When my dad started dialysis at home, the doctors told us he would need a sterile space. My mother cleaned out their small bedroom closet. It had just enough room for our old Formica table with the silver legs and a green cushy chair. She hung bags of fluid from the shelf. Then added: silver scissors that once sheared holiday wrapping paper; a paper towel holder; a red sharps jar; the rectangular, beeping home dialysis unit; the brown bottles of Betadine solution; the cotton swabs and the cotton gauze and the cotton puffs; the instruction manual for the machine, all the snaky plastic tubing; my dad.
Somehow, Dad managed to fit in there. Before, it was the closet full of Christmas decorations and old boxes I used to hide in when we played hide-and-seek in the house. He squashed himself in there for an hour four times a day, every day. There was no TV or radio. Just a pile of index cards that he used to record words, ideas, and historical events that came to mind, things he wanted to look up.
Dialysis at home did not go well. He got infections. He had pain. I would hear him moaning when he napped during the day. If he moaned at night, I’m ashamed to say I slept through it. The moaning became part of the house’s night sounds.
I had my first boyfriend around that time and because my mom was now working two jobs, it was my dad who drove me to and from school and to and from my boyfriend’s house. Dialysis was hard on his body. It affected his memory. Sometimes, he’d get lost in our own neighborhood, and we’d have to give him directions from the backseat, sneaking kisses between the turns as though he couldn’t hear that wet smacking sound.
One day he passed my bedroom and saw me and my boyfriend lying together. He paused, staring straight ahead, then kept on going. At the time, I thought he didn’t have the energy for a fight with me. Now I think it was because he knew time was short and he didn’t want to argue with his fifteen-year-old girl in his last days.
He was the first in our family to go to college. He went to art school and had been friends with famous cartoonists. I saw their names in the Sunday papers, and I saw their faces in my parents’ wedding photo—the man who drew Garfield stands behind my grandmothers. My dad was intellectual. He didn’t like anything woo-woo. He didn’t even read fiction. He said there was enough mystery in real life without wasting your time on things some Joe Schmo made up.
Once a week, we had a date at the library. He’d bring his index cards and dig for answers in their encyclopedias while I loaded up on teen romance novels. I never saw him check anything out except for one time. I dumped an armful of paperbacks onto the checkout desk, and my father came up with a small black book.
“I’m just going to use her card for this one,” he told the librarian, and he added it to my pile, face-down. Curious, I reached for it, and his hand slid to hide the cover. He shook his head no, but I saw the title as the librarian beeped it through: Hypnosis for Pain Relief.
From that day forward, I did hear it whenever he moaned in the night.
*
About ten years after my father passed away, I started volunteering in that same library. Every time I walked in and passed the circulation desk where he once hid away the book in his coat, I was that young girl again. And every night after I finished my reshelving, I would walk to the Self Help, 158., touch the book’s aged spine, and say goodnight. (No one ever checked it out. I checked its records. Mine was the last name on it.)
The library still looked the same as it did back when I visited with my dad. Hummy sliding doors opened to the wide front desk. Gray walls, black shelves. To the right of the desk was the children’s book section with its big fake tree in the center. The walls were covered with colorful patchwork quilts done by the local ladies’ auxiliary, and there was a big, pink rope rug that my boss shook out every night and sprayed with a cleaner that smelled like cotton candy.
To the left were all the adult books, my dad’s encyclopedias, and the outdated computers blinking on long tables. A bright oak banister curved upward to the second and third floors, where the library’s roof was all glass.
I had a red, double-decker rolling cart with my name on it. It reminded me of one of those double-decker buses in London. I’d push my cart onto the elevator and up to the third floor to get lost in the fiction stacks.
Sunshine would sometimes streak in through the glass roof to illuminate one title or another, like a sundial. I tried always to hurry over and say aloud the titles the sun chose.
I liked the feeling of being high up and underwater, especially when it rained and the roof felt like we were going through a car wash, the water splaying off the sides. It felt like the rain was washing off the library, and if I closed my eyes up there when it was pouring down, it felt like it was washing something off my soul, too.
My boss would periodically hire window cleaners for the glass roof, and one day, I screamed to see a man lying on his stomach, looking down at me, a squeegee in each hand and one attached to each foot as he swam across the glass, smiling and gyrating all the yellow pollen spots away.
He was like a skydiver. No, a swimmer.
At night, the third floor felt darker than anywhere else. My boss had bought six lantern-style lamps for the upstairs desks, and I loved clicking them on one at a time at dusk, their amber glass shades making it look like tiny campfires aglow on the wild plains, a place for gazing up to the stars. (Though I couldn’t see them because the glass was so smeary since the bizarre window cleaner had been dismissed.) All that darkness, all that night, and that wide expanse above the amber lamps and the stacks of stories made me feel like I was nestled in a canyon of books.
I encouraged the local Girl Scouts leader to have their annual library sleep-in on the third floor so they could set up their sleeping bags and pretend they were pioneer ladies. But she had been the one to make all of those colorful quilts on the children’s library walls, so she had her own reasons for wanting the girls to sleep down there.
Floating, floating, looking up—and then touching the hypnosis book on the way out each night for grounding, grounding my way back to a lonely reality.
There were some teens who did my same job and got paid minimum wage for the work I volunteered to do, and that was okay with me, it was. And then there was the other re-shelver, the other volunteer who worked evenings with me, a quiet woman named Chahee who was charming with the patrons. If someone asked her for a book, she knew right where it was. “Oh, Yuknavitch,” she’d say, speaking of the author as an old friend. “She lives here.” Always she lives, he lives somewhere in the stacks. I imagined myself in the stacks, near the self-help book on hypnosis, and someone asking, Is Noelle Strauss here tonight? Chahee would guide them to me with her hand over her heart, saying, “Yes, yes, she lives right over here.”
By the self-help book. On the second floor. I wondered if people knew that’s where I mostly was, the reason why I volunteered there so much.
But Chahee was put in charge of the library fundraiser that winter, and when I came in for my shift one snowy night, I saw that she had included Hypnosis for Pain Relief on a sale table with other banged-up, tattered books. I thought that if she knew the books, she knew me. I started making stupid extrapolations—that no one knew me in that place, that I was invisible, weird for always volunteering. In a daze, I lifted the book from the pile, drifted up the stairs to the third floor, and brought it back to its shelf, 158.63HYP. As long as that book was slotted where it was supposed to be, the world was right-side up. Right? I noticed Chahee’s tiny green sticker on its cover marking it for sale. I scraped it off with my fingernail and left a little hole on the dust jacket. I went to the women’s restroom, and when I washed my hands, it seemed I was washing stardust down the drain.
What was wrong with me? I had been volunteering at the library for two years, and I had never checked out that book or read a word. Yet it felt like the most solid book in the world, a touchstone, and it made the library a home to me.
Before leaving, I went to say goodnight to it and noticed Chahee’s black Sharpie mark on its deckled edge—the mark of “sell or destroy.”
I grabbed it and shoved it into my bag. I drove home through light snow.
I’d never seen him read it. Maybe he was disappointed in himself for checking it out—like I said, he had no patience for woo-woo. Maybe he felt embarrassed. He probably didn’t want me to worry. But I was grateful that I’d seen the title when the librarian beeped it through. I was caught up in being fifteen then and missing much of what was happening with him. That day I felt I could see him clearly.
I never saw him reading it at home, but maybe he took it somewhere—out to the car, maybe—and tried hypnotizing the pain away. Maybe he used it every day. Maybe he found relief. Maybe his fingers had worn out the book’s pages from so much handling. Maybe part of him, his sweat, tears wiped away from his face, now lived in the book. Maybe he lived in the book. Maybe if I cracked the cover, I would see something of him.
At home, I brought the book into my bedroom and put it face-down on the night table beneath my alarm clock. If I woke in the darkness to see that the numbers were still upright on the clock, not tilted as from a fight, then surely the book wasn’t actually alive.
Back then, red blood drops dried on all surfaces of the house—floorboards, the lid of the trash pail, the white Formica table, the edges of the silver scissors. Maybe inside the book, I’d find droplets dotting the pages, the brown of his red losing oxygen, the color of his cells becoming sepia-toned then rust.
Outside my bedroom window, the highway softened because of the late hour. The snow had stopped, and everything felt frozen in time. Self-Hypnosis for Pain Relief. I felt a loosening down my shoulders, a yielding. I reached for the book, rested my head on my pillow, and opened it with reverence. Maybe I would find some hypnotic instructions for easing my grief, all these years on from losing my dad. I let myself believe.
First, I was struck by its odd 80s-style font. Too much margin, no serifs. Exclamation points. Too many things in ALL CAPS. I read. I counted two typos on the first page. The syntax was jumpy and the sentences breathless, like you just knew this narrator led an aerobics class. I imagined the author with a spiky, frosted-tip haircut, feathered earrings, and a puffy headband, the kind you wore right across your forehead. In my mind, the voice of the narrator became the voice of Olivia Newton John from the “Physical” video. I started to laugh aloud.
Visualize your pain as a nosy neighbor. Slam the door in its face. Say, “MOVE ON, buster!”
Your pain is a grumpy roommate. Ignore it long enough, and it’ll move on!
When you feel pain, whisper to yourself, “You can miss me with this bullshit.”
I laughed. And then I cried. This black rectangle had been a solemn touchstone for my grief, a way of feeling connected to my dad. And now I didn’t have any of that: solemnity, touchstone—connection.
I turned the pages looking for a fingerprint, a rust-red spot, anything to prove he once held it. I brought it to my face and tried to smell it. He had been the last one to check this out. I tried to remember his hugging-him scent, but I could only smell the old glue of the book’s binding.
I pulled the book away from my face. I set it back down on my nightstand. And that’s when I saw it stuck between the pages: a small, white dogeared index card.
I held it to the light to make out the faint pencil.
Things written, things crossed out. Erasure marks. His handwriting for sure.
Take Noelle camping to see the lights at Ochre Canyon.
To London, to ride the red, double-decker buses.
Volunteer with her scout troop.
Teach her about sundials.
To skydive to swim.
