The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  “I thought it was you. Delightful to see you.” She smiles at Michael. “And how are you today?”

  He looks at the floor and mumbles.

  The woman looks back at me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, loudly and dramatically. “I never know what I’m meant to—”

  “I can hear you!” Michael yells at the top of his voice. “I can hear you, I can hear you. I—can—hear—YOU!”

  During this outburst, he continues staring at the floor. Carts stop in the aisle; heads turn in our direction.

  “It’s okay,” I say, getting down to his level. “The river,” I say frantically, remembering what Lars did. “The river, the river, Michael . . .”

  “You’re not saying it right!” He breaks away from me and tears down the aisle, knocking over a display of on-sale Wheaties cereal boxes as he turns the corner. He bolts for the door.

  “Oh, my, I’m—” Without finishing, I rush out of the store, leaving my cart in the middle of the aisle.

  Cars screech as Michael runs headlong through the parking lot. I expect him to run toward our station wagon, but he goes in the opposite direction. He is astonishingly fast; I would not have expected that of him. I would have thought him too weak and clumsy to be much of an athlete, but his legs seem to have taken on a life of their own. Terrified, I get in the car and drive toward him, praying that no vehicle will hit him before I get there. I cut him off and he almost slams into the front bumper of the Chevy. I get out, grab him by the arm, and drag him into the car. He is screaming incoherently, and I pray for the dream to end. I buckle him into his seat, hoping he won’t know how to unbuckle it. I lock the passenger-side door and scoot around the car. Sliding in on the driver’s side, I slam the door shut and pull out of the parking lot.

  Having a pretty good sense of where I am now, I make my way home to Springfield Street. Though the drive is short, these are among the worst minutes of my life—real or imagined. The screaming is fever-pitched; I cannot hear myself think, and my head is pounding by the time we pull into the driveway. This has got to end soon, I think. I’m going to wake up any second now.

  But I don’t. I turn off the car’s engine and wait to see what Michael will do. He continues to scream. There are no words, just high-pitched screeches issuing from his lungs. I don’t know whether to try to bring him inside or leave him here until he calms down.

  While I am thinking about it, the front door opens and Alma appears, pulling her arms into her coat sleeves. I open the car window and lean out. “Señora Andersson,” Alma says. “¿Estás bien?”

  I can feel tears welling in my eyes. “I’m just fine,” I say. “Just dandy.” I glance over at Michael. “Please tell me how to make him stop,” I beg Alma.

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Señora, I do not know,” she says starkly. “You know that you do not let me near el niño.”

  I don’t? Whyever not?

  “Well, then,” I say, opening my car door and standing next to her in the drive. “If he were your child, what would you do?”

  She shrugs. “I guess I do what Señor Andersson does.”

  “The river song, you mean? I tried that, and he didn’t like it.”

  “Did you . . .” She wraps her arms around herself. “¿Abrazarlo? Hold him?”

  “I was afraid to touch him!”

  “Señor Andersson . . . señora, I know you are not comfortable doing it, but Señor Andersson holds him.”

  Damn right I’m not comfortable.

  She shakes her head. “Señora, the iron is on inside. Por favor, I go back in?”

  I nod. “Yes, Alma, go on.”

  “You want me llamar por teléfono Señor Andersson?”

  I take a second to think about that. Do I want her to telephone Lars? Do I want to admit to him—even if all of this is imaginary—that I cannot handle it myself?

  “No,” I say slowly. “No, thank you. Gracias, Alma.”

  She goes inside.

  Wobbly on my heels, I walk around the car to Michael’s side. I use the key to unlock the door, but before I open it, I tap on the window. “Michael, honey, can you hear me?”

  Rapid-fire, with astonishing strength, he pounds his small fists against the window. I am almost afraid he’ll break the glass. He may be undersize, but I realize now that that doesn’t mean he’s weak. I open the door and lean in toward him.

  He keeps pounding, but now instead of the window, he begins hitting me. I step back, rubbing my upper arm. How am I expected to hold him, when any time I come near him, he lashes out at me?

  Finally I go around to the driver’s side of the car. Quickly, before he can hit me more than a few times, I reach in and unbuckle his seat belt.

  “You want to scream, stay out here and scream as long as you want,” I tell him. “But the seat belt is undone and the door is open if you want to come in.”

  And then, letting the screams subside behind me, I go into the house, leaving the front door standing wide open.

  Alma is ironing in the living room, the television tuned to Guiding Light. She looks up when I enter. Neither of us says anything.

  I go down the hall to Lars’s office. I make a beeline for the bar and pour myself a sizable glass of whiskey. Taking it to the kitchen, I add water and ice, and then stir my drink with a clean butter knife that I find in the dish rack. I brush past Alma and stand in front of the picture window, waiting to see what Michael will do.

  For a while, nothing happens. I can hear his muffled screams through the plate glass. Probably the whole neighborhood can. But I don’t care.

  “How long do you think he can keep that up?” I ask Alma, sipping my drink.

  She shrugs, her eyes downcast. “We have seen longer, señora. ¿Sí?”

  Yes, Alma. I’m sure we have.

  I press my lips together. The whiskey is starting to mellow me. I take a deep breath. “I tried to touch him,” I say, still looking out. “He hit me.”

  Alma nods, but does not reply.

  I face her. “He won’t run away, will he?”

  “So far he has not. ¿No?”

  “No.” I take the last swallow of my drink. “Well,” I say. “I’m all out of answers. Time to call my husband.”

  Chapter 16

  But I don’t get the opportunity to call Lars, because the dream does end at last.

  “Well, that one was a doozy,” I tell Aslan, who yawns, showing off his cracked, yellowed teeth. He stands, executes a full-on kitty stretch, and then resettles himself on my bed. You’re long and lean, I always tell him—a yellow-striped fighting machine. It’s a joke between us, because he is anything but a long, lean fighting machine. My aging, chunky Aslan couldn’t so much as catch a fly.

  So here I am, where it’s nice and quiet and I have private jokes with my cat. Back in the genuine, real world.

  I smile to myself, thinking that it doesn’t seem bad here at all.

  You’re in a good mood,” Frieda observes, a few hours later. I am humming as I dust the back upper shelves at the shop. She’s at the counter, working on inventory.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well—but I guess I finally got enough sleep last night.” The idea amuses me; in truth, I am sure I did not sleep well at all. Anyone who dreams the kind of madness that I do is clearly not sleeping well. This train of thought causes me to break into peals of laughter. Frieda smiles, shakes her head, and returns to her books.

  We have, at my suggestion, installed a phonograph, one that I purchased in a pawnshop on South Broadway. We both brought stacks of records from home, and now we have soft background music playing every day. At the moment, it’s an old Ella Fitzgerald tune, about how nice it would be if falling in love was one’s sole occupation.

  I cock my head as I dust, listening to the lyrics. Sounds good in a song, Ella, I think—but honestly, in real life, it all depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?

  I turn my gaze to Frieda. Next to her on the counter, propped on a wooden display rack, is the copy of Ship
of Fools that I wanted to sell to the woman who came in the shop the other day. The one with the autistic daughter. In careful letters, I’ve printed a small sign and placed it in front of the book: RECOMMENDED! BEST SELLER!

  Katherine Anne Porter, the short story writer and journalist, wrote that book. I read it earlier this year. In my view, the narration, like the ship itself, seemed rather adrift at times—but I think that was intentional, and it certainly didn’t dilute the impact of the characters’ struggles. Rather, Porter did an excellent job of exploring how people in a confined space can come to know more about each other than they might wish.

  There’s a scene in Ship of Fools in which one of the characters says something like, “Please do not tell me about yourself; I will not listen. I do not want to know you; I will not know you.” Those aren’t the exact words, but it was something like that. It makes me think of my imaginary family. The family who, in my dream life, I’m getting to know, whether I want to or not.

  From what I have heard, at some point in the 1930s Katherine Anne Porter was on a ship similar to the one she portrays in the novel; apparently she spoke little to the other passengers, but took copious notes. She let the notes lie dormant for years before writing Ship of Fools. I have long admired Porter’s work. Perhaps I feel a kinship with her because she lived in Denver for a time. In fact, I’ve heard that she almost died here in 1918, the year of the Spanish flu pandemic.

  I consider this. If Porter had died in 1918—why then, she would not have written Ship of Fools. In that case, the woman would not have come into my shop, seeking it. I would not have had the rather embarrassing opportunity to ask her what ailed her child. And thus I would not have learned—at least not in this way—what clearly ails my own child in my dream life.

  How odd—events turn so easily on a dime, don’t they? In much the same way, if Lars and I had stayed on the telephone a few moments longer that night—if I had heard him having his heart attack, if I had been his savior—why then, none of this right now would be happening. Nothing in this life would be real. Instead, the life I have with him and the children would be my reality.

  I shake my head and climb down the stepladder. I walk over to the counter and pick up the newspaper, turning to the sports section. I need to find out what happened last night in the final game of the World Series. “Darn it—they lost!” I exclaim.

  Frieda looks up. “Who lost?”

  “The Giants. They lost the series in game seven. Now what am I going to write for Greg?”

  She shakes her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind.” I give her a scowl and turn toward the door. I need some fresh air.

  I go outside to sweep the front steps. It’s a beautiful fall day, and I’m glad to be enjoying it, back here in the real world. I don’t know why the dreams take place in the future; now that Michael has been so accommodating as to give me dates, I can see that it’s just a few months from now. It doesn’t make any sense. But then again, it’s not real, so why should it make sense?

  “Want to go out to dinner tonight?” I ask Frieda when I come back inside.

  “What for?”

  I shrug. “No reason. We just haven’t had a ‘date’ in a long time, sister.”

  Frieda and I have been calling each other “sister” for most of our lives. That is where the name of our store comes from, of course—it was a natural choice for the store name, something we came up with simultaneously when we first discussed opening a bookstore together. Our use of the expression started in high school, when we wished we were real sisters. She was the oldest of four and the only girl in her family; I was an only child who, but for my mother’s loss of those three baby boys, would have grown up with the same family structure. What each of us wanted most in her childhood was a sister.

  Frieda and I first met on a September day in 1938. We were freshmen at South High, and it was our first day of school. South was nearly new then; only a decade or so had passed since its groundbreaking. The linoleum hallways were still gleaming, the windows bright and uncracked, the bricks a vivid, school-proper red, without the toll that weather and years would eventually take. We freshmen filtered in that first day, following upperclassmen who seemed to know their way around as if they’d been born inside that building. Those older students spoke animatedly to one another. There were shouts of joy as students hugged one another, many of them thrilled to be reunited after a summer apart. Still others laughed over memories of a summer spent together: “Remember the Fourth of July? Will we ever have that much fun again? Ever?”

  As freshmen, we envied those older students. Though some of us knew each other from our humble grammar schools, we all felt disjointed. Our exchanges with one another were awkward and brief. “I hope your summer was nice.” “Do you know how to find room 106?” We immediately grasped, as the crowd jostled inside the building, that our place in these huge halls was yet to be determined. And we were not at all sure that the fates bestowed upon us would be those we’d choose, if given the choice.

  Into this mix of insecurity and unfamiliarity strolled Frieda, head held high, long brown hair pulled back from her high forehead with a tortoiseshell band. She wore a straight taupe skirt and an ivory sleeveless blouse that showed off her shoulders, which were tanned and becomingly freckled. Her dark eyes gleamed with mystery and magic. Not just freshmen but even older boys gazed at her as she made her way through the hall. I couldn’t take my eyes off her; I stared until she entered a classroom and disappeared.

  As luck would have it, I found that I was headed for the same room. As I stepped in, I noticed that—miraculously—the seat to her right was vacant. Boldly, not knowing where my courage came from, I took the seat and held out my hand.

  “I’m Kitty Miller,” I told her. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  She nodded. Her grip was warm and firm. “Frieda Green. Nice to meet you, too.”

  We compared our schedules, which had been mailed to us from the school’s office the week before. We found that we had nearly every class together. “What a relief,” Frieda said. She leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “I was a little afraid of finding my way around alone—weren’t you?”

  Yes, of course I’d had the same fear. But I was astonished at her candidness in admitting it. Recovering, I nodded and smiled at her. “Let’s find our way together, shall we?”

  She grinned back. “Indeed we shall, Kitty Miller.”

  Over time, I got to know everything there was to know about Frieda. She came from money; her maternal grandfather had made a fortune in railroads in the 1880s, and her father’s family owned a large construction firm. His family had gotten in on the ground floor when Denver was a young city, just being built up, and they’d stayed on top ever since.

  Frieda had gone to private school through eighth grade, but her father felt that she needed to round out her education at a public high school, where she would meet and mix with people of all classes. He had a theory that his children, despite their advantages, would best build their characters by interacting with others of different backgrounds. While attending our solidly middle-class high school, Frieda lived with her parents and brothers in a large three-story brick house in the Country Club section of town—an elite development of palatial houses a couple of miles north of the modest Myrtle Hill district in which my family resided. The first time I went to Frieda’s house, I impulsively called it a “mansion,” which made her giggle. “You are so cute, Kitty Miller,” she said, grabbing my arm affectionately.

  All these years later, I still remember how her grip felt on my arm, how possessive it was—and yet gratifying as well. Despite all that she had, all that she was, Frieda Green—somehow, inconceivably—wanted to be my friend.

  It took months before I finally worked up the courage to ask her about this. What, specifically, made Frieda want me to be her dearest and closest friend, when she could have been best friends with any freshman girl in the school, or even with an u
pperclassman girl, if she’d wanted to?

  Frieda had laughed at the question. “You are you, Kitty,” she said simply. “I could tell from the first moment I met you that you would be loyal, that you would be truthful, that you would stand by me.”

  It was an unusually warm day for November, the day I asked that question, and we were standing on the school lawn between classes. Frieda waved her slender arms dramatically, as if to take in the entire student body, most of which milled around outside with us, enjoying the sun and warmth. “I didn’t see that sincerity in anyone else. Not at first glance, anyway.” She shrugged. “So, no point in letting myself be disappointed when others let me down.”

  How could I keep from loving someone who spoke so highly of me? No one else, save for my parents, had ever done so in my entire life.

  And as for Frieda—how could she not love someone who was so faithful to her? For she was right. Never, no matter what, would I do anything to betray her.

  And how amazing, I think as I walk toward her at the counter of our little shop—how amazing that all these years later, we still love each other more than anyone else, outside of our own families.

  We are sisters.

  Suddenly, I realize something disturbing: in the dreams, I don’t know where Frieda is. Obviously, in my last dream, when I was with Michael, I was not spending my weekday morning hours at the shop. Does that mean I don’t spend any hours at the shop? Do we even have the shop in that world?

  I shudder, thinking about it. I can’t imagine my life without the shop. Without being around Frieda all day, every day.

  Thank God, I think, as she starts throwing out restaurant names—“Rockybilt? Could you go for a burger? Or what about C.J.’s Tavern? I know it’s an expedition to get there, but I would adore Mexican food, wouldn’t you?”—thank God I’m just making up that other world in my head.