little noodge.”
Wait. Four–five split? What did that mean? I stared at Dolly, hoping for the same loop to repeat, as it often did, before she went on to a different loop. Amanda and I were going to be in the same class? Is that what Dolly had said? I was starting the fifth grade, Amanda in fourth, the two classes joined? My cousin looked up from her paper, she, too, registering the essential sentence. And yet she didn’t seem alarmed. She said, “Mom says Mrs. Kwaselnik is intwested in geogwaphy, that we’uh going to pawticipate in the National Geogwaphy Bee.”
“I know,” I lied.
“Mrs. Kwaselnik will want me to bwing in my Suez Canal memowabilia for Show and Tell.” Amanda really did have a collection, Stephen Lombard having once sent her maps and a key chain from Suez when he’d passed through Egypt. “She’ll teach us to use a dweidel.”
It was a matter of urgency that I leave the manor house immediately, that I get to the library where my mother worked. The Mrs. Kraselnik information could not possibly be true. Amanda and I were nothing to each other in school. In the mornings we waited for the bus together on our driveway but once we climbed the steps, even before we found our own seats, we no longer knew each other. This unknowing was an unspoken and mutually agreed-upon law. We weren’t embarrassed by our connection. It was only that we were entirely different persons outside of the orchard. On the way home we were with our friends and could not say hello. The second our feet touched the gravel drive we were again familiar, restored to our Velta-Volta selves, planning our after-school activities. It could not be explained to my mother why Amanda being in my class was a violation; I knew only that it must not happen.
Because my mother was the director of the library, and because there was no place in town except the tavern to gather, the gossips came to the circulation desk to tell all. In that way Nellie Lombard knew everything, the font of knowledge. I made an excuse to Amanda and left my glitter picture. Always in the Dolly kitchen I hurried past the door that led up the stairs to May Hill’s part of the house. It was a fact that she lived right overhead, but it was a fact I did my best not to consider. Her house, even though it belonged to the same structure as the downstairs, was in a different plane, a different realm. This truth also could not be explained. In any case, I ran down the back stairs of Amanda’s house, only to see Sherwood at the basement sink.
“Hallo, Francie,” he said. “You interested in seeing—” He held up a root of some kind but I didn’t look, didn’t stop, said I had to get home, although Velta was not my precise destination. I ran down the drive, past the barn, down the orchard path, up along the potato garden and the marsh, skirting the near hay field, past Gloria’s cottage, up to the baseball diamond, and ragged with running that quarter mile I burst into the library. My mother was at the circulation desk checking out the Bushberger children, Mrs. Bushberger putting no limit on the number of picture books each of her six children was allowed to take home.
“Francie, my goodness,” Mrs. Lombard called to me. But she wasn’t going to pay real attention until every single Bushberger book had been scanned and neatly stacked in the six baskets, each child talking about the plot of the book she loved best, Mrs. Lombard somehow listening to all of them at the same time.
Here is the reason my mother was a favorite person, children and adults, men and women flocking to speak to her: Mrs. Lombard was on the board of the American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, the representative of rural libraries, and furthermore she’d won the Outstanding Librarian Award (for Populations Under Five Thousand) in 1991. But even if she hadn’t been a nationally famous librarian you wanted to loll around in her company because of her very form, her skinny
Wait. Four–five split? What did that mean? I stared at Dolly, hoping for the same loop to repeat, as it often did, before she went on to a different loop. Amanda and I were going to be in the same class? Is that what Dolly had said? I was starting the fifth grade, Amanda in fourth, the two classes joined? My cousin looked up from her paper, she, too, registering the essential sentence. And yet she didn’t seem alarmed. She said, “Mom says Mrs. Kwaselnik is intwested in geogwaphy, that we’uh going to pawticipate in the National Geogwaphy Bee.”
“I know,” I lied.
“Mrs. Kwaselnik will want me to bwing in my Suez Canal memowabilia for Show and Tell.” Amanda really did have a collection, Stephen Lombard having once sent her maps and a key chain from Suez when he’d passed through Egypt. “She’ll teach us to use a dweidel.”
It was a matter of urgency that I leave the manor house immediately, that I get to the library where my mother worked. The Mrs. Kraselnik information could not possibly be true. Amanda and I were nothing to each other in school. In the mornings we waited for the bus together on our driveway but once we climbed the steps, even before we found our own seats, we no longer knew each other. This unknowing was an unspoken and mutually agreed-upon law. We weren’t embarrassed by our connection. It was only that we were entirely different persons outside of the orchard. On the way home we were with our friends and could not say hello. The second our feet touched the gravel drive we were again familiar, restored to our Velta-Volta selves, planning our after-school activities. It could not be explained to my mother why Amanda being in my class was a violation; I knew only that it must not happen.
Because my mother was the director of the library, and because there was no place in town except the tavern to gather, the gossips came to the circulation desk to tell all. In that way Nellie Lombard knew everything, the font of knowledge. I made an excuse to Amanda and left my glitter picture. Always in the Dolly kitchen I hurried past the door that led up the stairs to May Hill’s part of the house. It was a fact that she lived right overhead, but it was a fact I did my best not to consider. Her house, even though it belonged to the same structure as the downstairs, was in a different plane, a different realm. This truth also could not be explained. In any case, I ran down the back stairs of Amanda’s house, only to see Sherwood at the basement sink.
“Hallo, Francie,” he said. “You interested in seeing—” He held up a root of some kind but I didn’t look, didn’t stop, said I had to get home, although Velta was not my precise destination. I ran down the drive, past the barn, down the orchard path, up along the potato garden and the marsh, skirting the near hay field, past Gloria’s cottage, up to the baseball diamond, and ragged with running that quarter mile I burst into the library. My mother was at the circulation desk checking out the Bushberger children, Mrs. Bushberger putting no limit on the number of picture books each of her six children was allowed to take home.
“Francie, my goodness,” Mrs. Lombard called to me. But she wasn’t going to pay real attention until every single Bushberger book had been scanned and neatly stacked in the six baskets, each child talking about the plot of the book she loved best, Mrs. Lombard somehow listening to all of them at the same time.
Here is the reason my mother was a favorite person, children and adults, men and women flocking to speak to her: Mrs. Lombard was on the board of the American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, the representative of rural libraries, and furthermore she’d won the Outstanding Librarian Award (for Populations Under Five Thousand) in 1991. But even if she hadn’t been a nationally famous librarian you wanted to loll around in her company because of her very form, her skinny
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