Mostly Concerning Libraries, Sexy Books, and Small Deceptions

In 1969 when the Schaechterles washed up there, Yerington, Nevada, had no bookstore. As far as I know it has never had one since. Menesini’s dime store and soda fountain by the old courthouse had a rack of True Confession and True Detective magazines and comic books; Nevada Drug on the other end of Main Street boasted a more reputable magazine rack—I would buy the first issue of Ms. Magazine there in 1972—plus a spinning comics rack and a shelf of paperback westerns for the men and one of paperbacks featuring terrified women in long nighties running away from brooding ruins for the women. The furniture store had a small supply of Thornton W. Burgess animal stories in hard cover which my mother periodically bought for my younger sister, as she had previously bought books for me.

Yerington was not what you would call a bookish town; the closest brush it has had with literary fame is that Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon series of mystery books, claims to have been conceived there. The nearest bookstore was 80 miles away in Reno, not a trip my parents took often. But there was a library. And in 1970 when my parents bought a house in town—we had been renting some two and a half miles out on the Mason road—the Lyon County Library became the first public library in my experience that was within walking distance and freely available to me. I turned twelve the summer we moved into town and I acquired a library card as soon as we painted the last room and unpacked the last box.

The walk was short enough to be convenient, but long enough that it took in Yerington’s entire business district: Leaving by the back door and angling down the driveway to Littell Street, the Reader would cross the short ends of three blocks from California Street to Main Street, then make a left on Main, traverse one long block from Nevada Drug past The Emporium to the old Owl Club restaurant and casino—then half the next—Menesini’s and the Crescent Garage

where my father worked—to the Old Lyon County Courthouse. Between the Garage and the Courthouse was a little green space dominated by a marble Ten Commandments, the Protestant, not the Catholic (and certainly not the Jewish), version, but no matter: over the next six years I would break every one of those commandments through my reading.

Up the steps and into the courthouse, the Reader would veer to the left of the grand interior staircase. The library took up the two exterior rooms at the rear of the courthouse, about a sixth of the first floor. Across the hall was the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, with cells for miscreants either upstairs or below. The first room of the library held the children’s books, a reading table, and a mean old bat of librarian as unlike the sort of motherly, encouraging, possibly magical librarians populating children’s books as could be. The second room—paradise—held the entire collection of books for adults, fiction and non-fiction. On my first visit, the day I got my library card, she limited me to two books and tried to make me stay in the children’s room. I had to convince her that I had already read most of the books she tried to make me choose (true) and tell her that my mother did not care what I read (false) and name two books I wanted to get from the adult room (Oliver Twist and The Three Musketeers) before she would let me enter that nest of vice. My mother, in fact, would skim every book I brought home for forbidden sex scenes. As long as the books appeared sex-free she did not care whether I read The Bobbsey Twins or The Communist Manifesto, but her policy did make bringing home contemporary fiction a bit of a crap shoot.

That first year I stuck to many-paged classics from the great age of novels--Dickens and Dumas, Tolstoy and Twain, reading every holding in the library for a favorite author, carrying home books two or three at a time (this was in the era before book bags and backpacks, when you hugged books to your chest as you walked) stopping at the market for a bottle of Coke to drink on the way home. Late that year the old librarian disappeared or died of meanness and was replaced by a librarian too busy talking on the phone to give my books more than a cursory glance. That, and  my secret acquisition of the “lost” second key to my father’s camper trailer meant I could ditch books there to be read in the afternoons under the backyard elm or smuggled into my bedroom on a non-library day when my mother would not be suspicious: The Godfather, The Joy of Sex, Breakfast of Champions, books which she would have made me take straight back to the library, as well as more innocuous stuff, not sexy but soaked in adultery and guilt, like the novels of Grahame Greene. Thus did a lonely girl form her early taste for thick novels and for harmless deception, under the shadow of the block Y.