Click here for Part I.
The crowd turned right onto K street and then another right onto Main and town hall came into view, just a couple of blocks away. The rain started falling a little bit faster, the drops a little heavier. Miranda recognized the sound of the Caldwell family walking behind her, the sound of creaking rubber boots unmistakably belonging to eight-year-olds Jenny and Leah.
“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Mr. Caldwell said, and a chorus of others exclaimed or murmured their concurrence.
“This!” Jenny shouted as she broke free from her mother’s hand and jumped into a puddle. She let out a shriek of joy at the resulting splash and was soon joined by her sister.
Miranda wondered how much the twins remembered from what the town used to be like. Would they have little shards of memories left over that would keep coming back and seem incongruent with what they knew about the world as it was? In a few years, when Jenny would be a pretty teenager applying eye-shadow in preparation for her first date, she might suddenly be struck by the image of an American flag at half-mast and not know what it meant, where the image was conjured up from. She’d pause and frown for a moment, finally deciding it must have been her imagination recreating something she’d read in a book. Now the flag in front of town hall was shriveled up, the open book pictured on it hidden between the wet folds. It was never lowered to half mast anymore.
At the entrance to the building a row of coat hangers had been arranged atop a carpet of dry towels. The lobby reverberated with small-talk. Miranda hung up her coat and set her umbrella down, then walked to the bulletin boards to find which room her meeting would be in. Rather than stay in the lobby and join the chattering, Miranda preferred to take an early seat in the middle of the room and watch people coming in. She liked trying to guess who was loving that week’s book and who was hating it. A good way to tell was to look for the folds of dog-eared pages, the faint glow of highlighted sentences. To see who would be talking the most, Miranda looked for margins heavy with ink, question marks pouring out from the pages.
She walked past the row of copper busts of Vonnegut, Wilde, Hemingway and Murakami in the lobby and made her way up to the second floor, past the pictures of Faulkner, Plath, Garcia Marquez and Atwood. Like everywhere else in the town, quotations from books inscribed in marble or framed like artwork hung on the walls.
It was still early and Miranda expected the room to be empty, but she saw Ethan, the coffee shop waiter sitting on a stool at the front of the room, his back hunched over as he read. She stood at the doorway for a moment, trying to decide whether he was just pretending to be focused or if he hadn’t actually noticed her. His fingers absent-mindedly ran over the edge of the book as if he were caressing someone’s cheek.
“Hi,” she said, stepping into the room.
He looked up slowly from the book and flashed a smile, then quickly returned his attention to the pages in front of him. Miranda took a seat and watched him read for a while. They had never been in a reading group together, although she often saw him at the coffee shop reading the same book as her. They often said hi, or smiled at each other. Once, he had commented on the square ring she wore on her thumb, and on a different occasion she had asked him about how his weekend had gone.
After a couple of minutes, Ethan placed a cloth bookmark in between the pages and looked up at Miranda. “Hi,” he said, “Sorry, you caught me in the middle of a good scene.”
“No apologies necessary. How far along are you?”
“One-seventy-four,” he said without looking down. “Just finished chapter six.”
Miranda turned to the postcard in her book, “You’re a fast reader. I’m only at page eighty.”
“I have a lot of free time at the coffee shop,” he said. “I did the math once, and I get paid more per page that I read than per cup of coffee I serve.”
“That’s not a bad deal,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Ethan, right?”
“Yes,” he said, “Ethan. And you’re Miranda?”
“We know each other’s names, it’s like we’re already friends,” she said with a nod and a smile, enjoying the sentence as she said it, feeling that it was not merely people talking to each other but dialogue. “Is this your first time leading a meeting?”
“Yes and no. First adult meeting. I’ve lead a few children’s meetings before.”
“How’s that?”
“Reading with kids is a lot less structured. They don’t try to invent metaphors where there are none. They’re better than we are at letting a story be told to them. As grown-ups, I feel we never forget that we’re reading, and I think that sometimes gets in the way of the story. We know that there was a writer, an editor, a publisher, that there’s something beyond the book itself. We know that someone was trying to make this book good, or artistic or marketable. We put ourselves through books because they’re Books We Have to Read or Classics or New. And we sometimes forget to just listen to the story. Kids don’t do that.” He drummed his fingers on his book, “Plus, they’re a lot more fun to be around.”
They looked at each other across the room. Miranda hadn’t responded at all, but she was nodding her head and smiling, which Ethan seemed to be contented by. “How about you,” he said, “any experience leading?”
“Oh, no. I’m not organized enough. I was in a book club in the old days and we had this rotating scheme where every month it changed and you just couldn’t get away from not leading a discussion. Very aggressively diplomatic like that. At first I was excited to try to steer people to talk about the things I thought were interesting in the book, but when it was finally my turn, I ended up talking the whole hour about how there wasn’t a single mention of hair styles throughout the novel. It struck me as bizarre, not knowing what anyone’s hair looked like. I know that’s a silly thing to focus on, and it definitely wasn’t the only opinion I had on the book—it was actually a pretty fantastic book, if I remember correctly. Beautifully written. But I just couldn’t help myself, I started leafing through during the meeting, reading character descriptions out loud. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not some person that’s obsessed with hair or need everything imagined out for me. I don’t have to know what every secondary character’s hair looks like, not even every main character’s. But not one mention of a single coif? It was bizarre. Like the writer purposely left it out, or is bald and so he doesn’t consider hair to be all that important.” Ethan was leaning forward in his chair with an amused smile which had broken into chuckles a few times during her monologue. “So…no, I don’t lead discussions anymore. I think I’m better off letting someone else take the reins.”
That’s what I have so far, no ending in sight. But I don’t think I’m abandoning it. Just putting it down for now.
