“It was sacrilege, Marguerite, absolute sacrilege. Blasphemy. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross, but when I opened them that disgusting man was still there on the screen. I feel faint just thinking about it.”
My mother pushed Ctrl/Alt/Del, only to have a different naked man pop up. She tried to shut the power off, but each time she touched a key or clicked the mouse, a different beefy male popped up to fill up the screen.
“I tell you Marguerite, I was beside myself. Then I remembered that Herb knows about computers, so I ran to the top of the stairs and called down for him to come up right away.”
Herb is the man with no legs who lives in my mother’s basement during the coldest months of the year. In the summer, he stays at an inner-city shelter. I don’t know his last name or how my mother met him, but I think it had something to do with the church. I have a vague recollection of a story that involved Herb collecting alms on the cathedral steps and the church administration chasing him off and threatening to call the police, and my mother rescuing him. In any case, the arrangement seems to be a mutually beneficial one. In winter, he pays his share of the utilities and also serves as a TV-watching companion.
Herb made his way up the steps while my mother raced to her bedroom to fetch one of the vials of holy water that she purchased on a parish tour to the Vatican five years ago and which she keeps on hand for just such emergencies.
“Béni soit Dieu, that it’s Herb’s legs that are missing and not his arms,” she said.
She sprinkled the room with holy water and placed both the monitor and keyboard on the floor so Herb could reach them.
Herb typed and my mother prayed aloud, vowing to stay on her knees until her prayers were answered (as she believes they always are as long as we pray hard enough). I could see the two of them: Herb tapping commands into the computer as my mother cried out a series of ejaculations to the Blessed Virgin while clutching the scapular of the Immaculate Heart that she never removes from her neck, not even when she’s in the bath.
The incident used up an entire vial of holy water. My mother had only three left now, and regretted that she had not bought more when she had had the chance.
“After all,” she said, “the arrival of the new millennium hasn’t exactly been a surprise. We’ve had plenty of warning that another Holy War is on its way. I myself have witnessed the faithless mobs in the Holy Land with my own eyes. People here, they walk around with blinders on. Did they really think that the terrorists weren’t smart enough to figure out how to get here? That the devil can’t swim? That he doesn’t go wherever he wants to whenever he wants? I’m telling you, Marguerite, our Christian world is once again under attack. It’s happening now, and we are witness to it.”
I protested that the Palestinians had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, and that in any case, many of them were Christian, but my mother would have none of it.
“Listen to me, mon chouchou, this society we live in is an evil, godless one. Just turn on the radio and listen to what they call music these days. And it’s not just the music, it’s the movies, and then of course there’s the TV. All the profanity, all that nudity and sex. It’s shameful. Shameful. I thank the Lord every day that your father is not alive to see it. I tell you, it would kill him.”
In my mother’s mind, the pop-up ad on her computer, the attack on the World Trade Center, episodes of Will & Grace—these were all works of the devil.
Had she managed to get the cards printed?
Yes, mercifully, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the devil had finally been sent packing.
“You’ll be sure and offer up a prayer next Sunday, won’t you Marguerite? Prayer is the only hope for our poor world.”
Except as a tourist, I had not seen the inside of a church in twenty-five years, but I agreed to pray for the sinners of the world.
Fifty-three years old, and I was still lying to my mother, albeit mostly by omission. No mention of my financial worries, and no question of divulging my troubles with Wanda. How could I even begin to talk about my soured love life if my mother refused to acknowledge that Wanda and I were a couple in the first place?
WANDA AND I TACITLY AGREED that for the present time, I would retain the upstairs bedroom and she the spare room in the basement. Her clothes remained in the walk-in closet upstairs, but I helped her move a dresser, bedside table and lamp to the basement, as well as most of her books, including the Faber and Faber edition of Nightwood in original purple cloth, and the 1928 Modern Library first edition of Mrs. Dalloway.
I myself remain unseduced by the first-edition market. My business is to locate the cleanest and cheapest copies possible for my customers. Once the trade paperback of a title is available, I return the hardcovers to the publisher, and once the mass market is out, the trade paperbacks go back.
Our avoidance routine has been working surprisingly well. Most workdays, Wanda is gone by the time I get up, and she’s the first one home at night. She usually retrieves any clothes she needs from the closet when I’m out of the house.
Day and night, Snuffles races up and down the stairs, confused. With both of us still in the house, our friends are probably also confused about the nature of our relationship, about whether or not to invite both of us over, and if not both, which one? I can imagine the nattering that goes on. So, are they still a couple or what?
By the time I had finished talking to the bill collector and my mother, the sun was burning through the curtains and my pillow was drenched with sweat. I dragged the cool dry side over my aching head, but no sooner had I drifted off again than Carmen called. Her son was sick, which meant that I would have to open up. There was no one else.
I decided to go in early to work on the accounts, neglected because there was no money in the bank to pay Dustycan or anyone else for that matter. But cash or no cash, the figures still needed to be entered in the ledger.
17.
I DID RELISH THOSE PEACEFUL MOMENTS in the store before the customers arrived. I could sit at my old-fashioned desk in amongst the oak bookcases that almost touch the ceiling and fantasize that if I sat there long enough, the wisdom contained in the books might be soaked up through osmosis. The sensation was akin to standing in the midst of an ancient forest, surrounded by giant trees that creak and groan as they discharge their primordial knowledge.
Wanda would have scoffed to hear me say that out loud.
“A shitload of sentimental crap,” she would have said.
In any case, no time for peaceful moments in the book forest that morning. I gulped down a Tylenol and doggedly entered invoice numbers and dollar amounts until a rapping on the window summoned me to my bookselling duties. Griselda Woods stood outside the door and pointedly stared at her wristwatch.
I unlocked the door and turned on the rest of the lights.
“Ten-thirty. Must be nice,” said Griselda. “Wish I could get away with such a late start to the day.”
I resented the implied assumption that Griselda works harder than I do. Not only that. There’s no law that obliges me to open the store at any particular time, or to open at all for that matter. But I bit my tongue and apologized for my lack of punctuality. These days, I needed every sale I could get, and Griselda did have a special order to pick up. It was possible she would even buy another book or two. Now was not the time to risk offending her.
She headed straight to Literary Criticism. As I excused myself and hauled out the vacuum cleaner to suck up Saturday’s grit, she settled against a bookshelf to examine the new titles and did not look up until I had unplugged the vacuum.
“So, how’s business?” she said.
“Really good, thanks.”
One of the basic rules of retail is to claim you’re doing well, no matter the truth of the claim. Retention of customer confidence is crucial to survival.
“Oh Sara,
if you only knew how lucky you are. No tedious research or dreary departmental meetings, no backstabbing colleagues, no earnest students stalking you in the grocery store aisles.”
I switched on the stereo.
“That wretched university offers not one moment of free time. If I had the least amount of enterprise, I’d take early retirement and open up a bookshop of my own.”
Carmen would have laughed to hear this. On more than one occasion, she has remarked how people seem to think we do nothing but sit in a corner and read all day.
When Carman applied for the job, I had just dismissed the second of two employees in a row who had performed abysmally during their probation periods. Carmen earned an instant interview by not claiming that her hobby was reading or even that she loved books. Rather, she said she liked to keep busy and that she had enjoyed her most recent job in a restaurant well enough, but had been obliged to quit because of a shift change. (The new schedule ran too late in the day to accommodate daycare.)
I administered a snap test, handing her a stack of books to alphabetize by author: Fletcher, Foster, Forster, Forester, Fitch, Flemming, Fleming, Folger, Fielding, Fiedler. In no time flat, she had arranged the books on the shelf in strict alphabetical order without having to spread them out on the floor first or count letters off on her fingers. Until then, I had not found anyone who could alphabetize past the first two letters of the alphabet. When I asked her what equipment she knew how to operate, Carmen glanced around the store and answered, “The cash register, the computer, the adding machine.” When she added, “and the vacuum cleaner,” I hired her on the spot.
“Isn’t that the soundtrack from Better Than Chocolate?” said Griselda. “What a snore, all that vanilla sex. So inauthentic. Although the bookseller character was a scream, didn’t you think?”
Actually, I had enjoyed the tasteful sex scenes and despised the buffoonish portrayal of the bookstore owner. Booksellers may be cranky eccentrics and shockproof skeptics who suffer from publisher-induced headaches and excessive contact with authors and their readers. We may even be hypocritical chameleons who would hide our opinions to get a sale. But we can’t afford to be judgmental about books. If anything, booksellers were in the frontline against the prissy forces of the world that sought to control what everyone else read.
“I liked the mother character,” I said.
“Exactly my point,” said Griselda. “That mother had more fun diddling herself than the lesbian lovers did making love with each other. Completely unrealistic and disturbingly gynophobic. More like soft-focus David Hamilton porn than lesbian fucking. Did you hear any soppy soundtrack obfuscating the straight couple’s fucking? Of course, you didn’t. You got to hear all their slurps and grunts.”
“By the way,” I reminded Griselda, “that book you special-ordered is in. Carmen probably called you about it.”
I knew Carmen had called. In fact, she had called and left three unacknowledged messages on Griselda’s answering machine.
“What book might that be?” said Griselda.
I handed it to her: Multicultural Intersections Along the Harawayan Highway.
“Oh, right, I forgot all about this.... But my god, Sara, forty-five dollars…. That is steep. Can you give me a bit of a break on the price?”
“Sorry. As it is, I’m not making much money on it.”
I didn’t care to disclose that I was actually losing money on the book.
“In that case, sorry. I’ll have to pass. I’ve already spent an exorbitant amount on books this month.”
Not in my store, she hadn’t.
“I should’ve picked up a copy at the Learneds while I had the chance,” continued Griselda. “The publishers give us very attractive conference discounts, you know.”
I did know, all too well.
“I understood that you needed this book before the Learneds,” I said.
“Yes, well, thanks anyway for making the effort. You are a treasure….”
A couple of weeks before the annual Learneds Congress, Griselda had begged me to rush in a copy of Multicultural Intersections.
“I’m positively desperate,” she had said at the time. “I’ve spoken with the University Bookstore, but you know how they are. Overpriced and lousy service at best. The chap there said it would take at least three weeks to get in, but I absolutely must have it within the week. I had almost given up hope when I thought of you, and I said to myself, ‘If anyone can get me the book in time, it’s Sara over at Common Reader Books.’”
I should’ve informed Griselda then and there that I couldn’t do any better than the University Bookstore, at least not without incurring extra costs. But my ego got the better of me and I promised to get right on it.
The problem was, I had sent off an order to that particular publisher just the day before, so I had no titles to pad the order with. This publisher’s terms required a minimum ten-book order to receive a forty percent trade discount, and five to get twenty percent. An order of fewer than five books earned a measly ten percent discount off list price. Yet my bookstore was responsible for$15 U.S. airmail costs plus another five dollars to the Canadian post office for GST collection. (The publisher had not registered with the Canadian government for collection of the Goods and Services Tax.) Private couriers were out of the question, as they charged a minimum twenty dollars extra for GST collection. In order to recover actual costs, Griselda’s book, which was listed on the publisher’s website at $29.95 U.S., would have to be priced at $91 CDN.
But I had quoted a price of $45, on the dubious notion that now and then it’s better to absorb a loss so as to build up the sort of good reputation that the University Bookstore was obviously not interested in pursuing. Unfortunately, once rumours started to circulate that your books were overpriced, it would be almost impossible to dispel them. And my store was struggling enough as it was.
To my delight, Griselda’s special order arrived within the week, but she had not come in to pick up the book she had professed to be in such desperate need of.
So now what was I supposed to do with an academic hardcover without a dust jacket? If placed on the shelf, it would disappear next to the other more colourful spines. And who else would want the damn thing anyway? Better to cut my losses and send it back to the publisher for credit, even if it meant incurring return shipping costs to the U.S.
As I was writing instructions for Carmen to return Griselda’s special order, Andaya Brinn walked in, smiled a warm hello, and made her way to the Children’s section at the back of the store.
I smiled back. Not only did Andaya actually buy a book now and then, she was usually in on the latest industry gossip.
“Sara, I keep meaning to tell you,” said Griselda, “how much I admire your pluck. You are so brave to stand up to those chain stores. They make it awfully rough on you, don’t they?”
Not nearly as rough as customers like you, I thought, but held my tongue. Retail demands a lot of tongue holding. Anyway, the last thing I wanted at that moment was a depressing conversation with Griselda about the plight of the independent bookseller.
I believe I may have shrugged my shoulders in response.
18.
IN MY MIND, THE ISSUE WAS too complex to simply blame the big-box stores. Who forced municipal governments to offer tax breaks that allowed them to move into already thriving business communities in the first place, only to annihilate them? Who forced publishers to give in to demands for deep discounts on massive print runs of titles destined for the remainder bins of the future? And then the biggest question of all: What obliged anyone to shop at the big boxes in the first place?
And there was the Internet, of course, and not just because of the associated lost sales. It was also how much time the Internet sucked up. I was fed up with answering emails from people who were convinced that some crappy novel or diet book encountered on some self-published
author’s website was the latest most important book ever printed. Chances were, it would turn out to be ninety-eight stapled pages of ugly fourteen-point typos with one-eighth-inch margins and line drawings by the author’s twelve-year-old nephew, the sort of bad illustrations that were once confined to 1970s socialist and feminist tracts. But no, the customer was convinced that this discovery chanced upon while surfing the Internet was not only a masterpiece, but the target of a conspiracy to keep it secret. This same customer, however, thought access to revealed truth did not warrant risking her credit card information over the Internet, although she did expect me to risk mine, plus pay full price to an author ignorant of standard dealer discounts, plus absorb shipping and GST collection costs, plus get the book inside of a week and sell it for the same price quoted on the website. Why? Because the Internet had made instant experts out of everyone, that’s why, and because everyone thought they deserved a deal. I was also fed up with answering emails from customers who lived just around the corner but were too lazy to walk a few steps to the bookstore. What had happened to the readers who loved to browse through an experienced bookseller’s considered and quirky selection of books?
On the other hand, I should have known it was risky to open the bookstore in the first place. It was not as if the traditional book industry at the time wasn’t already showing signs of a downward spin. My timing had been completely off, and in business, timing was everything.
ALL THE WHILE GRISELDA was admiring my pluck, a middle-aged man had been pacing back and forth in front of the store, puffing and frowning at the titles in the window. Now, he took one last pull on his cigarette, tossed the butt into the gutter, and yanked open the door. As it closed behind him, he planted himself inside, blocking the entrance like a bouncer. He conspicuously extracted a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and began to examine the category headings, much like my childhood father used to inspect my messy bedroom.
The Heart Begins Here Page 13
