A Library Story
Erica Lansdown
Both hands on the armrests of her chair, Mary leans the mass of her torso forward and back, forward, and back, once more, and then with a girlish grunt, struggles to her feet. Rosa Verano, the new children’s librarian, has arrived. Mary heard Viet, the clerk at the circulation desk behind her, greeting the woman. She’s a few minutes early, and Mary puts a little mental checkmark--ping! —next to “punctuality” on the evaluation she’ll be doing on the new hire six months from now.
Mary is halfway to the circ desk to welcome the new librarian when she spots Daziyah watching her with that look on her face. Daziyah’s name is pronounced like desire but with an attitude, a swerve, and Lord knows the girl has both. In spades. Eight years old going on twenty-three, not much more than four feet tall, all bony elbows and knees, dark black skin, a multitude of short braids, each with a brightly colored barrette at the end, sprouting from her head, her mouth hanging open in a half-smile. She had clearly been watching the gymnastics, the spectacle, of Mary rising from her chair.
“What?” Mary says to her.
“What yourself, Miss Mary?” Daziyah says.
Did she say what yourself or watch yourself. No time to figure it out now. Here’s the new librarian.
Rosa Verano is lovely, young, with long wavy black hair, lively eyes, a trim figure, and a firm handshake. The children are going to love her. And Mary needs her. The position had been open for nearly a month and Mary has had to do everything that whole time but were they paying her both salaries? Of course not. Rosa speaks Spanish which is another great asset.
The following day, before the branch opens, she and Rosa have a meeting in Mary’s office and it is decided that Rosa—Miss Rosa, as the children will be calling her—will get some good programming going for the kids and Mary will continue ordering the children’s books while Miss Rosa gets to know the branch and staff and patrons. Rosa has that new librarian zeal. They are located right across the street from an elementary school in a neighborhood where the kids have nowhere else to go after school because no one can afford childcare, so what else are they supposed to do? Where else are they supposed to go?
“We’re open!” Viet calls, unlocks the doors, and a couple dozen adults walk to the computers as quickly as they can without actually running. Several of them carry large grimy bags, some of them bigger than they’re supposed to be allowed to bring in, but under Mary’s direction, the staff lets it slide. The patrons know to wad and wedge the bags well under the computer stations to avoid tripping hazards. How people live without internet, Mary cannot fathom, but she gets it. Jobs—especially without a college degree or even a high school diploma, with maybe a stint in jail on the resume—are hard to come by. Rent, food, all of it adds up. Mary lives in a house that’s all paid for. Her father had done that—paid off the house—and then drove up to a woodsy area on Mount Baldy and shot himself. He left no note.
He’d never had time to come see her ice skate at their local rink, which had been her great passion when she was seven, eight. Instead, when he came home from the office, unless it was very late, she would rush to him and he would glide her around the living room while she posed in her ice skating positions—a toe loop, a scratch spin, a layback. And so, what Mary holds close, is the memory of those evenings when she imagined the two of them in a dark forest, flat ice glistening below their feet and a million crystalline stars above.
Mornings are easy, with just a few requests for assistance on the computer, a few phone reference questions. Miss Rosa is preparing a craft for the children later that day. It’s a bright, warm spring morning and Viet, who suffers a bit from claustrophobia, has opened the front doors to the neighborhood.
A couple of hours later, from across the street, the final bell rings, a low muffled buzzing. The adult patrons sigh, pick up the pace of their tasks on the computers. Within moments, the street between the library and the school are gridlocked with the cars of the parents that do pick up their children, the sidewalks are gridlocked with pregnant moms and men with deeply lined faces wearing leather cowboy hats, uncles and cousins, carrying construction paper art projects and homework packets, pulling children along by the hand. There’s a man with a cart that sells ices made from fresh pineapple and mango and watermelon, and another that sells cobs of corn slathered with mayonnaise and chili, garlic, and lime. Children and adults mass around these carts like hornets on a nest.
When Mary comes back from lunch, Miss Rosa checks in with her and then announces, “Boys and girls, it’s time for the craft! Anyone interested, meet me in the auditorium.”
There are at least forty children in the library and all but three of them (the three who are hopelessly addicted to playing Minecraft on the computer) begin running toward the back of the library to the auditorium.
“Hey, HEY!” Mary roars. She’s so upset it takes only two “oomphs” to get up out of her chair. “NO running!” she yells. Viet comes out from behind the circ desk and glares at the kids, arms akimbo.
Mary, facing the children, most of whom have paused, can feel the muscles in her hands and wrists and can’t stop it. The flipping, she thinks of it, her hands as if she’s treading water. She knew it would happen because it always happens when she’s upset or frustrated but there is nothing she can do about it.
The children stare. Daziyah, standing just a few feet from Mary, stares at her, watching Mary’s fat wrists and chunky fingers flick at the air. It’s defiance Mary sees in the girl’s eyes now, her head tipped back a little, as if she’s looking down her nose at Mary. Who’s telling me I can’t run?
Daziyah loves crafts. She doesn’t love much else. She loves her dad, but he’s been in jail for so long, he almost doesn’t count. She loves their dog, a pit bull named Hank. She tells Rosa the jury’s out—a phrase she just learned from her third-grade teacher—on her mom.
The day they do finger painting, Daziyah puts a different color dab of paint on each of her ten fingers and the result is glorious and Miss Rosa tells her so. Fireworks on a black construction paper sky.
Then Miss Rosa brings in her Nintendo Wii so the kids can dance, get some exercise, both before and after doing the crafts. It’s turning into a regular afterschool clubhouse, but as long as Miss Rosa runs the whole thing and keeps the door between the auditorium and the library closed from the noise, Mary holds her tongue.
In late May, Miss Rosa approaches Mary. School will be out in a couple of weeks. What happens to the children who get the free breakfast and lunch at school?
What does she mean, what happens? Mary thinks. They eat at home, she assumes. Miss Rosa has printed out some pages from the American Library Association website.
“What if we provide lunch here?” Miss Rosa says. “In the auditorium? I’ve been reading through this material, and it seems a lot of kids just won’t get anything to eat in neighborhoods like ours.”
Mary sighs, clicks save on the book review she’s writing. All the librarians love the reviews she presents at book meetings. “Sounds like a lot of work,” she says. “And I doubt it would be approved by the Health Department.”
“I actually did some research,” Miss Rosa says.
Of course you did, Mary thinks. Oh, these new hires and their enthusiasm.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Miss Rosa continues, “But, yeah, apparently quite a few library systems are starting to participate. I’d be happy to take the reins.”
Well, if that’s the case, then fine. If approved, it’ll be a feather in their cap for the branch, something Mary can highlight in the Monthly Report.
Miss Rosa hustles to get the free lunch program together. There’s paperwork to complete, flyers to be distributed, signage to post, training for the staff who’ll be serving the lunches. Viet’s on board and Miss Rosa is so grateful. She wonders at times if she’s taken on too much, especially when Mary makes it clear she is not going to be involved at all.
“Don’t worry,” Viet says, “I’m going to have way less of other things to do after school’s out. Mark my words.”
Sure enough, once the school year ends, there’s no longer the avalanche of kids coming over to the library each afternoon. In fact, now, the busiest time of the day, is the hour of the free lunch and even that doesn’t bring as many children as Miss Rosa had anticipated. Twenty to thirty kids and a handful of moms, plus two dads, get in line each day at the door of the auditorium to be handed their lunches by Viet and Miss Rosa. They walk quietly to one of the long tables, eat, and leave. Very few stay for the story times Miss Rosa has planned or sign up for the Summer Reading Program.
On the third day of free lunch, Mary goes into the auditorium to take a photo for the Monthly Report. Everyone looks up from their meals and she feels terribly conspicuous. Seeing them all eating seems oddly intimate. There’s Daziyah with a burrito in one hand, a stick of celery in the other. When she sees the look on Mary’s face, she says, “They taste good together! The crunchy and the smooth.”
Mary lifts her phone and takes a few photos.
“You gonna have a lunch?” Daziyah calls from her table.
Mary stares at her and there are the shining eyes, the half-smile that confirms to Mary absolutely that the girl is making fun of her. She’s a joke to this girl, a rich, fat, white woman who has never needed a free lunch in her life. Just a big fat joke.
“You could have some!” Daziyah calls out as Mary turns to go, still with that smile. She takes a bite of the burrito from one hand, a bite of the celery stick from the other as Mary scurries out of the auditorium.
As the summer winds down, the number of kids showing up for free lunch declines. Some of the families go to Mexico for a couple of weeks before school starts again. Mary doesn’t see Daziyah at all and the days are long and dull without the children. Mary misses them.
And then, on the second Tuesday in September, it all begins again, the throngs of children, the bumper-to-bumper traffic between the library and the school, the food carts. The library staff feels like they are waking from a much needed but stultifying nap.
That first day, Mary comes back from her lunch break and surveys the scene, relieved. Lots of children, many of them looking exhausted, the first early morning wake-up in three months taking its toll.
There’s a small cluster of girls hanging out next to Miss Rosa’s desk. Mary marches over to shoo them away so the woman can go on her own lunch break. The girls are unusually subdued, and Miss Rosa looks pale.
“Girls,” Mary says. “Time to let Miss Rosa go to lunch now.” She makes a sort of scooping motion with her heavy arms, hoping it doesn’t look like she has flippers for hands.
“No,” Miss Rosa says, “I’m…okay. I’ll go in a few minutes.”
The woman really does look discombobulated. Is she sick? What’s going on?
Mary surveys the circle of girls and sees Daziyah. There’s something…confusing about her. The girl stares up at Mary, the defiant look, and Mary holds her gaze and, in that moment, it feels as if her brain refuses to process what her eyes are seeing or maybe her eyes have ceased to communicate with her brain. This is a joke. Has to be. The girl will turn around and throw off the tape or bandage or whatever all that is, and her arm will unfurl and Daziyah and her little posse will burst into great laughter at how she’s fooled Mary again.
But no. Eventually Mary’s brain catches up because there is no joke. The girl’s right arm is gone.
Daziyah finally looks away from Mary and walks nonchalantly to the shelf where the Wimpy Kid books are or, where they would be if they didn’t all get checked out all the time. Mary turns to face Miss Rosa.
“What happened?” she demands in a whisper.
Miss Rosa speaks, her voice low, her eyes cutting to the girls that still stand by her desk. “Hank,” she says.
“What?” Mary says.
“Their dog,” Miss Rosa says.
“I saw the whole thing,” one of the girls whispers, her eyes huge in her heart-shaped face. This girl pronounces each word carefully as some children do, trying to sound more adult, carefully analyzing the facts. “I don’t think he meant to do it, I mean, I don’t think he knew what he was doing.” Each word carefully enunciated, her eyes narrow as, for a moment, she sees nothing but the memory. Then grow round again. “That he was…hurting her.”
In the staff kitchen, at the refrigerator, Mary pulls out the snack she’d packed that morning for later in the day. She needs it now. It’s celery with peanut butter (the crunchy and the smooth). She leans back against the refrigerator and bites into the celery.
How could her parents have let this happen? How? She’s so furious. She tries not to picture the scene. Did the girl pass out? She must have. So much blood. She feels for the dog, too. It’s never their fault. Someone trained him to be that way. Had Daziyah done something to provoke him?
Still.
She takes another bite of the celery and peanut butter, looks out the tiny, barred window of the staff kitchen. She doesn’t want it to but the thought creeps in. Now will you behave? Now have you learned a thing or two?
Still.
Eight years old. Missing her right arm forever.
The crafts. Mary almost drops the rest of the celery with peanut butter on the floor. How is the girl going to do the crafts now? Mary sighs, washes her hands in the little kitchen sink.
On Wednesday, Miss Rosa starts again with the crafts and the Wii dance games and the kids are ecstatic. The adults, trying to get applications completed and bills paid, and email sent, breathe a sigh of relief at the sudden quiet in the library, the low hum of the music and muffled squeals seeping from under the auditorium door not a problem.
Mary works on her book order. She selects two copies of the newest Captain Underpants book and then ups it to four. She’s seen Daziyah in the library each day since school began again. She seems fine, though when Mary saw her up at the circ desk talking to Viet about something, the girl had her right shoulder dipped, as if trying to hide the fact of her missing arm. Viet knows, of course. The whole staff knows. She clicks on the tab of new nonfiction books, scrolls down, stops at a cover with a little blonde girl in a pink skirt, pink leotard, silver ice skates. I Love Ice Skating! it’s called. Right.
Mary heaves herself out of her chair, glances around the library. The adults on the library computers are focused on their work. Others, at tables around the branch, are enclosed in their own worlds of their laptops, wound around with headsets, phone chargers, external drives. She will see if Daziyah needs help with the craft. She will offer. If the girl says no, that’s fine, too.
She makes her way laboriously to the auditorium, opens the door. Miss Rosa, across the room in the corner opposite the door, moves among several children, looks up and smiles, nods to Mary. The children are painting pine cones and sprinkling them with glitter which Mary knows will sparkle in the carpeting for months to come. Another dozen children are on the side of the room close to the door, dancing, following the steps on the big white screen. Miss Rosa has turned off the ceiling lights in this part of the room, but still Mary spots an explosion of braids, each with a brightly colored clip at the end. Daziyah turns, mid step. She smiles that smile, the taunting one, and then calls to Mary.
“C’mon!” she shouts over the noise of the music. “Dance with us!”
Daziyah furrows her brow into a more serious expression, beckons with her left arm. “C’mon!”
Mary takes a step toward the girl.
“That’s right!” Daziyah calls out. She moves closer to Mary and then looks up at the screen following the steps, points with her left arm. “Just do what she’s doing,” she shouts and goes back to her own dancing. Mary tilts a little this way and that. She extends a foot. She bends.
In the dark, the pine cones shimmer.
Erica Lansdown
Both hands on the armrests of her chair, Mary leans the mass of her torso forward and back, forward, and back, once more, and then with a girlish grunt, struggles to her feet. Rosa Verano, the new children’s librarian, has arrived. Mary heard Viet, the clerk at the circulation desk behind her, greeting the woman. She’s a few minutes early, and Mary puts a little mental checkmark--ping! —next to “punctuality” on the evaluation she’ll be doing on the new hire six months from now.
Mary is halfway to the circ desk to welcome the new librarian when she spots Daziyah watching her with that look on her face. Daziyah’s name is pronounced like desire but with an attitude, a swerve, and Lord knows the girl has both. In spades. Eight years old going on twenty-three, not much more than four feet tall, all bony elbows and knees, dark black skin, a multitude of short braids, each with a brightly colored barrette at the end, sprouting from her head, her mouth hanging open in a half-smile. She had clearly been watching the gymnastics, the spectacle, of Mary rising from her chair.
“What?” Mary says to her.
“What yourself, Miss Mary?” Daziyah says.
Did she say what yourself or watch yourself. No time to figure it out now. Here’s the new librarian.
Rosa Verano is lovely, young, with long wavy black hair, lively eyes, a trim figure, and a firm handshake. The children are going to love her. And Mary needs her. The position had been open for nearly a month and Mary has had to do everything that whole time but were they paying her both salaries? Of course not. Rosa speaks Spanish which is another great asset.
The following day, before the branch opens, she and Rosa have a meeting in Mary’s office and it is decided that Rosa—Miss Rosa, as the children will be calling her—will get some good programming going for the kids and Mary will continue ordering the children’s books while Miss Rosa gets to know the branch and staff and patrons. Rosa has that new librarian zeal. They are located right across the street from an elementary school in a neighborhood where the kids have nowhere else to go after school because no one can afford childcare, so what else are they supposed to do? Where else are they supposed to go?
“We’re open!” Viet calls, unlocks the doors, and a couple dozen adults walk to the computers as quickly as they can without actually running. Several of them carry large grimy bags, some of them bigger than they’re supposed to be allowed to bring in, but under Mary’s direction, the staff lets it slide. The patrons know to wad and wedge the bags well under the computer stations to avoid tripping hazards. How people live without internet, Mary cannot fathom, but she gets it. Jobs—especially without a college degree or even a high school diploma, with maybe a stint in jail on the resume—are hard to come by. Rent, food, all of it adds up. Mary lives in a house that’s all paid for. Her father had done that—paid off the house—and then drove up to a woodsy area on Mount Baldy and shot himself. He left no note.
He’d never had time to come see her ice skate at their local rink, which had been her great passion when she was seven, eight. Instead, when he came home from the office, unless it was very late, she would rush to him and he would glide her around the living room while she posed in her ice skating positions—a toe loop, a scratch spin, a layback. And so, what Mary holds close, is the memory of those evenings when she imagined the two of them in a dark forest, flat ice glistening below their feet and a million crystalline stars above.
Mornings are easy, with just a few requests for assistance on the computer, a few phone reference questions. Miss Rosa is preparing a craft for the children later that day. It’s a bright, warm spring morning and Viet, who suffers a bit from claustrophobia, has opened the front doors to the neighborhood.
A couple of hours later, from across the street, the final bell rings, a low muffled buzzing. The adult patrons sigh, pick up the pace of their tasks on the computers. Within moments, the street between the library and the school are gridlocked with the cars of the parents that do pick up their children, the sidewalks are gridlocked with pregnant moms and men with deeply lined faces wearing leather cowboy hats, uncles and cousins, carrying construction paper art projects and homework packets, pulling children along by the hand. There’s a man with a cart that sells ices made from fresh pineapple and mango and watermelon, and another that sells cobs of corn slathered with mayonnaise and chili, garlic, and lime. Children and adults mass around these carts like hornets on a nest.
When Mary comes back from lunch, Miss Rosa checks in with her and then announces, “Boys and girls, it’s time for the craft! Anyone interested, meet me in the auditorium.”
There are at least forty children in the library and all but three of them (the three who are hopelessly addicted to playing Minecraft on the computer) begin running toward the back of the library to the auditorium.
“Hey, HEY!” Mary roars. She’s so upset it takes only two “oomphs” to get up out of her chair. “NO running!” she yells. Viet comes out from behind the circ desk and glares at the kids, arms akimbo.
Mary, facing the children, most of whom have paused, can feel the muscles in her hands and wrists and can’t stop it. The flipping, she thinks of it, her hands as if she’s treading water. She knew it would happen because it always happens when she’s upset or frustrated but there is nothing she can do about it.
The children stare. Daziyah, standing just a few feet from Mary, stares at her, watching Mary’s fat wrists and chunky fingers flick at the air. It’s defiance Mary sees in the girl’s eyes now, her head tipped back a little, as if she’s looking down her nose at Mary. Who’s telling me I can’t run?
Daziyah loves crafts. She doesn’t love much else. She loves her dad, but he’s been in jail for so long, he almost doesn’t count. She loves their dog, a pit bull named Hank. She tells Rosa the jury’s out—a phrase she just learned from her third-grade teacher—on her mom.
The day they do finger painting, Daziyah puts a different color dab of paint on each of her ten fingers and the result is glorious and Miss Rosa tells her so. Fireworks on a black construction paper sky.
Then Miss Rosa brings in her Nintendo Wii so the kids can dance, get some exercise, both before and after doing the crafts. It’s turning into a regular afterschool clubhouse, but as long as Miss Rosa runs the whole thing and keeps the door between the auditorium and the library closed from the noise, Mary holds her tongue.
In late May, Miss Rosa approaches Mary. School will be out in a couple of weeks. What happens to the children who get the free breakfast and lunch at school?
What does she mean, what happens? Mary thinks. They eat at home, she assumes. Miss Rosa has printed out some pages from the American Library Association website.
“What if we provide lunch here?” Miss Rosa says. “In the auditorium? I’ve been reading through this material, and it seems a lot of kids just won’t get anything to eat in neighborhoods like ours.”
Mary sighs, clicks save on the book review she’s writing. All the librarians love the reviews she presents at book meetings. “Sounds like a lot of work,” she says. “And I doubt it would be approved by the Health Department.”
“I actually did some research,” Miss Rosa says.
Of course you did, Mary thinks. Oh, these new hires and their enthusiasm.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Miss Rosa continues, “But, yeah, apparently quite a few library systems are starting to participate. I’d be happy to take the reins.”
Well, if that’s the case, then fine. If approved, it’ll be a feather in their cap for the branch, something Mary can highlight in the Monthly Report.
Miss Rosa hustles to get the free lunch program together. There’s paperwork to complete, flyers to be distributed, signage to post, training for the staff who’ll be serving the lunches. Viet’s on board and Miss Rosa is so grateful. She wonders at times if she’s taken on too much, especially when Mary makes it clear she is not going to be involved at all.
“Don’t worry,” Viet says, “I’m going to have way less of other things to do after school’s out. Mark my words.”
Sure enough, once the school year ends, there’s no longer the avalanche of kids coming over to the library each afternoon. In fact, now, the busiest time of the day, is the hour of the free lunch and even that doesn’t bring as many children as Miss Rosa had anticipated. Twenty to thirty kids and a handful of moms, plus two dads, get in line each day at the door of the auditorium to be handed their lunches by Viet and Miss Rosa. They walk quietly to one of the long tables, eat, and leave. Very few stay for the story times Miss Rosa has planned or sign up for the Summer Reading Program.
On the third day of free lunch, Mary goes into the auditorium to take a photo for the Monthly Report. Everyone looks up from their meals and she feels terribly conspicuous. Seeing them all eating seems oddly intimate. There’s Daziyah with a burrito in one hand, a stick of celery in the other. When she sees the look on Mary’s face, she says, “They taste good together! The crunchy and the smooth.”
Mary lifts her phone and takes a few photos.
“You gonna have a lunch?” Daziyah calls from her table.
Mary stares at her and there are the shining eyes, the half-smile that confirms to Mary absolutely that the girl is making fun of her. She’s a joke to this girl, a rich, fat, white woman who has never needed a free lunch in her life. Just a big fat joke.
“You could have some!” Daziyah calls out as Mary turns to go, still with that smile. She takes a bite of the burrito from one hand, a bite of the celery stick from the other as Mary scurries out of the auditorium.
As the summer winds down, the number of kids showing up for free lunch declines. Some of the families go to Mexico for a couple of weeks before school starts again. Mary doesn’t see Daziyah at all and the days are long and dull without the children. Mary misses them.
And then, on the second Tuesday in September, it all begins again, the throngs of children, the bumper-to-bumper traffic between the library and the school, the food carts. The library staff feels like they are waking from a much needed but stultifying nap.
That first day, Mary comes back from her lunch break and surveys the scene, relieved. Lots of children, many of them looking exhausted, the first early morning wake-up in three months taking its toll.
There’s a small cluster of girls hanging out next to Miss Rosa’s desk. Mary marches over to shoo them away so the woman can go on her own lunch break. The girls are unusually subdued, and Miss Rosa looks pale.
“Girls,” Mary says. “Time to let Miss Rosa go to lunch now.” She makes a sort of scooping motion with her heavy arms, hoping it doesn’t look like she has flippers for hands.
“No,” Miss Rosa says, “I’m…okay. I’ll go in a few minutes.”
The woman really does look discombobulated. Is she sick? What’s going on?
Mary surveys the circle of girls and sees Daziyah. There’s something…confusing about her. The girl stares up at Mary, the defiant look, and Mary holds her gaze and, in that moment, it feels as if her brain refuses to process what her eyes are seeing or maybe her eyes have ceased to communicate with her brain. This is a joke. Has to be. The girl will turn around and throw off the tape or bandage or whatever all that is, and her arm will unfurl and Daziyah and her little posse will burst into great laughter at how she’s fooled Mary again.
But no. Eventually Mary’s brain catches up because there is no joke. The girl’s right arm is gone.
Daziyah finally looks away from Mary and walks nonchalantly to the shelf where the Wimpy Kid books are or, where they would be if they didn’t all get checked out all the time. Mary turns to face Miss Rosa.
“What happened?” she demands in a whisper.
Miss Rosa speaks, her voice low, her eyes cutting to the girls that still stand by her desk. “Hank,” she says.
“What?” Mary says.
“Their dog,” Miss Rosa says.
“I saw the whole thing,” one of the girls whispers, her eyes huge in her heart-shaped face. This girl pronounces each word carefully as some children do, trying to sound more adult, carefully analyzing the facts. “I don’t think he meant to do it, I mean, I don’t think he knew what he was doing.” Each word carefully enunciated, her eyes narrow as, for a moment, she sees nothing but the memory. Then grow round again. “That he was…hurting her.”
In the staff kitchen, at the refrigerator, Mary pulls out the snack she’d packed that morning for later in the day. She needs it now. It’s celery with peanut butter (the crunchy and the smooth). She leans back against the refrigerator and bites into the celery.
How could her parents have let this happen? How? She’s so furious. She tries not to picture the scene. Did the girl pass out? She must have. So much blood. She feels for the dog, too. It’s never their fault. Someone trained him to be that way. Had Daziyah done something to provoke him?
Still.
She takes another bite of the celery and peanut butter, looks out the tiny, barred window of the staff kitchen. She doesn’t want it to but the thought creeps in. Now will you behave? Now have you learned a thing or two?
Still.
Eight years old. Missing her right arm forever.
The crafts. Mary almost drops the rest of the celery with peanut butter on the floor. How is the girl going to do the crafts now? Mary sighs, washes her hands in the little kitchen sink.
On Wednesday, Miss Rosa starts again with the crafts and the Wii dance games and the kids are ecstatic. The adults, trying to get applications completed and bills paid, and email sent, breathe a sigh of relief at the sudden quiet in the library, the low hum of the music and muffled squeals seeping from under the auditorium door not a problem.
Mary works on her book order. She selects two copies of the newest Captain Underpants book and then ups it to four. She’s seen Daziyah in the library each day since school began again. She seems fine, though when Mary saw her up at the circ desk talking to Viet about something, the girl had her right shoulder dipped, as if trying to hide the fact of her missing arm. Viet knows, of course. The whole staff knows. She clicks on the tab of new nonfiction books, scrolls down, stops at a cover with a little blonde girl in a pink skirt, pink leotard, silver ice skates. I Love Ice Skating! it’s called. Right.
Mary heaves herself out of her chair, glances around the library. The adults on the library computers are focused on their work. Others, at tables around the branch, are enclosed in their own worlds of their laptops, wound around with headsets, phone chargers, external drives. She will see if Daziyah needs help with the craft. She will offer. If the girl says no, that’s fine, too.
She makes her way laboriously to the auditorium, opens the door. Miss Rosa, across the room in the corner opposite the door, moves among several children, looks up and smiles, nods to Mary. The children are painting pine cones and sprinkling them with glitter which Mary knows will sparkle in the carpeting for months to come. Another dozen children are on the side of the room close to the door, dancing, following the steps on the big white screen. Miss Rosa has turned off the ceiling lights in this part of the room, but still Mary spots an explosion of braids, each with a brightly colored clip at the end. Daziyah turns, mid step. She smiles that smile, the taunting one, and then calls to Mary.
“C’mon!” she shouts over the noise of the music. “Dance with us!”
Daziyah furrows her brow into a more serious expression, beckons with her left arm. “C’mon!”
Mary takes a step toward the girl.
“That’s right!” Daziyah calls out. She moves closer to Mary and then looks up at the screen following the steps, points with her left arm. “Just do what she’s doing,” she shouts and goes back to her own dancing. Mary tilts a little this way and that. She extends a foot. She bends.
In the dark, the pine cones shimmer.
