The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [31]
How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages? Even at Coop, the tiny professor-run cooperative school we’d attended, a refuge of overly intellectual families, we were different. “What do you mean you don’t watch television?” one girl had asked Bean. She was new, her parents visiting professors who passed in and out in one calendar year, their sojourn so brief Bean cannot even remember the girl’s name. She remembers only the strange furrow to her brow, signifying the complete and utter incomprehension at the idea of a life without.
Except to us, it wasn’t a life without. It was a life with. For Rose, a life where, after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week’s reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air. One of her friends, a little girl with sunken blue eyes and parchment skin, laid her costume jewelry out in the same way, and even then, Rose had recognized the metaphor, standing in her friend’s white wicker bedroom, looking at the sparkle of paste, to her, dull by comparison. For Bean, a life where the glamour and individuality she sought was only the gentle flick of a page away. For Cordy, always slightly detached no matter how many people surrounded her, clucking for her attention, a life where she could retreat and be alone and yet transported.
In college, when it became clear people might think there were more interesting things to do than read, when it was apparent the only books appropriate for decorating one’s room were textbooks, weighty and costly, worth only their end-of-the-semester resale value, we were faced with a choice. Rose, who had never paid attention to the requirements of cool, carried on reading, her one concession choosing a single room after her first year, though this was probably more due to her penchant for cleanliness than for fear of being unmasked as a reader. Bean spent afternoons in the library, having discovered the classics room, filled with huge leather armchairs and ottomans, and walls lined with books into which she could escape. Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages. The difference between Rose and Cordy in this respect was that Rose, upon interruption, would fix the interrupter with a baleful glare, keep the book open, and reply curtly until a break in conversation allowed her reentry into the world in which she had been basking. Cordy would close the book, or slapjack it down on its open pages, and join the fun.
In New York, Bean chose the subway because of the reading time it afforded, free of questions but not of distractions—the frotteurs, the over-the-shoulder-readers, the panhandlers, the nosy parkers with opinions going spare—though Bean rapidly learned to dispatch each one of these with ease while keeping one eye moving down the page. She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. “A few hundred,” she said.
“How do you have time?” he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/ staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging.
This conversation, you will