Chapter Six

IT WAS 3:00 P.M., so Nan took up her post by the front door as if she were the official library greeter. She felt ridiculous standing there, but she was so worried the obscene thugs would come back, and Pip Conti would blame her. The library board meeting was coming up. She could picture the first two agenda items:

1. Police called to library for obscene intruders.

2. Police called to library for urinary vandalism.

If she didn’t get this library under control, she’d be dismissed during her ninety-day probation period and labeled for life as an unworthy librarian.

She’d applied for a million jobs before, and this was the one and only offer she had gotten, so how the hell would she support herself if she lost this job? Going back to her old Librarian I job was not an option as the Philly library system was in a hiring freeze again. That door was firmly shut. Even if there were openings, she wasn’t confident they’d hire her back again. Thinking of her lackluster performance ratings and her evident indifference, she admitted they could do better than her. She had to make this new job work, end of story.

The thugs were from the middle school across the street from the library; she was sure. Her two clues: they were shortish, and they appeared right after school let out.

That school was full of beasts—children at that horrible age when puberty hit some but not all; when some sprouted up as tall as adults and were in the same classes as others who still looked like children; when some turned into comedians with the sharpest wit and an eye for absurdity and others turned into surly beings who thrashed their way through life, ripping branches off trees and stomping on flower beds for fun, littering their way across town.

Nan didn’t actually know what she’d do if the door was flung open by those punks in ski masks again. Yell obscenities back at them? Shove them out and pull the door shut? It had all happened so fast before. Nan, the staff, and library users had all frozen in place, not able to do anything to stop them quickly enough. She was sure that was part of the fun for the thugs.

At 3:10 p.m., Mona called out, “The state arts council is on the phone for you.”

Nan was excited. This must be about the grant proposal she had sent them for a groundbreaking (well, for Pinetree it was) lunchtime classic books lecture series. The series would focus on those hard, fat books everyone always meant to read but never did. She envisioned fascinating conversations led by lively academic experts, their speaker fees fully paid by the arts council. Maybe they would bring amazing visual aids—gory relics like the bones and teeth of saints for Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for example. If Pip Conti wanted new, Pip Conti would get new.

“Our town is so ready for a cultural program like this,” Nan began. “People are desperate for intelligent conversations and to be around smart people.”

BAM, the front door was flung open.

“FUCKYOUMOTHERFUCKERS,” the thugs screamed.

“What was that?” the arts coordinator asked.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Nan said, hanging up and running to the door. But it was too late. Too late for the arts council program probably too.

“Did you see anything?” Nan shouted to the staff.

Dunkan was holding on to the desk like it was a life raft. “Face. Covered. Mask. Hood,” he panted.

“God DAMN it,” Mona shouted from the lap of Shaky Leonetti, who had caught her when she fell backward. He was smiling, as delighted as a puppy that had just caught a hot dog rolling off a paper plate at a picnic.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” Nan said. “Don’t you worry about that. I swear they will not be bothering us anymore. That was the last time.”

She had no idea on earth what to do. But she was not going to let those punks win.

*

EVERY STEP OF her walk home hurt Nan. Her body played out her worries in the flesh. Her head throbbed in tune to the funeral dirge playing in her mind if she lost this job. A muscle in her right buttock kept spasming, forcing her to stop and shake out her leg repeatedly like a fox with its foot in a trap. Even her teeth hurt with each breath she sucked in. On top of everything else, did she have a dental infection that would spread to invade her heart muscle and kill her?

Immaculata was in the backyard waiting for her. Nan wanted to snarl at her. But she held a jug of Joe’s amazing wine, and Nan was out of wine.

“Thank you very much.” Nan held out her arm to accept the wine.

Immaculata held firmly to the jug. “I’ll bring it up.”

So the price I pay for the wine is you, Immaculata. You at my kitchen table. You talking to me when all I want to do is be left alone.

An hour later, Nan felt quite wonderful. The wine was so powerful. She wanted to throw her head back and laugh BWAHAHA, like an anemic vampire chugging down whole blood. God, where did that come from? She hated vampire novels.

The study of odd couples was one of Nan’s favorite mental hobbies. She rarely heard Joe say more than two words at a time, while Immaculata talked enough for both of them. He was so older-Italian-movie-star-handsome, and she was quite peculiar-looking. Joe was a softie, and Immaculata was a bulldozer of the highest order. Joe was constantly in motion; he walked all over town all night long after everyone else was asleep. “Because he’s not right in the head” was how Immaculata had put it. She herself rarely left the house. How in the world had they gotten together and stayed together? Nan finally asked Immaculata.

“That Joe. He’s in love with this town. Always has been. Everyone knows. If he could of married a town, he would of.” Immaculata laughed, her mouth wide open, square little teeth flashing against her purple skin.

“But he fell in love with you instead.”

“I don’t know about all that. He had to marry me.”

“What do you mean?” Nan didn’t really care about the story, but she cared about this wine. It was smoothing out all the sharp edges. She slouched back in her chair.

“My dad asked him to marry me. And he was Joe’s boss, so Joe had to.”

“What, like a matchmaker?” Nan asked. Immaculata clearly enjoyed telling this story; Nan was intrigued.

“My dad, Sammy the tailor, had to pay somebody to marry me because of my face. He gave Joe a lot of money, plus he bought us this house.”

Am I supposed to pretend that massive maroon birthmark splitting her face in half is hardly noticeable? Nan gave a hmmm in response, her fallback all-purpose noncommittal sound.

“Well, nobody else wanted to wake up looking at this every morning,” Immaculata said. “Joke was on him. He could have saved his money. Joe would have done anything for my dad, anything for anybody in this town. He’s simple like that.”

“You don’t care?” Nan couldn’t help putting herself in Immaculata’s place. How would she feel about climbing into bed every night with someone who had been forced into marrying her to keep her job? She thought that bed would be a chilly place. But then again, once a love affair went sour, in those excruciating last few months before a breakup, nothing could top that for the horrible soul-crushing pain when your lover turned away from you night after night, when she refused to say what was wrong, when she came up with excuses to avoid touching you. Nan had been there many times.

“Who cares? I got what I want,” Immaculata said. “A house of my own. Got away from my family. The hell with all them. They leave me alone over here.”

“How’d you make that happen? Maybe I’ll try it on my sisters.” Nan had been working herself up to call Franny and Regina. She’d never thought about ditching them altogether like Immaculata had though.

“I told them don’t bother us. Me and Joe are good on our own.”

What in the world did Joe and Immaculata see in each other? It was a mystery. But surely, liking the same things for dinner was one of the best predictors of a long and happy marriage, as Dr. Parnell proclaimed in Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle. That was not actually easy to pull off in real life. Nan recalled all the food fights in her relationships. This one didn’t eat whey (Nan still had no idea where whey appeared in food or how to avoid it), that one ate only pea protein, the last one served disgusting gas station hotdogs for dinner.

The wine was beginning to work hard on Nan. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat around like this, drinking and talking with someone she hardly knew.

A sharp pain pierced her neck. Is that where my thyroid is? Does red wine aggravate the thyroid? How long does it take to die when the thyroid stops working?

Stop thinking about my thyroid.

Immaculata patted herself on the cheek as if she’d forgotten about her birthmark and was checking to see if it was still there.

“Do you ever think about getting it removed?” Nan wondered what she would look like without it.

“Joe thinks if I get it taken off, my brains will fall out.” Immaculata laughed, shaking her head.

“We wouldn’t want that.”

“Maybe I’m cursed; what do I care?” Immaculata seemed to find being cursed a highly amusing fate.

Am I cursed? Are thugs and urinating vandals my inevitable fate? Will I be driven out of this town, thrown out of my job? Am I doomed to fail because I dared to shoot for more in my life? Nan was sliding down the slope of an alcohol buzz, heading for the vale of despair.

“I don’t believe in curses,” Nan declared as much to herself as to Immaculata. She resolved to find an answer for her work problems. After all, there was no one to kick them upstairs to. She was the boss now.