“So?”
“So, I don’t like to go to the same place twice in the same day. Especially since I was just there.”
“That’s a little bit crazy.”
“I’m a little bit crazy.”
He liked that.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll meet you down to the used-book store. You can see it there at the corner.”
“You read books?”
“Just because I quit writing doesn’t mean I quit reading. For a smart kid, you’re kind of dumb, you know?”
That pleased her more than she’d expected. He was still a smart-ass, so maybe he was still rowdy enough to write poems. Maybe there was hope for him. She felt evangelical. Maybe she could save him. Maybe she’d pray for him and he’d fall to his knees in the bookstore and beg for salvation and resurrection.
“All right?” he asked. “About fifteen minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
He closed the door. For a moment, she wondered if he was tricking her, if he needed a way to close the door on her. Well, he’d have to call the cops to get rid of her. She’d camp on his doorstep until he came out. She’d wait in the bookstore for exactly seventeen minutes, and if he was one second later, she’d break down his front door and interrogate him. He was an out-of-shape loser and she could take him. She’d teach him nineteen different ways to spell matriarchy.
She hurried to the bookstore and walked inside. An elderly woman was crocheting behind the front desk.
“Can I help you?” the yarn woman asked.
“I’m just waiting for somebody,” Corliss said.
“A young man, perhaps?”
Why were young women always supposed to be waiting for young men? Corliss didn’t like young men all that much. Or old men, either. She was no virgin. She’d slept with three boys and heavily petted a dozen more, but she’d also gone to bed with one woman and French-kissed the holy-moly out of another, and hey, maybe that was the way to go. Maybe I’m not exactly a lesbian, Corliss thought, but I might be an inexact lesbian.
“Is there a man waiting at home for you?” Corliss asked and immediately felt like a jerk.
“Oh, no,” the yarn woman said and smiled. “My husband died twenty years ago. If he’s waiting for me, he’s all the way upstairs, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” Corliss said and meant it.
“It’s okay, dear, I shouldn’t have invaded your privacy. You go on ahead and look for what you came for.”
On every mission, there is a time to be strong and a time to be humble.
“Listen, my name is Corliss Joseph, and I’m sorry for being such a bitch. There’s no excuse for it. I’m really angry with the guy I’m supposed to be meeting here soon. He’s not my boyfriend, or even my friend, or anything like that. He’s a stranger, but I thought I knew him. And he disappointed me. I don’t even think I have a right to be angry with him. So I’m really confused about — Well, I’m confused about my whole life right now. So I’m sorry, I really am, and I’m usually a much kinder person than this, you know?”
The yarn woman was eighty years old. She knew.
“My name is Lillian, and thank you for being so honest. When your friend, or whatever he is, arrives, I’ll turn off my hearing aids so you’ll have privacy.”
Who would ever think of such an eccentric act of kindness? An old woman who owned a bookstore!
“Thank you,” Corliss said. “I’ll just look around until he gets here.”
She walked through the bookstore that smelled of musty paper and moldy carpet. She scanned the shelves and read the names of authors printed on the spines of all the lovely, lovely books. She loved the smell of new books, sure, but she loved the smell of old books even more. She thought old books smelled like everybody who’d ever read them. Possibly that was a disgusting thought, and it certainly was a silly thought, but Corliss felt like old books were sentient beings that listened and remembered and passed judgment. Oh, God, I’m going to cry again, Corliss thought, I’m losing my mind in a used-book store. I am my mother’s daughter. And that made her laugh. Hey, she thought, I’m riding in the front car of the crazy-woman roller coaster.
She knew she needed to calm down. And to calm down, she needed to perform her usual bookstore ceremony. She found the books by her favorite authors — Whitman, Shapiro, Jordan, Turcotte, Plath, Lourie, O’Hara, Hershon, Alvarez, Brook, Schreiber, Pawlak, Offutt, Duncan, Moore — and reshelved them with their front covers facing outward. The other books led with their spines, but Corliss’s favorites led with their chests, bellies, crotches, and faces. The casual reader wouldn’t be able to resist these books now. Choose me! Choose me! The browser would fall in love at first sight. Corliss, in love with poetry, opened Harlan Atwater’s book and read one more sonnet:
Poverty
When you’re poor and hungry
And love your dog
You share your food with him.
There is no love like his.
When you’re poor and hungry
And your dog gets sick,
You can’t afford to take him
To the veterinarian,
So you have to watch him get sicker
And cough blood and cry all night.
You can’t afford to put him gently to sleep
So your uncle comes over for free
And shoots your dog twice in the head
And buries him in the town dump.
How could he know such things about poverty and pain if he had not experienced them? Can a poet be that accomplished a liar? Can a poet invent history so well that his audience is completely fooled? Only if they want to be fooled, thought Corliss, knowing she was exactly that kind of literate fool. For her, each great book was the Holy Bible, and each great author was a prophet. Oh, God, listen to me, Corliss thought, I’m a cult member. If Sylvia Plath walked into the bookstore and told her to drink a glass of cyanide-laced grape juice, Corliss knew she would happily do it.
Precisely on time, Harlan Atwater opened the door and stepped into the bookstore. He’d obviously showered and shaved, and he wore a navy blue suit that had fit better ten years and twenty pounds earlier but still looked decent enough to qualify as formal wear. He’d replaced his big clunky glasses with John Lennon wire frames. Corliss felt honored by Harlan’s sartorial efforts and was once again amazed by Lillian as she smiled and turned off her hearing aids.
“You look good,” Corliss said to Harlan.
“I look like I’m trying to look good,” he said. “That’s about all I can do right now. I hope it’s enough.”
“It is. Thank you for trying.”
“Well, you know, it’s not every day I’m the object of a vision quest.”
“Everything feels new today.”
He smiled. She didn’t know what he was thinking.
“So,” he said. “Do you want to hear my story?”
“Yes.”
He led her to a stuffed couch in the back of the store. They sat together. He stared at the floor as he talked.
“I’m not really a Spokane Indian,” he said.
She knew it! He was a fraud! He was a white man with a good tan!
“Well, I’m biologically a Spokane Indian,” he said. “But I wasn’t raised Spokane. I was adopted out and raised by a white family here in Seattle.”
That explained why he knew so much about Spokane Indians but remained unknown by them.
“You’re a lost bird,” she said.
“Is that what they’re calling us now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, isn’t that poetic? I suppose it’s better than calling us stolen goods. Or clueless bastards.”