Library Blues, Christy Hutchcraft

~ She gave me socks, shoes, a jacket and blanket. I put them on behind the second floor stacks, and after I put them on, I realized how naked I had been. 

They are not for me, never for me, not ever, not one, two, three, four. Can’t read those pages, boring pages, silent pages, that only speak if you’ve been taught to hear. I haven’t been taught. I never learned. And what is hearing anyway when no one bothers to listen? 

Look there, a cola can someone left on the shelf in between the rows. One, two, three, four. A cola can I can read. A cola can I can understand. A craving, a sugary wetness on the tongue, satisfactional sweetness as juicy as glazed cherry pie. I love cherry pie, like the kind ma made in St. Louis. I don’t like to think about St. Louis. Shoo shoo shooo fly shoo. Flies in the buttermilk. There were candles, a casket, a strange man next to me with sweat pouring out of his pits, his pressed cotton shirt smelling of saline. Who is this man at ma’s funeral I’d like to know. Not for me this man, not for me these aisles of books whose only purpose is to hide yourself behind or in. The only thing I like is that they’re quiet, they don’t rat on you, they let you be. Not for me this cola can that I am now pressing my lips to, all but emptied out. A corpse of itself, a metal corpse, aluminum corpse. One day too I will be a corpse. Maybe I already am.

My feet stink of rainrot, and the lady at the desk downstairs, down by the entrance who scans the cards, says to me, I have shoes for you, come get some shoes. What size are you? I have different sizes and different shoes. Those blisters and bandages on your feet, so swollen, so heavy looking. Have you seen a doctor? There’s a mobile clinic down the street, I can take you there. The doctors will see you and help you for free. They can help those poor feet. I’ll give you the sack of shoes to look through. I’ve been making a collection. 

She means well, with her glossier than thou lips and pink freckles that get a little bit bigger when she lifts up her glasses to her face to read to me about where to get apples, bananas, granola bars, whole meal kits even, she reads the paper in her hand and has me repeat what she says back to her so I don’t forget. Then she tacks the paper onto the corkboard behind her desk. 7430 Selma Avenue on the corner of Whitley and Donahue, not far from the Dreamland Hotel. The Dreamland Hotel! 

She says if you don’t remember the rest, just ask for the Dreamland Hotel! Cross the street and you’ll find the center. The Dreamland Hotel, I say back. The center of what? This aluminum cola can is staring at me with some menace. Pure anger and menace. I want to twist its neck off. I try to twist its neck off and the little oval tab comes off in my hand. The can doesn’t bleed. 

My feet can’t fit in shoes, too raw these feet, too hurting, they don’t feel like feet anymore, ingrown claws maybe, sharp pieces slicing through the body that sting and ooze and make me wince, cry out, then later numbness settles in once and for all. This lady doesn’t understand this, or wait, she thinks I don’t understand. But I do. I understand this cola can. And this cola can understands. Someone went to take a book off the shelf a little while ago, drank down this cola and left the can there. The nerve. They took the book but not the can. I understand everything perfectly. Now the cola is a shell of itself. What good is a can of cola with nothing inside? What good is anything if you can’t get to what’s inside? This world has nothing inside it for me. Not for me, no no. 

Inside it’s not raining at least, inside I don’t have to ring out the blanket that catches the rain. It takes a week of sun for that blanket to dry out, it takes a week of sun and no one putting the knife to your throat for that blanket to dry. This same lady at the desk who scans the cards gave me that blanket two weeks ago, she said it was her grandmother’s who just passed, they were clearing the house of her things. What is it like to have things and then a house just for them? Is it like this place, this house full of books, and people just sitting there quietly opening and closing the covers and spending time looking through what is inside the cover, a lot of time, so much time they have, to look at and concentrate, not on anything else but the pages, and then they flip one page to the next but for who, for what, for who are you looking at or for in those pages? Not for me, no no. I know. So for who? 

She said she had her grandmother’s coats and sweaters for me too, one was called, what was it called? One was named after a dog, wait, ‘hound’ was the word. A hound’s tooth. ‘Houndstooth’ she said very fast, one word. Houndstooth. Very stylish. And will keep you toasty at night. Grandma used to wear it when she went to the philharmonic, she said. I remember that word too. Philharmonic. It takes so much energy to say, I’ve said it wrong plenty of times. But I know it now. I am good at remembering some of these fancy words she says to me, and this one especially because I once went to the philharmonic. A long time ago ma took me, she made me go even though I said no, so boring this philharmonic music with violins and flutes and harps and fancy things like that. But she made me go. We got all dressed up. 

This can of cola is looking downright angry, like I’m forgetting it and it doesn’t like that. I’m going to throw it away forever and let it rot like trash, like my feet, like my moldy blanket that caught too much rain. 

Ma thought we belonged. We deserved to watch and listen to the philharmonic just as much as anybody. It wasn’t as bad as I thought. I was surprised. I actually ended up liking those violins, not the sound of them though– too much like screeching parrots–but the way the wands moved up and down, so elegant like. I had never seen anything so elegant in my life. Afterward ma took us out for ice cream and said something funny. She said, I love looking at all of their hands turn the pages of the music while they play. She said, watching them all know a language so well, a language I don’t know, is the most beautiful and mysterious thing, don’t you think? I like going to the philharmonic just because of that, because they all go somewhere else, all those music playing people, and you get to watch them turn the page and go there right in front of you. I wish I could go with them, but I can’t. I can’t because I’m all the way back in the standing row, and I can’t know exactly what the notes mean, I can only sort of hear them, but they are certainly going somewhere, somewhere very interesting, and if I can’t go there with them, the least I can do is watch them all board their instruments like some sort of train and follow them like a curious child. That was the only time I ever really understood anything about ma. It was the only time we ever shared something like that. Poor ma, turning grey at the cookie factory. No more philharmonic. Only machines churning out sugar and death. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop chewing on this cola can tab. 

So here she comes, this lady from downstairs who says she’s got a sack of shoes. It must be time. I hate when she tells me it’s time. The old blanket, the houndstooth, they’re all wet and moldy outside under the picnic table where I left them. I’d rather just stay inside. So inside I’d crawl into one of the pages on the shelf if I could. I’d make myself small, like a little red ant, the ones that bite you when you’re sleeping and pinch a nerve when they do. I’d crawl my ant self up over this grimy carpet, onto the very top shelf of the bookcase and into the little crevice of that big stiff book cover over there, and just wiggle my way inside and hide and be safe in there. Please, lady, don’t tell me it’s time. I’m an ant, I’m an ant. Can’t I wish it?

It’s almost six, she says to me, looking very sorry. She’s always looking a little sorry. I ask what I usually do. Can I spend the night? I promise I’ll take care. You know the answer to that, she says. I got you a new warm blanket. It’s downstairs with the shoes. It’s wool. Not the scratchy kind. And the rain stopped so it will be nice and dry for you tonight. You’ve got ten minutes, but then I have to go. So get ready to go now, ok? I’ll come back in a few to check on you.

A few? She always says that, and I watch her from the balcony as she starts to roll the last empty cart near her desk into the back room. That’s what she does all day long. The cart gets full and then she moves the cart to the different shelves and empties it, one, two, three, four, then she moves it back to her desk and it fills up with more books that she and some others put there, and then she goes back to empty the cart in different aisles all over again. Meanwhile, people keep going to the shelves where she puts the books from the cart and they take them right off again. Sometimes they are the very same ones she placed there just minutes before! I recognize the different covers and their colors. I watch this all very closely from upstairs so I know exactly what nonsense is happening, they are undoing what she has done! I’ve told off a couple of people about that, but then she runs over and shushes me and tells me this is how it is, this is her work, it’s fine, I don’t have to get angry about it, but she appreciates me protecting her. 

I like that she says it like that. I like to think that I can protect someone. I feel buttery inside when she says that. I feel surprised by that melty buttery feeling.

But tonight she is looking up at me from downstairs with sad eyes, regret maybe, she feels sorry for me and this makes a shame in me grow because I don’t want her of all people to feel sorry. I feel like a tree that’s been pulled from its roots by some big storm and it’s just left hanging there by its roots, all up in the telephone wires in the middle of the day after the storm, for all to see.

Now her face is slanted up towards me from down below, the blue light from the window outside is hitting her cheekbones just so, and she almost looks like she is frozen in place like a picture, like she has no breath left in her and she is just going to be standing there looking up at me like that with such pity in her eyes for all eternity. She squints at me a little, then presses her glasses further up on her nose, and she looks back down to a book that she is holding, one she is maybe about to shelve, but then she gives the book a sudden surprised, curious look. 

It’s like there is my face and the book’s face and she is intrigued by both at the same exact time. She opens the cover up slowly, and I see her do something really strange without moving an inch. I watch her go somewhere, not with her body, she is still frozen, but with her eyes and ears. It is like ants silently communicating with their antennas. And I wish I could go there with her, wherever that is, but I know I can’t. When I go places it is to nowhere. It is out this door or that one and through another and if I’m lucky I am still breathing, but I’m still always on to the next nowhere. But she. She she she. I close my eyes. I’m an ant, I’m an ant. I can crawl inside those pages you are looking at, can’t I? Well, can’t I?

She’s doing that thing ma said the philharmonic does. The violins, I hear them plucking their wands, they are tuning up, the harpist tightens the strings, my ma holds my hand, and we want to leap from the back of the theatre onto that stage with all of the music loving people and their instruments, we want to go with them. I squint. I make myself small, as small as can be. I am the red ant. I crawl right inside the page this lady is looking at. 

Come in, she says to me inside the pages. You there, come in! You must come. I am reading, she says. I am reading you, don’t you see? Can’t you see? And you are reading you too. You are here in these pages with me. You have made it inside, where it does not rain. It does not rain at all. Unless you want it to.