In One Person

library—twice. I won’t forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I’d never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
    Miss Frost gave me a penetrating look. At the time, I doubt I was as tall as her shoulders. “Miss Frost
was once
what they call ‘statuesque,’” my aunt had told me, as if even Miss Frost’s height and shape existed only in the past. (She was
forever
statuesque to me.)
    Miss Frost was a woman with an erect posture and broad shoulders, though it was chiefly her small but pretty breasts that got my attention. In seeming contrast to her mannish size and obvious physical strength, Miss Frost’s breasts had a newly developed appearance—the improbable but budding look of a young girl’s. I couldn’t understand how it was possible for an older woman to have achieved this look, but surely her breasts had seized the imagination of every teenage boy who’d encountered her, or so I believed when I met her—when was it?—in 1955. Furthermore, you must understand that Miss Frost never dressed suggestively, at least not in the imposed silence of the forlorn First Sister Public Library; day or night, no matter the hour, there was scarcely anyone there.
    I had overheard my imperious aunt say (to my mother): “Miss Frost is past an age where training bras suffice.” At thirteen, I’d taken this to mean that—in my judgmental aunt’s opinion—Miss Frost’s bras were all wrong for her breasts, or vice versa. I thought not! And the entire time I was internally agonizing over my and my aunt’s different fixations with Miss Frost’s breasts, the daunting librarian went on giving me the aforementioned penetrating look.
    I’d met her at thirteen; at this intimidating moment, I was fifteen, but given the invasiveness of Miss Frost’s long, lingering stare, it felt like a two-year penetrating look to me. Finally she said, in regard to my wanting to read
Great Expectations
again, “You’ve already read this one, William.”
    “Yes, I loved it,” I told her—this in lieu of blurting out, as I almost did, that I loved
her
. She was austerely formal—the first person to unfailingly address me as
William
. I was always called Bill, or Billy, by my family and friends.
    I wanted to see Miss Frost wearing
only
her bra, which (in my interfering aunt’s view) offered insufficient restraint. Yet, in lieu of blurting out such an indiscretion as
that
, I said: “I want to reread
Great Expectations
.” (Not a word about my premonition that Miss Frost had made an impression on me that would be no less devastating than the one that Estella makes on poor Pip.)
    “So soon?” Miss Frost asked. “You read
Great Expectations
only a month ago!”
    “I can’t wait to reread it,” I said.
    “There are a lot of books by Charles Dickens,” Miss Frost told me. “You should try a different one, William.”
    “Oh, I will,” I assured her, “but first I want to reread this one.”
    Miss Frost’s second reference to me as
William
had given me an instant erection—though, at fifteen, I had a small penis and a laughably disappointing hard-on. (Suffice it to say, Miss Frost was in no danger of
noticing
that I had an erection.)
    My all-knowing aunt had told my mother I was underdeveloped for my age. Naturally, my aunt had meant “underdeveloped” in other (or in all) ways; to my knowledge, she’d not seen my penis since I’d been an infant—if then. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the
penis
word. For now, it’s enough that you know I have extreme difficulty pronouncing “penis,” which in my tortured utterance emerges—when I can manage to give voice to it at all—as “penith.” This rhymes with “zenith,” if you’re wondering. (I go to great lengths to avoid the plural.)
    In any case, Miss Frost knew nothing of my sexual anguish while I was attempting to check out
Great Expectations
a second time. In fact, Miss Frost gave me the impression that, with so many books in the library, it was an immoral waste of time to
reread
any of them.
    “What’s so special about
Great Expectations
?” she asked me.
    She was the first person I told that I wanted to be a writer “because of ”
Great Expectations
, but it was really because of
her
.
    “You want to be a
writer
!” Miss Frost exclaimed; she didn’t sound happy about it. (Years later, I would wonder if Miss Frost might have expressed indignation at the
sodomizer
word had I suggested that as a