“But . . .”
Her lips pursed and she leaned forward. “I’m married with two kids, young lady—kids I would murder Jesus for—with a husband who plays in a band and rocks my world and is twice as hot as any guy you’ll meet before you’re twenty-five. What kind of question was that?”
“I was kind of messing with you.”
“Well, you need to get better at it if you want to mess with me.” She got up and walked behind the counter for a refill. “So you like books.”
“I do. A lot.”
“What do you like about them?”
“I don’t know . . . you know . . . they tell the truth. At least the characters do.”
“Want to know what got me interested in being a librarian?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “The Color Purple.”
“You became a librarian because of a movie?”
She laughs. “It was a book first. One you might really like.”
“What did you like about it?”
“Did you watch the movie?”
“On cable.”
“Then you know the general story. I guess I read it at the right time. It didn’t matter that Celie was an uneducated black girl living in the south in the nineteen-thirties with a life completely different from mine. It mattered that she stood up. She took off her mask and stood up.” She frowned at me, like she was trying to decide something. Then, “I was a foster kid, and I grew up scared, trying to be good just so I could stay.”
“You were a foster kid?”
She nodded. “So are you, I’ll bet,” but again, didn’t wait for an answer. “I felt so good after reading that book, I wanted to stand up, too, and write stories just like it. Trouble was, I couldn’t write for shit, if you’ll pardon the expression, so the next best thing was to find more books like it, read them, and hand them out.”
“How’d you know I’m a foster kid?”
“Same way you recognize other kids like you.”
So I’ve been part of our group for three years, and when I think of all the things I have going for me, it would be one of the last I’d be willing to give up. It’s like, the world you have is the world you have, but books are the secret tunnel to the world you want.
Today Sharon asks us to introduce ourselves, because we have a new member, a tall, sandy-haired kid who doesn’t seem to blink, but he also doesn’t look right at anybody.
“Folks,” she says, “this is Seth. Seth assures me he is a voracious reader who will be instantly willing and capable to add to our discussions. Did I get that right, Seth?”
“Most certainly,” Seth says. His voice kind of booms.
We start clockwise around the circle giving just our names and the titles of one or two of our favorite books. Sharon knows anyone who stays any amount of time will come to their own conclusions about each of us and doesn’t like to waste time on what kind of car or animal we’d be.
Judging from his shifting glances Seth will remember Maddy for her outstanding cleavage and the fact that she’s sitting next to him and smells really good.
Sharon says, “Who wants to bring Seth up-to-date?”
Layton says, “I’ll do it.”
Maddy says, “Speak up, Lay. Make your voice like your pecs.”
Blood rushes into Layton’s face like he was flipped on his head. Maddy messes with him all the time. If he does make his voice like his pecs, it will be loud and clear. Layton is a dedicated non-steroid body-builder who’s almost as shy as he is built, and though he never comes in show-offy tank tops, almost any T-shirt fits him like a coat of paint. “We’re discovering heroes,” he says. “For a while it looked like we’d never actually start reading another book because no one could agree on what that was, but then Sharon said we were all right—as in correct—and gave us a list of a hundred books to find them in.”
“Which were just suggestions,” Maddy says. “We can choose from that list or any book in any bookstore that can get us enough copies.”
“So,” Seth says, “any book.”
Sharon nods. “Fiction, nonfiction, biography, science, history, you choose. We’ve fallen headlong into print looking for heroes.” She hands Seth a sheet of her hundred picks. “The idea being, if we define them in print we might also find them in real life.”
“And decide if we have any personal characteristics that could define us as heroes,” Layton says.
Seth glances quickly at the list and sets it aside. “I think you will all ascertain in very short order that I am not a hero.”
“We’ll see,” Sharon says, then looks to the rest of us. “If I remember correctly, and I always do, the final statement last week was, ‘There are no heroes. Only heroic acts.’ Did I get that right, Oscar?”
Oscar says, in his captivating accent, “Word for brilliant word.”
“Go.”
Oscar nods. “Like I said last time, choose any hero you wish, give me a little time, and I’ll find something in his or her history that is definitely not heroic.” Oscar came here from Cape Town, South Africa, several years ago, and always brings a different slant on any conversation. He was born “in the middle” of a black South African mother and a Dutch father, which, if you live in South Africa, creates an interesting life for you.
Mark says, “What about Jesus?” Very little of what we discuss doesn’t go back through Nazareth for Mark.
“Dude,” Oscar says, “I’m talking about somebody real.”
“Nobody more real than Jesus,” Mark says. Mark’s what you might call an enigma—dresses head to foot in camo—head to knees in the summer—and holds tight to his Christian beliefs, though he never pushes them on you like some people. He also acts on them.
“Pinocchio is more real than Jesus,” Oscar says back. “But let’s remove Jesus and Muhammed and Buddha and Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi from the equation for now. If you consider so-called heroes we can trace, whether
