass the turnoff to the dirt road leading up Lavender Mountain. On top is the House o’ Dreams, a cottage once belonging to Martha Berry, the college founder. Beside it stands a fire tower, high enough to see Alabama and Tennessee. High enough to watch for trouble-making Yankees approaching.

I maneuver a hairpin turn, pull into a small clearing, and park beside the screened porch. A light burns in my husband’s study. He’s probably reading Wittgenstein’s
On Certainty
or Foucault’s
The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language
, research for a book he’s writing:
Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition
. He tells me that it focuses on the novel’s representation of an ekphrastic art form as a reflexive device of mimetic
self-definition, exploring how a shift in realist paradigms has taken place in this century from an empirical, correspondence theory of signification to a foundational model emphasizing discourse and a coherence theory of meaning.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine such an incomprehensible book, with its own Dewey Decimal number, sitting on the shelves of Sara Hightower Regional Library. Certainly I myself do not, on any level of my being, understand what it’s about.

I’ve been married to this second husband—and all his obtuse sentences—for only a few years. I met him at the University of Houston, where he taught an adult education class I took. Initially, I was impressed by his eclectic knowledge, his collection of classical records, only belatedly realizing we have little in common. I, after all, love disco—undeconstructively, I might add.

Now, I quietly close the car door, so he won’t know I’m home yet. I sit on the front stoop. The humid night dampens the scent of pinestraw and of Floyd County’s paper mills, slightly acrid with chemicals grinding bark to pulp. I almost hear the whoosh of bats, the twitch of white-tailed deer, the rustle of wild turkeys. Through breaks in the trees, the moon rounds the sky—a thin Necco wafer, an old-fashioned candy belonging to the past. Even though I’ve lived in Georgia only a few years, perhaps it is the regretful past of the South I sense. Do I myself feel the chafed hopes of elderly widows—dusty African violets in their windowsills—attired in floral dresses for Southern Baptist church services? Afterward, they gather at Shoney’s for breakfast . . . widows sprinkled with carnation talcum, dusting themselves with dreams of long-ago summers. I feel this, as if I am an abandoned widow lady, too.

I masquerade with the alias of “Smith,” my husband’s name. “Smith” is camouflage. If I use my real name, my Jewish name, I’ll blend even less well into this Bible Belt landscape. Over the years, I lived in
DC
, the West Indies, New Jersey, Boston, Israel, Galveston, Houston, Missouri. I am an island girl, a Jersey girl,
a Sabra, a Texan, a Midwesterner, changing masks, identities, wanting to blend with the locals. I’ve shed my father’s last name as well as the name “Flint,” that of my first husband, before now evolving to “Smith.” Yet I don’t
feel
like a “Smith.” Ironically, despite (or
because
of) all the names, the disguises, I now worry I’ve never blended anywhere, never felt at home, never felt like a “me” who belonged.

Belle would probably call me “
Trouble
smith,” because I’m good at creating it.

The name is Smith. Trouble Smith.

Growing up in St. Thomas, I secretly spent hours at the public library in the Lange Building on Dronningens Gade, the main street of Charlotte Amalie. My father told me that I—just a girl—didn’t need to learn history, English, French, science. So I told no one I went to the library. No one knew of my contentment, at one with books, sitting at a wood table on the second floor. Termites tunneled most of the books as if they, too, devoured words. The result resembled miniature portholes. I could see straight through a book from cover to cover, as if I peered through a portal onto the world itself.

I loved all elements of books indiscriminately: the covers, the paper, paragraphs, sentences, punctuation marks, ink. I equally loved the way words lined themselves up in sentences. I could not have said that I understood the concept of “ideas” back then, but it was, nevertheless, the first time I sensed a relationship between an idea and a concrete word. So I also loved the way words could all be shaken up, used in any order you liked, thus establishing an entirely
different
set of ideas. It was magic. Black, inky magic. It was the first time I ever felt powerful, learning things girls weren’t supposed to, as if I knew voodoo, too. For a few hours, I was no longer the daughter of my father, that bank president who uprooted my stateside life by bringing me to an isolated, insular island.

The next morning I call my mother in New Jersey to tell her about the asbestos. I stand by the kitchen window watching deer graze on weedy grass at the edge of the forest. During the night, pollen from loblollies settled over my
VW
, green mingling with red dusty clay, like a pointillist painting.

“What should I do if they just sit on the report?” I ask. “Or never even write it?” I slide a piece of bread into the toaster.

She’s a lover of causes. In the 1940s, before I was born, my mother sat in the backs of buses with black passengers when she lived in Washington
DC
. Earlier, my Russian grandfather, to avoid his draft into the czar’s army, emigrated to the United States, where he joined the Socialist Party. So the idea of “protest” is entwined in my
DNA
, my personal gene pool.