How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

We like the sound of that. We are women with some life behind us. We know some things.

I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.

Harriet had never thought of existential crisis as a luxury, but now she did.

“They seemed okay with being dead as long as they got their say.”

Maybe tears hide away in the body until such time as they can spout safely. Freely. In the clear.

“Books won’t solve my problems, Harriet.” “No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”

Sophie’s judgments could in fact fill an oil tanker; her temperament suited her less to social work and more to tax law, or quality-control inspection, or window number seven at the DMV. She was also kindhearted, and Harriet hoped her love of the underdog would see her safely down the wrong chosen path. People chose wrong paths all the time and turned out all right.

People. Oh my God.

Sophie presses the entire thing to her face, wet splotches shredding the paper. “You see what’s happening here, right?” she says. It comes out muffled and weepy. “Yup. You ruined dinner, embarrassed your aunt, and now you’re crying but probably not about that.”

“I’ll need a photo ID with your address on it. A driver’s license should do it.” “I don’t drive.” “Or a state ID, something with your photo and address.” This is what happened at the bookstore, exactly. My most recent ID isn’t the sort you present to law-abiding booksellers. Or librarians. So I just stand there at the circulation desk with nothing but my worthless word. The librarian beams at me. “No worries.” The gap between his front teeth makes him look sweet and defenseless. “You can use a piece of mail,” he offers. “A utility bill, a letter. A little something-or-other to prove you live here.” “I don’t have anything like that. I just moved here.” “Ah, then welcome to Portland.” He beams again, probably doesn’t have a normal-temperature smile. “I’m sure we can solve this.” Because he looks like a librarian, because he wants me to use his library, because his teeth aren’t right, and because he thought I might have a letter in my possession, a letter somebody wrote to my current address, to me, to me personally, I start blinking back hot dumb tears. Again. This librarian, though. He is so polite, so respectful and kind. Instead of dropping dead of shame I tell him my story. Not all of it. Some. Not as much as I told Lillian the bank lady, but enough. Not only does he process a card based on my word that I live here, he finds Spoon River Anthology deep in the stacks, then walks me over to New Fiction and makes a few recommendations.

Important complexity and relevance for discussions about voting rights.

The sunshine feels tart and clean, the city buildings look sharp and bright, and I am suddenly the sort of person librarians recommend books to.

“This work is not a curiosity.” His voice is deep, with a hint of static, as if the birds taught him to speak rather than the other way around. “No, of course.” Like the birds, I find myself desperate to please him. “What we do here matters to the greater scientific community.” I just nod, waiting for the worst. “Through intelligently conceived studies and impeccably executed experiments,” he says, “we have revealed previously unknown avian cognitive abilities.” He says we, but I’m pretty sure he means I. “These birds communicate. They think. They count. They solve. They decide. Most significantly, they say what they mean, and mean what they say; a skill with which human animals struggle profoundly.” His whole face—keen and fearsome—tightens. “This is my life’s work, to demonstrate higher-order cognition in animals once dismissed as birdbrains.”

“Why did they forgive him and not her? He’s the one who pulled the trigger. She wasn’t even there.”

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

“Yes,” Harriet said, handing over the book of quotes. As she set it on the counter, it opened to what could not possibly—could it?—be a random page. Forgive everyone.

The trick is not too much salt and not too little. Which takes intention. Maybe that’s what people mean when they say they cook with love.

Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.

I used to race through books one after another, but in Book Club Harriet taught us that when you slow down, you notice more, and when you notice more, you feel more. Reading one book makes it part of all the books you’ve ever read, Harriet said, so she was forever dragging other books into our discussions.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she whispered. “Underneath all this razzmatazz, I’m a sixty-four-year-old lady who loves ice cream.”

Is there anything like a lover’s arms? That blanketing gladness? That muffling care? No there is not. It makes you deaf, it makes you blind, it makes you stupid.

Frank had yet to say a word, though Harriet sensed a coiled readiness. She met his eyes again; he gave a slight nod. She saw now what he was doing, declining to add a male voice to this female negotiation, or whatever it was. Frank Daigle understood women, she realized. He understood how to not make things worse for as long as that remained an option.

Even the least eventful life holds an avalanche of stories. Any one of mine would give you a fair impression of who I was and how I lived. But the one I chose—the one that now composes this epitaph—isn’t a story at all. It’s what Harriet would call the meanwhile, the important thing that was happening while the rest of the story moved along. My name was Violet Powell. I took a life. I lived and died. Meanwhile, I was loved.