Shared Silence at the Rare Bookshelf

Wilma had been looking forward to this evening for three weeks, and she was not going to let a little thing like turning sixty-four make it less perfect, because honestly, sixty-four was just a number and the archive was just the best room in town.

She had packed her bag carefully that afternoon, one soft apple, one thick book she had been saving, and a bottle of red wine wrapped in the dish towel her sister had sent her last Christmas, because a woman who planned ahead deserved a small reward. The rain had started around six and come down in earnest by seven, drumming on the old glass of the Victorian house that held the town's rare-book collection, and the whole place smelled the way it always did, of old paper and dust and, faintly, somebody's forgotten cup of tea.

Dante was at the front desk when she came in, shrugging into his jacket, thirty-nine years old and always ready to go home the minute his shift ended. He looked up and did the little half smile he always gave her.

"Mrs. Ellery. You know we close at eight on Fridays," he said, though his voice said he already knew the answer.

"And you know I only need the reading nook, Dante, and you know I'll be out before midnight, and you know I have never once set a book down with a wet thumb in six years of coming here." She set her bag on the desk and gave him the look that ended all discussion.

He laughed and held out the key ring anyway. "Fine, fine. I'll lock the front behind you. The back door sticks, so don't use it, please, it swells in the rain and then it doesn't latch right."

"It's been sticking since the Carter administration, sweetheart, I know." She took the small brass key to the reading nook and patted his arm on the way past. "Lock up. Go home to that boyfriend of yours."

"He's not my boyfriend yet," Dante called after her, and she waved a hand over her shoulder without turning around, because some things you just did not need to watch happen to know how they went.

The reading nook was at the back of the archive, down a short hall past the map cabinets, a small round room with one tall window and a lamp that gave off exactly the color of light Wilma liked, warm and a little gold, and two chairs that had been new in 1974 and were the most comfortable chairs in the building if you asked her, which nobody ever did. She hung her coat, set her bag down, unwrapped the wine, and settled in with her book and the sound of the rain, and it was, for about forty minutes, the most perfect birthday evening she had ever arranged for herself.

So of course that was when the back door opened.

She heard the heavy thud of the swollen door being shoved, then footsteps, wet ones, quick and apologetic even before the person belonging to them appeared in the hallway, and Wilma sat up in her chair with her heart thumping, trying to decide whether she was about to be robbed in a rare-book archive, which would at least be a good story.

Then the footsteps turned the corner and stopped, and a woman stood there dripping. It was Patricia, from three doors down, the quiet one, forty-seven years old, who had lived beside Wilma for three years and exchanged exactly the same nod with her every single morning, a nod and occasionally a comment about the hedge. Patricia's gray-streaked hair was plastered to her forehead and her canvas jacket was dark with rain, and she looked, at that moment, like a cat that had climbed into the wrong window.

"Oh my god," Patricia said. "Oh my god, I am so sorry. The back door was open, I just, it was pouring, and I saw the light, I thought it was some kind of public waiting area, I didn't, is this even open?"

Wilma blinked at her, and then the laugh came up out of her before she could do anything about it, a real laugh, the kind she had not had cause for in a while. "It's closed," she said. "It's been closed for an hour. Dante locked the front and left me here to commune with the maps. That door sticks, so it doesn't latch, which is why you're standing in my birthday puddle."

"Your birthday," Patricia repeated, dripping.

"Sixty-four, as of this morning. I celebrate alone, in this chair, with a book and a bottle of wine, and it's the best tradition I have." Wilma said it lightly, but it was true, and saying it out loud to a near stranger made her feel strangely defiant about it. "You're soaked, dear. Sit down before you catch something."

Patricia hesitated at the edge of the room, water gathering on the floorboards under her shoes, and Wilma could see her weighing it, the oddness of it, being caught in a locked archive by a neighbor she had only ever nodded at. "I really can't intrude on your, your whole thing," she said, gesturing vaguely at the chair, the lamp, the wine.

"You're already intruding, the puddle proves it. The only question is whether you intrude dry or wet." Wilma dug into her bag and came out with the towel she kept in there for spilled tea, an old one, soft and clean. She held it out. "Here. Take your jacket off, hang it on the rack, the radiator will do the rest. I have a whole bottle and nobody to share it with, and you, as it happens, are standing between me and my book."

That made Patricia smile, a real one, crooked and surprised, and she took the towel. "Three years," she said, patting at her hair. "Three years we've lived three doors apart, and this is the first actual conversation we've had."

"The hedge doesn't count?"

"The hedge absolutely counts," Patricia said, and her voice was warm now, easier, and she pulled off the wet jacket and hung it where Wilma had pointed, and she was wearing a dark green sweater underneath that the rain had mostly spared.

Wilma got up and fetched the second chair around, the good one, and set it across from her own, close enough for conversation, and poured wine into the two small glasses she had brought in a fit of optimism three weeks ago. "I planned for one," she admitted, holding one out. "But I packed two glasses, which I believe says something about me I don't want examined closely."

Patricia took the glass and sat down, tucking her feet up under her the way people do when they have decided to stay, and looked around the little room at the lamplight and the tall dark window and the rows of boxed maps. "This is a strange and wonderful way to spend a birthday," she said. "Alone in a locked building with a bottle of wine hidden in a dish towel."

"The dish towel is from my sister," Wilma said. "She'd be appalled at its current use, which is half the pleasure."

And Patricia laughed at that, a real laugh this time, and they clinked glasses, glass on glass with a small bright sound, and outside the rain kept coming down steady and dark, and Wilma thought, not for the first time and never so clearly, that the best evenings were the ones you had not planned at all.

"Sixty-four," Patricia said, settling back, turning her glass by the stem. "You'd never know it, you know. I hope you don't mind me saying, but I've always thought you carried yourself like a much younger woman."

"I mind flattery enormously," Wilma said. "Keep going."

Patricia laughed again, and it was a good sound in the little room, and the lamp hummed, and Wilma settled back in her chair with her glass and thought that maybe traditions were allowed to change, a little, at sixty-four.

Patricia turned her glass a few more times, and then she said, "Can I ask you something, and you can tell me it's none of my business, because it probably is." She looked up from the wine, and her face had gone from easy to careful in a way Wilma recognized, the way a person's face goes when they have decided to say a thing and are still talking themselves into it. "Do you actually like being alone, or have you just gotten good at it?"

"Well, that's a real question, isn't it," Wilma said, and she took a sip to give herself a moment, because it was a real question, the kind she had not been asked in years, maybe not ever, at least not by anyone who seemed to want the true answer instead of the polite one. "I like it on evenings like this. I like it on Sunday mornings. I liked it when I was forty-two and a man I worked with broke it off with me, nicely, kindly, no villains anywhere, and I went home and realized I had not been alone with myself in two years and I had missed myself terribly. That's when I started the birthday tradition, actually. Twenty-two years of one good evening a year, just me and a book."

"And the other three hundred and sixty-four days?"

"The other days it varies," Wilma admitted. "Some years I'm very good at it and some years I'm only adequate. Last winter I was barely passing, if I'm honest about it." She said it lightly, and Patricia heard the lightness for what it was, because Patricia looked at her with an expression of pure recognition, one working person seeing another working person across a small room.

"God, yes," Patricia said, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, the glass forgotten in one hand. "Adequate. That's exactly the word. Everybody asks how you are and you say fine, and you mean it, technically, there's nothing wrong, nothing to report, and somehow the whole year goes by and you realize the last person who touched you was a nurse at a flu clinic." She stopped, and a little color came up into her cheeks, and she laughed at herself, an embarrassed sound. "Listen to me. You invite me out of the rain and I start confessing things into your wine."

"Please don't stop," Wilma said. "I've had three weeks of planning this evening and not one person to tell about my day, so as far as I'm concerned you're the most interesting thing to happen to me since the map room reorganization of two years ago."

"That was you? Everyone talks about that."

"You're mocking me."

"I'm a little bit mocking you," Patricia agreed, and she was smiling again, that crooked surprised smile, and then it faded into something more honest, and she looked down at the wine turning in her glass. "Can I say the true thing? Since we're confessing. I moved in here three years ago because my roommate, well, she was more than a roommate, we were together almost nine years, and she decided at forty-four that she wanted a different life, and she moved to Vancouver, and I stayed because the rent was mine and the furniture was mine and I couldn't think of anywhere else to be." She shrugged, the shrug doing a lot of work. "And I have been adequate ever since. I go to work, I come home, I nod at the woman three doors down about the hedge, and I keep telling myself that's a life, and most days I even believe it."

Wilma did not say anything right away, because she had learned a long time ago that the kindest thing you could do for a person saying a true thing was to let it stand in the room for a moment without rushing at it, so she just refilled Patricia's glass, and the wine made its small sound, and the rain filled the silence the way rain does, steady and without opinion.

"I was married," Wilma said at last, settling back. "Briefly, in my thirties, to a good man who was wrong for me in every particular, and we parted like two people returning borrowed books, very polite, no scenes. And then the man at work, the one at forty-two, and that was the last of it. People assume that means I gave up. I didn't give up. I just stopped auditioning for a role I didn't want. But," and here she paused, because the next part was the part she did not say out loud, ever, "I will confess that some nights I would like very much to have someone to tell about my day. Not all nights. Some nights."

"That's it exactly," Patricia said, and her voice had gone soft, and she looked up, and for a moment the two of them just looked at each other across the little round room, the lamp humming, the window black