From a work in progress entitled “Dayjob”. I am still experimenting with all different tones for a series of essays I hope to put together about life behind the counter.
The Arts and Crafts Section
The interview was a thorough and lengthy one, and if I hadn’t just parked my car in the sprawling parking lot of a suburban strip mall, I might have mistaken the HR director of Bookends Bookshop for a thesis advisor. Did I know what I hoped to get out of this position? How would a job at Bookends contribute to my overall career path? A position like this would look good on the resume of an aspiring English major- he smiled when he said this, and leaned back in his chair, causing it to squeak- but didn’t all brunettes want to be English majors, nowadays?
I walked out of his office with the impression he wanted me to leave with- that there was a great deal of competition for this job and that my appointment wasn’t yet in the proverbial bag. But the impression was fleeting. The first time I’d ever walked into a Bookends Bookshop was in the privileged enclave of Lower Merion, outside of Philadelphia. I’d gone with a friend who was older than I was. She was into wearing hats. We ordered three-dollar lattes with caramel syrup and read the last pages of bestsellers out loud in the aisles. Leila stole a CD from the abandoned “world” section, and I took a postcard. The café section was filled with anxious bodies and unwashed heads of hair, and I thought, then, that this sprawling bookshop was the be-all and end-all in teenage bohemianism.
After my interview, I bought a sushi cookbook from the $2.99 sale rack and walked back to my car. My first car- the Play-Doh of my secret heart. In a town where Point A was an inevitable 30 minute-drive from any Point B, the intimate interior of that moving bubble was inseparable from my burgeoning sense of identity. Once outside, I looked around at the spotless sport utility vehicles carelessly parked with an unearned sense of entitlement , and realized that there was nothing ‘bohemian’ about this particular branch at all. From the look of the boarding school stickers and vanity plates, the under-twenty set of Stamford, Connecticut, had their book shopping done for them. So much for meeting a mournful writer in the heady area of the fiction center, between G and H. The cool kids that summer were working at Whole Foods. There was no competition. I knew I’d get the job.
I suppose I was assigned to the Arts and Crafts aisle because I’d rather recklessly told the HR Director that I liked to “make things” in my free time. He asked “like what?” with the tenacity of someone who expected a real answer, so I replied with confidence that I enjoyed making oil paintings, collages, the occasional needlepoint. I don’t know why I didn’t say “knitting”, because although I didn’t know how to, it would have been more digestible than “needlepointing”, which I’d pulled out of a small compartment in my mind that I kept full up with lies. I figured it was just an antiquated, stodgy enough pastime to convince the interviewer that I was stodgy enough to merit a job in a bookshop. It worked- but my creative slip-up earned me a rotten placement. They put me in charge of the Arts and Crafts section, which, as anyone who is under 60 and doesn’t own multiple cats knows, is not the “cool” place to be.
My first day on the job, I was given a locker- a cubby, really, a metallic entity the exact size of a breadbox into which I was to shove all of my mundane possessions. It was an unseasonably cold summer that year and I had pulled out my fall coat to wear until the cold spell passed. Each morning I had to choose between my backpack and my jacket; there was only room for one in the cubby. The choice would have been obvious had the temperature in the breakroom not been of an arctic quality. I asked the manager once to turn off the A.C, and he said that he couldn’t. “It comes on in May, it goes off in the end of September.” This seemed incredible to me, and I spent many an afternoon imagining a Bookends Executive somewhere in the American heartland, his finger on a button, his eyes trained on a screen. He watched me shiver. He watched me start to shake. But he wouldn’t do anything until the end of September.
The lockers in the breakroom were arranged in a semi-circle around a fold-up table. This table was draped in a plastic-coated tablecloth which never got wiped down. One of my colleagues, (we will call her AudioBooks) had a penchant for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on pumpernickel bread. In the morning, she would section off her sandwich into six vertical pieces, which she would enjoy standing at the table at stolen intervals throughout the day. By the end of my first week, the table was covered in hardened knots of pumpernickel crumbs and gummy with runaway jelly. I was surprised to come back after the weekend to find the crumbs still there. I imagined that a chain bookstore would have a cleaning service of some sort, and the realization that they didn’t struck me with a very American type of fear. I became apprehensive of the wall-to-wall carpeting on the main floor and started to pay more attention to customers’ shoes. I cringed when the dressage moms brought in their daughters, fresh out of the ring, leaving traces of equestrian excrement behind them on their way to the greeting card section. Birthday parties. Bat Mitzvahs. Daddy’s birthday coming up.
So on Monday, my first Monday, I asked the others if I could clean the tablecloth. Astonished, the lethargic lonelyhearts stood up from the table, cleared away their chamomile tea and crossword puzzles, reached down for their little wads of Kleenex and watched me at the sink. The decrepit, yellow sponge smelled of innumerable washings- a years worth, perhaps- and I already regretted the task I’d taken on for the way my fingers would smell, after.
Apparently, no one had washed the plastic-coated monstrosity before because there was a considerable amount of confabulation once the table was revealed. It turned out to be a poker table- nobody knew where it came from. In theory, it was purchased to play a game, or games, of poker, an endeavor that usually requires more than one person to execute. How that table found its way into our breakroom both puzzled and intrigued me. I imagined a standard story of neglect and fatigue. The portly wife with a bad dye job launching a plate of meatloaf at the wall. “It’s the table, or me!” she would bark, watching ketchup drip down the wallpaper that she’d proudly put up herself. Maybe the original owner had died (this seemed the most plausible), and bequeathed the green felt table to his good friends at Bookends, where he’d spent so many agreeable moments in the “Hobby”section.
In any case, the poker table was stolen that very same week. It was still there on Tuesday, but on Wednesday it was gone. The automatons I worked with didn’t seem surprised. AudioBooks greeted the news with a sigh so indiscernible, it might have been a breath. And then she sat down, spread a paper towel across her knees, and divided her peanut butter and jelly sandwich into only three pieces, the better half of which ended up on her pants.
The poker table was replaced with a picnic table from outside. The wood was splintered and chipped, and remained damp all summer. One time, the barista got her thigh stuck between the bench and the table and took the whole thing down with her in a humiliating cacophony of spilled tea and stifled laughs. After that, the Bookenders with oversized limbs took to eating outside in the parking lot, propped up by their cars, or they crossed the street to Starbucks where we got a six percent discount on anything blended.
Besides guiding the large buttocked women in their bulky sock and belted dresses towards how-to books on balloon sculpture and macramé, I was given the daunting task to overhaul the section.
“The Arts and Crafts section needs to be arranged by theme instead of author,” explained Daryl, the assistant manager. “I don’t know who was here before you, but this is just senseless.”
The assignment would have taken me all summer to accomplish and still, the new system wouldn’t have made any sense. For every three books on floral arts, there were two on cake decorating. Russian Egg Painting was next to a rambling, two-shelved section on Antiques, and underneath this lay a half shelf on model car parts.
The idea that all throughout America, there were unsung authors meeting with their editors, setting release dates for “Volume II: Big Baskets” amazed me to no end. The idea that there were real life human beings so enthused by their first go with “Big Baskets” that they simply had to have another crack at the whole business, both pleased and depressed me. Who were the authors of these mental balloon flights? At what point do you say, I have become an expert in the fabrication of whimsical yet stylish Christmas Tree skirts and the time has come for me to enlighten others in this sacred art?
I thought about classifying the how-to books from “eclectic” to “really?” From harmless, rainy day activities to somebody-call-the-police. Scrapbooking, for instance, wasn’t this sort of an intuitive activity? You assemble your various paperwork memories and glue them on the page. But no- there were people out there who believed they had a superior method for the organization of your memories, and there were plenty of others willing to believe them.
Sheila, in Fiction, never had to deal with overbearing types. Her customers came quickly with efficiency in mind, a dime in the parking meter, tick tock, no time. They came bearing the New York Times Book Review tucked under their armpits and or searched exclusively for the golden seal of Oprah. Morrison. Marquez. Kingsolver. Lamb. I often wondered about the lesser-known authors, the caged animals that never got adopted. Yellowing and patient, they waited for the type of angsty adolescent who lives inside her head.
Because “Arts and Crafts” is a wordy synonym for “Pastimes”, I oversaw a steady stream of the overheated lonely, their fingers sticky from some two-day old Danish, the crumbs making house in the carelessly formed bindings, three or more books stacked high on their legs. We had two faux-leather club chairs at the end of the section, and three step stools scattered haphazardly in each aisle. While Sheila’s customers darted in and out with a pen and a To-Do list, my visitors would sit for hours, perusing and purring, furrowing away ideas for upcoming holidays and autumnal craft fairs at the historical center. Gravy boats made out of gourds and canned rutabaga. Miniature furniture and bedazzled suspenders. Headbands and barrettes with interchangeable ribbons. Desk-sized Zen gardens and Sea Monkey Farms. There was simply no end to the madness.
The people in my section were crazy for hot beverages, and for some cockamamie reason classified in our staff manual as “the desire to create a warm, inviting place”, we allowed customers to bring their food and drink into the aisles, provided that it was purchased from the Bookends Brewing Co. The Arts and Crafts contingent really liked caffeine, and they had a mendacious attitude towards stains of any kind. Several times a day, an Arts & Crafty would struggle to her feet from her low-rider crouch on a step stool, and present me with a book on hangliders for gerbils or some such ridiculousness and ask me what kind of discount she could get for this very large stain here. She would thump her forefinger accusingly at some orangish spot near the top right of the page, a stain that nearly always corresponded with the Crafty’s beverage of choice, an extra large cinnamon latte with orange syrup, conveniently concealed behind the step stool. In the beginning, I reprimanded these readers for their blatant dog-earing of pages they would never buy, their transparent quest for discounts, their vehement denial that the chocolate-colored stain in question originated from their chocolate-colored brownie, but Daryl reprimanded me, and twice in front of customers. At Bookends, like every other mass-market, chain store across America, the customer was always right, no matter how obnoxious, no matter how often.
All summer, I presided over these spotted, hunchbacked creatures who crowded the aisles with their wooly dark daydreams. Large legged and anxious, they had thick hair and red knees and they always carried backpacks, charcoal grey companions that never seemed to close. Composition notebooks, Tic-Tacs, tips on baking bread. I once stole a glimpse of an underwater camera and couldn’t help but wonder; where? When?
The Arts and Crafts section was a horrifically large spider, pregnant, overfed. My shelves were like the boxcars of a broken down train, no room, ever, for anything new. The same, eclectic titles ripening on the shelves, dogeared and humid, waiting for some gentle soul to wake up one morning and crave a paper airplane. Waiting for a passerby to grow wistful at a stop light. How did she make the brightly tattered potholders of her youth? Could she find tongue depressors in bulk if she wanted to start over?
The books in my section were multi-sized and testy. Some were tall, some thick, some impossibly fragile. They jarred for space and leapt out of their assigned spots, desperate for attention while the uniformed half-inch paperbacks bound for beach and airplane flooded in and out on a nearly tidal schedule.
Makers are not buyers, and the lonely are stubborn. If I purchase a book on cross-stitching, I am a cross-stitcher. If I walk out with a book on collecting model trains, I am the person with one dish in my sink. Unasked to the movies, I’ve never mixed up my laundry with that of someone else’s. I yearn to lose a sock.
Halfway through my time at Bookends, I was surprised to learn that we were allowed to borrow books from any section we wanted. Paperback, hardcover, calendar or memoir, we only had to pluck our target from the shelves and it was ours for three weeks. There was something vaguely pornographic about this lending system. It was a staff secret, of course, kept in swaddling clothing from the customers. I was always cautious with the volumes I borrowed- draping a small hand towel across my chest, the edges tucked beneath my bra strap, but it is ever so difficult to eat and read alone.
I was fifteen years old when I worked in that behemoth of a bookshop. According to the rules of my township, I should have been off somewhere getting tan and getting fingered. Instead of undressing in the darkness with a backpack at my feet and a mind filled with first sentences, I should have been stretched out on a towel somewhere, my hair, a dampened wreath of chlorinated branches, my breath a celebration of darkened corners. Lukewarm water, a summer of songs.
I was born distrustful in a very wealthy town and when the change came, with it went carefreefullness. The tanned toes and painted fingernails of the little girls around me, the ponytails arranged at just the right height, their reluctance to take anything seriously- this wasn’t how I saw things. My hair was too thin and too soft for a ponytail. My outlook was fragile- it all seemed so important. These girls have grown to take things more seriously now. I, too, take advantage of stoplights to see them in their futures, perched on custom-made window seats in monogrammed bathrobes. They understand completely; it was the end of an era.
Perhaps I cultivated my role as emotional hitchhiker, perhaps I made things more difficult than they might have been. I went on several rides with the future heiresses of themed refrigerators. I lounged in moldy hammocks with their maybes and closed eyelids, but there was a wide and sorrowful difference between us that I couldn’t seem to mend. Darkness against beige. The night too cold for shoulders. When the petal starts to smell.
In the evening, after work, I took to writing stories, short ones- a genre that merited a place next to model airplanes. A construction that flies for no one but its maker. I had a writing desk then- where had it come from? It’s curious how we wake up one day and look at our furniture when we are still young. You come home one evening and your armoire is a stranger. How in the world did it get there? There aren’t enough shelves, too many, it’s pink. The object was chosen for a person you might not become. I had a loveseat, for example- what was the point? I was fifteen years old and my parents had moved on. There is a point at which you stop taking them for granted and you really wonder about these people, your parents, like a particularly bright wallpaper in a small hotel room. The “vacancy” sign buzzing, troubling your sleep.
I suppose it was the summer of a sudden separation between what I saw and what I was. The jumping off point, as it were, to something somewhere else. There was nothing new in the solace I found between the pages of the many books I borrowed – if they came back sullied, I purchased them at half price, their cost taken right out of my paycheck. There was nothing new, either, in the stories of the people around me- they kept coming back, the customers, the staff. Day in, day out- there were books to be read and presents to be bought, only, the other sections maintained a sense of antiseptic professionalism about them that the Arts & Crafts Section did not. It is only in the baroque section of a bookshop or perhaps in a course on Scandinavian film that one can observe such listless boats of people, the wandering, the lost- the type of sweatered human you wouldn’t want behind a wheel.
I sat amongst the magpies for three months that summer and watched them contemplate their possible outcomes cross-legged on the carpet. It’s curious, the clichés that we invent to help us make amends with the lengthy week. There is a sense of vindication behind these roomy definitions, and then, the sadness comes because what does that make you?
Near the end of August, I caught and killed a fly in between the pages of a book I borrowed from my section. The fly barreled into my lampshade, and the book was a strange one, I’m not sure why I borrowed it. It was a heavy How-To on making your own stationary. The fly was large and meaty- worthy of a Sunday roast with all the fanfare of too many sides. It crunched when I killed it. It made me think of fall.
What page was it? Somewhere in the middle, or closer towards the end? I didn’t want to buy the book, and assumed it wouldn’t sell, so I brought it back and placed it irrelevantly on the shelf as I had seen so many disingenuous Crafties do that summer, empowered by their secrets, staking out their claims.
Because life is like that, “Homemade, Handwritten” was one of the only books from my section that actually made it to the register, sold to a small woman with red plastic eyeglasses. She carried two bags and an umbrella and she had an air or preparedness about her, the type of person who stocked up on extra toilet paper and canned soup, just in case.
There was a dark cloud awaiting as she pushed through the glass doors, out into the electric energy of a storm about to come. The heat would return soon. I could put away my jacket and look forward to the end of mostly everything. Look forward to the fall- one more year until college- a so-called real escape. In the days ahead, I would overhear the grateful murmurings of the febrific customers, grateful for the chilly climate that our bookshop afforded. The one-time inquisitive with the sturdy red glasses never came back to complain about the fly. I imagined her seated just-so in her kitchen, and I couldn’t help but wonder, what would she think when she turned the page and witnessed my trespassing? Would she pause and reconsider the futility of it all, the cutting out and scribbling, the gluing and the licking, her behaved, scripted letters, going out to people who would never write back?
