Book Game
Book Game
E bby walks into her grandparents’ library. This is the room where Old Mo used to be kept when her dad was a kid. The room is still filled with books as it was when she was a child, only now most of the volumes are filed away on one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. They’re no longer piled on the furniture and floors as they were when she and Baz used to play there. Travel books and maps used to block the path of the rolling ladder that her grandfather had installed to reach the highest shelves, but it hasn’t been that way for years.
Ebby sinks into one of the two sofas and leans her head back to gaze at the room. She can smell the wood oil used to clean the furniture and that particular odor a vacuum cleaner can leave when it has sucked at the fibers of a rug. The amber-toned shelves are beautiful. The spines of all those books, inviting. Still, she liked it better before her grandparents had it tidied up.
There was a game she and Baz used to play at Granny and Gramps’s. The book game. It was the same game her father and Aunt Kandy used to play when they were growing up here. A large mason jar was filled with strips of paper holding clues. The players would form teams of two and take turns pulling clues out of the jar and reading them out loud.
One teammate would read a clue referring to a book and the other would scurry around the room looking for the title in question. But if someone knew for a fact that the book was not in the room and instead, say, upstairs on someone’s bedside table, they were supposed to speak up right away. It would be the sportsmanlike thing to do.
During the hunt, teammates weren’t allowed to talk to each other about which book it might be, or point to it if they happened to know where it was. There’d be a lot of raised eyebrows and meaningful stares and throat clearing. And, sometimes, a bit of bickering afterward. The first team to have more than two books would win. They would play this game a couple of times a year, mostly on cold winter nights or rainy summer days. Then Ebby and Baz would go back home, knowing that their grandparents would throw out some of the old clues and write up some new ones for the next time.
After Baz, there was no next time . It’s not that her grandparents didn’t make holiday meals, or take her and her cousins to the ballet to see Alvin Ailey or to a concert at Christmastime. It’s not that the kids didn’t play, or that the adults didn’t gossip and laugh together. It’s just that they never again played that game. No wedging of one’s body between piles of books on the sofa. No sitting cross-legged on the rugs. No jumping up to scan the titles all around them.
All the years that she and Baz had been going there, that room must have looked to other people like nobody had ever bothered to tidy up. But you only had to look at the rest of her grandparents’ home to know that it wasn’t a lack of care. And if you knew her grandmother’s profession, you would know it was intentional. Granny Freeman had been one of the first African American librarians in New England. She certainly didn’t reach that position leaving books all over the place.
No, these books had been left to inhabit the library like people. They had been left lying where they were to be picked up during the game, to be flipped through on quiet afternoons. To be sat among, the way you sat with relatives and friends. To be conversed with.
Her grandmother walks into the room now.
“We still have some of the clues, you know,” Granny says. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“Really? No, I didn’t know.”
“Open that drawer over there.”
There are cassette drawers running along the lowest level of the bookcases. Ebby pulls one open to find a sea of small strips of paper.
“Oh!” She looks at her grandmother, who nods.
Ebby crouches down and picks through the pieces of paper until she finds what she is looking for, even though she didn’t realize what she wanted until now. She finds a couple of strips with her brother’s handwriting on them. The Giving Tree, reads one. The other reads Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
“Go on, take them,” her grandmother says. Ebby stands up and hugs her granny for a long time.