The Anybodies Read online

  PART 3

  THE HOUSE OF BOOKS

  1

  THE NOSE

  THE BONE WAS DRIVING THE OLD JALOPY. FERN sat next to his suitcase and her own bag in the backseat where the seat belt worked. The Bone was giving instructions about the new identities he’d created for himself and Fern, but it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because he’d turned himself into an encyclopedia salesman. He was wearing a name tag pinned to the lapel of a shabby green suit: HELLO! MY NAME IS: MR. BIBB, SALES ASSOCIATE. His hair, which had been a graying blond puff, was flat, black, and looked shellacked, shiny as a Christmas ornament. Fern had pretended to be asleep in the morning while she listened to him humming in the low baritone he’d used with Mr. Harton. She heard him curse under his breath, and then he cheered, “Yes, yes, that’s it!” Shortly thereafter, the house smelled of something sharp like paint. The smell reminded Fern of Mr. Drudger daubing and rubbing shoe polish into his loafers. Fern guessed that the Bone had tried to become a different person through the magical transformations based on The Art of Being Anybody. He’d failed, and resorted to faking it. Had he put shoe polish on his hair? Was that new bulbous nose made of rubber and glued on? And that smarmy little mustache?

  The sloppy old car made Fern feel seasick, a queasiness that was aggravated by the watery sound of the Bone’s new lisp, a Mr. Bibb trait he’d taken on. There were too many s’s in everything. “I’m Missster Bibb and you’re Ida Bibb, my daughter. And we’re jusst passssing through for a few weekss. We need a room for jussst that much time. We’re heading wesst to visssit family. Jusst let me do the talking.”

  When Fern came up with the plan to look for the book at her grandmother’s, she hadn’t realized that she and the Bone couldn’t show up as themselves on her doorstep. No, no, the Bone had convinced her that they’d each have to go as somebody else. This was disappointing because Fern had wanted to go to her grandmother’s house to figure out if it felt like home. How could she do this if she was Ida Bibb? “But I sometimes blurt out weird things when I’m nervous,” Fern said. “I do sometimes. My brain just rattles on like a train with too many cars, and then I find out I’ve just said something that doesn’t make sense. What can I do about it? I can’t do much. Can I?” It dawned on Fern that she wasn’t saying all of this in her head. She was saying it out loud and that was a nice thing. Still she was nervous, and she pulled three barrettes from her pocket to lock down her wild hair.

  “Think of milk. Think of a big glasss of milk. Sstop talking and try to conjure the biggesst, whitesst, creamiesst glasss of milk you can, all beaded with dropss of water. Try to make it clear in your head, like you could jusst reach into spacse and pick it up and drink it. Think of ssoup, cheesse, lemonss, appless, plumss. That’ll keep your brain occupied.”

  “Do you have to talk like that?” Fern felt nauseous and thinking about milk, soup, cheese, lemons, apples, and plums wasn’t helping matters.

  “Yesss.”

  “I don’t think she’ll believe us! I don’t think this’ll work,” Fern said. “You should ask her for the book. Maybe she knows she has it and will just hand it to you.”

  “Nothing further from the truth. That woman doessn’t like me. She never did. Your mother told her that she’d reformed me, turned me into a real healer. A good guy. But her mother wouldn’t have much to do with me. ‘He doessn’t even like to read!’ her mother would ssay, like that wass the greatesst sssin in the world. The only good thing isss that she didn’t like the Missser either. She didn’t like either of uss.”

  “Do you like to read?”

  “I liked when your mother read to me. She read like a dream.”

  “I just have a feeling it’s going to be strange,” Fern said.

  “It will.”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  “Today’ss a good day, Fern! It’ss a very good day. Thingss are already looking up.”

  “They are?”

  He pulled the car over onto a grassy shoulder and stopped. Fern looked at the Bone. He said, “Look! Look at my nosse.”

  “What?”

  He pushed the squat nose, then pulled on it, then wiggled it around. It looked fat, real, completely attached. “That there iss the real McCoy, Fern, I tell you. I couldn’t get any of the other sstuff right, but the nosse, that iss a genuine nossse, fully transsformed. I may be faking Mr. Bibb, but my nosse issn’t. It’ss the firsst time in a long time that I ever got any of it right. I wass thinking of the Great Realdo. He’d helped me oncse before, when I wass wooing your mother. I wass thinking today the ssame way I wass thinking all those yearss ago: ‘I need your help. Jusst an inch of your great sspirit. Help me, Great Realdo.’ And it worked.” He smiled. He reached behind and patted Fern on the head. It was a soft little pat, not a mushy pat, but it was just a little sweet. He sighed and looked out the front windshield. “There’ss the housse.” He pointed down a long dirt driveway to a tall yellow farmhouse and a large red barn surrounded by fields. There was a sign dug into the dirt: BOARDERS WELCOME. MUST BE TIDY AND WELL-READ.

  The Bone gazed up at the house. He started humming the song Fern had heard him singing the night before. “Sweet, sweet, my sweet darling angel, where have you gone, where have you gone?” He put the car in gear and headed down the long, bumpy driveway.

  Fern stuck her head out the window. She stared at the house. She figured it looked like a place she could call home; it was hard to tell, really, when she didn’t know exactly what a place she could call home should look like. A wind kicked up, gusted. One of the shingles on the roof lifted in the breeze but didn’t come off. Something white fluttered under the shingle, just for a moment, a quick flipping of what seemed like pages. Was the roof made of books? The Bone jerked the car to a stop in front of the house. Dust rose up, then settled. No, no, it was just an ordinary house, Fern assured herself, with an ordinary roof.

  2

  UNEXPECTED GUESTS

  GRANDMOTHERS. AH, GRANDMOTHERS! THE world needs more of them, if you ask me. I’m quite nostalgic and overly sentimental about grandmothers. My own is a very short, yet gorgeous and ample Southern belle. Her house is filled with poodles and handguns—her second husband being a military man. She wears muu-muus year-round, drives only Cadillacs and adores Liberace—for his good taste. But Fern’s grandmother isn’t at all like my dear old granny. Fern had never met her real grandmother. She wondered what she would be like, and if there would be any traces left in the house from her mother, something, anything, that would tell Fern more about her. Fern wondered what she would find.

  The Bone was carrying their bags and Fern had the banged-up umbrella. An old crumbly sidewalk that she hadn’t noticed before ran from the street down the long driveway and ended right at the front door. It divided the thigh-high underbrush that rustled not too far away. Fern looked out at the tall grass and barbed weeds of the front yard. There were small boxes made of bricks sticking up here and there. They looked like chimneys, but on the ground and without smoke. Up the hill toward the main road, Fern thought she also saw some windows peeking out of the ground and latticework. It was confusing, and Fern was too jittery to try to make sense out of it. She was wary now of unfamiliar front yards since the last one had had a rooster man in it, not to mention spies.

  The Bone knocked at the paint-chipped door. The door, latched by a chain, opened just a bit. Two eyes swam up below the chain. That’s what Fern noticed first—the eyes behind a pair of round glasses that made the big eyes look even bigger. In fact, the eyes seemed unconnected to a face, like two fish in a set of fish bowls. The eyes worried Fern. If Mr. and Mrs. Drudger thought Fern’s big eyes were a deformity, what would they think of this pair? Fern thought of Little Red Riding Hood—“Grandma, what big eyes you have!” It wasn’t a comforting association, as you can imagine. Big and blue, the eyes glowed like headlights on a Buick in the middle of the night. The rest of the face slowly came into focus—a small bony nose and a pink wrinkled mouth that was
as small as a bow you’d paste on a poodle to make it look fancy. Fern narrowed her own eyes, out of practiced manners.

  “Who is it now? Can’t be too careful!” The old woman said this out loud, but it was the kind of thing that should have stayed in her head.

  The Bone started in on the speech he’d practiced, his red nose bobbing. “I’m Missster Bibb and thiss iss my daughter, Ida. We’ve come for a room. Sssaw the ssign. I ssell encsssyclopediass.”

  “Well, don’t just stand out there! Come in. Come in,” the fish-eyed woman said, unlatching the chain. Then she looked past Fern and the Bone to the yard, distracted by something she saw there and didn’t like. She hobbled past them into the yard. “Is that another little house they’ve dug? Blast it!” She shook her head and hobbled back. Fern’s grandmother was a small, arthritic old woman. She sagged and wheezed like an old accordion as she shuffled. She was bent over so far that it was as if she were looking up at the Bone and Fern from the bottom of a hole, and Fern wasn’t so tall herself. There was more rustling and then quiet.

  “Well,” the old woman said, looking at Fern and the Bone impatiently. “I didn’t mind a few in my yard, just a few, but they’ve gotten so content over the years with their little routines and their manners. Edgy! Uptight! Always digging a new little house, here and there. But they’ve come from a hard place. Poor things. I don’t like to upset them!”

  Fern had no idea who she was talking about—animals digging in the yard? Was she saying that the brick stacks were in fact little chimneys? Was there some sort of little neighborhood built under the front yard?

  Fern was trying to be Ida Bibb, but she didn’t really know Ida Bibb very well, so she didn’t know exactly how she should act. She only knew that Ida Bibb wouldn’t ask the woman if she’d had any children, a daughter, for example, named something like Eliza, and what exactly was she like. No. Fern reminded herself: don’t ask about that. You must be exactly like Ida Bibb. But then it dawned on Fern that her grandmother didn’t know who Ida Bibb was any more than Fern did. For that matter, her grandmother didn’t know Fern Drudger, and so Fern decided right there that she should be herself, except she wouldn’t mention anything about daughters, her grandmother’s daughter in particular. Fern knew this would be hard because the only thing she wanted to do was ask questions. Not being able to made Fern nervous, and when Fern feels nervous, the chatter begins in her head followed by the occasional blurting. She was thinking: Do you have gophers? I hear gophers are hard for a yard. Do you have groundhogs? They’ll ruin a yard too. That’s what I’ve heard. I sure hope you don’t have gophers or groundhogs! That would be a shame. And they’d ruin a garden! But she was blurting too: “Do you have a garden? Do you use weed killer? Do you mulch?”

  Much to Fern’s surprise, however, her grandmother didn’t appear to be shocked by the blurting. She was listening intently. And so Fern continued on, thinking and blurting at the same time now. In fact, she was giving a lively speech. She went on talking about gophers and groundhogs and gardens for a good while. At one point, she wandered into the subject of being tender to a garden, raising it with love, like a, like a—but Fern did not say daughter. She said, “Well, like a garden. That’s all.” And she forged on with talk of shrubbery. The Drudgers and their neighbors often talked about lawns and yards and such, and although Fern had never seen either a gopher or a groundhog—both of which would have struck panic in her old neighborhood—she found herself unable to get off the track for fear of talking about her own mother. Eventually, mercifully, she simply ran out of breath.

  And her grandmother said, “Yes, dear, to question (a): It’s quite expansive. No to question (b). And a few years back to question (c). Never is the answer to question (d)….” And so on, until the old woman, quite incomprehensibly, had answered all of Fern’s questions. But for some reason, it made Fern feel much better. Did it make her feel at home? No, not really. She still didn’t feel herself, but she did find her grandmother reassuring in a way she couldn’t explain.

  “May I take your umbrella?” her grandmother asked. “It looks like it’s seen better days.”

  Fern handed her the crumpled umbrella, and the old woman ushered them into the parlor. Fern was anxious to see inside the house that she might be able to call home. And here she was. The room was lit with small reading lamps and there were books everywhere, piled on the coffee table, under the coffee table, on the sofa and under it, too. Books were stacked up the stairs, and through the hall. Fern could see a small forest of books in the kitchen, books stacked on the table, the counters, like dishes in the dish rack. The rolltop desk (not rolled up) seemed to be belching books. Books lined every wall so that you couldn’t see the walls at all. In fact, a mirror had been hung over the books as if the wall were made of books. And the oil paintings, which hung over the stacked books, depicted books. One was a still life of a bowl, but it was almost as if the fruit that was supposed to be in the bowl had been taken out and replaced with books. There were even books fitted in the rafters and hung in the hat rack’s arms. This made it especially tricky for the old woman to find a spot to hang Fern’s umbrella, but she fussed with it this way and that, rearranging books until she had the umbrella hung and the books balancing just so.

  Now, it’s an odd thing to go inside some people’s houses. Have you ever been house hunting? Well, I bet you haven’t because sometimes I forget how young you are—which is a compliment, meaning you seem so mature for your age. Let me explain: house hunting isn’t as exciting as it sounds. There is no actual “hunt.” You don’t hide out in the underbrush wearing camouflage and making noises like a house to lure the house into an open field. No, it’s more like you go through house after house following around some sharply dressed someone who smells very mouthwashy, while they turn on and off light switches and ceiling fans, pointing out closet space while diverting your attention away from foundation cracks. But, while house hunting, you do realize that you’re walking into somebody’s private space, and it’s an odd thing to suddenly know so much about a stranger—their bad taste in furnishings, their obsession with cow knickknacks, their overconfidence in the power of duct tape or certain rotten presidents. Now this house, this house, topped them all! It was clearly the house of someone who lived quite differently from the rest of society. Quite differently, indeed! It’s the kind of house that no one could ever imagine buying because it so clearly belongs to one person and one person only in the whole wide world. Or, well, maybe two…because the house reminded Fern of her own bedroom, or at least the bedroom she was trying to create with her ten-cent yard-sale books.

  Although it was a wonderful thing to be surrounded by books, Fern felt overwhelmed. There were so very, very many books! Her eyes darted from title to title. And weren’t Fern and the Bone here to find a book? How in the world could that be possible with so very many books? Fern suddenly, deeply, missed her old bedroom, and she wondered how Howard was making out and if her lichen was still growing in her closet. No, Fern decided, she didn’t feel at home here. It was just too much!

  The old woman said, “First things first. An introduction. I’ve got your names, but what would you like to call me?”

  The Bone looked at Fern in a way that seemed to say, I told you she was a strange one.

  Fern shrugged. “I don’t know. What did your parents name you?”

  “That was so long ago, it’s hard to say, really.”

  “Don’t you have it written down?” Fern asked.

  “Why most certainly,” the old woman said, glancing around. “I must have written it somewhere. Somewhere.” The old woman grabbed a book off the shelf. “Books,” she said, and she held it open and shook it. The pages flapped back and forth. “Look at this. Nothing!” She pulled another one off the shelf and shook it, too. “Nothing ever falls out anymore. Now a giant was hard to get out. Sure, you could shake a boot loose, but it’d take a whole day to get a giant out of a book, and what to do with him once he’s out? And how to get him
back, even if he wants to go back?” She handed a book to the Bone. “Shake this one, Mr. Bibb. Go ahead. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  The Bone shook the book and nothing came out. He handed it back to the old woman, who seemed victorious, as if the Bone was proving her point. “See? See what I’m talking about? The little creatures used to slip right out, especially the ones who were looking for something. But aren’t we all looking for something?” She glanced at Fern and the Bone with a kindly twinkle in her eye—or was it a menacing glint? Hard to say. Fern, for one, didn’t know. All she knew was that the old woman wasn’t making sense at all.

  Fern was getting really nervous. She didn’t want to start talking. She could feel words bubbling up again, You might think I’m after something, but you’d be wrong…. She tried to think of milk, as the Bone had suggested. She tried to think of cheese, then soup, then lemons, apples and plums. “How about Mrs. Appleplum? We could call you that. It’s a nice name.”

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “Mrs. Appleplum will do just fine. Tell the new guest upstairs to call me Mrs. Appleplum, if you see him. He just arrived this morning with an enormous black trunk and bulky sack, and he didn’t want to name me anything. He said he’d call me ma’am, since I refused to give him a name. He’s a whiskery fellow who told me that he likes his quiet and privacy. Do you all like your privacy? It sure has been a busy day here. I usually don’t have any guests. And since these books are nothing but books again, after all these years, pages and bindings and glue, well, most of the little characters have run off. Except those messing in the yard, digging, digging—and a few little thieves. If something’s missing, come to me straightaway. The house has its little thieves.” The old woman’s large eyes toured the book-packed walls. She’d lost her train of thought, it seemed, or more like the train had derailed. She said, “I’ll get tea. The water’s already hot.” With this, Mrs. Appleplum limped out of the room, hunched like a question mark.