An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [2]
The man next to me introduced himself. “You’re new here at the library, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“You’ll be fine in no time,” he said, and turned back to the conversation. I noticed Henry sitting tall on the edge of his chair, hands in his lap, eyes glued to the face of the woman. A minute later, I glanced at him again and he was still staring. I tried to kick at him under the table. I missed. The woman jerked upward in her chair then turned to face Henry.
“Will you come to a movie with me this Saturday?” he said without introduction or warning.
“Are you serious?”
“Dead,” he replied.
She slid her chair away from the table and slung her purse over her shoulder as she stood up. “Pick on someone your own size,” she said without a glance at him. He didn’t take his eyes off her until she’d disappeared into the crowd.
As if the incident hadn’t even occurred, Henry turned to face the conversation around the table. Someone was reminiscing about Christmas in the outports during the twenties and thirties. “If you found an orange under the tree, you were grateful. We didn’t get spoiled back in them days,” the person said.
Up until that moment, I didn’t think Henry was really paying attention. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “You think you had it bad? Sure, where I lived in Ireland, if you didn’t wake up Christmas morning with a hard-on, you had nothing to play with.”
I was the only person who laughed. One by one, they rose from the table and pushed in their chairs. They dropped words behind them like crumbs: vulgar, infantile, rude, juvenile, pig. Henry heard them too, although he acted as if he hadn’t. He smiled and drank his coffee with a my-it’s-a-grand-day air about him. Not long after they’d gone, he looked at me with a halo of feigned wonder. “I was only telling the truth,” he said.
“I can’t believe you would actually talk about hard-ons like that with those people.”
“Go on with ya, ya sissy.”
“The pick on someone your own size was a bit much.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s missing,” Henry said. “As Chesterton wisely observed, better to have loved a short man than not at all.” He washed the comment down with a mouthful of coffee.
I don’t have any experience with being short. I’ve always been in the ninetieth percentile for height. That means only ten percent of the population looks as out of place in a crowd as I do. It also means that, as a child, I was easy prey for school bullies. The earliest incident I can remember was during the first week of school. I believed them when they said that, if the bathroom door at the back of class was closed, someone was in there. The teacher was doing a lesson. “There are rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans, seas, streams,” she said. “Do we drink the water from the ocean or...”
I glanced over my shoulder while she talked about what we do when we’re thirsty. The bathroom door was closed. Much later, while we practiced our printing with words like gush, flow, dribble, drop and flood, it was still closed. Later that day, I tried to explain all that to Papa. He didn’t say anything except that, if it happened again, he’d make me sit in my wet pants until I went to bed.
“Will we have another apple flip and coffee or will we go back now to the library?” Henry said.
“It’s already four and we’ll be going home at six o’clock. It’s two hours before supper and only three hours after lunch. If you consider lunch from the time it ends at two o’clock then that’s only two hours ago. If you–”
“You’re a sissy with a math problem,” he said. “Give me the abridged version next time.”
That evening, after work, Henry offered me a ride home. Along the way, we stopped at the supermarket. We were heading towards his car in the pelting rain when we spotted a frail old woman, hunched over with her plastic grocery bags in either hand. She was about to step off the curb into a deep puddle between two parked cars. Henry hurried over to her, carrying his own bags. “Wait here!” he called above the howl of the wind. He grabbed her