My Life with Bob Read online

  But finished or not, The Trial was the book I needed at the time, an apt metaphor for the extended bout of umbrage and frustration of adolescence. It is the teenager’s lot to feel simultaneously innocent and guilty, accountable to grown-up society but not allowed in, bristling with potential yet largely powerless. How could you not be drawn to a book about a person falsely accused, harassed, and made to carry out a series of tasks he didn’t want to do? I got out of The Trial exactly what I needed: Vindication. An excuse. An escape. A convenient metaphor. A hero with whom I could identify.

  The Trial also made clear to me, in a way a book could but another person could not, where bitterness crossed into brattiness. Joseph K. was the subject of a gross injustice and heartless bureaucratic dudgeon; I’d merely accompanied him along the way, then broke for croissants.

  But this was my own business. I marked the book down, in secret, in my new clandestine diary. I may have felt misunderstood and terrible at French, but you wouldn’t be able to tell any of that from reading the pages of my personal journal, my most excellent yet still thoroughly true-to-me Bob. In this Book of Books, I’d be able to take charge of my own story and make it better.

  CHAPTER 4

  Catch-22

  Never Enough

  Some people are perfectly content with the mere reading of books. They take them out of the library, they borrow them from friends, they give them away with little expectation or even desire to see them returned. They download them onto devices where they exist in some ephemeral electronic format, never to be carefully stowed in a specific slot on a physical bookshelf or left to beckon from a nightstand or artfully piled on top of a coffee table. For these people, it’s all about content. I envy their focus and their discipline.

  Because there is also the other sort, the kind who gets all caught up in the rest of the book—even when it’s not read. My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.

  We in this latter group like to own books, and, with our constant demands and high expectations, we’re the worst—preferring some editions over others, having firm points of view on printings and cover designs. We’re particular, and we’re greedy. We want an unreasonable number of books and we don’t like to throw them away. Some of us develop an almost hoardish fear around letting go of a book, even after it’s been read and reread. Throwing away or lending a book to an unreliable reader inevitably leads to regret. It is lovely to share books, but they need to come home. I have known people to maintain years-long grudges over unreturned books. Who can blame them? (You with my Daniel Kahneman. You know who you are.)

  Obviously, I want the books that I intend to read, but I also want the ones that I don’t intend to read but think someone else I know might. Some books I may want to check back in on occasionally and I worry when they can’t be found. Some books I need to have around “just in case.” Just in case my daughter has to do a school project on French colonialism. Just in case one of my sons finally shows an interest in dinosaurs. Just in case one day I go to Ireland and need to consult the Irish classics. Or decide it’s time to read Gilgamesh, or need a last-minute emergency gift.

  I remember the moment my parents gave me my very first book, a soft fabric treasure called The Pocket Book that contained real, workable pockets you could open and close with a snap or a button. I could hardly believe such a spectacular creation existed and that it was mine. I wanted to climb inside The Pocket Book and snap it shut.

  Part of me never fully left that welcoming interior or abandoned that giddy joy of ownership. I wanted to own more such things, a desire that remains unabated, even in my current state of plenty. If I pass a bookstore, I want to go in. When I see an especially sweet local library, my heart swells. Used bookstores contain untold possibilities. Library sales, same thing. There is always room for more books, even though I’ve barely dented the piles I already have.

  Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mountaining up on my shelves. Places to stack them are covered as soon as they surface; I keep adding new built-in bookshelves. At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I’ve deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. I own many times more books than are noted in my Book of Books, yet still I worry over his empty pages. I use a minuscule type when writing in my Book of Books in order to leave room for everything that needs to go there. Bob’s pages, I used to fear, would one day run out. Now I fear I will die before I can fill them up.

  This is every reader’s catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven’t read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible.

  Some of my particular strain of want is certainly due to early deprivation. Books were—and still are—expensive, and my mother almost never purchased them. To this day, she waits for a title to become available while her name climbs up the library wait list. I remember picture books of my childhood like The Pocket Book so well precisely because there weren’t many of them. We had Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town and his superb I Am a Bunny (a book that forever raised my sensory expectations for the changing seasons), the high-drama Miss Suzy, the unfathomable bounty of Blueberries for Sal. Especially in the recession seventies, decades before printing became inexpensive in China, hardcover picture books were practically a luxury product. The few we owned were shared among my brothers and me. I read more books about trucks than did most girls.

  In my childhood bedroom, I had one meager bookshelf whose lower rung primarily accommodated back issues of Young Miss and Seventeen. With my ten-cent second grader’s allowance, ratcheted up over the years into a weekly allotment never to exceed five dollars, I didn’t have much money for books. Sometimes, I could afford comics or massive newsprint-quality compendiums sold at the dollar store with titles like 1,001 Wacky Facts. Birthday checks were requisitioned for “college.” If I asked my mother for a book, her standard response was “Get it from the library.”

  There wasn’t much you could say back to that. Our house, a creaking hulk built in 1673, had actually been our town’s first library; it had long since ceased to serve in that capacity, but we were just around the corner from the existing library, which was directly across from Main Street School. After dismissal, I’d cross the street and install myself for an hour or two.

  While the library was, of course, a public institution, it felt private to me. The children’s library shelves were mine. I knew where my friends Ginny and Geneva awaited and where the slightly naughtier Klickitat gang hung out at the end of the front row. The mean kids from Deenie and Blubber looked down from the high shelf. These characters provided my social life and I never had to be told to be quiet in their presence.

  I wanted to crawl into the stacks and absorb the musty smell of decades-old paper. I riffled my fingers through the wooden card-catalog drawers like they were flip books, trying to decode them. I could be the first girl to master the Dewey decimal system. I might one day know where every book stood. All I needed was some authority or at least some kind of officially sanctioned status. A few years after we’d moved to town, I mustered the courage to ask for a job.

  “I’m sorry, there are no jobs available for children,” the librarian told me. I was ten.

  “You wouldn’t have to pay me,” I insisted, my eyes gleaming with what surely came across as unhealthy fervor.

  “That’s okay, but thank you.”
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  The rejection was terrible. What was it that put the children’s librarian off my candidacy? Was it the you-don’t-have-to-pay-me part? Did she question my intentions? Did she not see that I was a book person, different from other, more casual library visitors, that I cared? That I would never leave a book facedown with its spine splayed open like other kids my age. I couldn’t help but feel they were taking me down a notch. “This library isn’t yours, you know,” is how I heard it.

  Every once in a while, I’d gin up the pluck to inquire again, thinking maybe they wouldn’t remember me from the last time. Sometimes asking at the children’s library, other times going to the person at checkout with the enviable task of scanning each book through the ghostly red glow of the primitive computer system. These requests were always swiftly rebuffed, and each time I felt sorry for having had the temerity to ask. Perhaps they knew I was reading beyond my jurisdiction; someone in charge must have seen me with the Sweet Dreams.

  Because the library limited the number of books you could check out at a time, I developed fantasies about coming into a large quantity of books. Our house had a basement whose walls crumbled at the touch. (Murderers lurked in the dark spaces behind staircases, and after seeing Friday the 13th at far too young an age I knew they were waiting to reach through and grab my ankles.) But there were untended boxes down there, too, and they might be filled with books if only I dared look. The other probable stash was in the allegedly inaccessible attic, a place we never once entered during our fourteen years in that house. Stowed away up there, I believed, was an immense trove of Archie comics and other goodies, perpetually kept out of reach.

  Books in the living room were for grown-ups and not to be touched. My mother had a few coffee table books, which she guarded fiercely. I was allowed to read Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life only under supervision, turning its pages gingerly and never removing it from the coffee table. My aunt had given it to my mother as a gift, and it was made clear that, despite appearances, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life was not a children’s book.

  My older brother Roger’s books were not exactly children’s books either; his were the literature of defiant male adolescence. What he liked to do was read Jaws when my mother forbade him from seeing the movie. Of all my family members, Roger was most like me; we even looked alike, though, as he liked to point out, my face managed to be both too long and too fat at the same time; his was merely too long. Roger and I shared the same twisted sense of humor that made other people frown when we laughed. My chief ambition was to get him to laugh against his will, sometimes achieved by adopting my signature Glazed Look during a staring contest or performing a spirited jig so foolish that merely glimpsing it as a passive observer proved embarrassing. Neither of us was socially successful. For his part, Roger blamed the chess club. “Thus sealing my social fate forever,” he said.

  According to some tacit regulation, Roger controlled the bathroom reading. Its inventory remained stable for years: The Twilight Zone Companion, an episode-by-episode guide complete with creepy stills (“Eye of the Beholder” in particular provided the stuff of nightmares); Stephen King’s Christine, riveting despite being about a car; The Fiske Guide to Colleges, which gave me early and strong opinions about the undesirability of Swarthmore (all those nonliterary requirements!); Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, never as rewarding as its title suggested. I read them all, cover to cover, over and over.

  None of it was enough.

  Whenever my bank account managed to reach the double digits, I’d bring my blue passbook to the local branch and bike up to the used bookstore off Main Street to buy Nancy Drews. These purchases were carefully considered. “Do you have any new Nancy Drews?” I’d ask when I walked in, by which I meant old Nancy Drews, but not too old. I wanted nothing to do with the reissued paperbacks and their loathsome “contemporary” illustrations; the really ancient ones with their dark woven blue covers were also unacceptable.

  But oh … the yellow-bound Nancy Drews, with their broody cover paintings and pen-and-ink interior images of the girl detective and friends, pixie-haired George and “plump” Bess. They sold for about a dollar a copy, an incredible bargain. Nancy Drew taught me that a book wasn’t merely about the words within, it was everything—the quality of paper, the intoxicating smell of the binding glue, an older formulation that you didn’t get in newer volumes, the decorative end pages. It was the book as object, the vase as much a pleasure as the flowers.

  If the shopkeeper had no yellow Nancy Drews, I’d depart in haste, shrouded in remorse for having wasted his time. The poor guy with his forlorn shop that nobody ever went into. He probably lived for those precious moments when the bells jangled on the front door, dreaming of customers less particular about their mysteries. He probably scraped by on lunches of peanut butter and jelly and cursed the chain bookstore at the nearby mall. I constructed an entire narrative around the shopkeeper and my sorry role in his professional travails. Only after I’d graduated from high school and left town did I mention to my best friend, Ericka, how I’d suffered on his behalf.

  “The used bookstore owner?” she replied, incredulous. “He was a millionaire! He just kept that shop for fun.” Ericka knew all kinds of town stuff because her parents were entrenched in the community whereas my mom was strictly the commuter type.

  I had one other book-buying opportunity and I shamelessly abused it. On Divorced Dad Thursdays, after I’d finished my strawberry French toast and strawberry milk shake and strawberry cheesecake at the diner, my father would often let my brothers and me run amok in the Barnes & Noble at the Roosevelt Field mall. My father was a construction contractor—“small jobs, Pammy”—and didn’t have a lot of money to spare. He would warn on arrival that I could pick two or three books and no more, which he paid for with folded bills or hastily shuffled credit cards. I would nod, almost intending obedience, and then set out. An hour later I’d show up at the cash register with a tower of books wedged determinedly under my chin.

  There was no helping it. Series like Choose Your Own Adventure were meant to be consumed whole, and the library must not have considered them worthy for its collection. Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, both erratic presences at the library, beckoned in long, gleaming rows, breathless plots teased enticingly on their covers, brand-new, sometimes with embossed letters. I was really, really sorry but it was impossible to narrow things down.

  “I don’t want to have to say no to you when it comes to buying books,” my dad would say, as I lobbied for please just one more. “If I’m going to spend money, then it should be on this.” It was the best thing he could have said. I never forgot it and I never stopped feeling guilt ridden about taking it so literally.

  But it still wasn’t enough. Frustrated by my failure to gain employment at the library, I threw myself into the project of making money, not to buy clothes or makeup or records, but because I wanted not to have to depend on others—not in life, not in stories, not for books.

  This wasn’t always easy. When I was twelve, I started babysitting, but while my friends got to babysit toddlers who were already asleep in houses with poorly cataloged liquor cabinets, my wards were bad sleepers whose health-food-nut parents came home early and paid $3.35 an hour, precisely minimum wage, and never rounded up, rummaging through their pockets for the appropriate coins. In eighth grade, I was fired from my first “real job” at a real estate office for subpar typing, a stunning blow to my already tenuous self-conception. I couldn’t type!

  I envisioned a fantasy job that involved free food and ample downtime to read as I waited for the occasional customer. Instead, I stood on my feet all day at Butterfour Bakery, where roaches discouraged us from snarfing up the sprinkles. At a friend’s mother’s South American–import warehouse, I glued together catalogs in an empty room that reeked inexplicably of molasses. I folded sweaters at Laura Ashley in a store dense with the scent of Laura Ashley No. 1, prim women in headbands narrowing their eyes at my sloppy sleevework.

  Thro
ughout junior high and until I was seventeen, I slaved away three to five nights a week at a local restaurant. The married owner would alternate between muttering under his breath as he trailed his fingers over the small of my back: “I can’t stand it—you’re driving me mad with desire!” and yelling at me in front of the line cooks: “Don’t lean on those counters, clean those counters!” As a reprieve, I worked at the Grand Union supermarket, where I dreamed up stories for each customer based on the items in front of me. (“She promised him he’d have meat loaf that night, if only he’d…” “He came in to get onions, but in aisle four he decided…”) I liked to juggle several jobs at a time to alleviate the tedium of each post, five or six days a week after school, saving up.

  Senior year, I arranged my schedule so that my classes ended at one o’clock. Skipping lunch meant I could rush off to whatever store or restaurant job was on my schedule that day. There was little time for extracurricular activities; Ericka and I founded the school’s Coalition for the Poor and Homeless, but our efforts sputtered out after a few protests and one visit to a nearby soup kitchen. I felt increasingly untethered from the social world of high school, biding my time until I was free.

  Finally, armed with a driver’s license, I was able to find the kind of work I sought. Twenty minutes from my house, at the upscale Americana shopping center, was a branch of the B. Dalton bookstore chain—and they hired me.

  Now this was a job! I was the only high schooler who worked there, a monumental achievement and a source of fierce pride, even if you considered there wasn’t much competition. All the other employees were actual grown-ups, some of whom saw the job as a calling, others who could just as easily have been working in the produce section at the A&P.