The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (18 page)

It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.…

By the time people sat down to Sunday dinner the poor guy was defending his entire ministry as the rumor mill caught, chewed, reformed, added significant pulp fiction to and spit back the single salty word he’d said in character.

First we found it funny, but when we realized just how deep judgment currents were running, we felt like character assassins. We called him to apologize, offer to help, whatever he needed, but he sounded sanguine.

“Better not do any murders for a while, but I want you to know, we had a great time. Believe me, this is small stuff compared to what some pastors put up with.”

Guilt still haunts us over “Pastorgate.” WHITB, SITB is our policy, but no one can control what others say or do—or what others decide to say about what someone does. And yes, life would get pretty awful if we expected everyone to behave according to the same rules. But that safe third space, the little neutral Switzerland we thought we’d created, wasn’t immune to the flash fires of gossip, which was disappointing.

Sometimes you really do want to go where everybody knows your name. And sometimes you want to be where people know you only as “that short, pleasant woman who reads J. A. Jance.” Either way you slice it, a used book store should be able to serve it up, the place where people got to define themselves for themselves.

C
HAPTER 16

Growing into Ourselves

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

—Confucius

E
VEN AS WE WORKED TOWARD
becoming the place where everyone could find safe harbor, physical space was rapidly becoming a precious commodity in the bookstore. Tales of the Lonesome Pine opened in our long front parlor and sucked up the side bedroom (which became the mysteries and thrillers room) a few months later. Personal space compressed as the shop grew. When the downstairs kitchen succumbed to cookbooks, crafts, “-ologies” and gender studies soon after Stephen-Saved-Our-Bacon Sunday, a countertop laden with cookery gadgets sustained us. Our teakettle boiled up perfect four-minute eggs, while the rice cooker turned out beautiful potatoes. A (metal) sieve atop the boiling potatoes would steam broccoli to perfection. Crock-Pots didn’t just make good stew, they wafted homey smells; we sold more cookbooks with the slow cooker on. The Asian fusion meals Jack produced in our electric skillet were pure delights.

Gadget Corner lasted about a year, until we scraped together enough money to renovate the upstairs kitchen. It sat in the back outside corner of the house, painted white since tiny windows in slanting alcoves let in so little natural light. I liked the sea-green tiled floor, so reminiscent of my paternal grandmother’s odd taste in kitchen colors, but its best feature was the 1950s vintage stove. Previous occupants had for some reason left this brand-new antique unused, its plastic-wrapped instruction book and meat probe waiting patiently on the pristine oven shelf. The manual sported the usual house babe with a flared skirt belted waspishly around the waist, high heels, bobbed wavy hair, and a gleaming smile. Valued online, the manual turned out to be collectible and sold for an obscene amount of money (which helped buy the new fridge). We learned by trial and error how to work the oven.

The second year, the enclosed side porch became the envisioned children’s area of our early dreams, and Jack built a shelf for humor in the bathroom. (It sat within easy reach of the toilet. Sales rose. Did this make us flush with success?) Year three, the downstairs closets became “book nooks” for young adult literature and Jack lost his back-room man-cave to Westerns and war novels. A year later he enclosed the carport, ostensibly for my chair-caning sideline, but the books for sale online wound up segregated out there.

Four years and ten months after we opened, we reached a carrying capacity of thirty-eight thousand volumes when Jack refused to put a bookshelf in the downstairs bathtub. I pointed out that two tubs remained in the upstairs bathrooms, one an ancient claw-foot big enough to scald a cow, but he only responded, “Some things are beyond the pale.” Of course, he said it in that cute Scottish accent, so it didn’t sound like saying no.

Learning to maintain private and public space upstairs and downstairs didn’t come easy. Once we arrived home from an elegant evening of music feeling frisky, which led to a most satisfying romp ’round the paranormal romances. The next morning a guy came in looking for vampire novels. Draped across the Christine Feehans lay my bra.

We instituted a walk through the store just before opening each morning, doing a quick check for things that might frighten or confuse customers. I remain notorious for doing laundry of an evening, then forgetting the next morning that certain intimate items, which in Britain are called “smalls,” hang drying in our downstairs—public—bathroom.

As Jack and I settled into the roles of colorful local bookstore owners, we continued trying to give customers the space they needed while staying in business. As an example, a young woman telling me about her mother’s death mentioned feeling isolated, unable to talk to friends about the trauma of her mother dying so young. She made a half-sniffling, half-giggling reference to the movie
Ghost
and said she almost wished she believed in psychics just so she could talk to her mom one more time.

It’s that ever-present balancing act: on the one hand, people who visit independent bookshops tend to like hearing recommendations; on the other, hawking books to crying customers could not only offend, but seem cynical and caustic. Add in that Jack and I need enough money to eat, and you see the problem. Where’s the line?

I didn’t want to play the pushy salesperson with that young woman, so just mentioned that in
A Grief Observed,
C. S. Lewis said something similar. She asked who he was, and what else the book said. Fine, that meant I should show her the book. If she hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have said anything else about it.

Selling used books is not like selling most other things. Food must be palatable; clothes should fit; paint has to be the right color. But books? On the one hand they are all things to all people, on the other a different thing to every person who buys one: entertainment, information source, inspiration and motivation, a talisman of wisdom, even a mile marker on one’s journey. The reason someone wants a book can vary widely, from household decor to seeking enlightenment.

For instance, it’s a documented phenomenon that people who survive extended periods in graduate school find they can’t read for pleasure anymore—at least for a while. Finishing my Ph.D., I realized with horror that a pastime that had sustained and encouraged me since the age of three had been crushed by the weight of so many pages read purely for informational gain. Too many books addle the brain, indeed.

Trying to get through even the lightest of fiction, that winter of my post-doctoral discontent, I found myself repeatedly skimming for basic plot and meaning, using the same techniques I’d mastered for academic survival. No longer possible the slow savoring of book, wine, fireplace, cat and couch; now it was grasp the gist and move on. Many post-docs have similar tales of woe.

And of being cured. My magic reconnection came in
Beach Music
by Pat Conroy. It held sentences so beautiful, so interesting and twisty in their wording, I had to stop flying past and think about what he meant. One has to inhale Conroy’s constructions slowly or they don’t make landfall on the brain. Soon I was reading as God intended, sentence by beautiful sentence, savoring the descriptions and the drama. And when the book ended, I’d enjoyed it. Not getting information from it, but reading it.

Thanks, Mr. Conroy.

We observe a lot of “book reunions” among browsers, when people reconnect to books that mark an epoch or turning point from their past (as Conroy did me). Sometimes they find something that’s been lost so long, they’ve forgotten they were looking for it.

One drizzly day a woman in her fifties picked up a copy of Jessamyn West’s
Except for Me and Thee,
lying atop a pile waiting to be priced. (Although bad weather usually lessens customer traffic, on this hectic morning the front table sagged beneath trade-ins.) Frowning at the illustrated cover, she said to herself, “Is this—?” She opened the book and read a few lines. A slow smile crept across her face. “It is,” she said with quiet conviction, folded the book shut, and handed it to me.

“Special book?” I asked, writing up the sale.

“My mother read it to me when I was sick in the seventh grade and missed a month of school,” she said. “I don’t think I ever knew the name of it. I’d really forgotten all about it until I saw that picture.” She pointed to the cover, a colored line drawing of a barn in winter, some animals in the foreground, a human figure walking between them. Her finger lingered on the jacket, tracing the man’s footprints through the snow; I don’t know if she knew that a smile lingered in her eyes as well.

It’s that kind of thing that makes it—well, there’s no better word for it—happy-ifying, to run a bookstore. (Yes, okay, it isn’t a “real” word, but don’t you think it should be?) Still, take such moments as part of the whole, because book reunions, while sweet, are not the bulk of our transactions. Neither, for that matter, is intellectual discourse.

People who visit our shop sometimes drop hints that they’d like to open a bookstore “someday.” They say how delightful it sounds to be surrounded by books and ideas all day long, to spend languid afternoons on literature’s great themes; to find a good debate partner about whether Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has become the thinking man’s Elvis (what with Laurie King marrying him to a girl half his age in her books, the Dr. Who lads creating a charismatic thirty-something sociopath for British telly, and Jeremy Brett’s ghost chasing action hero Jude Law’s Watson across the big screen); to compare Cormac McCarthy’s mired-in-despair novel
The Road
to the stiff-upper-lip despair of Nevil Shute’s
On the Beach,
then both of these to Dean Ing’s shoot-your-way-back-from-the-apocalypse paperbacks; to hand literature professors cups of tea as they rail against the trend of twice-told classics—Mr. Darcy a vampire? Louisa May Alcott solving Special Victims Unit crimes? Becky Thatcher raising Tom Sawyer’s love child? Tiny Tim operating a brothel in London??!! (All these fractured-looking-glass tales have been published and rest between covers on our shop shelves.)

Trouble is, there’s rarely time to have those great conversations, because we’re too busy looking up orders and hunting down mildew. Anyone getting starry-eyed about owning a bookstore should ask herself a few questions: Can you lift a box weighing fifty pounds? Do you know what cat pee on paper smells like—and can you get it out? Will you exude patience while solving puzzles that start, “I’m looking for a book…” and peter out somewhere between “it has ‘The’ in the title” and “It has a red cover and the author was a soldier whose last name started with S. Or was it Z?” I’ve already told you about the life stories you’re going to hear, many of them unpleasant.

The essential criterion for running a bookstore is less “Do you like books?” than “Do you like people?” Ironically, we find that having unlimited access to more reading material than we ever could have imagined means we read less. Chuck and Dee Robinson own Village Books, a new-and-used location in Bellingham, Washington, a shop I visit regularly because my friend Cami lives there and we are both bibliophiles. He once said in an interview with business writer Robert Spector, “If you’re opening a bookstore because you love reading books, then become a night watchman because you’ll be able to read more books that way.” He was right. It’s amazing how just the sight of so much intellectual fodder quells the appetite, let alone how little time remains to read once the shelves have been straightened, the day’s swap credits assessed and put away, and the sales taxes tallied.

And yet, in one of life’s great paradoxes, we admit that in the midst of having very little time to do as we like, we very much like what we are doing. In the novel
A Ring of Endless Light,
Madeleine L’Engle’s teen protagonist realizes she is most contentedly herself when concentrating wholeheartedly on something else. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in
Flow
that we get into a zone, absorbed in doing something needful that we know how to do, unaware that we’re enjoying ourselves until we stop.
The Happiness Project
’s Gretchen Rubin described a happiness fog, enveloping you wholly but turning ethereal the moment you become aware of it.

Jack and I spend our days sorting crimes from cookbooks; helping customers find a particular self-help tome while listening to the havoc the problem they need help with is wreaking in their lives; explaining why we won’t buy 1940s encyclopedias; nodding in encouragement as someone outlines plans for a novel he’ll write someday. It’s all about the customers, 24/7. Yet in those moments of concentrating on what other people need, want, long for, we catch glimpses of own contentment, fluttering like that elusive bluebird just at the edge of our sight line.

C
HAPTER 17

Reading Rekindled

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.

—Richard Forsyth and Roy Rada,
Machine Learning

S
O ONE MUST ASK: IF
running a bookstore is such a happy thing, why are there fewer and fewer of them?

When we started Tales of the Lonesome Pine, we were light worriers and big dreamers. Fortunately, we had friends to do the heavy worrying for us; they called us weekly from places across the States and Scotland, just to outline their fears and explain in simple terms why we were doomed to failure.