The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Read online

  I did understand and I indicated this with a puppety nod. Maybe our mother wouldn’t have stopped me from going to Mrs. Daniels’s house if she knew I was heading hip-deep into the land of Adult Fiction, but I wasn’t taking that chance. Such a small little lie and besides, I could find something to dust the next time I was in her house and so it wouldn’t even be a lie at all.

  I was a bad Catholic but I still had some uneasiness about all this lying. I took it, like I took most of my uneasy feelings, to Lilly.

  “Oh, don’t be a ninny. Who cares if Mrs. Daniels likes hearing rosaries or not? Mom’s never going to walk over there and ask her.”

  “She’s not?”

  “Nope. She thinks Mrs. Daniels is a little scary. I heard her say it to Mrs. Seifritz.”

  “Really?”

  Then Lilly said exactly what I needed her to say. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If she gives you more cookies, ask for extras.”

  The first afternoon I worked for Mrs. Daniels, we ended with Mrs. Roosevelt’s “My Day” column, and then she said that was enough reading for today. “I need to stretch. I’m going to tell Violette to bring us a little something,” she said. She stood up and started toward the kitchen. I stood up too, and drifted to the part of her bookshelves that held the titles like Paris Spring. Mrs. Daniels stopped in her tracks. “Move along, child. Leave that section of the library alone.”

  “Will we ever read one of these, Mrs. Daniels?”

  “One of the romances? No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You are young, and impressionable.”

  “Does something happen to you if you read them?” A rhetorical question—I assumed that something happened to the people who read them, or Mrs. Daniels wouldn’t be shooing me away from them.

  “The first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not.”

  “No?”

  “No. They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing.”

  “Why would anybody be against love?”

  “On the surface, a reasonable question.”

  “I’m not against love,” I offered.

  “So you are a devotee of love?” Mrs. Daniels said drily. “One wouldn’t assume that to look at you. But the world is full of hope, isn’t it? It appears in the most unlikely of places.”

  The next time we met she set me to The Odyssey, not going in any order but picking out parts she particularly liked. On my first day with Mr. Homer I found the Sirens busy trying to draw Odysseus and his men onto the wreckage-strewn rocks around their island, luring the sailors to destruction with their beautiful voices. Of course, Odysseus survives to fight another day, out-tricking the singers by plugging his crew’s ears with wax so they couldn’t hear him howling to be taken closer, closer, to the Sirens in their ring of broken boats.

  I knew I was supposed to hate those damn Sirens, but I didn’t. I figured that a person takes his chances with Sirens because he wants to—maybe has to. He crosses his fingers and ties himself to a mast and says, Keep going, everybody—I’m not missing this—and that made sense to me.

  NEAVE

  Mr. Boppit, Wonder Dog

  That summer we came upon Mr. Boppit waiting patiently outside George’s Sweetheart Market for a person who was never going to return to him. This kind of thing happened to dogs back in 1936 if feeding them got too expensive. Bop was there at ten a.m. when Snyder and Jane were sent to the store for milk. He was there at five p.m. when Lilly rode her bicycle by. He was discussed at dinner, and all of us trooped back to see if he was still there at seven. Yup—alert and patient, attending his betrayer. I suggested that his owner maybe had suffered a heart attack in aisle three and the dog hadn’t actually been dumped. Lilly mocked this hopeful view. “The mutt was ditched by somebody who lost his job or left town. He hasn’t even gotten his full growth yet and he probably already eats a pound of dog food a day. Look at the size of those paws.”

  We walked slowly home, but once everybody seemed to have gotten busy with something else I snuck an enamel pan out of the kitchen along with what leftovers I thought I could liberate without drawing any attention to myself and I walked back. He was still there, and pleased to accept the meal. His manners were good and he greeted me civilly—not a jump-on-you-chew-everything kind of dog. He watched as I set the food down and he looked up at my face for permission before he ate, though when he did tuck in it was clear that it’d been a long time between meals. A good dog. I asked George if I could use his tap and an old pan and I set out some water for him. When I walked away I kept looking back to see if he was watching me. He was. The tail would lift and sway when I turned toward him, droop when I started to turn away.

  The next day I went back with a ham bone and some vegetable-cheese casserole. He was still there, still polite, and pretty cheerful considering his situation. I sat down next to him this time as he ate, and when he was done he sat down next to me and set a paw on my knee. I described my day. He listened attentively. If I walked away right then I thought maybe George would drive him off and we’d come upon him in a week trying to tip over trash cans behind the Breakfast Nook Spa. Boys would attach things to him or drag him around with ropes tied to his overly loyal furry neck. He would be hungry, maybe scared, all alone.

  I took a few steps away, but I looked back at him and his tail lifted. Our eyes met—the tail swayed a little. “Well, come on,” I said. He looked at the door of Sweetheart Market. He looked at me. “I’m not going to try to explain ratfinks to you,” I said, “or back doors. But I don’t think your owner is coming back, no matter how long you sit there.” He stood and I swear he sighed. Then he fell into step by my right knee and we walked home in companionable silence.

  Janey fell on the poor dog like he was her last friend on Earth, and he didn’t object when she climbed on him and yanked at his ears and tail. She named him Boppit, and I added the “Mr.” because he just looked too sober a creature to give him a name that called up the sound a cartoon mallet made hitting a cartoon head. Mr. Boppit’s manners were elegant, not something you’d expect from a goofy style of dog. But dogs don’t always match their looks any more than people do. I’ve seen three-pound lapdoggish ones attack a horse and giant fang-toothed ones hide under porches when the ice man’s bell goes by. Mr. Boppit was neither. When Jane got calmer and stepped away from him, Bop sat down quietly and held up one paw for her to shake. She took it and he didn’t budge until she was done pumping it up and down. Mom saw that and it decided her in Mr. Boppit’s favor.

  He was initially my dog, not because anybody discussed it but because I’d brought him home. He was also partly Janey’s by default because she was the baby and he’d given her his paw to shake. Snyder wasn’t usually moved by animal magnetism, and Mr. Boppit wasn’t the kind of dog who imposed himself on you if you weren’t interested. Lilly outright disliked him. She claimed he smelled like a dog, but then, he was a dog. Exactly what was he supposed to do about that, I asked her. He also shed and liked to sleep on our bed, which Lilly hated, but his major offense was what he did to Lilly’s shoes. Bop could push any door in the house open easily, even manipulate a simple latch, so getting into our closet was not beyond him. Lilly’d find him there sitting in a pile of chewed-up remains and she’d whack him. He’d stand there and take it, tail down, looking as ashamed as any dog ever looked, but the next week he’d do it all over again.

  Aside from his feelings about shoes, he was a perfect dog. He let Jane tie bonnets on his head and sat at her doll table with her for tea. He walked by our sides and guarded us on our trips to the end of the block to buy penny candy at the corner spa. The winter after he came to us, he was walking with Lilly and me through some marshy fields by the beach. A little whisper of snow that had just fallen made it hard to see what was underfoot, and I was skidding along on the icy skin that had frozen over some stand
ing water. I broke through and got a foot jammed in the shattered ice, which didn’t put me in any danger but Mr. Boppit couldn’t tell that from the volume of my yelling. The water was icy, only seven inches deep, but it sloshed in over the top of my boot. Worse, when I yanked the boot up it caught on the edge of the hole I’d made and pulled the boot right off my foot, which sank in the still unfrozen muck as I struggled.

  Lilly yelled directions at me from the dry path along the marsh. She’d just gotten a new pair of boots that week, her first new boots in three years, so she was not stepping into any slushy goop to offer help unless there was more at stake than wet feet. She stayed put and yelled helpful advice. Not Mr. Boppit. Ears up, tail streaming out like a flag, Mr. Boppit charged to my unnecessary rescue: He got a big mouthful of my jacket, braced himself, and yanked me right off my feet and through a good five feet of ice water before I stopped yelling. As soon as I was quiet he released me and stepped up to lick my face. That’s the kind of dog he was.

  Of course, Snyder used Mr. Boppit’s nature against the poor animal. I think Janey was the only creature on Earth Snyder loved, but still he’d pretend to hurt her just to torment Boppit. He’d grab our little sister and make-believe whack her. The dog got positively hysterical—whining, barking, trying to push himself between Snyder and Janey while Snyder fake-yelled at her and windmilled his arms around her head, fake-attacking. That’s the sticky little dark place where Snyder lived. Boppit was helpless in these situations—too sensitive and good to imagine what Snyder really was.

  At night Boppit slept on the floor between our bed and Jane’s cot. He would have climbed into bed with us and wedged himself between Lilly and me if Lilly had let him. I would have let him. My sisters were sound sleepers but sometimes I’d wake up anxious and confused, climbing out of some bad dream. I’d look over and there would be Mr. Boppit looking across at me in the dark all calm and alert. He would watch me as I’d try to remember what I was dreaming, fail, and calm down. Sometimes he’d step up to the bed beside me and lay his head on my pillow until I told him I was all right. I’d say I was fine and he should lie down. I’d shut my eyes to convince him I’d fallen back asleep, but when I opened them again to see if I’d fooled him, his eyes would be shining at me; his tail would thump on the floorboards. He was on guard, shielding me from whatever it was that had woken me.

  NEAVE

  The Pirate Lover

  Mrs. Daniels regularly sent me home with paper bags of Violette’s cookies or brownies. In our backyard a sweep of birches stood between the rock and the kitchen window so we were invisible to our mother, who said charity was for the weak. Uncertain if this idea extended to free cookies, I distributed them in secret. In bad weather we met in Snyder’s bedroom; in good weather we met on the big rock at the back of our property. The first autumn afternoon that the air turned crisp Mrs. Daniels had Violette put a huge pile of coal in the grate—as much coal in one fire as my family used in a day. We toasted bread and slathered it over with jam during breaks from reading. My whole life wasn’t heaven, but those parts of it were.

  I’d been waiting for the moment when I could get an up-close look at the forbidden shelves of her library, and it finally came one afternoon when Mrs. Daniels excused herself for a slow trip to the facilities. She turned the corner into the hallway and I was on my feet and across the room in a flash. I told myself that I was going to take only a quick look, but that didn’t last a second longer than it took to see the first cover: The Pirate Lover. Well, I told myself, I would borrow it for a very short amount of time and just skim a few chapters before returning it. By the time she got back, The Pirate Lover was jammed into my book bag and I’d rearranged my face into an innocent blank.

  I took my stolen book to the bedroom closet that Daddy had built as a storage space for old snowsuits and clothes waiting for the next kid in line to grow into them. At the back was a perfectly usable if very tiny space that was out of sight and sound of family life. It actually had an electric socket, which made it easy for me to read with the help of a yard-sale lamp our mother had bought and abandoned in the garage. I dragged in a stolen pillow and a borrowed blanket and settled in with The Pirate Lover as soon as I could do so unobserved. The first afternoon I hid there I folded the blanket into a fat square seat, flicked on the yard-sale lamp, and just sat regarding my kingdom. It was raining and the drops hit the shingles just inches from my head with a soothing rapraprap. Thus began the part of my life that was lived in book romances.

  All I can say in my defense is that I was just looking for the truth.

  Also love, which I hoped was a true thing.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Electra Gates was a young woman so beautiful that she had commanded the attention of the men around her from the age of twelve, and though she had been an obedient and proper young woman, or perhaps because she had been an obedient and proper young woman, she had yet to taste passion herself though she had inspired it. She had hated no one, desired no one, loved no one. So when she encountered Basil Le Cherche, her feelings were a revelation to her.

  She first encountered his coolly assessing gaze in a Parisian drawing room in the spring of her eighteenth year. Electra’s mother was French, her father had been British, and when he was alive they had moved easily from one world to the other. But upon his death his widow had been shocked to discover how far beyond their actual means they had been living. His creditors swarmed their home and picked it clean, and the world they had known evaporated in a matter of weeks. It took only one social season in London for her mother to see how utterly their new poverty had changed her world. Where once she had known only flattery and smiles, now she met an endless stream of small humiliations. She took her daughter and withdrew from the London rooms they could no longer afford. They would take what they still had and go to Paris, where she could live more cheaply—and discreetly. Her mother had lived there in her youth with distant relatives, so this world felt familiar to her as well as far from their current difficulties. There she would bide her time, waiting for her daughter to reach the full flood of a beauty that could secure the attention of Paris society—and its wealthiest men. Two years had passed in this manner. Now the waiting was over.

  “We have saved every sou in preparation for this last chance,” her mother had said to Electra. “We must play out our hand now.”

  Even as they were reduced to worn cotton and broken shoes from seasons many years past, Electra’s mother had studied the little dolls dressed in Paris’s latest fashions that made their way to every small village and major capital where women owned mirrors. She had sold their sticks of furniture and every jewel she owned to pay for the Chinese silks and extravagant carriage fees that would provide her and her daughter a kind of disguise—the trappings of wealth and security, neither of which did they actually possess. She bet her future on this last gamble.

  Electra did not regard herself as a hand to be played, but she was an obedient daughter. Thus in the spring of her eighteenth year she found herself drinking tea in a Parisian drawing room on the day that all the talk was of a woman who had been found on the steps of Notre Dame, her clothes sliced away from the desecrated body, her throat cut cleanly at the artery. A picture had reached the newspapers and fascinated all of Paris—the victim’s head thrown back, lips white and parted, her face alabaster and her eyes wide but utterly empty now.

  In a corner of Madame Cirque’s Tuesday salon she heard a soft suggestion from the Viscount Pronauge that the victim looked like a mythic virginal sacrifice. “A draggle-tail homeless creature, a prostitute, apparently,” someone in the little cluster around the viscount added. “No, no,” another said, clearly agitated. “We’ve all passed her in the street—she’s the baker’s daughter. A simple, good girl!” Electra turned away from them, covering her fear with a practiced smile, and at the crest of her turn she saw the face that changed her life forever—Basil Le Cherche, standing out in the select gathering like an obsidian shard in a bank of
snow. All evening she struggled to keep her eyes from him, and all evening she failed. Each time her eyes found him she met his gaze. No matter the quickness of her turn or the interval between searching glances—he was waiting with a stillness deeper than any she had ever observed in man or woman.

  She drifted toward Madame de Lac, a woman who would know the worst of anyone in the upper social circles of the city. “Who is that man?” she asked, dipping her chin in the dark stranger’s direction as quickly and unobtrusively as she could.

  “Someone to avoid at all costs, my dear. His name is Basil Le Cherche. He is brother to a judge on the highest courts—Monsieur Henri Le Cherche. They say that his brother’s influence is all that keeps his neck from a noose now. Basil Le Cherche is rich, but his wealth, they say, is rooted in piracy and smuggling. He is also a noted swordsman.”

  “But duels are illegal in the city!”

  “My pet, the sword he wields is not brought to the battlefield but the bedroom.”

  Madame de Lac laughed to see her young companion flush crimson.

  Electra was still taken by surprise in this place where one’s clothing and connections mattered all; one’s character and intelligence not a whit. “I heard of tiresome difficulties after your father’s death. But you and your mother seem to have had a change of fortune,” Madame de Lac observed, her eyes tracing the French seams of Electra’s kidskin gloves. Electra merely nodded. She refused to tell the lie her mother had invented to explain this new wealth if anyone asked pressing questions—a departed long-lost relative from England who had left them this inheritance. No such thing or person existed, Electra had argued, and one lie will only demand ten more to prop it up when it totters. But her mother had not hesitated. “You have no idea how easy it is to lie,” she sniffed. “And you will be moving in a world where lies are legion—it is easier to identify a liar if you are one yourself, Electra. I suggest you learn the skill.”