The Bookseller (3 page)

I think back to the dream, and how it was snowing when I looked out the window in the girl's bedroom. Missy? Is that the name? Yes, snow was falling outside the window in Missy's
room. I wonder that I can remember such a detail from a dream, that my mind can create entire snowscapes for my viewing pleasure while I am asleep.

I smile at the memory of the view inside the room, as well: those two darling children, and the man with the beautiful eyes.

Finishing my coffee, I file Mother's latest postcard in a manila folder, nestling it with the others I have received—at least three or four a week. I keep the folder on my desk beside a framed photograph of my parents.

I rise and go draw myself a bath. Nice as that dream life was, I need to get on with my own, very real day now.

I
walk to our bookshop on Pearl Street. It's only a few blocks. Frieda walks from her home, too, and sometimes we meet on the way. Today, however, I am alone as I turn the corner onto Pearl. For a moment I stand still, taking in the quiet, the desolation. There is not another soul about. No automobiles pass my way. The drugstore is open; I can see their neon sign lit up in the left-hand window. The sandwich shop, too. I know from experience that throughout the course of the morning, perhaps a handful of passersby will stop in there for coffee or a salami on rye to go. But only a handful.

It was not always this way.

When Frieda and I first opened Sisters' Bookshop in the fall of 1954, we thought this the perfect location. Back then, we got the streetcar traffic from the Broadway line, which veered onto Pearl. We're just down the block from the Vogue Theater, and we made sure to stay open in the evenings when a feature was playing, to cater to the before-and-after movie crowd. We saw a lot of evening customers in those days; people loved to browse our bookstore at night, no doubt hoping to meet a mysterious beauty or handsome stranger among the stacks.

Things are much more iffy now. The Broadway line has been shut down—all of the streetcar lines have been shut down, replaced with buses. The new bus line does not run down Pearl Street, so we don't get that traffic anymore. The Vogue still shows films, but they don't draw the crowds that they did years ago. People simply don't shop and amuse themselves on our block and in other small commercial areas like ours, not the way they used to in bygone years. They get in their cars and drive to the new shopping centers on the outskirts of town.

We've been talking about that, Frieda and I. What to do about it. Ought we to close down, get out of this business entirely? Ought we to—as Frieda suggested years ago, and I held back—close down this location and open in one of the shopping centers? Or ought we to just maintain the status quo, believing that if we stick with it, why then, things will surely turn around? I don't know, and neither does Frieda. It's a daily topic of conversation.

What I've learned, what we've both learned over the years, is that nothing is as permanent as it appears at the start.

B
efore we opened our store, I'd worked as a fifth-grade teacher, a job that I told myself I was crazy for.
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job
, I would silently chant to myself each morning as I bicycled from my parents' home, where I still lived, to my school a few miles away.

How could I
not
love it? I'd ask myself. After all, I adored children, and I adored books and learning. What sort of person would I be, then, if I did not, logically, also love to teach?

But standing at the chalkboard in front of a large class of ten-year-olds made me as nervous as a novice musician who had somehow faked her way into performing in an overflowing
concert hall. Small and alone, seated at the grand piano under the spotlight, that phony musician would realize too late that the moment she struck a key, she wasn't going to hoodwink anybody.

That is how I felt, standing there in my classroom. My palms would sweat, and my voice would become too quick and high-pitched; often a student would ask me to repeat something. “Miss Miller, I didn't catch that,” one would say, and then they all would take it up:
Me, neither. Nor did I, Miss Miller. What did you say, Miss Miller?
I felt that I was a joke to them. But not a good joke, not one that I was in on, too.

Every year I had a few standouts—thank goodness for the standouts—those students who could learn in any environment, students who were smart and adaptable and quick to grasp concepts all on their own, without much help from me. But such pupils were few and far between.

And then there were the parents. Oh, the parents.

I remember one particularly awful morning toward the end of my teaching career. Mrs. Vincent, whose daughter Sheila had just received a D in history on her midterm report card, stormed into my classroom before the first bell. She waved Sheila's report card angrily. Sheila trailed behind her mother.

“What is the meaning of this grade, Miss Miller?” Mrs. Vincent demanded. “Sheila tells me that you don't even study history in your class!”

“Of course we do,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. Crossly, I bit my lip; why should I have to defend something so obvious? “We've been learning about the Civil War all term.”

“The Civil War? The Civil
War
? What possible use does a young girl have for something as prehistoric as the Civil War?”

The question was so absurd, I could not even come up with an answer. Sheila stood smugly next to her mother, dark eyes challenging mine. I wanted to slap her. I knew I never would, but
the impulse was so strong, I had to put my hands firmly at my sides to control myself.

“That is the curriculum,” I said. “That is what I am asked to cover, ma'am.” I walked to the classroom doorway as the bell rang, ready to greet my other students. “I am just following the curriculum.”

Mrs. Vincent smirked. “Well,
that's
creative, isn't it?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whirled around and left the room.

I was a wreck; honestly, it took me weeks to get over that one. Over time, I began to blame myself. Yes, I was just doing my job. But if my students couldn't, or wouldn't, learn—why then, I was at fault. Learning had come so easily to me over the years; I assumed therefore that it would be easy to teach others. I didn't know how to fix things when that turned out to be untrue.

During those same years Frieda, who had been my best friend since high school, worked in an advertising firm. It was demanding but glamorous work, and she was good at it. Her firm's accounts were mostly local businesses, but many of them were sizable companies—the Gates Corporation, Russell Stover Candies, Joslins Department Store. She went to parties and grand opening events. She wore gorgeous evening gowns, which she would model for me beforehand, to see what I thought. I always thought they were fabulous.

On the surface, Frieda seemed to be having a fine time. But when she and I were alone, comfortable on the weekend in dungarees, low-heeled shoes, and sweaters, she'd confess that it was all too much, it was all a sham. It made her feel, she said, as if she were acting in a play. “Acting is fun once in a while,” she said. “But it's tiresome to do it all day, every day.”

Frieda and I talked a lot about our situations. How much she hated the phoniness of her work. My fear that I was failing at the one thing I had thought I'd be good at.

“What would a different life be like?” she asked me one Sunday afternoon toward the end of March 1954, as we took a walk in my new neighborhood. I had moved out of my parents' house the month before—approaching my thirties, I'd felt that it was time for me to be out on my own, so I had leased an apartment in Platt Park. My new place was not far from the school where I taught; it was also less than a ten-minute walk to the small house that Frieda had purchased two years earlier. It was a typical Denver spring—as usual, we'd had more snowstorms in March than in any other month. That year, as in most years, the storms were generally followed by several warm, sunny days, during which the snow melted into puddles and new grass poked up in muddy yards. The day before, we'd had one of these characteristic late-season snowfalls—but that Sunday, as Frieda and I took our stroll, it was clear and bright, with temperatures in the fifties.

Frieda watched heavy droplets of melting snow fall from a nearby house's eaves. She turned back to me and asked, “What if the work we did was gratifying?”

“What if I didn't end most days in tears?” My mind felt open, alive, as I considered the possibilities.

Frieda nodded slowly. “Indeed, sister,” she replied. “Indeed.”

Finally we decided that it was time to stop dreaming and start living our dreams. We raided our savings accounts, borrowed from our parents, and got a business loan. As single women, we had to have a man cosign our loan; fortunately, Frieda's father was agreeable. Thus Sisters' was born.

I remember our elation when we opened the store. At last, we were doing what we wanted to do with our lives. We would have a thriving business that we co-owned; we would make our own choices and determine our own fates. From here on out, no one—parents, bosses, not to mention a horde of contrary ten-year-olds and their mothers—would have a hand in determining
who Frieda and I were going to be. Nobody would decide that for us, nobody save for each other.

We'd both come through our twenties without marrying, something that no other girl we'd known in high school or college had done. Neither of us is perturbed by singlehood. The goal I once had to marry Kevin—that seems irrelevant now. It was the desire of a young woman—a girl, really. A girl I no longer am.

Over the years, I've come to realize that being unmarried gives me—and Frieda, too—an element of freedom and quirkiness that other women our age do not have. It's like being a singular necklace that might catch one's eye in the jewelry section of a department store, the one strung with colorful, random beads, rather than the monotonous, expected strand of pearls.

Who needs men? Frieda and I ask each other. Who needs children? We smirk at our station-wagon-driving counterparts, feeling relief that we never fell into
that
trap.

It is not a life that either of us has wanted for a long, long time.

O
ur day is challenging, Frieda's and mine. We have only two customers in the morning, each of whom purchases a copy of that new Bradbury novel—a rising star in our humble little line-up, that book. In the afternoon a few folks come in to browse, and several people ask if we have Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
—the book, about the hazards of pesticides, was presented as a series of essays in the
New Yorker
earlier this year and will be published as an anthology later this month.
Silent Spring
is much anticipated in local literary circles, but unfortunately, we won't receive copies from our distributor until the last week of September.

All day long, Frieda is edgy, irritable. Her mood rubs off on
me, and I notice that my hands shake a lot, even though I've only had two cups of coffee today. Perhaps it is just the memory of the dream, which lingers in my mind.

“I need to get out of here,” Frieda tells me at four thirty. “I've had enough for one day. Will you close up?”

I nod and watch her leave. Outside the shop, she furiously lights a cigarette and stomps down the street.

“Sister, I'm so sorry,” I whisper, although she is long gone and cannot hear me. “I'm so sorry for the way things are going for us.”

And then, after I close the front shades, as I am gathering the meager amount of cash in our register so I can store it in the safe out back, it comes to me.

I know where I've heard that name before. Lars.

The recollection dates back some eight years. It was just before Frieda and I launched Sisters', during the phase when I began calling myself Katharyn. Back then I read with great interest the personal ads section in the
Denver Post
. And finally I ran an ad myself. It was something to do, I suppose, another brave something that went along with my new job, my new name, my desire to make myself over into someone different.

Lars was one of the fellows who responded to my ad. In fact, now that I think of it, Lars was
the
fellow.

What I mean is that, out of the twenty or so men who wrote, the eight or ten that made the first cut and to whom I talked on the telephone, and the few that I went on a date with (none of them to be repeated, generally not to my disappointment)—out of all those men, Lars was the only one with whom I truly thought there might be potential.

Like all of the men, Lars wrote me a letter to introduce himself. But unlike many of the notes I received, Lars's letter was more than a few lines scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed in an envelope, with little thought of the outcome. I could tell,
just by what he'd written, that Lars had put a great deal of time and consideration into his letter.

I
am a saver. I have an enormous file cabinet at home, and I save every piece of paper that ever had meaning to me. I have letters, recipes, travel itineraries, magazine articles—you name it, and it's in that cabinet

So it is no surprise, when I rush home from work and go through my files, to find a manila folder marked, simply, “Ad Respondents.” And in this folder are a smattering of letters and pieces of paper with first names and telephone numbers scribbled on them. There is also a yellowing copy, cut from the newspaper, of my personal advertisement: