A ghost of a woman walks laps at the library as I browse for books. She wears white pants and a pastel striped sweater. I thumb through books; the paper cracks; I smell the must of the disused paper, and all the while this lady walks laps.
Her face is vacant. Her eyes are magnificent in bottle cap glasses but there isn’t anything there in her stare as she looks straight ahead through wisps of crackling blonde hair. She never runs into shelves or into the pobre homeless guys who come to use the free internet and get out of the cold, so I know she’s looking where she’s going. She never touches the books, and she’s there every time I am. I would think she is following me but I don’t walk around in circles so she must be following something else.
I know other people know her. Other people know ‘The Lady that Walks Laps in the Library.’ All the crazy people in this town have a little fan club and, more than that, I imagine she has some family. Someone must pay her bills because she can’t work with all the lap walking.
She whooshes past me when I’m in the V’s with a Vonnegut book. Then again when I’m in the M’s looking at a Claude McKay book. I go to the finance section on the other side of the library and – vroom – there she goes by me. I wonder if she recognizes me at all or wonders why a guy like me would be in the finance section.
She doesn’t work at the library. The ghost-pale old lady carries an over-the-shoulder purse, too big for her, and walks with her free right arm tucked closely to her body. She walks slowly like she’s confused. There’s never a cart of books in front of her or even one book in her hand. I’m sure she’s unemployed because she’s always at the library where she can’t possibly work.
The library isn’t very big and this ghost-woman is rail skinny, unhealthy skinny, so she’s not a fitness freak.
I drop the magazines on the table when I’m bored with them because I don’t want to put them back on the shelf, and she glides past me without looking. No one else in the library thinks twice about her, but I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that, so she’s real enough. I stop by the DVD section to see if I’m interested in any movie and as she glides past me I notice she smells like soap. Not stomach churn public soap, so I know she doesn’t live in the library.
She looks like she has a cat somewhere, and that cat probably wonders what this lady does all day. That cat is all alone, I think, and that’s kind of sad if you’re a cat lover. I hate cats, but still I wonder if this lady has one because she could use one if she doesn’t.
She walks past me while I’m looking at a book on Hindu metaphysics because she’s not just walking laps around the edge of the room, but down every open space between shelves. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I designed: “Hey, German Guy, is there a God? – I vish I knew”. I wonder if she’s got a photographic memory and they hire her to keep stock? No. She doesn’t work at the library. The people that work at the library have a different confused look on their faces.
In the entryway some children are putting their parents’ quarters into a spiraling wishing well for the needy, and I can’t watch it because the ghost lady walks right through my line of sight. This lady has some problems, I think, and she’s starting to scare me because I don’t want to be there when she loses it. They go off at any time, those silent ones that walk a lot. I know she doesn’t have a job, because if she did she’d have cable and she’d be at home flipping and flipping through the stations waiting for something good to be on. This ghost lady doesn’t have a cell phone, either.
Unless she’s a crazy heiress, but I doubt it. I’ve never met an heiress, so I don’t think they exist. I believe in ghosts more than in heiresses.
She’s not following me, because I check my books out and from the check out desk and I can see her still cutting in and out, through the rows and rows of books and books. If she’s following anyone or anything, then I don’t think I can see it. It just looks like she’s walking laps. She must be a health nut. But she’s so skinny!
I don’t know.
There are many cats somewhere meowing out in pangs of loneliness and all the while this ghost lady walks laps in the library.