Behind my desk in sixth grade math is a small, unobtrusive bookshelf.  Like most of the furniture in our school, it’s made of particle board, with generic wood grain veneer darker than the veneer on our desks.  It’s short and squat, with five rows of books.  Mrs. Bryant, the math teacher, or perhaps the school’s custodial staff, keeps the room well-dusted, and the shelf is clean, apart from the collection of cracked and faded paperbacks it houses.  It stands apart from the larger bookshelves with dictionaries, encyclopedias, and board games.  

I have a trick that usually gets me through lectures, but it doesn’t work so well for math.  Most of the time, I read my textbooks.  It looks like I’m paying attention that way, but I’m really just reading the short stories and case studies, the good stuff.  Now, I try poking around in the desk in Mrs. Bryant’s room, but the student who normally sits there doesn’t keep any books inside.  There’s an English textbook, and those usually have some good stuff, but there is no way to pull it out and read through it without getting caught.  There’s Mrs. Bryant’s bookshelf, but I don’t know if I can get into it without being noticed.

Mrs. Bryant dims the lights and flips the switch to turn on the projector, and I start to eyeball the shelf.  The black and yellow-white spines of books, interspersed with the occasional blue, green, or red, are like the neglected, crumbling keys of an old, out-of-tune upright piano kept in someone’s living room as a decoration.

I resist the bookshelf that day, but keep an eye on it for the next few days—it never changes.  The books remain in their uneven rows of concave spines; none of them are ever even tipped out from having been looked at.  Keeping one eye on Mrs. Bryant as she works through a math problem on a transparency, I reach out with my left hand, placing my index finger on the yellowed top of an Anne McCaffrey book, tilt it out of line, grasp it with the rest of my fingers, and swiftly pull it off the shelf, hiding it under the lip of the desk, halfway inside the desk’s cavity.

I can’t hold the book up to my face for fear of being caught, but I can smell it faintly, like the dry leaves on the forest floor in the summer.  Holding the book down in my lap, leaning it against the bottom lip of the desk’s opening, I read cautiously.  I have to pay attention to the class–turn the page in the math book when necessary, and be prepared to answer questions when called upon.  As Mrs. Bryant nears the end of her lesson, I dog ear the page I’m on, and slide the book back into its place on the shelf.  

As the year progresses, I grow more confident at my stealth reading.  I learn to situate my math book so I can angle my head in such a way that I appear, from across the room, to be studying it instead of reading a book.  I figure the signals Mrs. Bryant gives before she starts calling on students, so that I can be more engrossed in my reading during certain parts of class.  It doesn’t take long for me to finish the bookshelf’s selection of fantasy books, making it difficult for me to decide what to read.

There is one book that interests me, but I’m not excited about actually reading it.  Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men sits on the shelf, white cracks running like lightning through its black spine.  I know the story.  My brother and I had watched the movie version with Dad a few times.  The one with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.  After the first time he saw it, Ross had asked Dad, “Why’d he shoot that guy for?”

“Because that other guy with the glove, Curly, was gonna shoot him in the belly and let his guts hang out and let him suffer.  But George and Lenny was friends, and George didn’t want him to suffer like that.”  

“Oh.”  It’s hard to say if Ross was satisfied with Dad’s answer.  It seemed like a decent enough movie to me, but it was just a movie.  Dad says the book is better than the movie—and there aren’t a whole lot of books that hold his interest.  He identified with the characters in the book, the way they went around looking for work, living hand to mouth, trying to survive.  He had lived a life like that, day laboring, dreaming of getting a little place of his own.

I know it’s a story about the real world, and I prefer escapism.  I try to sit through math class instead of reading a book about the real world, as there can’t be much difference between the two.  It doesn’t take long for me to grow so bored of math class that I decide to read the book, even though I already know the story.  As I did with all the others, I sneak it off the shelf and open it in my lap.  I move through the story quickly, taking only a couple of math lessons to finish.  I let my guard down as I read, losing myself in the book’s worldly prose.  As I reach the end, I can feel the strain in my face and the tears welling up in my eyes as Lennie asks George, “Ain’t you gonna give me hell again?” but I can’t put it down—I have to see how the scene plays out.  “’Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little stake an’ then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’ that gives a hoot in hell about ‘em—‘”

Every couple of lines I have to look up to the ceiling, trying to slow my pace.  “’Go on,’ said Lennie, ‘How’s it gonna be?  We gonna get a little place.’” Eyes aimed back at the ceiling, I focus on breathing as Mrs. Bryant drones on about math.  I know what’s coming.  “’No, Lennie. I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now.’”  I blink, and a tear escapes from my eye.  Mrs. Bryant moves toward the middle of the room.  I quickly press my fingers into my eyes to wipe away the excess fluid.  “Slim twitched George’s elbow. ‘Come on, George. Me an’ you’ll go in an’ get a drink.’”  I close the book, and sneak it back to the empty slot on the bookshelf.  Breathing slowly through my mouth, I keep my eyes pointed up, trying not to blink and not to think.  I suddenly notice that the room has gone quiet, and I hear Mrs. Bryant ask, “Riley, what’s wrong?”

The class has stopped, Mrs. Bryant has focused on me, along with every face in the room.  I don’t know what’s wrong—I’ve seen the movie, it didn’t make me cry.  What’s wrong is the God damned injustice of it all, but I can’t put that into words.  I get enough flak for not doing my homework or not paying attention in class.  I can’t tell her that I’ve just finished reading a book that moved me to tears.  I put my head down, hoping she will move on, but she doesn’t.  I start heaving and sobbing uncontrollably, and in between breaths I gasp out a hurried “Nothing.”

I keep my head down, but I can feel everyone staring at me, watching.  I can’t tell her why I’m crying.  I’m not sure I can explain it to myself.

My surreptitious reading of Mrs. Bryant’s books got me through the sixth grade, and the experience encouraged me to take note of people’s bookshelves wherever I go.  A person’s books are a part of them.  Their bookshelves help to keep a lot of parts together.  The first thing I take note of when I enter someone’s office is their books.  I wonder, often, to what degree their books are ornamental.  Are they meant to convey identity?  Personal philosophy? Are they favorites or just the ones most often reached for?  I have never asked anyone, or indicated that I knew anything about their shelved books.  

When I was growing up, there was never enough room for all the books in our house.  Most bookshelves are simple affairs—a box of wood or plastic with horizontal shelves to hold the books.  Dad hung shelves on the wall for Mom using metal brackets, but she still had piles of books in the corner of their room, at the ends of the thin corridors between their queen-sized bed and the walls.  The weight of her books pushed the floor down away from the wall, leaving a small gap.  

As I neared the end of high school I started reading through her collection—she liked nonfiction, especially biographies.  If I thought one of her books was really cool, I’d try to hang on to it.  I still have her copies of Freud’s case studies, like The Wolfman and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

I still have Mom’s copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, too.  I had figured out at a young age that not going to church meant that I was not a very respectable person, and so I was very interested in ideas and things that made church people uneasy.  I was intrigued by Rushdie’s title, and asked Mom what it was about.  “I don’t know—I couldn’t understand it,” was her reply, “but it was a big deal when it came out.”  She recalled that the radio stations in Texas had boycotted Cat Stevens’ songs because he had made statements in support of the bounty on Rushdie’s head.  Khomeini’s fatwa was enough of a reason for me to read it.

That year—my senior year—I had an American Literature class with Mrs. Sladek.  She was a short, round, dark-haired woman with intense, bulgy eyes who kept her room orderly and quiet.  Some teachers seemed more interested in social status than teaching, and Mrs. Sladek struck me as one of them.  If you didn’t go to the right church, if your family wasn’t prominent enough, if you didn’t look fashionable, she wasn’t interested in you.  She was more dismissive of me than I was used to, even for someone who rarely did his homework.

Near the end of the year, we had a lot of quiet reading time in class. One day, I pulled out Mom’s copy of The Satanic Verses, found my place—marked by the glossy red and gray jacket—and started reading. My desk was near hers, and it wasn’t long before I heard her voice: “Riley, what are you reading?”

I was excited at her interest. I’d been struggling with the book—I didn’t know much about Islam or the cultures Rushdie was writing about—but I kept at it, rereading and trying to work through it slowly. Maybe Mrs. Sladek, an English teacher, could help me understand it.

I held up the book and said, “The Satanic Verses. Have you read it?”

She scowled. “No, and I don’t think I would.”

I put the book back on my desk and kept reading, but her response stayed with me. I’d thought everyone had heard of The Satanic Verses—Mom and Dad had told me about the protests, the bounty, the boycotts of Cat Stevens. I was surprised that she hadn’t heard of it—and more surprised that a teacher would shut down a book like that without a second thought.  I suppose not everyone thinks of books in the same way.

When someone dies and the family swoops in to divvy up their stuff, I try to get their books.  When Mom’s dad died everyone fought over what to do with his things.  I took his books.  He had a lot of books about faith.  He was a Catholic, and he struggled to reconcile his religion with his politics.  The church told him that in order to be a good Christian he had to vote for the party that wanted to outlaw abortion, but he felt that it was unconscionable to vote for the Republicans.  He had a lot of books about what it means to have faith.

Uncle Elbert, on the other hand, was a Republican and lifetime member of the NRA.  He owned most of the land that butted up against Tuggle Road—all hayfields and cow pastures and hollers where the woods were left to grow because they weren’t worth turning into hayfields.  Dad bought the piece of field where we put our house from him, and, when Uncle Elbert was dying, everyone bought the fields their houses sat in from him.  They were worried that there would be a problem with his will—he had family who would be able to claim his property before any Tuggles, though I’ve never met them.  They let me take his books when he died, but everything he owned was supposed to be sold off and divvied up to this other family.

Elbert’s bookshelf, which I keep in a safe spot at the top of my stairs, is made of a knotty old cherry tree that wasn’t quite worth sawing up into boards to sell.  I never dust it, and I don’t think he did either.  There may still be dust from his house on it.  It isn’t like most bookshelves—he had made it by hand in his shop.  It’s got two boards which serve for legs that are rounded at the top and come up about waist high, one of them is so full of knots that it has started to split and separate from itself.  Between the legs run three shelves which are each made of two boards put together at a right angle.  The books rest on their sides, not quite parallel to the floor.  It’s made to hold paperbacks about the size of your hand.  Uncle Elbert had filled it with dime store westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour.  

The top shelf holds a row of my own paperbacks that just happened to fit. The rest of the collection is fragile, held together more by memory than glue. I think about those books sometimes—about the legacy Uncle Elbert left me without meaning to. Maybe I’ll explore them one day. But I don’t think it’ll be as simple as pulling one down to read—it might crumble in my hands.