The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  Chapter 2

  Goodness,” I say to myself. “That was quite the dream.” Stiffly, I sit up in bed. Aslan, my yellow-hued tabby, is curled up next to me, purring softly with his eyes half closed. I named him after the lion in C. S. Lewis’s novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—an extraordinary book, especially if one adores children’s fantasy stories. I read each Narnia novel as it came out, and I’ve read the entire series at least half a dozen times since.

  I look around my bedroom. The windows are bare, stripped of their curtains and shades. Masking tape still frames the woodwork. My bed and nightstand are the only pieces of furniture in the room; before I began painting yesterday, Frieda and I moved the bureau and hope chest to the living room, to make space and keep splatters off the furniture. The room smells of paint, but the color is extraordinary—it’s the exact color of the sun on a bright day. It’s just what I’d hoped for. With a satisfied smile, I rise and don my robe, padding across the newspaper-covered floor.

  Heading to the kitchen to make coffee, I stop to switch on the radio that sits on one of several scratched, tag-sale bookshelves that line my living room, overflowing with books and journals. I twist the knob to turn up the volume and tune the dial to KIMN. They’re playing “Sherry” by the Four Seasons, which I’ve been hearing constantly on the radio this week—I’d put money on it topping the Billboard chart this weekend.

  I place my percolator under the kitchen faucet and fill it with water, then pull a can of Eight O’Clock Coffee from an upper cabinet and begin measuring it into the stainless-steel top chamber of the percolator.

  “. . . Out tonight . . .” I sing along under my breath as the song on the radio fades away.

  “And now here’s an oldie but a goodie,” the disc jockey says. “Does anyone out there remember this one?”

  As the next song begins, my hand freezes, my fingertips holding the coffee scoop and hovering midair over the percolator. Rosemary Clooney’s voice fills my small duplex.

  “Now that’s just plain eerie,” I say to Aslan, who has wandered in to check whether his morning dish of milk has been set on the floor yet. I finish pouring the coffee and switch the percolator to On.

  The song—I remember now that it’s titled “Hey There”—dates back at least seven or eight years. I don’t remember the exact year it was so popular, but I do remember humming it often in those days. I haven’t thought about that song in ages. Not until I heard it playing in my head, in my dream last night.

  I recall my dream man’s eyes, piercing and blue, like the water in a postcard from some exotic locale. I remember thinking that I ought to have been frightened, but I was not. Did I look at him with stars in my eyes? I suspect one could say I did.

  Well, but how could I help it? The way his eyes gazed into mine. He looked at me as if I were everything to him. As if I were his whole world.

  That, to me, was without a doubt exotic. No one, not even Kevin, has ever looked at me like that.

  And the way Lars spoke! Katharyn, love, wake up. You must have been in some deep sleep, love. You always know what to do, Katharyn.

  No one, here in the real world, says such things to me. And certainly no one addresses me as Katharyn.

  There was a brief period, some years ago, when I toyed with calling myself Katharyn. This was right around the time when Frieda and I opened our bookstore. With a new career and a new decade of life—I’d turned thirty a few months prior—I felt it was time for a sea change. Despite my general dislike of the unwieldy Katharyn, I could think of no better way to bring about a grand change of character than to alter my name. Perhaps, I mused, I needed only to get used to it.

  And so I charged forward. I had personal stationery printed with the name “Katharyn Miller” on it. I asked Frieda and my other friends to call me Katharyn. I said my name was Katharyn when introducing myself to customers, to the other shopkeepers who we were just getting to know on our little block of stores on Pearl Street. I even asked my parents to use my given name—which they, albeit reluctantly, did. They have always been overindulgent with me.

  Frieda was not so easy to push over. “Kitty suits you,” she said. “Why change?”

  I shrugged and said that perhaps it was simply time to grow up.

  I even used that name when introducing myself to potential suitors. It felt good, a fresh start. A chance to be someone new. Someone a bit more sophisticated, a bit more experienced.

  Nothing happened with any of those fellows—a random first date here and there, but no second ones. Apparently, changing my name was not going to automatically change my persona, the way I’d hoped it might.

  A few months later I placed the remaining “Katharyn Miller” stationery in the dustbin and quietly went back to calling myself Kitty. No one commented.

  I take my coffee to my desk, which faces my two living room windows. I open the curtains. Seated here, I can look out onto Washington Street. It’s a sunny, warm September day. The postman is coming down the street; I wave as he fills my mailbox and that of the Hansens, who own this duplex and live in the other half of it. After the postman leaves, I go outside to get my mail and my Rocky Mountain News morning paper.

  Lars, Lars . . . I am still running the name over in my mind. Lars who?

  And where have I heard that name before?

  I go back inside, glancing at the newspaper headlines. President Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University yesterday, promising a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I’ll believe it when I see it. I cast the paper on my dining table, planning to read it over breakfast.

  My mail contains only a few items. Besides several bills, there is an advertisement with a coupon for a free car wash—not that that would do me any good; I don’t even own a car—and a postcard from my mother.

  Good morning, sweetheart,

  I hope you have nice weather. It’s 85 degrees here and humid, but lovely, of course. There is nowhere lovelier on Earth, I assure you!

  I want to remind you of our return date. We’ll take the overnight flight on October 31st. We’ll make a connection in Los Angeles and arrive in Denver on Thursday, November 1st.

  We are having a wonderful time, but we can’t wait to be home and see the fall colors! And you, of course.

  Love,

  Mother

  P.S. I am also eager to get back to the hospital; I miss the babies terribly. Wonder how many have been born since we left????

  I smile at her note. My parents have been in Honolulu for the past three weeks and will be there for about five weeks more. It is a huge trip for them, the biggest they have ever taken away from Denver. Their fortieth wedding anniversary was this past June, and the trip is a celebration. My uncle Stanley is a chief petty officer at the Pearl Harbor naval base. My parents have been staying with Uncle Stanley and Aunt May in their apartment off-base, in Honolulu.

  This trip is a wonderful event for them, the experience of a lifetime, but I could see why they—especially my mother—wouldn’t want to be away from home any longer than two months. My mother is committed to her work in the Unwell Infants Ward at Denver General; she has been volunteering there for almost as long as I can remember. (“The oldest candy-striper on the planet,” she cheerfully calls herself.) My dad worked for the Colorado Public Service Company for years, assembling electrical meters for homes; he took early retirement last year, at age sixty. Dad spends his time puttering around the house, reading, and going golfing with his cronies twice a week, even in the winter, as long as there is no snow on the ground.

  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.

  Before 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.

  Our 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.