Neighborhood Watch (6 page)

We also knew—for all of her attempts to dismiss his work—that it wasn’t insignificant. Roland worked for an alternative energy company and sometimes groups of people came to his house for meetings, most of them well dressed and driving tiny cars that looked as if they’d been tooled by hand from thin sheets of steel. Through Roland, we learned that green energy development wasn’t just for hippies and counterculture aesthetes. There was money in those minicars lined up along the street, money in the layers of peasant clothes they wore. Once I saw a man in cowboy boots and a bolo tie clasped with a fist-sized disk of turquoise step out of a limousine and walk around the house to Roland’s basement door. We assumed they would explain it sooner or later—
he’s from Texas, an investor, a crazy old coot
—but Marianne never mentioned it and neither did Roland.

It’s been a year since the last time Marianne mentioned Roland’s name, and I haven’t got the heart to ask where he lives now. For all her buoyant enthusiasm over my release—the balloons, the cake, the WELCOME HOME banner hand-painted and strung on one wall of the living room—there is a sadness about Marianne that isn’t hard to see.

“What’s happened to the old neighbors?” I ask, trying to make the question sound casual. I need to find these people and talk to them, the sooner the better.

“Well, the Baker-Harrisons moved to New Jersey. But a nice part. Montclair, I think. I don’t know if Helen still has that faux-finishing business. And Wendy Stubbins died from something. Brain cancer, I think.”

Wendy Stubbins was one of the young mothers on the block. Once I saw her walk up the street carrying a trike in one hand and her toddler by his overall straps in the other. “You’re not listening,” she hissed as she walked past, her child’s limbs pinwheeling through the air. I remember so many snapshots like that, so many times I wondered:
Would I do that?
It was easy to believe I would have made a firm but fair mother, one who could discipline with one throat-clearing sound and a narrowing of the eyes. “Wendy’s
dead
?” I say in disbelief. Her son couldn’t be more than fourteen now. I always feel a pang when I hear about motherless children. As if there should be a way to match us up, a dating service of some kind.

“I don’t know if Jim ever remarried. He was a little bit of an alcoholic even before she died. I don’t know what happened with that.”

He was?
For the umpteenth time I wonder how much I witnessed and failed to see in those days of watching so much on our street.

After we’ve cleaned up, Marianne leads me to Trish’s old bedroom, apologizing along the way for the state it’s in. “I haven’t done much with it,” she says, which might be an understatement. Apparently, in twelve years she’s done nothing at all because it still looks like a little girl’s room. In one corner there’s an empty hamster cage, in another a dollhouse with one door hanging loose. The twin beds are covered with throw pillows and stuffed animals.

Trish’s brother, John, was the one most people noticed first. The smartest boy at the middle school and probably the oddest. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute but couldn’t, when pressed, clip his own fingernails. He had a nervous personality and a habit of licking his lips and then spitting when he spoke. I know Marianne worried about John for most of his childhood. She got him out of PE classes, and had the mandatory swim test required for graduation waived so that the valedictorian of the class could get a diploma. He never learned to drive a car or ride a bike. Once I saw him struggle for ten minutes to open a bag of potato chips.

Marianne tells me that these days he works as a software designer and lives in Alabama. She sees him twice a year and says he’s become a churchgoer. “Apparently he’s always wanted some type of community. I never realized that. I’ve asked him does it really have to be a
church
and he says, ‘Yes, Mother, it does.’”

Trish, though, I never hear about. No old stories about her childhood. No verbalized regrets. It’s as if Trish has died and there is no need to keep repeating the fact. I’ll also say this, though: There were times—not every visit, but often enough—when Marianne would lose her train of thought midstory and her stare would grow vacant, whatever she’d been about to say gone. I thought of Trish then, and assumed she was part of whatever it was Marianne hadn’t said.

It made me sad because I remember Trish well as such a bookish and appealing girl. In my early days, when I worked in the children’s room of the library, Marianne brought her often and let her check out ten books, the maximum number allowed per card. They were always returned before their due date, and I could tell by the way Trish fingered their spines that she’d read every one. She was a little odd, like her brother. When she was eight she joined a project I organized making shoe box dioramas of famous places in literature. I left the choice up to the children, and we received some wonderful ones: Pooh’s Corner; Wilbur’s barnyard pen; the Borrowers’ home, with thread-spool tables and matchbox beds. Then Trish showed up with the most elaborate diorama of all, what looked like mounded Play-Doh hills dotted with flowers and a small dollhouse hospital bed in the corner. “It’s Yr,” Marianne whispered after I’d studied it for a while without a guess. “From
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
.”

I looked at her, confused. Trish had read a book about the imaginary world of a schizophrenic seventeen-year-old living in a mental institution? I assumed Marianne was joking. She smiled sheepishly. “Sometimes they let her check out from the adult room. I don’t know if it’s a bad idea. I don’t know how much she understands.”

Trish smiled as she slid her diorama onto the table beside Laura Ingalls Wilder’s log cabin home. She seemed delighted with her project, grinning fiercely as she straightened the title card out. I looked back at Marianne, who studied her daughter. I could almost read her hopeful thought—
Maybe it’s fine.

I didn’t stay in the children’s room for long after that. Though I never made the request and nothing was ever directly said (to me, anyway), after my third miscarriage it was understood that I’d be better placed elsewhere. After that, I saw Trish at the library only occasionally, and I was usually shy, as I was with all the children, never quite sure if they would remember me. Trish surprised me, though, starting a conversation herself. Once she asked if my hand got tired stamping books. Another time, what the best part of being a librarian was. The question surprised me. Who’d ever heard of a child asking an adult a question about her life? I asked her, “Do you want to be a librarian?”

She beamed. “Not at all,” she whispered. “I want to be a writer.”

I thought about Trish in prison sometimes, when my mind wandered to children I’d known and liked in the past, but I asked Marianne about her only once, enough to know I shouldn’t again. “She’s gone from our lives,” Marianne said. “Cut herself off from us.” It was clear enough that the choice was Trish’s and not her parents’.

Now I look at Trish’s bookshelves filled with ceramic animals and, behind them, her childhood books—some predictable, many not. I recognize a few fantasy titles, some sci-fi, the vampire books that were just coming out when I left.

At one end of the shelf I see
Middlemarch
by George Eliot. My favorite book in college, and more than five hundred pages long. Was it possible Trish had read
this
as a teenager? Was she
that
precocious? I pull it out and then my breath catches at the inscription I find on the first page:

I
can still remember the first time I saw Geoffrey at my library: He came in and stood by our “Hot Books” shelf, seven-day loans on popular fiction. I was working in the back office, out of view, but I watched carefully as he looked around, as if he’d come in not for books but for something else. I could have gone out there on any excuse. I waited five minutes, then ten, to see what he would do. After fifteen minutes, he left.

Two days later, he returned while I was shelving an overflowing return cart, struggling with a rolling ladder that hadn’t been working for a while. “Let me get that,” he said, taking the book from my hand, tall enough to reach the shelf without help.

“You know Dewey!” I said too loud, after he’d placed it properly. I tried to laugh as if I’d made a joke because Dewey is so often the punch line of librarian jokes. We all have more mugs with “Librarians Dewey it in the Stacks” than we know what to do with.

“Yes,” he said, grabbing a book and reaching up again, so close I could smell his musk deodorant. He told me he was here to do some research. “I’m trying to write something from a teenage girl’s point of view, except now I realize I know almost nothing about teenage girls.”

His eyes were so blue and clear it was hard to look at them for long. I told him I knew a little bit about teenage girls—or what they read, anyway. “And of course I was one once,” I added. Was that too flirtatious? It’s true that I wouldn’t have said it standing at the front desk with my colleagues around, sorting through request slips, listening to everything. “I was a bookish girl. Not very popular,” I admitted. “Mostly I sat around watching people who had more friends than I did.”

He smiled. “That’s
exactly
what I need. A girl who’s an observer, a watcher of everything. Can you remember your life at age fourteen?”

All too well, unfortunately, but I didn’t tell him that. Nor did I admit that
bookish
and
unpopular
would have been kind adjectives to describe me at that age. I was also surly and difficult, given to wearing layers of black and writing bleak, angry poetry.

“I’m happy to give you the books I read at that age,” I told him, thinking I’d amend the list and leave off
Go Ask Alice
. I composed a cheery list of Judy Blumes and classics:
Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mocking-bird, Little Women, Gone With the Wind.
The same books, I realize now, that are sitting on Trish’s shelf. This makes no sense. Was he using me to befriend her? She was twelve when he moved in, fifteen by the time we all left. What kind of friendship could they have possibly had?

“This is great,” Geoffrey said that first day, checking out five of my recommendations and reading them all inside of a week. I started thinking of more, reading a few myself, storing up anecdotes to tell him on the days when he came in. Eventually I told him the truth about my adolescence: “I don’t think I was invited to a single party until I got to college and forced myself to do a personality makeover. I found an article in a magazine that walked me through it.”

He clapped his hands and laughed. “A
personality
makeover. I love it. Does Paul know about this?”

I stopped short for a second. Paul
didn’t
know all of it, or not in any detail. I’d never told him about my sleepwalking episodes because the episodes seemed to be behind me. I told myself it was a temporary matter, more connected to the stress of school than to any deep-seated psychosis.

I got called away before I could answer. “Look,” Geoffrey said later, resting his books on my desk. “I’d like to hear more of your story if I could. All the re-creating yourself fits right in with what I’m doing.”

I smiled and mouthed,
How about later?
pointing to the line behind him. For the rest of the day, I reconstructed my old stories. I made up funny details and forgot what was true and what wasn’t because that seemed less important than getting in his book.

Eventually he started finding his own books. “What do you think of this one, Bets?” he’d say, assuming I’d read everything, though, like many librarians, I’d become someone who talked about books more than I read them. I could tell you which writers had the longest wait lists. I could recommend books I’d never read based on the request slips I’d processed. Geoffrey changed all that, reminding me of the books I loved as a girl. When he asked me what my favorite book of all time was and I told him
Middlemarch,
he included it in that day’s stack of books. That night I opened my copy for the first time in years, reread a few passages, and wondered why I’d named this book so quickly, and if it wasn’t all just a little depressing: Dorothea with all her do-gooder sincerity and her terrible marriage to Casaubon, the phony writer and academic. Now I wonder what Geoffrey had thought when he read it. Did he see pieces of himself in that character? Apparently not if he passed the book on to Trish, but why would he have done that?

I remember how nervous I was to discuss the book with him. In college I’d wept over it, how Dorothea with her good intentions ended up with so little, and in the end, dead. Rereading it, it seemed more frightening than sad: a childless woman filling the emptiness at the center of her life with gossamer plans and projects to help the poor. What would Geoffrey know about me and my delusions of importance—my dream that what I did at the library mattered to people, mattered to
anyone
—after he read it? I felt embarrassed about the whole thing until the day I looked up from my desk at work and saw him standing there with tears in his eyes. “Oh, Bets, what a book,” he said. “I cried at the end and I never do that.”

After that, we tried to have something we were both reading at the same time. His favorite book was
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey, and I did what you never see a librarian do: I sat at the front desk with a book open, reading it. I wanted to love it—he’d loved my suggestions—and in the end I did, or pretended I did, anyway. Geoffrey said reading books with me took him back to the time before they’d become a complicated pleasure. Reading new ones now meant he knew the writer or the writer’s agent, and inevitably those threads of connection made him uneasy; not with jealousy, I didn’t think, but with a self-consciousness I could hardly believe the first time I saw it.