We had book club last night at my house. Right on schedule, about half an hour before anyone came over I decided I wanted to just turn off all the lights and lock the door and hoped people wouldn’t show. I feel like that on the rare occasions when I actually do have people over, so that was no surprise, but this time around the feeling was compounded by the very nature of the evening and the preparations I’d made for it.
I’d suggested last month that we shake things up a little in book club by talking about our favorite kids’ books instead of reading the same grown-up book and talking about that. People could bring their own or borrow from my collection, which I brought out from the bookcase in my room and arranged in a pleasing configuration on the coffee table in the front room for easy perusal. I hadn’t paid much attention that particular section of my library since I moved; I knew where to find A Swiftly Tilting Planet if I had to (and you know, sometimes you have to) but I hadn’t taken a recent inventory lately. I was sitting on the couch with my old copy of Hans Christian Andersen (thinking, “Damn, this stuff is intense. The Little Match Girl full on freezes to death.”) when the doorbell rang, and it was only the knowledge that the people who were coming over also like to read and to talk about reading that persuaded me to open it.
As expected, we talked about From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and how it’s the best book ever (and I only read it for the first time like two years ago, can you believe it?) and how great Harriet The Spy is (which I’ve never read but which Gael informed us she loves so much that she when she misplaced her copy from when she was a kid, she had to get a new old one from eBay because the newer editions don’t have the right cover) and how after Anne Shirley married Gilbert Blythe the whole thing is a little less interesting, and how we sometimes envied kids in books whose parents’ died because they always seemed to have all the adventures. Sweet Valley High came up not a little, as did Nancy Clue, Nancy Drew’s lesbian mystery-solving alter-ego. Everyone there loved to read as kids and loves to read now and so it was a really good conversation all around. Plus there was home-made mac and cheese and caramel apples and lavender-scented cheese, so, you know, perfect night for me, pretty much.
I talked about a book called Many Moons, by none other than James Thurber. It’s a little fairy tale about a sick princess who wants the moon and who finally gets it in the form of a little circle of gold on a chain around her neck, courtesy of the court jester. I played the princess in a local university adaptation of the book when I was about ten and I always loved the book and the Moonlight Sonata associated with it. I still have the wire and paper crown from the play, hanging over my bed. I read the last couple of pages of the book aloud to book club (the members of which were very tolerant of my apparent need to emulate the nice lady on Reading Rainbow) and thought about how the people doing the play specifically wanted a non-blonde princess, and how my friend Marah came to see me in it and how she gave me the copy of the book I have now for my twenty-first birthday.
Also, a couple times, when people were talking about the place reading had had in their lives as kids, I had this weird, very visceral image of the branch library on the island when I was a kid. It was built when I was in fourth grade or so, in that weird in-between time when you’re still obviously a kid but you’re not a little kid anymore, if that makes sense. I think they’re calling those kids “tweens” now or something but I think you’re just the essence of kid-ness when you’re nine and ten. The big thing when the library opened was to go do your homework there after school until your mom got home from work, and I remember thinking that was so cool, so much like being in the far-off neverland of high school. Going to the library to study! Awesome!
Anyway, a couple times when people were talking about books they loved, I could see the library the way it was in the eighties so clearly, the tables in the kids’s section, the water fountain that I stopped to drink from every single time I went, the view of the little pond (rumored to hold a very small alligator) from the coveted window seat. It’s a really small library and I’m sure the librarians and the other patrons were annoyed by the simmering children’s room full of eighties’ kids in their jelly shoes and goomies, whispering and sneaking around and looking up “boobie” in the encyclopedias. It was cool and quiet there and I loved the feeling of sitting and reading any book I wanted, of being away from home and away from school and feeling independent with my very own library card.
I just realized, however, when I see that image it’s from my current height, looking down…I’m seeing it as an adult, from the outside. Last night we kept saying that certain books are so brilliant because they capture exactly the tenor of childhood, of being seven or ten or thirteen. I thought about being a kid and wanting to write books when I grew up, and vowing to myself that I would always remember what it was like to be at that age and that I would never take the adults’ side. I haven’t kept that vow. I have sympathy, now, for the harassed librarians and the overworked teachers and the tired parents. I can see images from my childhood very clearly sometimes (the banyan on the far side of the school playing field and the long, long walk back to the classroom; the beach reconstruction project and the old rocks by the hotel walls before they were covered with sand; the way the school smelled; ballet practice behind the stage curtains and the story about that one girl who cracked her head open on the double bars) but I have a hard time really being that little girl anymore. I couldn’t write a story from her perspective and I can’t always empathize with her plights…like, damn, who cares if your mom is taking you to the mall? You are twelve and you should be grateful your mom is driving you anywhere at all, you know. Sometimes it does really feel like many moons ago. It’s just those little glimpses I get, every now and then, talking and thinking about the books I loved then and still love now.