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laughed as Bernice put the Coke bottle down. If she drank a glass of it, it would mean that someone might have to leave the house later in the evening to pick up another bottle. She knew it would be all right to make a smart remark and then pour herself a glass. As long as she made them laugh she would be forgiven. She didn’t want the Coke that badly though.
    Her uncle had snorted at her meanly, “Lose some weight.”
    She had walked out of the room to her mother’s voice. “Really, Lou, one glass isn’t going to be missed,” her mom said.
    “That kid’s too sensitive,” she heard her uncle mutter.
    She was sorry to have left her room. She looked at the pile of library books on her floor (the carpet was the kind that is supposed to feel like grass when it’s green) and feltbetter. Back then, Saturday was just about her favourite day of all. She would spend about four hours in the town library, about three and a half hours too many by Miss Robbins’ watch. Miss Robbins, Bernice imagined, was at least seventy years old. She was almost certain that Miss Robbins, Clara Robbins, was a smoker. She had arthritic fingers and knew every title on the shelves of the Grande Prairie public library. The skin on her fingers, spotted, yellow and papery thin, would tap past books at an alarming rate as she tried to select what Bernice could read. She also remembered the old woman, wearing orange lipstick that was an orange not found in nature, as being mistrustful.
    “Bernice Meetoos, I think that book is too old for you. Judy Blume is not for ten-year-olds,” she said slyly one time, not at all in a librarian voice, but in what Bernice thought was an in-sin-u-ating voice. She was not quite sure what that meant, but she thought it had something to do with putting sin into someone else. She had read it in the
New Yorker
(which caused Miss Robbins to smack her lips against her teeth louder than ever before). She had presumed this was because Miss Robbins was prone to put sin into whatever motives a ten-year-old girl might have.
    Bernice’s momma had a standing policy that Bernice could read whatever she wanted. Well, she could at least bring home whatever she wanted. Bernice assumed this was because her mom was the best judge, after Bernice of course, of what Bernice should have been reading. Bernice reminded Miss Robbins of this for the sixteen thousandth time.
    Miss Clara Robbins clucked her tongue on the roof of hermouth and said, “I’d certainly like to meet this mother of yours.”
    To Bernice it sounded like she didn’t believe that Bernice had a mother.
    She stuck out her tongue at Miss Robbins as she swung her wide librarian bottom around and, while fascinated by the girth of the bottom, continued her search for the perfect book.
    The perfect book, to Bernice, would depict a clean house with flowers in every available container. There would be no cigarette burns in gaudy-coloured carpet, no empty bottles or glasses half-drunk or spilled on the floor on weekends, and no visits without invitations from her parents’ friends. No one would bother her in her room under the stairs, and she wouldn’t be woken up by thundering feet up the steps (a fight) or the thudding down the stairs (someone falling down). There would be happy shiny people who always hugged and smiled. They would never put each other down or make fun of one another to make other people laugh.
    They would take family vacations to Disneyland, go for walks as a family, and sit down for meals and ask each other questions they had always wanted to know the answers to. There would be another daughter who was a little chubby, popular and smart. The other daughter, who was, coincidentally, the same age as Bernice, would wear store-bought clothes, have her hair cut in parlours (Bernice loved that word; she also loved “turgid,” “nomenclature” and “conglomerate”), and would not have to take out books from the library because she would have her own