Something shifted in Alice that evening. She was tired of the eyes of the town on her, sick of being monitored and talked about and judged. She was sick of being married to a man whom everyone else thought was the Good Lord Almighty and who could barely bring himself to look at her.
Alice had come halfway across the world to find that, yet again, she was considered wanting. Well, she thought, if that was what everyone thought, she might as well live up to it.
She took another sip, and then another, batting away Beth’s hands when she shouted, “Steady now, girl.” She felt, she told them, when she finally handed it back, pleasantly squiffy.
“Pleasantly squiffy!” Beth mimicked, and the girls fell about laughing. Margery smiled, despite herself.
“Well, I have no idea what kind of library this is,” said Sophia, from the corner.
“They just need to let off steam, is all,” said Margery. “They’ve been working hard.”
“We have been working hard! And now we need music!” said Beth, holding up a hand. “Let’s fetch Mr. Guisler’s gramophone. He’ll lend it to us.”
Margery shook her head. “Leave Fred out of it. He doesn’t need to see this.”
“You mean he doesn’t need to see Alice all inebriated,” said Beth, slyly.
“What?” Alice looked up.
“Don’t tease her,” said Margery. “She’s married, anyway.”
“In theory,” muttered Alice, who was having trouble focusing.
“Yeah. Just be like Margery and do what you want when you want.” Beth looked sideways at her. “With who you want.”
“You want me to be ashamed of how I live my life, Beth Pinker? Because you’ll be waiting halfway to the heavens falling down.”
“Hey,” said Beth. “If I had a man as handsome as Sven Gustavsson come a-courting me, I’d have a ring on my finger so fast he wouldn’t even know how he’d found himself at church. You want to take a bite out of the apple before you put it in the basket, that’s up to you. Just make sure you keep hold of the basket.”
“What if I don’t want a basket?”
“Everyone wants a basket.”
“Not me. Never have, never will. No basket.”
“What are you all talking about?” said Alice, and started to giggle.
“They lost me at Mr. Guisler,” said Izzy, and belched quietly. “Good Lord, I feel amazing. I don’t think I’ve felt like this since I went on the Ferris wheel three times at Lexington County Fair. Except . . . No. That didn’t end well.”
Alice leaned in toward Izzy, and put a hand on her arm. “I really am sorry about your strap, Izzy. I didn’t mean to break it.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll just ask Mother to go get me another.” For some reason they both found this hysterically funny.
Sophia looked at Margery and raised an eyebrow.
Margery lit the oil lamps that dotted the end of each shelf, trying not to smile. She wasn’t really one for big groups, but she quite liked this, the jokes and the merriment, and the way that you could see actual friendships springing up around the room, like green shoots.
“Hey, girls?” said Alice, when she had got her giggles under control. “What would you do, if you could do anything you wanted?”
“Sort out this library,” muttered Sophia.
“I’m serious. If you could do anything, be anything, what would you do?”
“I’d travel the world,” said Beth, who had made herself a backrest of books, and was now making armrests to go with it. “I’d go to India and Africa and Europe and maybe Egypt and have me a little look around. I got no plans to stay around here my whole life. My brothers’ll have me minding my pa till he’s dribblin’. I want to see the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China and that place where they build little round huts out of ice blocks and a whole bunch of other places in the encyclopedias. I was going to say I’d go to England and meet the king and queen but we got Alice so we don’t need to.” The other women started to laugh.
“Izzy?”
“Oh, it’s crazy.”
“Crazier than Beth and her Taj Mahals?”
“Go on,” said Alice, nudging her.
“I’d . . . well, I’d be a singer,” said Izzy. “I’d sing on the wireless, or on a gramophone record. Like Dorothy Lamour or . . .” she glanced toward Sophia, who did a good job of not raising her eyebrows too far “. . . Billie Holiday.”
“Surely your daddy could fix that for you. He knows everyone, don’t he?” said Beth.
Izzy looked suddenly uncomfortable. “People like me don’t become singers.”
“Why?” said Margery. “You can’t sing?”
“That’ll do it,” said Beth.
“You know what I mean.”
Margery shrugged. “Last time I looked you didn’t need your leg to sing.”
“But people wouldn’t listen. They’d be too busy staring at my brace.”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Izzy girl. Enough people got leg braces and whatnot around here. Or just . . .” she paused “. . . wear a long dress.”
“What do you sing, Miss Izzy?” said Sophia, who was arranging spines into alphabetical order.
Izzy had sobered. Her skin was a little flushed. “Oh, I like hymns, bluegrass, blues, anything, really. I even tried a little opera once.”
“Well, you got to sing now,” said Beth, lighting a cigarette and blowing on her fingers when the match burned too low. “Come on, girl, show us what you got.”
“Oh, no,” said Izzy. “I only really sing for myself.”
“That’s going to be some pretty empty concert hall, then,” said Beth.
Izzy looked at them. Then she pushed herself up onto her feet. She took a shaky breath, and then she began:
My sweetheart’s murmurs turned to dust
All tender kisses turned to rust
I’ll hold him in my heart though he be far
And turn my love to a midnight star
Her eyes closed, her voice filled the little room, soft and mellifluous, as if it had been dipped in honey. Izzy, right in front of them, began to change into someone quite new, her torso extending, her mouth opening wider to reach the notes. She was somewhere quite distant now, somewhere beloved to her. Beth rocked gently and began to smile. It stretched across her face—pure, unclouded delight at this unexpected turn of events. She let out a “Hell, yes!” as if she couldn’t contain it. And then, after a moment, Sophia, as if compelled by an impulse she could barely control, began to join in, her own voice deeper, tracing the path of Izzy’s and complementing it. Izzy opened her eyes and the two women smiled at each other as they sang, their voices lifting, their bodies swaying in time with the beat, and the air in the little library lifted with them.