The women looked up as they entered.
“Alma?” Marge said. “Trudy? This here’s Julia Tomasov, our newest volunteer.”
The two women nodded, smiling.
“Alma here is in charge of acquisitions. She’s been with us for six years now—”
“Seven,” Alma said.
Marge looked surprised. “Seven? It’s been that long?”
“Time flies when you’re having fun.”
All three of them laughed, and Julia smiled politely.
“Anyway, Alma’s in every day, and she’s sort of my right-hand woman. Trudy’s been volunteering for about a year, and she comes in a couple times a week. I don’t know what you had in mind, but we can use you whenever you’re available. An hour a day, once a week, whatever.”
“I was thinking about Tuesdays and Thursdays at first. Maybe… ten to two?”
“That’d be fine,” Marge said. “That’d be great. As you can see, we’re processing donations right now. We got a pretty big gift from the estate of one of our ex-mayors a few months ago, but we were in the middle of a remodeling project, and we haven’t been able to get to it until now. We sort of let that slide. But processing these books is now our top priority.” She looked at Julia. “Were you planning to start today?”
Julia nodded.
“Great, great. You said you worked in a library before, so you can probably pick up on this pretty quick.” She motioned toward an empty seat next to Trudy. “The girls’ll show you the ropes. If you have any questions they can’t answer, just pop up front and I’ll be more than happy to help you.”
Marge remained a few minutes longer, helping her to get settled, then excused herself and walked back out front to check on the patrons.
“Molokan?” Alma asked, handing her a stack of blank accession cards.
Julia nodded.
“My first husband was a Molokan. Drunk bastard.”
She remained silent, not sure where this was going.
“Your husband Molokan?”
“Yes,” Julia said.
“He ever beat you?”
She laughed. “No.”
“You’re lucky.”
“They’re not all wife beaters,” Trudy said.
“I know.”
“And not all wife beaters are Molokan.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
Trudy smiled sympathetically at Julia, giving her a quick she’s-not-so-bad-when-you-get-to-know-her look.
Julia smiled back, understanding, and the conversation soon settled into the usual biographical chitchat. Alma had indeed had a hard life, and Julia was amazed by the soap-opera quality of her troubles, from her string of marriages to various losers and layabouts to the recent arrest of her eldest son on drug charges. Trudy, by contrast, had been married to the same man since she was sixteen, an insurance salesman and an elder in the Mormon church. Both women seemed simple and honest and refreshingly free of pretensions, and when Julia thought about what her day would have been like had she remained at home, in the house, she was very glad that she’d come here this morning.
After that, the conversation took a turn for the worse. It was Alma who steered the talk away from the personal and toward the political.
“The government’s lying to us again,” she said.
Trudy did not respond, and Julia followed her lead, saying nothing and continuing to fill out the accession card on the book in front of her.
“There’s a comet that’s going to crash into the earth, and the government knows about it, but they’re keeping it a secret.”
Julia could not help smiling. “Where did you hear that?”
“Joe Smith.”
“Who’s Joe Smith?”
“He’s on the radio. From midnight ’til four on the Wilcox station. Last night, he said that there’s a comet heading directly for Earth that’s going to crash somewhere on the West Coast and kill millions of people but they’re not telling people because they don’t want them to panic.”
Julia shook her head. “Don’t you think if that was true, we would’ve heard about it before? We would’ve seen it on the news or read about it in the paper?”
“That’s because the government’s keeping it a secret.”
“And even with all the big news organizations and everyone who has a telescope, no one’s heard of this except the nighttime radio guy in Wilcox, Arizona? Sorry. I don’t buy it.”
Alma squinted, looked at her suspiciously. “You’re not some kind of liberal, are you?”
“Alma’s right,” Trudy said. “Joe Smith tells the truth the government doesn’t want you to hear. Joe Smith’s not even his real name. It’s just the one he uses so the government can’t track him down.”
She had considered Trudy an ally in this, but now she looked at both of them as though they were crazy.
She was reminded, absurdly, of American Graffiti, where the characters all invented elaborate stories surrounding the Wolfman, their favorite disc jockey, some claiming that he was broadcasting from a ship in the ocean in international waters, others believing he was illegally broadcasting from Mexico into the United States, when the truth was that he was a local guy working in a cramped studio at the edge of town.
She didn’t feel like continuing the discussion, and she made the decision to ignore it, let it slide, and concentrate on the work before her. She was being arrogant and elitist, she knew, reverting to her old ways, but she put their opinions down to ignorance and a lack of sophistication. She assumed that the fundamental differences of opinion and diverging worldviews were due to the fact that Alma and Trudy had grown up here and had, at the most, high school educations, while she had grown up in Los Angeles and graduated from college. In her mind, she agreed that they would disagree and vowed to avoid the subjects of politics and religion entirely.
“You’ll see,” Alma said firmly. “When the comet hits California, then you’ll believe it.”
Julia refused to respond.
“The government lies to us all the time. They didn’t tell the truth about Oklahoma City or the bombing of Flight 800. They won’t even acknowledge helping to train the UN troops.”
Trudy nodded. “The government’s like that. That’s why we need our own militias, to protect America.”
Julia couldn’t resist. “A militia’s not going to do much good against a comet,” she pointed out.
Alma squinted at her. “What are you? A traitor? Can’t ever tell with you Russians—”
“Leave her alone,” Trudy said. “It’s not her fault. She’s just been brainwashed by the media.”
Marge walked through the door into the back room. “Girls, girls, girls…” She smiled tolerantly. “We can hear you all the way out front. I came back to tell you to keep it down. You’re disturbing the patrons.”
“Sorry,” Trudy said.
The librarian’s voice dropped. “Also, I heard what you all were talking about, and I couldn’t just let it slide. Julia, believe it or not, our country does face some mighty big problems and some serious choices about the future. There are threats confronting America that our government just will not or cannot respond to. The United States is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and sometimes the people just have to take matters into their own hands. That’s why we have the Second Amendment. So that we can form militias, so that we can respond when America’s freedom is threatened.”
Julia met Marge’s eyes. “Who’s threatening our freedom?”