We knew he wouldn’t miss a few tomatoes as long as we didn’t leave any big bare holes. We foraged in Daddy’s garden and Mom’s pantry like stray dogs. Snyder once stole a jar of our mom’s jam, which he shared when we caught him and threatened to rat him out. We didn’t want to spoil Janey’s dinner, so we didn’t tell her about it. Also, she can’t keep secrets. We made a bread-and-jam picnic in the far back of our property when she was taking a stroll to the end of the block. We love Jane, but she has to be managed. She’s overly transparent, overly cheerful—characteristics you wouldn’t think could get in the way of trust, but the fact is, they can.
That year the bubble around my life extended just as far as jam and tomatoes and the seven-cent loaf of bread, and at the time I found that a very workable amount of room in which to live. I was just at the lip of knowing about other bubbles, other worlds, and my brief glimpses outside my little universe were changing me. My schoolbooks were full of tiny-waisted unopinionated mothers making dinner and brothers who were always pleased to lend you their bikes. At a certain point these stories started to feel wrong. This cheerful primer-book world was clearly what the grown-ups believed I saw or wanted me to see, and I was beginning to feel duped. Worse, I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel duped. I was supposed to feel just like the children in the primers, which was scary because I didn’t. There had to be something wrong, and it seemed to be wrong with me.
I started nosing around for stories about stubborn siblings and disappointed fathers. I’d look around my classroom hoping to find my fellow students raising eyebrows, looking worried. Nothing—only bent heads, jiggling feet, and moving lips, apparently at peace with the view from the school primer serving eleven-year-olds. No company here. Of course, I had Lilly, whom I loved completely, and Snyder and Janey, whom I would step in front of a bullet for, but someplace deeper down, I was alone.
I did what lots of people like me do: I started haunting the local library. One day I found a book in the Children’s Room about a boy who lived with his parents in an ocean of Wyoming prairie grass. They raised horses. The boy was happy because all the company he needed in the world was his horse. But in a brief scene buried around page 320 where it might go unnoticed, his mother went running into the dark Wyoming winter night after a fight with the boy’s father. She ran miles and miles until she reached the railroad tracks. There she stood, waiting for the night train to shoot through the Wyoming prairie, where she lived with the things that weren’t enough, with the cold husband and the boy who was obsessed with his horse. She saw people in dining cars lifting glasses of wine, beautifully dressed people in brightly lit car after car, all of it rushing by so quickly. She watched them with her whole heart. I could tell that. I couldn’t entirely decode this moment in the story, but I knew it was true and real and important. I’d stumbled onto a secret message from the adult world that had slipped past the gates of the Children’s Room. I was scared. I was thrilled.
I hated the Children’s Room. Our town library was a converted two-story house riddled with wood rot and mediocre donated castoffs. Its Children’s Room was cobbled out of what was once a nursery. The grown-ups who thought that children had smaller feelings and needs than adults had put the “children’s” section in the building’s darkest little rabbit warren. A stuffed dog who looked like he’d known happier times slumped on one of the bookshelves. He was alone, no other animal friends or posters of puppies to back him up. A table with a small pile of books was wedged against a wall. Peggy’s Pokey Puppy, Snow White, Cowboys of the Wild West, Mommy and Me Make Cookies, Lizzy and the Lost Baby, Adventures in Our Back Yards.
A wasteland.
The librarian thought it was morally important that once children stepped into the library they should be shuffled into this room and made to stay put. She kept her eyes on me, smiling in a cheerful, threatening kind of way and making sure I stayed where I belonged in my little desert of happy endings and cheerful relations with talkative animals. I made three separate attempts on the living room, home to Adult Fiction, and I was turned back every single time.
Mrs. Daniels changed all that. It was Snyder who brought her to me, or me to her, which is more accurate even if it didn’t feel like that. Sometimes after school Snyder delivered groceries and five-dollar bags of coal for Mr. McGarry’s grocery. The only customers who bought five-dollar bags were rich people who didn’t care what it cost and poor people who couldn’t scrape together enough cash to get half-ton deliveries. Mrs. Daniels was one of the rich ones. She was so old that the skin on her arms was sliding off her bones and her eyes weren’t cooperating with her anymore. She needed somebody whose eyes still did their duty, because Mrs. Daniels was a reader. That’s how she came to offer Snyder five cents an hour to read to her after school.
Snyder was only vaguely interested in working and not at all interested in sitting for hours with a bony old lady. “I’ve been in her house,” he told us. “She reads trash like The Sheik and Office Girl. She gets Love Pulps with people kissing on the covers.” The idea of getting to read whatever was in a Love Pulp made something in me come totally alive, never mind the unbelievable sum of five cents an hour.
“Tell her about me,” I said. “Tell her I can do it.”
He did.
“You’re no bigger than a potato,” Mrs. Daniels said when I got there. Snyder had walked me over and bolted the moment my feet hit the porch. “What was your brother thinking of to send you to me?”
“He was thinking I would do just fine,” I said. “I’m little for my age but I’m eleven,” I added. She gave me a long up-and-down look and handed me a story by Ernest Hemingway in Cosmopolitan magazine. “Sentences are short in this one,” she said. “Try it out for size.”
I tried.
“What do you think of Mr. Hemingway?” she asked when I was done. The reading had gone briskly sometimes; lumpily sometimes.
“I think this man who goes fishing in the start of the story is in trouble. I don’t think he’s gonna get out of it either.”
“Cynical little creature,” she observed. “You mispronounce something in every line.”
I glared.
“Very well,” she said. “Perhaps you only mispronounced one or two things.”
“I’ll read for free until it’s better if you want. It’ll get better fast with practice, Mrs. Daniels.”
She looked me up and down again. “What if I pay you nothing for weeks?”
“If I’m not reading good, that’s fair.”
“Well.”
“Well what?”
“‘If I am not reading well.’” She sighed.
Mrs. Daniels called out to her cook, Violette, and told her to bring cookies. She offered me one. I reached eagerly and then I thought of Snyder, Jane, and Lilly, all cookieless.
“What’s wrong, girl?”
“At home if there’s not enough for everybody I shouldn’t take anything.”
“There’s no one here to share with but me,” she replied. She reached forward and lifted the largest cookie from the plate and took a bite. “And I eat what I please.”
“You took the biggest one,” I observed.
“Of course I did. I like cookies.”
“That’s rude,” I told her. “The first person to pick should pick the smallest one.”
“Who says?”