Escaping to the library

Chris and Susan's library stories (in response to my post on being read to) made me think of the libraries of my childhood: the Cashmere public library, the Vale Elementary school library, and the rural circulating library we had access to in my hometown. Here are some stories, some of which I've written down in the past and some newer ones:

The Cashmere public library is a building the size of a small two bedroom ranch house, its shelves filled with books shrouded in crackling plastic dust jackets. There were five sections: the children's, the young adult, the adult fiction, and the adult nonfiction and reference. Small tables with fake varnished wood tops and vinyl chairs provided seldom-used reading space. Sheila Ogle, town librarian, presided over all, her beehive bobbing efficiently over the stacks of books she checked out to schoolteachers, farm wives, migrant farm workers, and gangly farm kids like me. There was something open and refreshing about Sheila. The previous librarian whom my brother and I had nicknamed Mrs. Applefuss, had been a retired school teacher, stooped, frail with a gray bun, orthopedic oxfords, and a prominent red apple brooch that clasped the top button of her shirtwaist. Checking out a stack of books with Mrs. Applefuss had been an experience in correction as she frequently marked misspellings and omitted words on library check-out slips. In contrast, Sheila was young and chatted breezily as she checked out books. Petite and only twenty-six years old, she drove a 1969 lime green Camaro with wide mag wheels and white pinwalls. She liked to speed to work on Highway 2, dipping over the white line, a careless habit that earned her many tickets. Her husband Randy, a placid cornfed looking farm boy in the glass business often drove her to work to avoid the white line incidents.
Every weekday morning at nine a.m., Sheila, in her homemade miniskirts, unlocked the front door of the Cashmere library, her platform shoes making stompy clonks as she swung open the plate glass door, flung down the open sign, and began business for the day. I was one of Sheila's pet projects, a fixture in the young adult section of the library where I was determined at age twelve to read "the classics". Sheila was all for the idea of my education in the classics. When I showed her the "classic reading list" I had discovered on the back of the "What Katy Did" series, she encouraged the project, handing me copies of _Silas Marner_ and _Wuthering Heights_.
"Start here," she said, flicking back a strand of her streaked blond beehive.
I remember laboring over the books one dry summer on the farm, my jean clad legs swung over the side of the gold loveseat. Far away in a nineteenth century British world, people spoke proper, clipped English. What stayed with me most was Heathcliff's terribleness, his gnashing teeth.
"It's a terrible story," I remarked to Sheila after returning the book.
"It's a love story," she said.
Neither of us knew what we were talking about. Twelve years later I wrote my master's thesis on _Wuthering Heights_.
When I wasn't fumbling my way through the "classics," I read with abandon the books in the young adult fiction section. When I wasn't reading books, I hungered for them. I needed books like some of my classmates needed that first school recess of the day; they rushed outside as if they had been penned. Although I could choose books from the school library, I hesitated to exercise my full reading habits in front of my peers as my love of reading made me the object of teasing and ridicule.
The teasing began in the third grade when I checked out a four hundred page book about Paul Bunyan. I had wandered through the library, as usual, searching for books to take home to read in the evening. I passed shelf after shelf of thin, insubstantial books with bright racy covers and thin much-read tattered ones. I felt myself always in a state of perpetual disappointment at the "chapter books" that were thought appropriately challenging for elementary schoolers. Those chapters were mostly made of air, I concluded, as I sped over the white pages with scanty clumps of large print black letters and the large colored pictures or black and white drawings that were thought to be necessary for kids. I needed a long book. A book full of lines and lines of black print, few white spaces, and few or no pictures. The Paul Bunyan book sat plumply, importantly in the midst of the thin books. It felt solid and meaty in my hand. I checked it out and brought it back to the school room.

At the end of the day, I stood at the doorway of the classroom in the kid-line-up waiting to march out to the bus; idly, I wondered what my mother would cook for dinner that night. My big-headed but affable classmate Pat noticed the book as we stood waiting.
"How many pages?" he said, fingering the side of the book crooked in my arm.
I looked in the back and saw the book ended at page 430. "Four hundred and thirty,” I said, with no hint of bragging in my voice. I was as matter-of-fact about books as I was about peanut butter sandwiches and carrots sticks I found in my school lunch bag
. Pat seemed impressed, but Pat's companions the dark-haired, freckled David and sandy-haired Scott hooted: "430 pages, 430 pages?"
"How long will it take you to read that book?" Scott asked.
The question hung in the air as the dismissal bell rang, and we dashed through the hallways toward the bus area. My book crooked under my arm, I did my best to keep to a fast trot, far enough in front of Scott and David but not far enough to avoid their calls of "bookworm."
That night when I sat down in the living room after clearing the supper table, I read determinedly, my eyes flying over the words, scarcely caring about the story. It was full of embellishments and posturing, anyway: Paul chopping down whole forests with one stroke of his ax, eating huge stacks of flapjacks, fighting off bears and wolves. My father told better hunting stories. I fell asleep over the book, my mom shaking me gently at 10: 00 p.m. I climbed the bare wooden stairs to my room, the book heavy in my hand. With great effort, I awoke early the next morning and read more pages. I reached page 100 when it was time to get dressed and go off to school. Scott and David were waiting for me in the reading classroom that morning.
"How many pages, bookworm?"
"One hundred," I said primly, brushing past them on my way to my desk.
They danced a jig and slapped each other's hands, chanting "A hundred pages! A hundred pages! Bookworm read a hundred pages!"

As usual, in my reading course, I finished my vocabulary sheets, spelling test, and reading lesson early. I went to the back reading corner. The Paul Bunyan book felt heavier than I remembered it, and I looked longingly at the other books in the "book corner." I dutifully read 15 pages while my classmates finished their work and as Scott and David looked back and snickered .
Every school afternoon and evening that week, I read the Paul Bunyan book. I read it after school instead of playing outside, I read it after dinner instead of watching TV. I read it early in the morning while my sister still slept and the sun crept up over the ridge of the Wenatchee Mountains, the dawn making the room light enough for reading. During the day, I was tired and listless but resolved as I did my school assignments and played with classmates. I was getting the day's work out of the way. All my energies were focused on finishing the book. Each day for four days I read one hundred pages; I finished the last thirty on Friday morning--fifteen before breakfast, fifteen during reading class. I thumped the book down on the desk. and slumped in my school chair, my head awhirl with Paul Bunyan's and Babe the Blue Ox's feats.
"She's done," Scott whispered. She read the whole book!”
My other classmates took notice, and I was teased for weeks after that. "Eileen read 400 pages in four days. Bookworm!!" After that, the feat was increased to 600 to 800 then to 1,000 pages, my appetite for reading taking on elephantine proportions. For a while, when the reading class visited the school library, Scott and David followed me from shelf to shelf.. They peered over the stacks to comment on the thickness of the books I selected. After I set a book down, they'd sneak over and pick it up and quickly flip to the back page to see how long it was, announcing the page total and laughing. Although I pretended to ignore them, I could see that my love of reading simultaneously interested and bothered them.
Indeed, my reading habits made me unpredictable and unpopular with some of my classmates. I knew words that others didn't, and I had a habit of springing those words on them in sharp and unaccustomed ways. After a girl-boy chase and scuffle on the playground, little boys often scratched their heads, wondering why I'd called them "cretins" or "gargoyles," words I'd acquired form reading my parent's National Geographic magazines. I was always trying out those words when I could, stumbling over their pronunciations, rivaling in their importance without quite being sure what they meant. Words were my ladder, my way out.
My reading minimally disturbed my family; they worried I was too pale and deemed me the "house pansy" for the long afternoons I spent reading on the gold loveseat in the living room. But they liked to read, too, so their complaints were minor. On holidays and on long winter evenings, my father read whole books often in one sitting--long political biographies and historical works When he liked a book, he wouldn't put it down. "I'll annihilate it," he'd say and he'd stay up long past his farmer's prescribed bed time, even after my mom turned down the heat and the house grew cold and the only light shining was the living room lamp illuminating the floor where he lay on the carpet, his head propped up with a brown fake fur covered pillow. After midnight, he'd stagger up to bed, shaking with the cold, half-drunk on language and complex political plot and then he'd read in bed unless my mom protested too much.
My mother read pop-psychology books, diet books, books on theology , and turned us on to the phrases she was learning at the Yokefellow encounter groups she and my father attended at the Methodist church. We learned dream analysis, transactional analysis and "role-playing." We analyzed dream symbols and underwent meditation exercises. My mother grew more and more liberated as the weeks went by. She got a lock for her bedroom door and went up there every afternoon to spend time alone.
Sensing a break in the motherly status quo, I protested:. "What will happen if I fall down the stairs and break my leg?"
"I think I'd hear you fall down the stairs and scream even with the door locked," my mother said flatly. "You kids have to give me some time alone. I need to read and think."
I grew up believing all farm wives fought for the space to read and think.
My brother belonged to the Military Book Club, and he devoured books on World War II and piled up his hardback club acquisitions on the fake walnut paneled shelves in his room next to his ammunition reloading equipment. My brother lived for war stories, and his vocabulary was peppered with precise military terms often ill-pronounced. Confiscate was pronouned "confisticate" and magazine was pronounced "mazagine."
Even my sister, busy as she was with her piano playing and track meets, read her bible and fashion magazines, and she kept a journal under her mattress that I read and thought about, barely keeping myself from advising her about which friends she should keep and which she should eliminate.
Reading was a fortification against the sameness and monotony of farm life. A book took us places when we couldn't get there any other way, and it let us get into someone else's head for awhile.
Since my reading habits were such an object of fun for many of my classmates, I concealed the true volume of my reading by ordering titles from the rural circulating library book catalogue. My mother explained that the rural circulating library was an attempt to reach the kids and adults who lived "in the brush," too far away from libraries or book stores. I imagined these bookless kids living in log cabins or in lone farmhouses at the end of winding canyon roads. With the library just four miles away from the farm, I felt as if I were cheating by ordering those books and possibly denying them to farm kids like Trina and Sandy Wallace who lived up at the end of Ollalla Canyon without running water or electricity. The guilt only lasted so long. I received those paperback titles in brown paper envelopes like Christmas gifts from distant relatives. I fell upon them when I got home from school and read them long into the night. I read about teen girls and boys who attended boarding schools in Boston. I read about girls living in apartment buildings in New York City. They rode subways, walked city blocks, and dined at the automat. I was hungry for knowledge of how others my age lived. I hoarded these bits of information like a raven keeping a cache of shiny objects.