Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  Oh, I was a hard-hearted consumer. The red roses that Brandon had always bought for me now seemed obvious and Midwestern in their cloying effort to be pretty and perfect, which of course described me as well.

  In my memory fugue, I had trailed the friends for blocks and blocks; when they disappeared into a clothes shop along Broadway, I thought to follow them inside, but my heart wasn’t into admiring the black lace shirt they were inspecting: The act of buying cute clothes belonged to a different, doomed era.

  I was thinking I’d never walked so far south on Broadway but I was wrong because there was Zabar’s across the street, and my stomach ached from the memory of Brandon standing underneath the orange-and-white awning eating a warm salt bagel with scallion cream cheese, because, too late, I wanted to nourish him forever. My mind looped with memories, and some kind of all-over softening was happening, my peripheral vision fading to cataract cloudiness and even the faces directly in front of me looked hazy, almost featureless.

  But I was not living in a dull, Brandon-less tundra—he was with me. I just needed to find the path to him.

  Brandon, Brandon, Brandon: I whispered it three times with each exhaled breath.

  I had come upon Westsider Books, where merchandise was displayed unattended on the sidewalk, an honor system on Broadway. I grabbed the corner of a scarred table stacked with clearance books and felt a splinter lodge in my palm. The faded index card on top of a spindle of author postcards read “1.00” in weather-smeared ink. I browsed a bit, my vision sharpening again. There was an unfairly schoolmarmish, pinch-faced pen-and-ink of Emily Brontë that telegraphed: Why, yes, my wild-hearted adventures were all on the page. Dear Reader, are we surprised that in 1846 she published her brilliant and subversive book under a male-sounding pseudonym? Yet Wuthering Heights survives without an accompanying author photo to inform the reader: Why, yes, I’m a smart, soulful young woman and also, hot! There was also a postcard of James Baldwin in a sweater vest, smoking a cigarette, holding my gaze, and one of Kurt Vonnegut—heavily mustached, holding an unfurling roll of typing paper. Oh, and there was F. Scott Fitzgerald in a tweed suit—with his large, sensitive eyes, I sensed something Brandon-esque about him. (Alas, perhaps only a hopeless sucker for the pretty boys would write a phrase like “with his large, sensitive eyes.”) And then there was Carson McCullers with her fetching bob and feline smile next to a young and darkly lipsticked Flannery O’Connor.

  I picked up the postcard and flipped it over: Iowa City, February 1947. Flannery O’Connor was wearing a hair scarf and a muskrat fur coat in the valentine heart of bright, cold Iowa—a day of snow and sunshine—and standing on the front steps of a house with a porch swing, the metal chains reflecting in the front window. Her gloved hand rested on an iron handrail, and she was smiling so naturally that I guessed the photographer must have been someone she liked, some long-forgotten Iowa City friend.

  Dear Reader, I whispered your name.

  And then the door of Westsider Books opened.

  “Caitlin? Caitlin!”

  I recognized that voice.

  Eight

  Flannery closed Wuthering Heights and stood too fast. The lobby of the Broadway Hotel and Hostel swayed, the tourists and the desk clerk and the front desk itself listed to the left. Was Miss Sweeney’s vertigo catching?

  “Steady yourself, girl!”

  Heath’s hand skimmed her knee when he stuck it out to help Flannery, and if she needed any kind of hypothesis to prove she was Pavlov’s lovesick dog, here it was! The bodily contact automatically reddened her face and made her heart leap, as it had all morning long, whenever Heath touched her shoulder or paid her any old haphazard compliment.

  “She’s just walked into Westsider Books,” Flannery said.

  “Don’t know the shop. But then I’m not a reading fanatic like yourself, am I? Let’s have a look.” He Googled Westsider Books on his phone, squinting a bit, and Flannery wondered if Heath was too clumsy for contacts or too vain for glasses, and all the while her brain persisted with the hand-knee energy. Flannery thought about how her knee pulsed as though it contained a beating heart, the dub-bub feeling migrating outward, like tree rings. And even though Miss Sweeney was struggling in the real world, she remained an authoritative, red-ink voice in Flannery’s brain: And these migrating tree rings are the result of Heath’s hand brushing your kneecap? Have you considered writing a chapbook dedicated to the unsung romantic potentialities of the patella?

  “I just clicked on the Yelp reviews: Molly G. thought the proprietor was a real stuffed shirt, but Jennifer V. just loves the place.”

  “Is it very far?”

  A shuttle bus of Italian tourists walked in, all backpacks and guidebooks and cell phones, their hopeful eyes taking in the Broadway Hotel and Hostel.

  Heath shrugged. “It’s not that far, relatively speaking. It’s not Berlin, but no more cat-and-mouse rambling along Broadway, eh?”

  He stood and swept his hand. “You first, my dear.”

  He followed Flannery out of the Broadway Hotel and Hostel, and hailed a cab at the corner. Flannery knew that riding with him in the backseat of a banged-up, parrot-yellow Chevrolet was going to be the dreamiest mode of transportation. After Heath gave the cabdriver the address, the driver admired his accent (Join the club, thought Flannery) and asked, “Where do you hail from, young man?” When Heath said England, the driver nodded. “I thought so. I was in Dublin many years ago. Wonderful people!”

  “Indeed,” Heath agreed heartily, without a touch of condescension.

  The cab heater cranked heat so intense it made Flannery feel as if her chapped lips and hands might crack and bleed, and she was most certainly sweating in Heath’s leather jacket. But the vibration of her phone distracted her from the terror of B.O.: It was her mother, returning the text that Flannery had sent hours ago:

  Hope U feel better. Dad and I just went to THE MOST FAB seminar! The Tumult in the Clouds: Images of the Cork City to Liverpool emigration via the engineered famine in Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.

  Heath looked at Flannery’s phone, his chin grazing her shoulder. “The engineered famine? How very festive.”

  Flannery had not-so-casually tilted her phone toward Heath, and she was delighted that he was curious enough about her life to sneak a glance.

  “They’re at an Irish Literature conference in Florida. They aren’t professors or anything—they’re both IT specialists. They just love books.” She cringed, remembering her father finishing his latest craft project just minutes before leaving for the airport: a plain canvas shopping tote embroidered with the cover of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh God, his wooden embroidery hoop, his looped skeins of bright, silky thread. “Irish Literature is their bag.”

  “Ah, thanks to Irish writers you have the house to yourself?” Heath did a little waist-up boogie there in the backseat of the cab; he raised the roof. “Wooh!”

  Flannery loved how Heath assumed she would take full advantage of an empty house instead of reading, playing Words with Friends, and watching TV into the early morning hours, lonely and a little scared. She missed the sound of her father making sure the glass doors were securely locked by sliding the door open and shut, over and over. The click of the lock, the click of the lock, the click of the lock. Yes, he had OCD but it could masquerade as parental concern if Flannery let go of rational thought and let the swoosh and click sounds fold into a love song.

  Her phone vibrated again, and she and Heath looked at the screen. He whispered her mom’s text, and Flannery, boiling in his jacket, shivered: “I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate. Those that I guard I do not love.”

  The cab screeched to a stop. The driver raised his hands up in a Lord-have-mercy gesture toward the crosswalk and divined the thoughts of every breathing soul on Broadway: “Guy’s riding a goddamn six-foot-high unicycle across Broadway? I love it!”

  Flannery laughed as
she looked out at the man peddling—a foot back, a foot forward, his arms out for balance as he waited for the light to turn—but Heath was not so amused. “Cheerful as the circus, isn’t he?” His voice was quiet, so the cabdriver couldn’t hear. “Look at his shoes.”

  Her face grew hot as she looked at the unicyclist’s dirty tennis shoes on the pedals, one sole hanging loose, the other a tread of rubber tongue lapping below the pedal. Did Heath think she had been laughing at an impoverished unicyclist? That she was a jerk for not noticing the sole-flapping loneliness of another human?

  Before Flannery could lobby for her pure-hearted intentions—it was just the novelty of the gigantic unicycle in traffic!—she received another text from her mother. This time Heath read more loudly, and though she’d just been shamed, she felt her heart flowering with love. Miss Sweeney offered up a quick scolding: Your aorta and capillaries are blooming with wisteria and Wild Blue Veronica? But Flannery only had ears for Heath:

  “‘My country is Kiltartan’s cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight. Nor public man, nor cheering clouds. A lonely impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind. In balance with his life, this death. Bye.’ The bye is from your mom, I would think. Not the poet.”

  Flannery snorted, and immediately rued that porcine sound. “Of course my mother texts a poem—”

  “It’s a great poem, actually.”

  “Oh, I know. But she doesn’t think to ask me how my day is going. Just: ‘Stanza, stanza, stanza. Bye.’ Typical.”

  Uh-oh! She could hear the unappealing self-pity in her voice and moved quickly to correct it. “But obviously I have no right to complain about anything. I’m not starving in Darfur. I don’t have the Taliban forbidding my education. I’m not a slave or a prisoner in a concentration camp. I’m not trapped in a Magdalene Laundry. I realize that I’m an entitled whiner. I get it.”

  Heath nodded his agreement, though he spoke with kindness: “Abused girls, current and past, dream of being Flannery Fields, that is true. But it still doesn’t mean you’re not going to feel like shite sometimes.”

  Flannery was too distracted by the lovely long i of the British-y swear word that transferred mere shit to shite to berate herself for her crybaby ways. Oh, she reveled in the Louis Armstrong thrill of it all: You like tomato and I like tomahto/You like potato and I like potahto …

  But Heath turned away from her and looked out the window, distracted. Flannery looked out her window to the sidewalk and absorbed the aftermath of his mood swing, the unmoored, tense loneliness so familiar to Flannery and, she guessed, to the Irish airman: “Those that I fight I do not hate; those that I guard I do not love.”

  Her love of Wuthering Heights had led her on many a sugar-and-caffeine-fueled Wild Google Chase. With a homemade latte in hand and her desk littered with the foil shreds from unwrapped Hershey’s kisses, she had perused scholarly and not-so-scholarly research about how all of Wuthering Heights was an allegory for British-Irish relations: The port city of Liverpool was a primary emigration destination for the starved Irish, and Liverpool was where Cathy’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, found the orphaned Heathcliff: “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb…”

  There Flannery sat, on any given starlit Saturday night, staring at her laptop. (While a sporty gaggle of her Sacred Heart classmates had seasonal fun: cross-country skiing at midnight—their BPA-free water bottles filled with Maker’s Mark and Diet Coke—or skinny-dipping in the saltwater pool in Sarah K’s backyard.) Flannery’s companions were the other lonely souls with a Wi-Fi connection sharing their Internet wanderings and curiosity about Emily Brontë’s intentions: Was she alluding to the famine immigrants—most of whom spoke only Gaelic—when she wrote about Heathcliff: “A dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over some gibberish that nobody could understand.”

  As the cab pulled up to Westsider Books, and Heath paid the driver—“Keep the change, Mate”—Flannery zipped her phone and Wuthering Heights into her backpack. He held open the door for her, a minor courtliness that made Flannery’s stomach flip. And then they were back in the elements—the air too cold to be refreshing, and an unlovely gray sky, the clouds bloated and stagnant—before Heath pulled open another door for her and they entered a warm world.

  A staircase bisected the store, and books were stacked on the edges of the carpeted stairs leading to a tight loft area. The smell of paper and dust and glue permeated Westsider Books, and the companionable silence of readers was broken only by a pleasant snippet of arguing about Thomas Pynchon between the man working the front counter and a customer with a grocery bag of books to sell. Flannery felt at home among fellow word geeks, eyes cast down at the open books in their hands as if deep in prayer: Here was a frowsy middle-aged woman in a beige-and-brown plaid coat, a coat so bulky that it made her appear as if she’d ensconced herself in an earth-toned sofa, yet she was reading Pablo Neruda, her lips moving in grief or ecstasy or a combination thereof. Her poetic radiance vanished when she barked into her cell phone: “Yes, I AM still at the bookshop! The cat won’t croak if I’m five minutes late with the goddamn Meow Mix.” And then there was an elderly man in a crushed-velvet blazer (the exact luscious green of Thompson seedless grapes) leaning heavily on a cane, but with three books tucked, spines out, beneath his free arm, a trifecta of bliss that awaited him once he’d made his slow journey home: John Irving, James Baldwin, and Edna O’Brien. That was enough companionship for anyone, really.

  “Do we see Miss Sweeney amongst our bookish friends?”

  Flannery peered down every tightly shelved aisle of the shop. “I don’t see her.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe she’s in the ladies’ room? Assuming there is one.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s a bit of a bookish maze in here.” Heath raised his hand to indicate the stairs to the loft. “Perhaps Caitlin Sweeney will descend like an angel. Though I suppose one generally ascends like an angel and descends like a devil. Well. We’ll keep an eye out.” He turned to the fiction shelves.

  Flannery looked up, imagining Miss Sweeney walking down the steps, waving, a starlet at her premiere. But all her curiosity and anxiety about Miss Sweeney was tempered by finding herself in a bookstore with Heath, an experience so sublime that Flannery could give up the corporeal world for this interlude with him, buffeted from the outside world by an army of book spines. Oh, how these moments surpassed all previous delights: the vanilla lattes and the smoked poblano enchiladas and the winter’s hush of rising at dawn to see silver white snow had silently blanketed the world while she slept, and then crawling back under the covers for another hour of deep, dreamless sleep, the triple-layer birthday cake studded with Junior Mints, the jeweled freshness of a blue pool on a stifling, hazy August day …

  And Miss Sweeney was there, if not physically, busy editing Flannery’s thoughts. Being with Heath at the bookstore is superior to, among a great many other things: “the jeweled freshness” of a blue pool? I fear this sounds like a majestic deodorant composed of crushed sapphires.

  Heath leaned down and ran his finger along a row of book spines. “B is for Brontë. Here are your girls.”

  Flannery delighted in the Brontës being thought of as her girls. She envisioned herself a Yorkshire girl drinking hot tea and reading with Emily and Charlotte and Anne in the Haworth parsonage while their doting minister father nagged them to sit closer to the fireplace, wanting to make sure his girls stayed warm.

  Heath pulled a copy of Jane Eyre off the shelf, held it over his face, and pitched his voice: “Oh, Emily, you think you’re the best writer in our family, don’t you? Admit it, you verbose little hussy.”

  Flannery
was still holding her copy of Wuthering Heights—would the Pynchon-loving proprietor of Westsider Books think she was shoplifting?—and she masked her face with it as Heath had. “I am the real writer in the family, Charlotte. How many people are madly devoted to Jane Eyre? I hasten to guess not as many as are devoted to Wuthering Heights.” Flannery lowered the book and resumed her Connecticut voice: “Although Jane Eyre has its own merits.”

  “Maybe this argument really happened,” Heath said. “The Brontës had a rather contentious relationship.”

  “No! I think they supported each other, and they had to fight the patriarchy—”

  “The patriarchy? Those eternal BASTARDS!” Heath clawed at his face in mock-anguish and shook his fists at the heavens. Flannery collapsed into giggles, which, she noted, a touch worried, was probably precisely what the patriarchy expected from her.

  “They really did have to fight the patriarchy. They used gender-neutral names so people wouldn’t write them off as silly little women from the sticks. They loved their life in Yorkshire, though, their literary domesticity and life at home with their father. Emily in particular hated to be away from home.”

  “Oh, Flannery.” Heath shook his head and offered up a few sad chuckles. “You disappoint me. You truly think Emily Brontë was a mere Pollyanna touched by genius? How could she write so keenly about emotional anguish if she knew nothing of it?”

  “But Emily—and Charlotte, and Anne—did know anguish. They lost their mother when they were young, and they had two older sisters who died of tuberculosis, which went untreated at their abusive boarding school. Loss was all around them.”