Katherine winces. “May I ask you not to do that? There are people trying to read here.”
The man looks around at the empty study carrels, at the tables reflecting puddles of light, at the autumn-colored rows of books, and then he laughs, a loud gleeful bark. “What’s your name?” he says.
“Katherine B,” Katherine answers. Then she feels a prickle of color spreading into her face, something that hasn’t happened to her in many years. She corrects herself: “Just Katherine.”
“I’m Woodrow,” he says. “Just Woodrow. You should read this.” He picks up the larger of the two books, the one that landed first, and cocks the spine to display the title: Things That Fall from the Sky. “The world is a strange place, Katherine. Did you know that until the nineteenth century, scientists believed that meteorites were just peasant superstition?”
“No, I didn’t,” she says.
“It’s true. I’ll have to copy some of this for you.” He riffles through the pages of the book.
“Yes, well—” It occurs to Katherine that the man might be out of his mind. Meteorites? Gravity? He is seventy-five or eighty years old, and like her mother he may be showing the first confusions of age. His hair is a pale straw yellow, and the sleeves of his jacket are a cuff or two too long. The skin on his forehead seems to filter into a large central dimple. “If you could just be a little bit quieter,” she whispers.
He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re the boss,” he says. Before she leaves, though, he asks her a question: “Will you be my mother?” he says.
At the desk, Katherine A is still playing solitaire on the computer. She bends closer to the monitor, her face taking on a pallid green glow. Katherine sits heavily beside her and makes a hmphing noise to catch her attention. “I just met a crazy man,” she says.
Katherine A looks at her and gives a needle-thin sigh. “This is a library,” she says. “There’s nothing but crazy men. What do you want, a cookie?”
That evening, Katherine finds a message from her son Peter on the answering machine. Peter is the younger of her two boys—a happy, noisy, eager-hearted child who somehow became, when she wasn’t looking, a lonely, sullen man. He manages a drugstore now in London, and though he calls once a month, she suspects that he no longer loves her. After he moved, she discovered a half-written letter in his bedroom, addressed to his older brother, that pierced her heart like a baited trap. “You’re lucky to be living your life,” it read. “I want no more of this place—no family, no home, no quiet little town. It’s only holding me back. Sometimes I think that even an ocean won’t be far enough.”
She gazes at the blinking red message light and listens to his voice on the answering machine; it speaks quickly lest she should arrive home unexpectedly. “Hey, Mom, this is Peter, just calling to touch base. It’s eight o’clock here, and you’re probably still at work. Everything’s fine, it’s raining outside, things are busy at the store. You know how it is. Give me a call sometime.”
Katherine lets his phone ring eleven times before she hangs up.
Later that night, after she has eaten dinner, she calls her other son, Tanner, who lives across town with his wife and daughter. Tanner is on the creative development team for a national breakfast food manufacturer and is trying to find a name for a new product. “It’s a tropical fruit–flavored cereal,” he tells her. “Little pineapples and bananas and coconuts. What do you think of ‘Fruit Island Cereal’?”
“That sounds familiar,” she says. “Wasn’t there a Fruit Island something a few years ago?”
“Familiar is good. People will think it’s an old favorite.”
“Still,” she hesitates. “How about ‘Tropical-Ohs’?”
“Mom.” Tanner squeezes the word from his mouth like an egg. “I don’t try to explain the Dewey Decimal System to you, do I? Besides, they’re fruit-shaped, not O-shaped.”
Katherine changes the subject. “Have you talked to Peter lately? He phoned today and sounded depressed on the machine.” She thinks of her son and a sadness moves through her. “Oh, Tanner, does he let anyone know him at all? Is it just me? I feel like I haven’t heard his voice in years.”
Tanner hesitates for a moment, then says, “Fruity Yum-Yums.”
A ripple of sound comes over the line. It is his daughter Robin, Katherine’s granddaughter, four years old and full of joy and commotion. She is not yet lost to the world, and Katherine treasures her.
“Robin says hi,” Tanner tells her.
“Let me talk to her. Put her on.”
There is a muffled seashell emptiness on the line and Katherine knows that he has pressed the receiver to his chest, something he used to do when he was living at home. She hears him saying quietly, “Grandma says hi, too,” and then the air parts around his voice. “It’s her bedtime, Mom, I don’t want to get her all excited. Tell you what: this weekend you can take her out for ice cream. How does that sound?”
“Fine,” says Katherine. “It’s a date,” she says.
“Good,” says Tanner. “I’ve got to go now, Mom. Take care.” He hangs up before she can say good-bye.
The next day, Katherine is leaving the library for lunch, rummaging for her car keys in the jumbled nest of her purse, when she discovers a slip of paper on her windshield. It is battened under a wiper blade, and a loose upper corner of it shudders in the breeze. At first she thinks that it’s a promotional leaflet or a parking ticket, but when she pulls it free she sees that it is covered to the margins with a dense, weblike handwriting.
In April of 1987, the Rev. John Cotton of Chester, England, witnessed a fall of “hundreds of fishes” during a late afternoon thunderstorm. He gathered several and placed them in his bathtub, but they died before he could secure them food, from which he determined that they were a saltwater breed. All were about two inches in length. A local angler identified them as small stickleback. ★ Portland, Oregon. 1974. Ms. Cora Block heard something on the roof of her house that, she said, “sounded like hail.” When she went outside to investigate, she found that her front yard and roof were both covered with live frogs. At first she thought that somebody was playing a practical joke on her, but she could see nobody in the area. The last few frogs fell as she was watching. The sky was clear. ★ Reported in the journal L’Astronomie, 1890, p. 272: A stone of unknown origin, which geologists were unable to identify, fell to earth in 1872 near the town of Banjite, Servia. It was unlike any stone that scientists had theretofore catalogued, and they designated it with the name Banjite. Another stone of Banjite fell in Servia in 1876, and another in 1889. Nowhere else have such stones been found. ★ In February of 1996, John Young of Bloomington, Indiana, was struck on the foot by a six-inch metal rod, an inch in diameter, while working in his garden. He was wearing heavy leather dock boots at the time, but the rod still broke two of his metatarsals, which demanded surgery. He described the rod as “burning hot” and said that it displayed shear marks at both its ends. The Bloomington Regional Airport reported no planes in the area at the time of this incident. Mr. Young speculated that “some sort of catapult or sling” was involved. ★ In the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, written in Greece in 200 A.D., there is a chapter entitled “De pluvius piscium.” This chapter tells of a rain of fish in Chersonesus that continued for three days. Athenaeus writes that “certain persons have in many places seen it rain fishes, and the same thing often happens with tadpoles.” ★ In 1990, while boating on a lake with some friends, Claire Mooney of Springfield, Missouri, was caught in a downpour of onion bulbs. They fell, she said, for about twenty seconds, and only in the immediate vicinity of her vessel. Her companions verified this story to the Springfield Clarion-Ledger, stating that one of the bulbs hit Ms. Mooney in the eye, scratching her retina. “I shouldn’t have looked up,” she told reporters. ★ In Calabria, Italy, in May of 1890, a substance the color and consistency of fresh blood fell from the sky. Similar falls had been reported in the region in 1814 and 1860. Scientists who examined the substance found tha
t it was corpuscular in nature. They claimed that it was birds’ blood, though no feathers or other such material was found. Cosmographer Charles Fort, who relates this incident in The Book of the Damned, speculates “that something far from this earth had bled, that there are oceans of blood, somewhere in the sky.”
Katherine finishes reading the slip of paper—a letter, should she call it?—and looks around for the man she met the day before. He is nowhere to be found, but she is certain that the letter is his, and this unnerves her. Where is he now? She steps into her car, starts the engine, and pulls out of the library parking lot. As she drives away, he seems to rise up before her in every face she sees, floating through them one by one like a thread drawn through an eyelet: through the teacher standing in the school yard, through the businessman hailing a taxi, through the traffic cop standing on the highway safety island, through the GOOD CHRISTIAN MAN who WILL WORK FOR FOOD.
It is Friday morning and Katherine is hosting a tour of the library for a group of junior high school students. She is leading them past the map room and the state document archives, explaining in what she hopes is her least stuffy voice that they should not think of libraries as mausoleums or petrified forests, as stacks of old books with fossil ideas, but that libraries can be living places, that every book there can be like a person, and a person who truly wants to be known, she tells them, a person who will give you the best of himself if not the whole of himself, and where else can you find that?
The students are following along behind her like a carnival parade.
A boy with tinted black glasses and a downy mustache is kissing his girlfriend with a piglike rooting noise. Another boy is flexing a steel ruler in his hands and snapping it across the butt of the girl in front of him. A cheerleader in a black-and-gold uniform is pulling books from the shelves at random, fanning the pages into her face and idly inhaling the scent. The escort for the field trip, a moon-faced woman whom the children call Miss Grandon, is paying no attention to them whatsoever: she keeps sniffling and dabbing at the edge of her eye with a tissue. When Katherine presses her own eye in imitation, a dark spot, like a splash of ink, appears in the opposite corner.
At the end of the tour, as they congregate around the front desk, Katherine asks the children if they have any questions for her.
A girl raises her hand. “Whatever happened to the Bookmobile?”
The Bookmobile was a converted school bus, bookstacks housed around the ribbed central aisle, that used to carry best-sellers and picture books to the shopping plazas around town. “It still runs,” answers Katherine. “But we didn’t have the money to keep the full route going. It travels by appointment now, mostly to churches and nursery schools.” She turns again to the crowd. “Any other questions?”
A boy in a canvas army jacket asks her, “Where do you keep the pornography?” and is greeted with a chop or two of stifled laughter from his friends.
The class escort, Miss Grandon, clears her throat, and her body seems to tighten in on itself. “That’s enough, Eric,” she says, accenting his name at both syllables.
“No, it’s okay,” says Katherine. She answers this question several times a week and considers it standard information, like where to find the restrooms or how to position a book on the Xerox machine. “We carry art and photography on the west side of the second floor, but you’re probably looking for the glossy magazines. Those are behind the Periodicals desk, in the closed stacks, but you have to be eighteen before we’ll retrieve them for you.”
The boy in the army jacket looks surprised by her answer, or by the fact that she answered at all. His mouth is twisting into a strange shape. Miss Grandon gives an indignant hrrum and takes the girl standing next to her by the wrist. “We’re leaving, kids,” she says. Her face is firm and bloodless. “Now.”
The children begin to talk to one another in a flurry of murmurs and whispers, adjusting their bookbags and peeking at Katherine from behind the collars of their jackets. She watches them flow through the double glass doors into the sunlight.
Katherine A is sitting at the front desk, shaking her head. “What on earth did you do that for?” she asks.
“What?” says Katherine. With her thumbs she taps a little tattoo on the desk.
Katherine A shakes her head again. “That teacher didn’t look too happy. Notice that?”
She did notice, of course, and it comes to her like a light that the teacher was unhappy with her, not the boy. For the second time in a week she feels her face coloring with heat.
Outside, the children have all filed onto the school bus, and Katherine looks up to see Miss Grandon glaring at her from behind the door. She storms back inside, her walk full of anger and purpose, swinging a heavy gray purse at her side like a horseshoe or a bowling ball. Katherine imagines for a moment that she is going to strike her with it, but instead she stops at Katherine’s breast and drops the purse at her feet.
“I apologize,” says Katherine, preempting Miss Grandon as the woman takes a breath. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
What she means to say—what she is, in fact, thinking—is this: I don’t know what’s become of me or who I’m supposed to be. My sense of what it takes to live with other people is slowly drifting away. My thoughts have become a mystery to me. I watch myself speaking lately and it’s as if I were somewhere else. It’s as if my life were being displayed before me on a table: I could carry it off in my hand, place it in a box or a drawer, and forget that it was even there. More and more I think as I grow older that I live in this world and know nothing about it.
“Damn right you weren’t.” Miss Grandon pokes her finger at Katherine’s ribs as she talks but doesn’t actually touch her, so that the gesture seems strangely weightless. “Don’t think for a second that I won’t report this,” she says, and when Katherine doesn’t respond, she adds, “because I will.”
“I get so used to answering questions,” Katherine says.
“To kids? About pornography? I can tell you this,” Miss Grandon says. “When somebody’s parents go crying to the school board that little Johnny Thompson learned about skin magazines at the library today, it won’t be my ass on the line.”
Katherine hesitates for a moment, not sure she should continue. “They just seemed like people,” she says quietly. “I thought I could treat them like regular people.”
“In junior high?” Miss Grandon picks up her purse. “Lady, we can’t even teach Huckleberry Finn to these kids.”
She heads for the doorway, but stops before she reaches it. “ You screwed up,” she says, “not me. I’m not the bad influence here.”
Then she swivels on the balls of her feet and is gone.
The bus pulls away in a blur of yellow. Katherine takes a seat behind the desk.
“You’ll have to excuse me for a second,” says Katherine A, standing. A laugh is sneaking into the corners of her mouth, and as her hand finds the door to the bathroom it escapes in a sudden snort.
Katherine rests her head on the desk, hooking her fingers around the edge of the raised front counter. She closes her eyes and small twists of color swim across the darkness. They look, these designs, like Chinese ideograms, like messages from some foreign language, and she wishes that she could decipher them. Should she have stopped herself from answering the boy in the army jacket? She doesn’t know. But there is a little knot of worry in her stomach suggesting that she should have.
She feels the touch of another hand against her own and when she lifts her head, she sees the man who was dropping books the other day behind Bound Periodicals. “I was watching earlier,” he says. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You should know that.”
Though she suspects she should be alarmed that this man is touching her, there is something calming in the pressure of his hand. It draws whatever fear she might feel away, sending it into the sky, in spite of which she says, “I’m not your mother.”
He gives a slow, thinking smile. “Okay.”
?
??Did you put a note on my windshield?”
“Of course.” He places his other hand on the counter. “But about those kids: this is what I wanted to say: you’re not a bad person—that woman was wrong. You simply confused them. Sometimes people don’t really want the answers they ask for. What they want is a reflex response—a laugh or a look of sympathy, even a punch in the face. They want to be recognized,” he says. “We’re all built that way, I’m afraid.”
Katherine doesn’t know what to say. These are kind words, the most compassionate she has heard in a long time, and she is taken aback that they have come from the mouth of this man.
“Thank you,” she begins, and then realizes that she doesn’t remember his name. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Woodrow,” he says. He retrieves his hand from atop her own and gives her a brisk salute good-bye.
As he leaves, she repeats his name: “Woodrow.”
Even after the sun has risen, Katherine lies in bed simply listening to the world for a time. She hears a squirrel chiseling at a nut outside her window. She hears the knocking of tennis shoes along the sidewalk. Her breathing is peaceful and steady, and her blood tingles warmly in her hands and feet. As she rests there, her bedroom seems to widen with light, and the quiet, steady motion of it makes her think of golden fields of grass, drifting in long waves in the breeze. It is Saturday.
Katherine has promised to take her granddaughter Robin out for ice cream, and after she has showered and dressed, she drives across town to Tanner’s house, skirting the edge of Lake Sodowsky to avoid traffic. When she reaches Chestnut Street, the neighborhood children are playing a game of street hockey with a tennis ball. They part before her car in that resolute, mannish way of boys pretending to be athletes.
She coasts to a stop beside Tanner’s mailbox. His car is parked in his driveway, and his yard has been freshly mowed. Her feet kick up loose shocks of grass as she walks to the door.
She can hear voices coming from inside the house. “What did I tell you?” her son shouts. Ever since he was a boy he has suffered from fits of improbable anger—fits that would seize him for a few minutes and then just boil away—but this is the first time Katherine has heard him in such a temper in his own home. “Your grandmother will be here any minute. Put the damn puzzle up and get your shoes on!”