Joyce Oates - Sourland

You’re wondering how we meet. People like us.

“Excuse me?” — near closing time at the library & suddenly he’s looming over me. His manner is friendly-anxious & his eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses are dark & shining like globules of oil. He smells of wettish wool, something chalky & acrid. He’s a neatly dressed man in his late thirties whom I have seen previously in the library, at a little distance. Or maybe I have seen him elsewhere in Barnegat. His breathing is oddly quickened & shallow as if he’s just run up a steep flight of stairs with a question only Jane Erdley Circulation can answer.

In fact Jane Erdley has been observing this person for the past hour — he’s tall, lanky-limbed & self-conscious — as if he’s ill at ease in his body — there’s a glare in his clean-shaven face, a look of intense excitement, yet dread — for the past hour, or more, he’s been sitting at the long polished-pine table in the periodicals & reference room across the foyer, covertly glancing over at me while reading, or pretending to read, a copy of Scientific American.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“I have a, a question — ”

“Yes?”

Vaguely I remember — in the way a near-forgotten dream is recalled not by an act of will but unwittingly — that I’d first glimpsed this man shortly after the New Year. He’d worn a dark woolen overcoat — another time, a hooded windbreaker — now it’s late winter he’s wearing a tweed herringbone sport coat frayed at the elbows, black corduroy trousers & white dress shirt open at the throat. He might be as old as fifty, or as young as thirty-five — his thick dark hair is threaded with filaments of gray & receding unevenly from his forehead.

On the previous occasions I’d sighted him in the library, he’d been watching me, too. But not so fixedly that I took note of him.

For others stare at me, often. Mostly men, though not exclusively men. Rarely do I take note, any longer.

When I was younger, yes. When I was a girl. But no longer.

Today has been an odd, ominous day. Icy pelting rain & few people came to the library & abruptly then by late afternoon the sky above the Atlantic Ocean cleared & now at dusk there is an eerily beautiful blue-violet tinge to the eastern sky outside the Barnegat library’s big bay window a quarter-mile from the shore & somehow it has happened, who knows why at this moment, the man in the herringbone coat has decided to break the silence between us.

“There is a writer — ‘Triptree’ — ”

“‘Tiptree.’”

“‘Tiptree.’ That’s the name?”

“‘James Tiptree, Jr.’ — in fact, Tiptree was a woman.”

“A woman! I guess I’d heard that — yes.”

How eager, his eyes! Behind the steel-rimmed glasses a terrible hunger in those eyes.

In this way we meet. In this way we talk. There’s both excitement between us & a strange sort of ease — a sense that we know each other already, & are re-meeting — reviving our feeling for each other. Later I will learn that Tyrell premeditated this exchange for some time. Tiptree is just a pretext for our meeting — of course. Any reader interested in Tiptree would know that “James Tiptree, Jr.” is the pseudonym of a female science-fiction writer of the 1950s, of considerable distinction — but Tyrell’s question is a shrewd one since as it happens I am the only librarian in the small Barnegat library who has actually read the few Tiptree books on our shelves & can discuss Tiptree’s stories with him as I check out other patrons at the circulation desk.

In the Barnegat Public Library where I’ve worked — in Circulation , in Reference , in Children & Young Adults — for the past two years, since graduating from library school, it’s common that visitors pause to speak with me like this; it’s common that they hope to establish some sort of bond with me, which I find repellent. With what absurd sobriety do people regard Jane Erdley — with what respect they speak to her — as if the youngest librarian on the Barnegat staff were composed of the most delicate crystal & not flesh, blood & bones, or afflicted by some hideous disease which causes the victim to waste away before your eyes & wasn’t a reasonably attractive & healthy young woman of twenty-six with long curly rust-colored hair, hazel-green eyes and skin flawed only by tiny tear-sized scars at my hairline — ninety-seven pounds, five-foot-three — small hard biceps & sculpted shoulder muscles just visible through my muslin blouses, silk shirts open at the throat & loose-crocheted tops. You might expect me to wear trousers like the other female librarians but I prefer skirts; from vintage clothing stores I’ve assembled a small but striking wardrobe of velvet, satin, lace dresses & shawls & in winter I am sure to wear stylish leather shoe-boots. In warm weather, quite short skirts: & why not?

Deliberately I’m not looking at the man in the frayed herringbone coat leaning his elbows on the counter as we speak together of the mysterious & entertaining fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. I’ve become so accustomed to checking out books — a mindless task like most of my librarian duties & therefore pleasant & soothing — that I can manage a conversation with one library patron while serving another — though sensing how this man is staring at me, turning a small object in his fingers — car keys? — compulsively, like dice; I can sense his unease, that my attention is divided — I’m withholding from him my fullest attention — when he has surprised himself with his boldness in speaking to me, at last. Clearly this is a reserved man — not shy perhaps but secretive, wary — the kind of person of whom it’s said he is a very private person — & now he’s feeling both reckless & helpless — resentful of the other library patrons who are taking up my time.

That sick-drowning look in the man’s eyes — it would be embarrassing of me to acknowledge.

This is one who wants me. Badly.

When he walks away I don’t glance after him — I am very busy checking out books. I assume that he has exited the library but no — there he is in the front lobby a few minutes later, peering into glass display cases at papier-mâché dinosaurs made by grade school children, bestselling gardening books & romance novels.

How strange! Or maybe not so strange.

He isn’t looking back at me. He’s determined not to look. But finally he weakens, he can’t resist, a sidelong glance which I give no indication of having seen.

Don’t look at me. Try not to look at me.

Go away. Go home. You disgust me!

Much disgusts me. For a long time I was encouraged to count myself blessed , for of course it could have been much worse , but in recent years, no.

Since graduating from library school at Rutgers. Since having to surrender my life as a student, a privileged sort of person in a university setting in which, though never numerous, others like myself were not uncommon; that large & varied subspecies of the disabled of which I am but a single specimen & by no means the most extreme.

Wanting to say to the somber faces & staring eyes Save your God damned pity for the truly piteous. Not me.

This I resent: though I could be trained to drive a motor vehicle — with mechanical adjustments for my disability, of course — I’m forbidden by the Motor Vehicle Department of the State of New Jersey which will not grant me a driver’s license. How ridiculous this is, & unjust! — when any idiot with two legs & half a brain can get a license in New Jersey. And so I’m dependent upon accepting rides with co-workers or taking the shore bus.