The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

“Well.” I stride back into the dining room, to the small desk by the wall. It’s dust-free; even if it’s not been used recently, Alma undoubtedly keeps it as clean as everything else in the house. I reach inside and pull out an opened notebook. A scrabbled line of capital A’s is penciled on the page. The line falters to the right, and the last letter is only partway done—just the first slanting line of the A, nothing more.

  I stare at the notebook for a while. My thoughts turn to Greg Hansen, to the stapled-together books I crafted for him in the other world. The awkward pictures I drew for him. The set of index cards tied together with a string.

  “Michael.” I set the notebook on the desk, walk back to the couch, and sit beside him. “You know I’ve asked you to learn the letter A. Can you tell me some words that begin with A?”

  “Apple,” he says dully, and then he closes his mouth.

  “True.” I nod. “But let’s think about some more interesting A words. What about . . . wait a minute.” I run upstairs; I know exactly what I am looking for and where to find it. I go directly to Missy’s room and pull the Picture Dictionary for Young Readers off the bookshelf. Hurrying down the stairs, I turn to the front of the dictionary, to the A section.

  “Here’s a word,” I say, putting the book down on the sofa between us. “Above. That means something that is on top of something else, like this . . .” I dash over to his desk, pick up a pencil and his notebook, and bring them back to the couch. Leaning over next to Michael, I draw an airplane flying over several tall buildings. Beside the drawing, I write ABOVE in capital letters. “You see, the airplane is above the city. Above.”

  I wait, breathless. Michael studies what I’d written and drawn. “Above,” he repeats softly.

  “Yes,” I go on. “Every word, each word has a meaning, and if you remember what it means and can picture it in your mind . . . and you can picture the letters that make up the word . . . why then, you’ll be able to read that word every time you see it. Let’s try another one.” I turn the dictionary page slowly. “Here’s one that I think you know,” I say. “Add. Like adding numbers together.” In the notebook, I write 1 + 1 = 2, and under that I write ADD.

  “Add,” Michael echoes me. “Add, that word is add.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right.”

  “What’s the book you’re looking through, Mama?” he asks. “Can I see it?”

  “Of course.” I lean back, allowing him to study the pages.

  “Here’s one I know,” he says, pointing at anchor—with, handily, a drawing of an anchor right next to it. “That says anchor, doesn’t it? Like a ship’s anchor.”

  “Yes!” I cry. “Yes, it does, Michael. You’ve got it!” I can’t help myself; I pull him—notebook, dictionary, and all—onto my lap and squeeze him with all my might.

  He screams and pulls away from my grasp. “Too tight! Too much!” he yells, and runs up to his room.

  Yikes—I ruined it, I think. Nice going, Katharyn.

  And then I smile. I don’t care. He has learned. He has learned something, and I am the one who taught him. I sigh and lean against the back of the sofa, hugging the dictionary to my chest, bathed in happiness.

  After a while, I go up to the boys’ room and coax Michael back downstairs. “I don’t want to read anymore, Mama,” he says, as I lead him gently to the desk in the dining room. “Reading tires me out.”

  “Okay.” I can see there’s no point in pushing it. I need to take this slowly. If I want it to happen at all, if I want Michael to learn to read, then I need to take it in baby steps.

  “Let’s do some math instead,” I suggest. “Can you count?”

  “What a funny question, Mama.” He sits at the desk and begins to count aloud. He makes it to one hundred in less than three minutes. I interrupt to tell him he can stop.

  “What about adding?” I ask. “Do you know two plus two?”

  “Mama.” He rolls his eyes. “I know two hundred and two times two!”

  “Really?” I smile. “And what is that?”

  He sighs, bored. “Four hundred and four.”

  “Okay,” I say, turning away from his desk. “Let’s work on money instead.”

  “Real money?” he asks eagerly.

  The excitement in his tone makes me smile once more; he is so rarely enthusiastic about anything. “Sure,” I reply. “Real money. Come with me.”

  We raid the coin jar in the kitchen, the one perched on the windowsill. Sitting at the kitchen table, we count every coin. I am astounded by his concentration, and how easily he grasps the denominations, adding the amounts in his head. “Thirty-three dollars and sixteen cents!” he says triumphantly when we’re done.

  “That’s a lot of moolah.”

  “What’s moolah, Mama?”

  “Money.”

  He laughs, that wonderful laughter that reminds me of my mother’s. What a gift, hearing that sound. “Moolah is a really funny word.”

  “You’re right. It is.” I stand up. “I’ll go see if Alma is ready to make your lunch.”

  On the way down the hallway in search of Alma, I pass the photograph of the mountain scene, of Rabbit Ears Pass. And suddenly, finally, I understand its significance: Lars proposed to me at that exact spot.

  We’d been dating steadily for about six months. Our courtship was like nothing I’d ever experienced; it was as if we couldn’t get enough of each other, as if we had to make up for all the time we’d lost in trying to find each other. He’d call me several times a day at the shop; I’d take the calls in a breathless voice, like a schoolgirl. Frieda would roll her eyes at me, but she did turn away to give me privacy.

  Lars and I spent nearly every evening together—dinner at his place or mine, movies, sometimes going out dancing.

  “I never see you anymore, outside of work,” Frieda complained—a bit peevishly, I remember thinking, as if Lars and I had planned our blossoming romance for no better reason than to upset Frieda. “I miss you, sister,” she’d beseech me. “Make some time for me, would you?” I’d nod and tell her I was sorry; perhaps she and I could do something that week, some night after we closed. But then Lars would telephone or show up at Sisters’, and I’d forget my promise to Frieda.

  The day Lars proposed was a beautiful late-spring Sunday. We’d gone for a drive with no particular destination in mind. We drove into the mountains on Highway 40, meandering through Winter Park, Grandby, Kremmling, gazing out the window at the vast mountain ranges and the tiny towns and the melting snow. At one point, after we’d been driving for several hours, I suggested that we ought to turn back. Lars simply shrugged. “What for?” he asked, and since I could give him no answer, we continued on.

  At the summit of Rabbit Ears Pass he parked the car, and we walked to the top of a rise to admire the view. The late-afternoon sun was warm on my bare shoulders, but the breeze was cool. Lars took off his sweater and draped it around me. “Wait,” he said, reaching around me into his pocket. “Can’t hand over the sweater without handing over this first.” He’d bent onto one knee and opened a small jewelry box, holding it in front of me. “Will you marry me, Katharyn?” he’d asked. “Please say yes.”

  I looked at the ring, and then into his blue, blue eyes. “How could I say no?” I replied. “Of course I’ll marry you.” I wrapped my arms around him. “Yes,” I’d whispered. “Forever—yes.”

  Now, turning away from the photograph, I shake my head, smiling, and veer into our bedroom.

  I find Alma in our bathroom, cleaning. I am suddenly guilt-ridden. I don’t mind watching Alma iron or wash the dishes—I did such things willingly in my other life, my made-up life, and I didn’t consider them taxing chores. But cleaning a bathroom? I can’t recall anyone, except for my mother when I was a child, ever cleaning a bathroom for me. But Alma doesn’t seem fazed; she is smiling and humming as she works. I am surprised that I recognize the tune: “De Colores.” It is a song that I don’t recall ever hearing in my other life, but one that I know for sure A
lma has taught my children. It’s all about colors, about everything colorful in the world.

  De colores, de colores . . . Se visten los campos en la primavera. De colores, de colores . . . Son los pajaritos que vienen de afuera.

  And then I know all sorts of things about Alma that I haven’t remembered until now. I know that she is forty-seven years old. I know she and Rico grew up together in a small town in Sonora, the northwest part of Mexico, and that they married young. I remember how Alma’s eyes teared up, years ago, when she told me about their eldest children, a boy and a girl; as toddlers, the two were fatally trapped while staying with relatives whose house burned down one summer night. I know that although Alma and Rico grieved for this loss, they went on to have two more children. Not long afterward, Rico, with urging from his brothers, immigrated to Denver, where he joined those brothers working restaurant jobs. It took Rico four years to save enough money to send to Sonora for Alma and their daughters. The children were young when the family immigrated; they received most of their schooling here in the States. I know that Alma is fiercely proud of both girls—the elder, who is attending the University of Colorado-Denver with the intention of becoming a journalist, and the younger, who married right out of high school and recently gave Alma her first grandchild.

  I think about the first time I saw Alma—the first time after I began going into the other world, the world where I was Kitty. I think about how, as Kitty, I did not really understand this system, this world in which darker-skinned people serve lighter-skinned people. I did not understand it because Kitty had not become accustomed to it gradually, over the course of many years, the way Katharyn did. As Kitty, I was thrust abruptly into this lifestyle, and—quite understandably—it jarred me.

  But in truth, I have been Katharyn, not Kitty, for a long time now. So is the view of this world through Kitty’s eyes—a new awareness that, even as Katharyn, I need not treat someone working for my family as somehow less than me—another gift? Is it like the gift of imagining myself quietly conversing with my mother? I believe it is.

  The fact is, I owe everything to Alma. If not for her intervention, when would I have realized how Jenny was treating Michael? How much longer would it have taken me to grasp that? How much more cruelty would my child have had to endure, were it not for this woman who today is washing my bathroom floor?

  “Alma,” I say.

  She stands and faces me.

  “Thank you.” I look around, feeling suddenly foolish for interrupting her work. Hastily I go on, “Thank you for everything you do. For taking care of my family, when you have your own to take care of, too.”

  She nods. “Sí, señora.”

  “How is your family?” As soon as I ask this, my cheeks redden. In this context, with work to do, Alma will surely find my chitchat silly and distracting.

  But she smiles, visibly pleased to be asked. “Bebé is getting so big,” she tells me. “He sits up now, all by himself.”

  I find myself genuinely delighted to hear about her grandson’s development. “Oh, I love that stage,” I say. “When babies learn to sit up, when you can put them on the floor on a blanket with a few toys, and they stay there happy as clams.”

  Alma nods. “Sí, I love that, too. And so does his mamá.”

  “Alma,” I ask her, “when was the last time you had a raise?”

  She looks thoughtful. “It is a year ago, maybe,” she recalls. “Señor Andersson, he raise me from one dollar fifty an hour to one dollar seventy-five.”

  I’m shocked. “That’s all we pay you? You ought to make more than that. As of today, we’re doubling your wages.”

  She tilts her head. “You discuss this with Señor Andersson, señora? No?”

  “No.” I shake my head firmly. “But trust me—he won’t mind.”

  After Michael and I have lunch, I ask Alma what her plans are for the afternoon. “No mucho,” she says. “I think I go after the kitchen drawers. They need organización. And cleaning.”

  “How would you feel about watching Michael for a few hours?”

  She eyes me suspiciously. “You sure, señora?”

  “Alma.” I put my hand on her arm. “If I have ever acted as if I didn’t trust you . . . please believe me, it’s not because of you.” I can feel my eyes pleading with her. “It’s because of me. It’s my guilt, and . . . this is my life.” I remove my fingers from her arm, but keep my gaze on her. “In the meantime, I think Michael would have a fine afternoon with you.” I turn to glance at him, still seated at the table. “Wouldn’t you, buddy?”

  He does not look up. “Can I count the money again?”

  I’d hoped he’d want to page through the dictionary some more, but counting money is better than nothing, I suppose.

  Baby steps, Katharyn, I remind myself. Baby steps.

  “Sure,” I say to him. “Why not?”

  He nods. “Well, then I think I’ll have a fine afternoon with Alma.”

  And so it is that at exactly one fifteen on a snowy Thursday afternoon in early March 1963, I find myself opening the garage door of the big house on Springfield Street and sliding behind the wheel of my green station wagon.

  Starting the car’s engine and waiting for it to warm, I take a look at the bicycles, in a haphazard pile near the east wall of the garage. Michael’s blue bike is among them, next to my old Schwinn. I study the two bikes, side by side, and remember the day I was so determined that Michael had to learn to ride a bike. Why did I think this was so important? I can no longer remember. Who cares if he learns to ride a bike now, at age six? Who cares if he ever learns? I shrug. He might never learn. Or someday he might decide—as he did this morning, when he voluntarily looked in the dictionary and found the word anchor all by himself—that he is ready to take it on.

  Either way, it is not my decision to make. I am Michael’s mother, but I cannot control who he is. My attempts to do so, I realize, only make both of our lives more difficult than they need to be.

  I remember how excluded I felt on that day—just this past Sunday, it was—as I watched Lars comfort Michael. I am quite certain that Lars and I rarely quarrel—but when we do, it’s nearly always about Michael. Does Lars consider it my fault that Michael is who he is? No, I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s more that, while he does not believe I am responsible for Michael’s condition, Lars can become irked with me for my impatience, my blunders. And I, in turn, become angry that Lars does not realize how irrational, how unfair, it is for him to be cross with me about that. After all, Lars is not the one who spends every day caring for our son.

  I bite my lip. I cannot change the mistakes of the past. All I can do is move forward with whatever future my new reality holds.

  I put the car in gear and back down the driveway. Leaving the neighborhood, I make my way north on University Boulevard, then get on the Valley Highway and head toward downtown.

  I looked up her address in the telephone book before I left home. It was right there: Green’s Books and News, Corporate Offices, with an address on Eighteenth Street, downtown.

  Whether she will be at the office, whether I will be able to get in to see her—whether she will even be willing to see me—is a different matter entirely.

  After finding a parking space a few blocks away, I walk to Frieda’s block. As the salesgirl at the Green’s in University Hills mentioned, there is a Green’s bookstore across the street, in a rather modest, single-story row of storefronts. The other side of the street, where the corporate offices are, is another matter. Craning my neck to look up at the soaring office building, I wonder if Lars’s firm designed it. No sooner have I begun to speculate about this than I’m struck with the knowledge that this was not Lars’s project, that the work was done a couple of years ago by an out-of-state architectural firm. I have a distinct memory of Lars telling me about it—I recall his disappointment at not getting the job, which he bid on. I also remember that it was Lars who told me, after construction started, that he’d heard Gree
n’s Books and News had plans to lease office space here. The structure is clean and modern, constructed of concrete, with large plate-glass windows. There’s a small plaza with a fountain out front; next to the fountain are several heavy concrete sculptures in geometric designs—a cube set on its tip, a pyramid with a sphere balanced atop it, like enormous children’s blocks defying gravity.

  The office building is fifteen stories tall; the Green’s offices are on the eleventh floor. I glide up smoothly in the elevator, pressing my hand nervously against my hair, putting on fresh lipstick, straightening my stockings.

  At the reception desk I ask for Frieda Green, and am informed coolly that she is in meetings for the rest of the day. “Truly, with no break?” I ask. “I’m . . . an old friend. I would love to see her, even for just a few minutes.”

  The receptionist regards me suspiciously. “Are you a writer?”

  I smile inwardly at that. Indeed, I am not a writer. But I’d like to be.

  “No,” I tell the receptionist, shaking my head. “As I said, just . . . a friend.”

  “We get a lot of people off the street wanting to sell their books here. At our stores.” Her look is disdainful. “But we do all our book buying through publishers and distributors. I want to make sure you understand, ma’am.”

  I tap my foot impatiently. “I’m perfectly aware of how books are purchased for bookstores.” I lean forward and put my hands lightly on the receptionist’s desk. “I’d just like to see my old friend.”

  She gives me a look of resignation. “And your name?”

  I pause. “Andersson,” I say softly. “Please, just tell her that Mrs. Andersson is here.” I glance back toward the glass outer door, see the bank of elevators a few feet away. So invitingly polished, those elevators—so safe, like big metal wombs. I could walk out of here, press the button to summon one of them. I could abandon this preposterous plan before it goes any further.

  “She’ll know,” I say bravely, turning toward the receptionist and squaring my shoulders. “She’ll know.”