The Book Borrower (6 page)

After class, Ruben didn't need to hurry. Let me see where you work, she said to Lily.

Lily led her, with Squirrel in her arms, upstairs where small children ran, mothers talked, teachers shouted—some affectionately, some coldly. A woman reached to touch Squirrel. Then Emma came out of a classroom, carrying two babies.

—Emma, Emma, why don't you come to school? said Ruben. But Squirrel was crying. She bounced him on her arm, but he cried.

—It didn't work out, said Emma. She smiled indulgently. It just didn't work out.

—But I
want
you.

—That's nice of you to say. Emma had a big body. The babies she held were both black, and Ruben felt outnumbered. Emma waited to find out whether Ruben wanted to say some-thing else, as they listened to Squirrel cry, and then she said, Naps for my honeys, here, hoisting the babies higher and letting them settle. One laughed. And she crossed the hall and went into another room.

—Oh, drag her by the hair, Deborah said that night on the phone.

—I'm going to go up and drag Emma down by the hair, Ruben said to the rest of her group, before the next class.

—Don't you touch her
hair,
girl, she spends hours straightening that hair! But they grinned.

—And when I bring her, for God's sake don't insult her!

Ruben tried three rooms where everyone pointed where she should go, agreeing—Yes, Emma should go—and finally walked into the room where Emma worked. Emma came, impressed. They walked down the stairs together. Ruben had pre-tended to be a certain kind of person and everyone had believed she was. As they walked down, Ruben asked, Why don't you let your hair go natural? But now she'd gone too far.

Emma still couldn't read. Ruben was exhausted that night. Maybe it was a mistake. Emma couldn't do it.

The next time, Ruben was afraid to look, but when she did there were five women at the table. She threw her bag onto the table to celebrate and the table shook and everyone laughed. Emma kept coming. She hugged Ruben often. She couldn't learn.

Deborah was huge. She hugged Ruben, too. In the cold, Deborah and her girls came to Ruben's house and they ate grilled cheese sandwiches. Deborah took over the stove because only she knew how to make the sandwiches so her girls would eat them. She made sandwiches for herself and Ruben, too. She buttered the bread inside and outside and Ruben could feel them both grow fatter. Deborah said, Toby, you aren't fat, you're gorgeous.

—Nonsense.

—It's true.

Ruben considered herself. Red hair, center parted. Slightly fat. Glasses. Not beautiful, not that it mattered, not the sort of thing she thought much about.

—Did you ever sleep with a woman? Ruben said.

—No, did you?

—Never. Did you ever think about it?

—Of course. Let's, some day, said Deborah.

Deborah stood behind her as she ate at her kitchen table, and Squirrel lay back in his white slanting plastic chair and roundly looked at them from the middle of the table. Rose and Jill played with pieces of sandwich and talked to slimy babies that were apple slices, dancing them up and down. Deborah kissed Ruben's scalp and ate a bite of Ruben's remaining half sandwich. Ruben did not turn around. She could feel Deborah's pregnant belly against her head, warm and firm. The window faced south and the winter sun came in behind her and around them both, through a stained-glass yin-yang sign in green and blue, coloring a white macrame hanging she'd tacked above the table. She felt sun on her arms. Rose climbed into Ruben's lap and jumped apple slices over Ruben's arm. Were Ruben and Deborah becoming each other? Toby Ruben hugged Rose and noticed the grain of her own oak table, which lay in such a delicate curve that she had to trace it with her forefinger. Something else beautiful: Rose's ear in the sunlight.

 

A brace of ladies, they walked, that fall and into winter. It grew dark and Rose wept. Once, miles from home, Squirrel cried unceasingly in his stroller. Ruben stuck her hand down his pants to check his diaper pins.

—Use Pampers, said Deborah. You tape them with masking tape.

—Yuck. Ruben hated the feel of Rose's plastic diapers.

—You want pins sticking in him?

—They're not. Squirrel kept screaming. Deborah shrugged as she stretched past her belly to propel a long stroller made for two, in which Jill was asleep and Rose sang mournfully to herself.

—When we walk, said Ruben, where will you put the baby? They laughed, not that anything was funny: it was cold, twilight, they were far from home with their backs toward home. Partly their laughter was guilty. Squirrel still cried. The houses leaned at them, wooden simple houses with three stacked porches. Skimpy wreaths hung on doors, early, or could they be from last Christmas?

—We ought to turn around, Deborah said.

—Are you tired?

—No.

—Nobody else would do this with me, said Ruben.

—Everybody else would call the Child Abuse Hotline. At last they turned. When they reached Ruben's house, they turned again and walked to Deborah's house. Squirrel was asleep. Outside Deborah's house he cried again. Ruben picked him up and rocked him in her arms. The little girls climbed out of their stroller and ran up on the porch in the dark. Ruben's knees hurt with cold and tiredness. Her breasts hurt. Can I nurse him in the street, standing up?

—Doctor, doctor, I have frostbitten nipples! Come inside.

—I'd never get going again. She nursed him, standing, in the street.

 

—When is the test? Emma asked, at every class. When will I get my equivalency?

The others were afraid of the test and shushed Emma.

—I keep coming, said Emma. I've come every time. Now I want to take the test.

Ruben kept changing the subject. When she talked on the phone to Deborah, she told her about Emma.

—So?

—So what?

—So schedule her for the test.

—How can she? None of the others are taking it yet. She couldn't possibly pass it.

—So?

—What do you mean, so? It would be irresponsible.

—Do what she wants, said Deborah.

It was a way of looking at things, it had nothing to do with Emma. It made Ruben angry. She'll fail, said Ruben. Everybody will think I'm a bad teacher.

—Oh, is that it?

—No, said Ruben. She'll be unhappy when she fails it. She'll blame me.

—Toby, I can't think about that. I'm four centimeters dilated. I haven't slept in a week.

—Maybe you should stop teaching.

—Oh, I bring magazines and read to them.

—Not really, said Ruben, who spent hours late at night planning lessons.

—Somewhat really, said Deborah.

—What do you think Deborah meant? she said to Harry, but Harry didn't care. They were in bed. He'd learned not to touch her breasts, which were just kitchen appliances these days, so he ran his fingers through her pubic hair and began to touch her inside. What did Deborah mean? she said again, but for the first time since she'd had Squirrel, she liked the feeling, she wasn't just giving herself lectures about it.

When Deborah had to go have her baby, Jeremiah showed up on Ruben's porch with the little girls. She had seen him only once before.

—Do we have one of those friendships with husbands? she and Deborah had said to each other. But Jeremiah was nice, and Harry was nice, and once they had all stood on a corner in the wind—strollers, husbands—and talked. Now Jeremiah, a short man, glittery-eyed from fucking to work songs or for some other reason, stood and laughed on the porch because his wife was having a baby quite soon, two weeks early, and Ruben gathered the little girls into her house and talked to him shyly through the partly opened door. It was windy.

—Quick or slow? Ruben asked, through the doorway. What do you think?

—Quick or slow what? said Jeremiah, and she felt herself blush as if he'd caught her in a double entendre, when all she meant was labor. The birth.

—Oh, quick, surely.

—Better hurry then, which was also embarrassing, as if she was throwing him out.

This strange husband smiled and stood. Jill had breakfast, he said, but Rose wouldn't. It was early in the morning. Harry was still asleep.

—I'll feed her.

—She likes—

—I know what she likes. Grilled cheese sandwich. Butter on the outside. Cut into strips. Handled till it's gray. She wanted him to know that she knew.

Harry met her, carrying Squirrel. Didn't Deborah have friends before you?

—I don't mind! Ruben was proud to be the one.

—I didn't mean it that way. I was curious.

—Her other friends are boring.

She baby-sat perfectly. Harry left, Squirrel napped, and she made cookies with the little girls, letting the rug stay dirty. She lifted the heavy daughters onto her kitchen chairs, saying in a perfectly casual, adult voice—just as she planned to speak later to Squirrel—Oh, Jill. Maybe you could dump in this baking soda? She guided Rose's hand. The phone rang.

—Toby, we've got another kid!

—Healthy?

—Oh, healthy, yes, of course!

—Girl or boy?

—Oh, girl. They're always girls.

—What's her name?

—Mary Grace.

Ruben's eyes teared. She would have to kidnap the whole family, maybe even glittery Jeremiah. She would keep them in her bed, all five of them, and take them out to look at them, now that they were perfect, now that they had given that old-fashioned, believing, innocent name to their third little daughter. But if she kept them in the bed, Harry would discover them. Where would she keep them? They would be her secret plea-sure. She hung up the phone and turned, blushing and grinning, to the untidy yellow-haired girls standing on her chairs. Then she cried and hugged them.

—Doesn't it need more baking soda? said Jill.

They baked the cookies. Ruben ran out of creative activities long before Jeremiah came. That night she climbed into bed as soon as Squirrel slept. Harry watched television. She'd been reading a library book, but she had finished it. Before that book, she'd read books her students might like, and books about teaching such students. Now, at last, she could read the book Deborah had lent her. Seeing Jeremiah had made her re-member it. She was a little afraid he'd ask for it, but of course he didn't. Tired as she was, she got out of bed and found the book in a pile on the dresser.

 

 

The wintry fog wrapped itself around the union hall, as if to hold tight within its grip the men and women gathered there. I'm inventing this. I wasn't there. I'm looking around that room in my imagination, and I have to admit: it's a crowd of decent people. Some look naive, some look foolish—of course their clothes are old-fashioned to me as I write this in 1964—but there's plenty of intelligence and goodness. The leader, whose attention everyone is trying to get, is my sister Jessie's old flame, William Platz. He's got curls on his fore-head and a skinny nose that looks elegant profiled in the lamplight. He's obviously noble, smart, fearless—maybe too fearless? He's suddenly distracted and when I look around I see that my sister has stepped decisively into the room, looking squat and determined: not sexy, but maybe sexy after all, because of her directness. He hasn't gotten over her, though he's gone back to his wife. He's pointing to a chair. Jessie sits. At first she has a hard time paying attention because she, too, has felt something, once again, between herself and William. Also she's thinking of—what on earth?—me. We'd had a quarrel. We'd met before work in the morning. I'd told her the strike would be just as successful or unsuccessful without her as with her. Now I see how angry and nasty a remark that was. I was suggesting she wasn't a leader.

Jessie shook off any thoughts about her uncomprehending sister Miriam and anything else besides the business at hand, and listened attentively, raising her eyebrows as if ideas could be made clearer that way. The discussion was about the trolley strike that had taken place just a few months earlier in Denver. After death, injury, and terrible property damage, the workers returned to their jobs, merely requesting that the scabs be run out of town. The union leader said, “You do not know what this shooting, this loss of life, has done to me. I am a different man. I would do anything to end this bloodshed.” The gathering in Boynton considered these words seriously, with strong disagreements. Some thought the Denver union leader was a hero, others that he had betrayed those he was supposed to lead.