Chapter 5
Nora
I should have been frightened.
That is the thing I keep coming back to, in the days after Graham comes through the door of my library and Rhett puts a hand around his wrist and tells him, in a voice I will remember on my deathbed, what will happen if he touches me again.
I should have been frightened. I was twenty-six years old.
I had spent my entire life being raised by a family that treated raised voices like household appliances and that treated raised hands like the next inevitable step.
I had been taught — explicitly, repeatedly, with the kind of patient hammering my mother and Pauline made into a kind of joint hobby — that any man who could move that fast, who could speak that low, who could compress another grown man's wrist with that economy of motion, was a man you walked carefully around for the rest of your natural life.
I was not frightened.
I should pause on that. I should let it sit, because it was the first time in my whole life that the thing that was supposed to happen inside me did not happen.
The fear that was supposed to come — that quick blooming sourness in the gut, that wash of cold up the back of the neck — did not arrive.
What arrived instead was something I had no shelf for.
Something that landed in my body like a weight settling.
Something that took the small fine shake out of my hand, eventually, by way of a pair of big rough palms holding it like a bird that had flown into a window.
What arrived instead was the first time in my whole life that I had not been alone in a room where a Forsythe man was raising his voice.
I did not know how to file that.
I file most things. I file them quickly and accurately.
I have built a life around a filing system.
I can tell you what shelf any book in this library is on without looking at the catalog and I can tell you who returned what and when and what they thought of it.
My mind is a card catalog and I am proud of it.
But there was no card for what Rhett did to me in the moment he closed his hand around Graham's wrist. There was no card for what I felt when he took my hand in both of his and held it until the shaking stopped.
There is no Dewey number for the first time someone stood between you and the people who taught you how to be small.
I am going to file it eventually. But not that day.
—
The library closes at six on Saturday. We do not have many patrons in the last hour.
Mrs. Halloran has finished her grandsons' reading hour at four and they have gone home with their armfuls of chapter books.
The two college students at the back table have left.
By a quarter to six the only people in the library are me, behind the desk, and Rhett, in the wingback chair near the south windows, where he has been sitting since Graham walked out and where he has not, in all of that time, opened a book.
He has been keeping watch.
He does not call it that. He does not, in fact, do anything that looks like watching — he has been reading the same page of the Wendell Berry he returned this morning for the last hour and a half — but the angle of the chair is wrong.
The chair has been moved. He moved it after I went to the back to make tea, ten minutes ago, when he thought I would not notice.
The chair used to face the south windows. It now faces the front door.
I notice.
I do not say anything about it.
I lock the back door at five forty-five. I lock the side door at five fifty. At six I cross the floor to the front door with the keys in my hand and I look at him over my shoulder and I say, "I am going to lock up."
He says, "Take your time."
I lock the door. I turn off the front light.
I leave the desk lamp on. I leave the reading-nook lamp on.
I leave the small green-glass lamp on the cart by the periodicals corner on.
I come back to the desk. I take the kettle off the warming plate I keep on the back shelf — the kettle is officially against fire code, which is why no one knows about it but me — and I pour two mugs of tea.
Earl Grey. I take milk in mine. He has never told me how he takes his because he has never taken any from me.
I leave his black. I bring the mugs to the wingback chairs.
There are two wingbacks. They are not, strictly, a set.
They are similar enough. I bought the second one at an estate sale a year ago because the first one looked lonely.
I set his mug down on the small round table between them.
I sit in the other chair, my chair, the one with the cushion that has the worn spot where my elbow rests when I read after closing.
I pull my knees up. I tuck them under me. I cup my mug in both hands.
He closes the Berry. He sets it on the floor.
He picks up the mug. He looks at it. He looks at me.
He says, "Thank you."
I say, "It is just tea."
He says, "It is the first time someone has made me tea in twelve years."
I do not have an answer for that. I drink my tea.
I look at the steam coming off the surface.
I look at the dust motes in the lamplight.
I look at the south windows, where it is going from late afternoon to early evening, the long blue of late May, the green of the trees in the back garden visible through the glass.
I say, "Rhett."
He says, "Yes."
I say, "I am going to tell you about my family."
He says, "Okay."
He puts his mug down. He folds his hands in his lap.
He listens.
—
I tell him about my parents first because the parents are where the architecture starts.
My mother is a Lyttleton of the Richmond Lyttletons, which means very little to anyone who is not from Virginia and which means a great deal to anyone who is.
My father is a Forsythe, which means more, in the particular thin air of the particular country club my family belongs to.
They met at a debutante ball in 1979. They were married fifteen months later.
My sister, Pauline Anne Forsythe, was born in 1982.
I was born in 2000, eighteen years later, almost certainly by accident, and my mother — I have always suspected, although she has never said it out loud — never entirely forgave me for that eighteen-year arithmetic.
I was the child of her late forties. I was the child she had to begin again for, when she had thought she was done.
I was, by the time I was old enough to notice, a kind of awkward addendum to a household that had already finished its main draft.
Pauline was the draft.
Pauline was loud. Pauline was accomplished.
Pauline was on the lacrosse team and the debate team and the prom committee.
Pauline went to Sweet Briar. Pauline interned at her father's firm.
Pauline came home at twenty-three and married Graham Forsythe — no relation, although the name created weeks of pleasant confusion at the rehearsal dinner — and moved into a townhouse on Monument Avenue with a small fenced yard and a Bernese mountain dog named Atticus, and Pauline began the long and successful project of being my mother in miniature for the next two decades.
I was none of that.
I was a small quiet child who liked books and who read at the dinner table and who would not, no matter how often I was scolded, learn to project from the diaphragm.
I had a stutter on the s sound until I was ten.
My mother sent me to a speech therapist twice a week for two years and the speech therapist eventually told my mother, gently, that there was nothing wrong with my speech and that I was simply a quiet child and that my mother might consider whether the household was the kind of place where a quiet child could feel safe enough to speak. My mother fired the speech therapist.
The stutter came back at family dinners.
Anywhere else, I was fine. At family dinners, every time Pauline asked me what I thought of something or my father asked me what my plans were after college or my mother asked me whether I had given any thought to the Junior League, the s sound would dissolve into a small soft hiss and the back of my throat would close, and Pauline would laugh, not unkindly — Pauline rarely is unkind in a way you could point to — and she would say, Oh, sweetheart, take your time.
We're not going anywhere. And my mother would tighten her mouth, just slightly, the way she did, and the conversation would go on, and I would be left holding a sentence I had not finished.
I learned, by twelve, to stop trying to finish sentences in that house.
I learned, by sixteen, that the safest way to live in that house was to be invisible in it.
I learned where the quiet corners of the house were.
I learned which floorboards in the upstairs hallway did not squeak.
I learned that the library — the actual library on the third floor of our actual townhouse, my great-grandmother's library, the one room in that house my mother did not redecorate — was where I could go to be by myself for hours and that nobody would come find me as long as I came down for dinner.
I learned, by the time I left for college, that the best thing I could do for myself was to make my body into the smallest possible footprint inside that house and to wait until I was permitted, by degree and by graduation and by the eventual securing of a paying job, to leave it.
I tell him all of this.
I tell him about my mother who treats my quietness as a defect.
I tell him about my father who tells the men at his club that he has two daughters, one in real estate and one in books, and who pauses for the laugh at his own joke and who does not understand why the laugh is the joke.