Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [19]
Mary slipped the papers back in their folders and shut the drawer. “It was just an idea,” she said, flicking her finger against my arm. “So, no more Rileys here if we can help it. I’ll put a big sign in front that says they’re not allowed.”
I smiled, relieved, but sadder, much sadder than I had been before I’d seen my name in black type. Later, without Mary knowing, I went back and back to those papers, which almost tore in my shaking hands. I looked at the names of my parents and felt the most profound sense of longing and loss, though I barely recognized then that that was what it was: loss of the most heart-wrenching kind, despite the books raging with life around me, despite Mary and her kindness, her beautiful words and stories.
By and large, it was the men in Oakley who had begun reading books—bringing candles into their rooms late at night to read the Canterbury Tales, perusing Montaigne while sitting in tractors or on bales of hay. They loved coming into the library and showing Mary how they’d read the selections she’d made for them, telling her about their favorite parts and lines.
Women sought Mary out more shamefully, in whispers and with scarves pulled over their heads. Beatrice and Mrs. Adams were only two out of what must have been five hundred women who came to see Mary when I was there. In my first year of working at Mercy Library, I heard women confess to hating their children; to loving women instead of men; to cheating on husbands with all variety of other men, from farmhands to cousins to the traveling salesmen who sometimes appeared at our doors with cases full of perfume or makeup; to hating their lives, our town, and the fields that kept all of us wrapped around their fingers; and to desiring any number of things so strongly that they could barely eat or sleep or get through the house- or farmwork they saw pile in front of them each day.
Several months into my new working life, I was sitting on a small rocking chair near the table, struggling through a book called Sister Carrie that Mary had picked out for me, while Mary sat behind the desk with a deck of cards spread out in front of her. She played absentmindedly with her cigarette as I spat out each word, fitting my lips and mouth around them. The cards snapped as Mary shuffled them between each game. The day had been particularly grueling: we had talked to a woman having an affair with a boy half her age, despite her husband’s legendary temper. Mary seemed especially quiet, melancholy.
“Love, that’s all anyone asks about,” she said, sighing. “It’s pathetic.” We finished closing the library together, then walked out into the balmy spring night, down to the river that ran a mile or so behind the library. We stretched on the grass by the river.
She turned to me. “Have you had any boyfriends yet, Tessa?”
“Me?” I looked at her, truly astonished.
“Of course,” she said, winking.
I didn’t know what to say. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked, finally.
“Oh,” she said, a smile forming. “Yes. Not for a long time, a very long time, but yes.”
“What is it like? Who was he? Is he the man from the post office?”
But she hardly heard my questions. Her eyes closed; the sweat glistened on her brown face. The warmth of her skin seemed to radiate all around me. I crept up close to her and put my face next to hers.
She said finally, “No, his name was William. From Rain Village. His body was perfect, like a sculpture you’d see in a museum, and he was just made like that. He would walk around naked, very casually, as if it were the most natural thing and his body were above such things as shame or modesty. Like a child’s white hair. As if he didn’t even know it.”
She seemed far away from me then, and to be talking to herself as much as to me. I squinted up, following her gaze. I felt that if I concentrated hard