Charlotte

Charlotte

My first experience with Charlotte was about a year and a half ago, and I was lounging behind the library service desk with my head in a dream when I heard:
“Oh crap, Charlotte’s here.”
“Who?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
I looked toward the entrance to see a short spherical looking woman carrying four dark blue canvas bags with handles, bulging at the seams, waddling up the wheelchair ramp.
She heaved through the doorway with a huff, and pushed a wisp of her shoulder length grey-black hair out of her squinty eyes.
“Young Lady, could you please help me with my bags?”
I immediately lifted myself out of the chair, rushing over to help.

The closer I got the more I took in the appearance of the old woman. I started to hear her labored breathing, and when I journeyed a few feet closer, a thin sheen of sweat appeared on the thick ridge above her eyes. She relinquished the rest of the bags, and I leaned down and picked one up by its feeble handle, and even though the thing weighed as much as me, I made it over to the couch she was pointing at with a wagging finger. I went back for the rest of them and brought them to the couch, where she was sitting, magazine already in her hand. I waited for a “thank you” or any acknowledgement at all, and when it didn’t come I went back to the desk.
“Young Lady!!” Charlotte called from across the library.
I sighed and heaved myself out of my chair and went back to her little corner. Her bags were splayed out around her, their contents spilled out and covering the brown leather couch she was making her own. The variety of just stuff was overwhelming; cassette walkmans, a faucet to a sink, balls of yarn, clipboards, coins, and a whole bag dedicated to carrying lemonheads.
She looked up at me and said “Where are your biographies?”
It seemed like such a normal question, coming out of such a weird sight, that I almost wasn’t sure how to answer. Then I saw how she was looking at me and immediately pointed to the left. She didn’t say a word as she lifted herself off of the couch, as slow as an as an asthmatic snail, and wobbled over to the shelf.
I went back to the desk, and two minutes later Ulene (the other librarian aide on duty) came out of the shelves with a sour look on her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she just shook her head and let out a hushed “God damned Charlotte”. This made me overly curious, considering the fact that

Ulene only swore in dire circumstances and never took “the lords name in vain”. I got out of my chair and found some books I could pretend to put away.
As I covertly snuck over to the biography section I wondered what could possibly make Ulene swear about a patron, when I rounded the corner and saw the reason for myself. Charlotte was leaning against one shelf on her elbow, books spread all around her, historical figures looking up from various bindings. They were thrown on the floor and surrounding shelves, where they hung like the garments off a windblown clothesline.
I panicked, my brain reeling with possible consequences for this strange old woman. Then I remembered Ulene’s resentful passiveness as she walked back to the desk, and decided she must know more about it than I did.
When I got there she explained that my boss allows Charlotte to go to the library every couple of weeks to get ten biographies and to give her 85 year old mother a break for a few hours, and we were expected to treat her like every other patron, because she “didn’t know any better”.
Charlotte came back every couple of weeks religiously, each time destroying the shelves, bringing in a vast array of strange objects, and asking her usual questions. In the meantime (and I mean every day, sometimes twice a day) she would call and ask us to renew her books, ask what time we closed, ask us the time, and then hang up. It became kind of a joke to ask the lady working desk with you “What time is it? What time do you close?” over and over again. We all knew how terrible it was to make jokes about someone with her mental capacity, but picking up the books and just generally dealing with her was an unnecessary burden and we all got a little bitter.

After about a year of her weekly visits I was pretty irritated at just the thought of Charlotte and her crazy antics, and just when I was thinking I had had enough of her, she came wheezing up the library steps, enclosed in her bags. She called me over, and I helped her with her luggage, walking away afterwards without a sound.
A few minutes later she came lumbering up to the desk, bag clasped in her short handed grip.
“Young Lady, do you have any biographies on Rinus Michels?” She questioned, putting a book on the table, licking her fingers, and swiping the pages back.
She continued talking, but my gaze was focused on her mouth, where her fingers were going from tongue to page, tongue to page, tongue to page. My eyes zoomed in on her lips, purplish-grey with a dark hint of mustache. Her teeth were uneven and displaced, reminding me of a New York City skyline, except yellow and thick. I could only think of the spit she was putting on every page and what kind of germs this old woman was carrying and what happened if she had hep c or something, and what if I got it from….
I realized she was asking me something, and I snapped back into real time.
“Did I ever tell you about the report I wrote in high school about him? I got an A, and I stood up in front of the whole class, and my teacher wrote “A” with a capital in the corner, and she said I should show my papa, and I wrote it on him, and I got an A, I stood up in front of the whole class. She gave me an A.” There she paused, and laughed to herself. “Papa was so proud of me and my A.” She stopped speaking and just glared into the distance, her eyes glazing over, a smile sliding its way across her plump face.

Then something amazing happened; her face transformed. The deep wrinkles around her eyes and lips disappeared, the light in her eyes intensified reminding me of the porcelain dolls my grandmother used to collect, and she stood up straighter than I had ever seen her before. I knew she was back in that classroom, delivering her grade A report.
She was beautiful. I imagined her, sixteen years old, and untainted by hard years and misfortune. Something I never even imagined she could be. I was in awe. I must have stood there staring at her for years.
In reality, only a few seconds had gone by, but just as soon as the change had started, it was gone. Her eyes went back to their dull waxy brown, her eyes and mouth aged 50 years, and she became the stooped, lost woman I had come to know again.
“What time is it?”
I spoke over the lump in my throat, uttering a raspy “Its 3:45 Charlotte.”
“What time do you close?”
I cleared my throat and I declared “We close at 6:45 Charlotte.”
She walked away from the desk without a word, completely unaffected. I watched her go with a sinking feeling in my chest, thinking that I never knew her at all.