She flutters around the book-stuffed world that she calls her own. She wears ill-fitting clothes in bright, tropical colors, and sometimes she tugs a scarf twice around her beefy neck and calls it fashion. She has gray hair mixed in with wiry strands of white and it ends in a triangle just above her shoulders and three inches out from her head. She is round and flustered; small eyes and an even smaller mouth drowning in the sea of her face. She speaks far more often than she ought to now, she knows that. She cannot control her mouth; she is constantly ordering and questioning and muttering to herself about inconsequential things and puttering about like a little steam engine, always busy and bustling, always something to get done. But if she doesn’t do it, who will? This library is her domain, it is all she has to call her own and she loves it. She loves her job, though she gets tired out quite often and it saps away her energy.
Stephen died last year. All the expected guests attended the funeral, no more, no less. They returned to their houses in droves, carrying cold brownies wrapped up in cellophane and cookies on platters under their arms, the kinder ones remarking what a shame and the more cynical ones remarking with snide laughter what a surprise indeed that the old man hadn’t committed suicide years ago just to escape and were they really sure that wasn’t, in fact, what he had done now?
Since then, things have changed. Lillian keeps cats now, and watches television at night. Things she never did when Stephen was still living. He didn’t like the sound of the laugh track on the comedy shows she used to watch. And cats made him sneeze. He’d never have admitted he was allergic; he believed sickness was a sign of weakness, and the last thing Stephen wanted to be was weak.
Lillian tears up a little bit as she pushes a cart through the grocery store, eyes flitting from shelf to shelf across all the brightly colored packaged goods. The supermarket is a world of possibilities, now that Stephen has died. Lillian can buy potato flakes and frozen Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in any flavor she likes, even the “ridiculous” ones.
Stephen was raised on Vermont soil and when Lillian had begged him to move to Massachusetts after their son was born, he had hated her for it. But there were jobs in Massachusetts and little suburban communities with nice schools and real, city-educated teachers. Lillian hadn’t been able to sleep at night, plagued with nightmares of Carl as a grown man, spending his days milking cows and fixing fences and never finding a life outside of the one his father and grandfathers continued to cycle through every eighty years. The thought had bothered her so much that she had kept at the subject every night for a month; she had been braver then, more willing to stand up for herself. Stephen didn’t believe in divorce, just as his good dead mother had taught him, and so the only solution had seemed to be to give in to her demands. So he picked up and moved and got a construction job in a clean, bustling little town with a mall the next town over and a school all to itself. And he punished Lillian for it for the rest of his life.
But she didn’t regret it, not for a second. When Carl grew up and went to college in Boston and then to law school in New York, Lillian couldn’t have been prouder. She cried the day he passed his BAR. Stephen only muttered that it was a good waste of a small fortune just to get his son to pass a test so that he could become another one of those dirty cheating snakes that made up the American legal system. Lillian shouldn’t have been surprised; she knew how Stephen had felt about lawyers ever since they had gotten “scammed” by one back during that lawsuit.
The neighbor, whom Stephen had previously been friends with, claimed he had lost business due to the disheveled state of the Fosters’ front yard. Stephen didn’t believe in keeping up appearances like the other inhabitants of the tidy little street insisted on doing. If he didn’t want to keep the grass trimmed down to a perfect 1.5 inches, he wasn’t going to. If he wanted to leave the rusted over bits and pieces of last winter’s broken snow blower strewn haphazardly about the front yard, he was going to do that too. Will and Macy ran a little knickknack shop full of homemade birdhouses and painted glass wind chimes out of their living room. Business had declined significantly the year Stephen and Lillian moved in, which was partly due to the unappealing state of their front yard, but mostly due to the bad economy. Presentation, it’s all about the presentation, Will’s lawyer claimed in court. Stephen got so heated he stood up in the middle of the lawyer’s argument, his chair echoing sharply as it crashed to the ground. The judge didn’t even have to say anything before a policeman stepped out quietly as if from the shadows and restrained her husband like no one had ever dared do before. Lillian could have laughed in that moment, as she saw the giant of a man she had married actually held back by somebody else, dominated by another bigger, stronger person, but she didn’t dare.
They released him from custody when he calmed down and apologized and Lillian had to bite her lip as he trudged out of his jail cell and the policeman gave him the manila envelope full of his things. The case was wrapped up the next day with Stephen getting charged, though less harshly than Will had hoped, and the neighborly friendship they had developed dissipating. After that Lillian and Macy couldn’t talk to each other anymore, no more friendly gossip shared over the fence or recipe swapping or desperate phone calls if one was in a bind and needed the other to babysit. Once, Macy snuck over for a cup of coffee but then the sound of a car in the driveway sent them into a panic. It turned out to be just someone who had gotten lost using the drive for a turnaround but after that, Macy didn’t come back.
If Lillian had a nickel for all the times Stephen had ever made her give something up or throw something away she would’ve been a rich woman. But she forgave him for all those times, though he never asked. And the day that he died, the day that his heart finally couldn’t take him anymore, Lillian knew she should be sad.
Three days after her husband’s funeral the librarian came back to school. The other teachers said it was too quick, they said she needed longer to mourn, but she felt fine. She came back to work and she let her books consume her. They have been her comfort all her life and they continue to comfort her now. And she loves what she does. Sometimes her coworkers are rude to her, pushy and impatient New math teachers, new young English teachers, men who spike their hair and wear designer frames and sweater vests and have ideas about how to change America; women who straighten their hair with flat irons and wear high heeled boots and subtle perfume and believe that armed with a smile and an edge, the whole world will be theirs to conquer. Her students are rude to her, a new generation raised to be self-centered and disrespectful in their own right. A generation raised to question why they should wait, why they should listen to the admonishing or adhere to the rules. The librarian doesn’t hold much store in any of that. She believes she does more work in that library in a single week than any one of them has done in a year. Nobody else is willing to take on the burden of all she does. Much the same as these books she adores, she is stagnant. Nobody wants to read her. She could die here, right at her desk and she wouldn’t mind. Nobody would mind.
