Fate Flipped Its Coin
A tale of reading and writing
Fate flipped its coin the day of my birth.
Born in a blizzard, too early, too small, my mother hitched a ride out of that sleepy snow-banked hospital in the morning delivery truck of the Dixie Lee Bakery, sitting on a rack next to fresh-baked breads and muffins. She left me, tubes in my tiny body of wrinkled chicken skin, to fend for myself.
Lesson number one, day one: survive or die.
She came back six weeks later, when I finally tipped the scale as a 5-pounder, so they had to release me.
I was a quiet kid. I could stare a hole into a stranger’s face until it wrinkled in discomfort, like a plastic shopping bag jerking on a thorn branch.
Thank U for shopping!
The fun part of being quiet is you hear things that others miss. You see things, too. You get to puzzle them together and discover where they don’t fit.
My mother would talk to anyone and everyone. She had a smile that dazzled and pretty, twinkling eyes, but her best trait, what made any stranger bond with her, was how quickly she could make a stranger believe she was just like them.
A chameleon survives by becoming a mirror to anyone and everything it’s near. If a chameleon was a person she would take on accents and patterns of speech, walk a certain way, think certain thoughts, buy a new wardrobe for every new setting.
One day, my mother met a writer. Within a week, there was a typewriter on our dining room table, a stack of white paper, a pad of onionskin, and fascinating pages of blue ink to make carbon copies. The writer she had met was also a magazine publisher and my mother, who had never before written more than a shopping list, now had a monthly column with a byline and a deadline.
I was recruited as her photographer because the most pressing part of her deadline was, of course, the author photo. She tied a short silk scarf around her neck, rolled the cuffs up on a new button-down tailored shirt, and posed in thoughtful silhouettes in front of the typewriter. At my suggestion, she put a sheet of paper into the typewriter and pressed the keys while I snapped.
On deadline day, every month, she became a writer, sitting at the typewriter, clicking keys, blacking out sentences, ringing that ding-ding of the carriage return. Deadline day dinner was a pizza and a glass bottle of orange soda, because, she said, writers don’t have time to peel potatoes.
I liked Deadline Day. The idea of being a writer, if it meant pizza every day you wrote, stuck with me.
Meanwhile, something else was happening with words. I was learning more of them. The more of them I learned, the bigger books I was allowed at the school library. Sister Matthew, the oldest of the old nuns, took us to the library when she remembered, once or twice a month. No matter how thick the book, I’d finish it in a day.
I begged and begged my mother for more books. My mother, exasperated, promised to one day take me to the town library, but it was far away, she would say, each time I reminded her.
Once, by chance, as she drove to pick up my brother from high school, I read the word library on a sign on Town Hall. It’s not far at all, I said. We go past it every day. And so, eventually, my mother drove me to the library.
Books! I felt such joy when we checked out the 10 books I was allowed. My daughter, the Reader, she laughed to the librarian, as we left. It wasn’t only the anticipation of the stories in the ten books I held that made me smile, it was all the books that I hadn’t checked out, too. They all waited for me.
They waited, but I couldn’t return.
There is something, my mother said, weeks later, at some libraries, called a fine. If the books aren’t returned by a certain date, a fine increases until it’s too much for you to pay. Then, you are never allowed to check out another book.
I didn’t beg for books anymore. I was quiet, as if someone had died. It was someone I knew maybe, or someone I could have known, I could have been. The girl that read all the books.
The typewriter, I noticed, except for deadline day, was as lonely and word-hungry as me. At first, I teamed up with it for book reports. I discovered it was fun to write a book report of a book you never read, one with a story you imagined yourself. That book could be about anything.
The stories didn’t stop when the book report was done. They kept coming, like fairy tales told to an army of dolls, the typewriter keys punched the too-quiet world and spit out stories made only for me.
Valentine’s Day, my mother discovered, was Amnesty Day at the library. Fines were waived. I tagged along quietly, wary of showing any excitement. When the books were finally checked in, I asked if I was allowed to get more.
My mother laughed loudly. My little Reader, she said to the librarian. She wants to spend all my money on books. No, she said, turning to me. No more library books.
Soon, the typewriter became off-limits, too. Maybe it made too much noise when my father was watching TV, or the ribbon needed to be replaced too quickly.
But I had a secret weapon by then. I had learned I could hide a library full of new, unread books inside a blank marble composition notebook. All I had to do to read a new story was to write one.
I was moved to write this piece when I recently read in the local news that my library (the awesome Asbury Park Free Library of Asbury Park NJ), in order to ensure that all of our residents are allowed equal access to library resources, will no longer charge fines for overdue books.
Thank you to the librarians who see the children that others don’t and who never, ever, forget them.
This Is Not About is written by Ada Austen, the author of Better Late Than Never, a multicultural second-chance romance set on the beaches and boardwalks of the New Jersey Shore. It is the New Jersey Romance Writers 2021 Golden Leaf Winner - Best Book by NJ Author.