Frenemies(4)
As I said, I blame Janis Joplin. And Amy Lee for introducing the J?germeister, as well as the thought of singing, into the night. Mix Janis with a few too many beers and unnecessary anesthetic shots, roast it all on the flames of a broken heart, betrayal, and It’s better this way and what did anyone expect?
It started with Bon Jovi. When I was growing up, no one admitted to listening to Bon Jovi, and now that we were almost thirty everyone seemed to know every line of “You Give Love A Bad Name.” The bar erupted in sound, as everyone indulged in air guitar and the birthday girl herself rocked out in the middle of what was, on some nights, a makeshift dance floor.
This was probably what made me believe that I, too, should take to the floor.
The guitar kicked in.
Janis started to wail, “Come on, come on, come on—”
What happened next was probably inevitable.
Which didn’t make it any less embarrassing.
I started off just singing. Then, right around the second chorus, something flipped inside me and I thought, what the hell?
This was always, I had discovered through years of trial and error, the moment at which I should stop whatever it was I was doing and take deep breaths until the what the hell feeling passed. The what the hell feeling was not my friend.
So, obviously, I ignored every lesson I’d ever learned in the span of my twenties and kept right on singing. Even louder than before.
Janis Joplin lured me on, with her scratchy voice and obvious pain. I thought, Janis and I have a bond. Then I thought what the hell again, and the next thing I knew I was shouting out the lyrics.
Directly to Nate and Helen.
Into their faces, to be precise.
My memory got a little foggy on the details, whether from J?germeister or shame I would never know for sure, but I retained a crystal-clear recollection of myself standing on a chair as I towered above the two of them, shrieking out my extremely drunken version of “Piece of My Heart.”
I didn’t know which was worse: the appalled look on Nate’s face, Helen’s frozen smirk, or the sympathetic expressions both Amy Lee and Oscar wore as they drove me home to my little apartment around the corner from Fenway Park. All I knew was, I’d be seeing them play inside my head for the foreseeable future.
Outside my apartment building, I waved the car away and paused to take a deep breath while I reviewed the wreckage. I didn’t feel blurry any longer, just slightly sick. The late October night was so cold and dark, however, that it was hard to take a deep breath. I was reduced to taking a few shallow ones instead. Somehow, that made it all seem worse.
I was turning thirty years old on the second of January, my perfect boyfriend had cheated on me with my freshman year roommate and then dumped me, and I had just humiliated myself in front of every single one of our mutual friends.
The good news was, it couldn’t get worse.
chapter two
It was clear to just about everyone that I was meant to be a librarian when, in the fourth grade, I spent my winter vacation alphabetizing, arranging, and cataloging all the books in my parents’ house. For fun.
It wasn’t clear to me, however. My plan was to take the Broadway stage by storm (which, perhaps, puts the Janis Joplin horror into perspective). When I wasn’t sorting my books into appropriate stacks, I was belting out show tunes. Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, Anything Goes, and so on. If it had been up to me, I would have sung all day. I took voice lessons, sang in the school choir as well as the church choir, and often gave impromptu concerts to my collection of stuffed animals.
I’d always had a thing for The Music Man, so when Broadway mysteriously failed to come calling for me in Boston, I went with my second choice and got my master’s in Library and Information Science. I soon discovered that Marion the Librarian was expected to do a little bit more than sing and wear spectacles these days, however. While I was in grad school, I happened upon a part-time job in a tiny museum no one had ever heard of—the Choate Downey Museum, just a few streets off the Common. The Choate Downey Museum boasted the mediocre art and mediocre collections of the Downey family, of which Minerva Choate Downey was the current heir and curator.
She was also a complete lunatic.
When I graduated from Simmons with my master’s in hand, I had big dreams of, say, a cushy job at Harvard or (during a brief, giddy spring fever in which relocation seemed crucial) the New York Public Library. But Minerva sat me down and offered me a full-time salary, excellent benefits, and the impressive title of head librarian. I was also the only librarian—the only employee, in fact—but at just twenty-five, who was I to argue?
Four years later, I was still head librarian of the Choate Downey Museum, and while from time to time I dreamed about a really exciting job—being a superspy like Sydney Bristow on Alias, for example—I was fairly content. The fact was, I loved what I did. I got paid to search for information, then to arrange it so others could experience the same voyage of discovery. I got to charter trips through knowledge. I spent my days researching questions no one in the world but me might ask—but if I decided the answer needed to be known, as head librarian I got to decide to search for it.
True, I had to deal with Minerva and her many delusions, but I tended to chalk that up in the “entertainment” column. After all, Georgia had the theoretically more exciting job, being a big-time lawyer, but I was the one who got to spend whole mornings seriously debating whether or not it was appropriate for Minerva to identify herself as One of the Blood to the hapless fools who got lost on their tours of Revolutionary War Boston and wandered into our front hall. I doubted Georgia had that kind of fun while filing documents and typing out briefs.