A fictional recollection.
The first library card I remember was kept in the pocket of my mother’s winter coat, behind a tissue and a grocery list. On library days she would put her hand into that pocket and search with a look of mounting suspicion, as if someone might have reached in there and stolen the card while leaving the tissue. Then she would find it, and I would ask to hold it, and she would say, “At the desk.”
The library stood beside a parking lot with a painted curb. Its doors were heavy enough that I had to lean backward to open them. Inside, the floor changed from gritty concrete to a carpet the color of weak tea. There was a radiator beneath the front window that knocked and hissed in cold weather, and a bulletin board covered in notices: piano lessons, a lost cat, a room for rent. I read the lost-cat notice every week, though I never saw the cat.
My mother went toward the tall shelves, where the books wore sober jackets and the print was small. I went to the low ones. The children’s room had a rug with a road printed on it, and sometimes a boy lay across the road with his cheek pressed to a book. A librarian with a pencil through her hair kept a jar of blunt crayons on the desk. She had a way of asking, “Do you want something funny or something strange?” as if these were two countries and she had relatives in both.
One afternoon I chose a story about a girl who found a door behind a cupboard. I cannot remember the title, or what was on the other side. What remains is the green cloth cover, the looseness of a page near the middle, and the conviction that I ought to read the book with my back against an actual cupboard. At home, I sat on the kitchen floor with my knees crooked and read until my mother needed a pan from the cupboard above me. She reached over my head, and for a moment the book became a roof.
We borrowed more books than we could carry comfortably. My mother stacked hers in the crook of one arm and took half of mine under the other. I held the rest flat against my chest, walking slowly because I liked the weight and because dropping them on the wet pavement seemed an unforgivable act. At the car I was allowed to hold the card again while she found her keys. The card had a crack near one corner. I rubbed it with my thumb the whole way home.
Due dates
A borrowed book came with a date attached, which made it different from anything else in the house. The date could be postponed, if nobody was waiting, but it could not be ignored forever. I understood that other people had a claim on the girl behind the cupboard. They might even be waiting for her, though I disliked imagining them with their fingers on the loose page.
Once I hid a library book under my bed rather than return it. This was not a grand theft. I put it there on a Tuesday and forgot it until Friday, when my mother knelt to retrieve a sock and found the book lying open beside a dead flashlight. The cover had acquired a dusty gray edge. She did not scold me at first. She closed it carefully, looked at the date, and asked whether I had finished.
I said no, though I had read it twice. She knew I was lying. I knew she knew. The book sat on the kitchen counter through dinner, propped against a bowl of oranges, while I worked myself into a terrible state about fines and disgrace. At last she said, “We’ll see if we can borrow it again.” She did not add that I was being silly. That restraint made me feel both relieved and somewhat exposed.
At the desk the next day, I confessed to the librarian that I had kept the book under my bed. She examined the cover. “A popular place for books,” she said, and checked it out to me again. I had expected a ceremony of judgment; instead she handed me the book and stamped its new date. On the way out, my mother stopped to read the bulletin board. The lost cat had been replaced by a notice about a missing parakeet.
I liked that the library could hold these different errands at once. A person might come for an hour of quiet, another for a warm place to wait for a ride. A student might have six books open and a face of complete despair. The librarian would cross the room with a stapler, and life would proceed around all of them without requiring a purchase.
The shop with the narrow aisle
The used bookstore I loved as a teenager had no such spaciousness. Its front door struck a bell that gave a reluctant cough. The aisle between fiction and history was so narrow that two customers had to negotiate passage, one turning sideways while the other apologized to a shelf. Books leaned against the radiator and lay in short towers on the floor. A handwritten sign by the register said PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE CAT. There was no cat, at least none I ever saw. The owner said the sign had been there when she bought the shop, and she had kept it because people asked about it.
My friend Lena and I went there after school with the kind of money that required arithmetic. We inspected the prices in pencil on the first page and put books back with solemn faces. Lena bought mysteries and read the last page first. I thought this was an offense against the author, the bookseller, and perhaps the law. She said she wanted to know whether it was worth spending her afternoon with the detective. We argued about it while the owner wrapped our purchases in pages from an old calendar.
One day I found a cookbook with a recipe clipped from a newspaper tucked between its pages. The clipping had browned at the fold, and someone had written LESS SALT across the top. The book cost more than I had. I carried it around the shop anyway, opening it now and then to check that the note was still there. A stranger had cooked from this book, disliked the result enough to make a correction, and then surrendered the evidence. I wanted the recipe, although I could barely cook an egg.
Lena offered to lend me the difference. I declined because I did not want to owe her, then hovered beside the register while she bought a mystery. The owner noticed the cookbook in my hands and asked if I wanted her to hold it. I said yes so quickly that Lena laughed. I returned the following Saturday with enough money, bought it, and made the soup on the marked page. It was thin and tasted mostly of onion. My mother ate a bowl and suggested toast.
The cookbook is still on my shelf. The clipping is gone, lost during one of the moves when books traveled in grocery boxes and came out smelling faintly of apples or detergent. I have tried other recipes from it, some with better results. But when I open it, I look first for the pale strip where the paper once lay. I remember the pleasure of wanting something small enough to save for and unnecessary enough that nobody could explain the purchase on my behalf.
At home among the shelves
Visitors sometimes run a finger along the spines and ask whether I have read them all. I have not. There are books I bought for a version of myself with more patience for long wars, books given by friends whose judgment I trust, books I opened once and put aside because the first page met me on the wrong day. There are also books I keep without liking very much. One belonged to my father and has his name written inside in an unusually formal hand. Another contains a note from a friend I no longer see. I would not know where else to put the note.
My mother, who used to carry half my library books, now asks me for recommendations. She is exacting. She does not want anything too bleak before bed, but she objects when a book pretends that difficult people can be fixed by a single conversation. She will tolerate a murder if the sentences are good. When I give her a novel, I tuck a receipt or a scrap of paper into the front to mark a passage I think she might like. She removes it immediately. “I’ll find my own,” she says.
Sometimes she returns a book with a different scrap marking a different page. We discuss the characters as if they had behaved badly at a family lunch. We disagree about their motives. Once she pointed out that a woman I had described as cold was the only person in the story who had remembered to bring food. I reread the scene and had to admit she was right. I had been watching the wrong part of the table.
Leaving room
Last spring I cleared one shelf. I had run out of room, and the books had begun to lie in sideways heaps on top of their standing neighbors. I made three piles on the floor: keep, give away, and decide later. The third grew fastest. I sat among them for an hour, reading inscriptions and testing the weight of old paperbacks in my hand. Some books fell open to places where I had once turned down a corner. I could not always see why.
At the bottom of one stack was the cookbook with the missing clipping. I put it back. Beside it I placed a novel Lena had given me, its spine broken in two places, and a book of poems I had not yet managed to finish. I packed the others into a box for a neighborhood book exchange. The box was heavy enough that I had to brace it against my hip on the stairs, just as my mother once carried our library books to the car.
At the exchange, a child was kneeling on the floor, examining a book with a silver fish on its cover. His father stood over him holding a bicycle helmet and a paper bag that had begun to split at the seam. I set my box down. The child looked up, saw the books inside, and asked if he could take one. His father said yes, once they had helped put them on the shelves. The child chose a large blue volume, turned it over, and carried it carefully to the lowest shelf.
When I got home, the cleared shelf looked oddly formal, as though company were coming. By evening I had put two books there that had been living on the kitchen table. A week later my mother returned the novel with her scrap of paper still inside. I left it where she had put it and slid the book into the space beside the cookbook.
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