How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

I can still see us so clearly: twelve women dressed in our blues, our dry hands folded or spread or drumming, and the Book Lady at the head of the table, sensible button-up blouse patterned with smiley green bees, helping us discuss a book we hate. I feel the way I always feel in Book Club. The way I believe we all feel. Safe.

“I understand your point,” the Book Lady says. She always understands our point, because she’s a retired English teacher who enjoys “lively” discussion. Plus, she likes us.

I miss me in Book Club, too. I miss how Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.

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

Sophie took Violet’s phone and let it rest in her hand, just long enough to telegraph that she was doing all and sundry a big fat favor. Corinne again: a wonderful person who enjoyed demonstrating her wonderfulness. Maybe Sophie had chosen Berkeley only so it could be understood that her commitment to social work required a round-trip journey of six thousand miles.

The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

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. But here on the Outs, I’ve rejoined the good people, the people who have not done wrong. Who can blame Harriet for preferring that I be one of them? I want to be one of them, and at work I can pretend I am.

“You need what, Violet?” Harriet asks. “What do you need?” “I need my mother,” is what comes out, and after a few small questions, a few mild words back and forth, Frank and Harriet agree that needing one’s mother is a good and natural thing. Frank will drive.

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.

Of all the books we read, over the year and a half of Book Club, Spoon River Anthology stayed with me the longest. I liked that the ordinary dead spoke for themselves at last, even if someone else had engraved different words on their stone. I liked that they told stories about each other. And I liked that so many recalled not how they died, but how they lived. Lydia Puckett was the real reason Knowlt Hoheimer died a soldier. Herbert Marshall broke an engagement, forsaking Louise for Annabelle. Elmer Karr gave thanks to the loving hearts that took him in again. I’m guessing that Lydia and Herbert and Elmer lived acceptably long, acceptably happy lives, but when the time came to wrap it up, they reached back through the decades for a story that most defined them. One that would forever speak for them.

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.