Nalani and Sofie texted this morning after I’d asked Noelle if she wanted me to come in early and give us a ride to grab the suitcases my roommates sweetly packed up,all three of them, and then to work.
Lucy and I were very excited that Noelle had set up a cute little reading nook with a chair that unfolds into a chaise lounge and a low folding table she can sit on the floor and color at in the office directly behind the counter. She was very excited to meet new friends, and yes, they signed her cast.
Right now, she is in the office up front with Preya, another new friend, while I am in the used book section that we just added, shelving all the battered paper Fitzgeralds and Austen reprints in a quad-stack formation, making sure every spine is squared to the shelf’s lip. There’s something cathartic about alphabetical order, and although we don’t use the law of Dewey here, I love that too.
But for another thirty books or so, I am just hands and eyes, arranging the dead for the comfort of the living. It’s the closest I’ve come to being relaxed in almost a week. And that has nothing to do with Lucy. It was easy to ignore being a visitor in someone elses space before, but now, now it’s going to be much harder to mask. But that’s an issue for later, right now the world contracts to my pulse and the click of my fingernail on a dustjacket. I could do this for hours like this if I don’t stop moving.
I shift to the next shelf—Faulker’s this time, lovely. But it’s not the books, and there is a k and an n. I line up the titles so their serifed names march in unison. Cataloging is triage;every book has a wound, every corner is dog-eared or torn, and sometimes there’s an annotation in the margin—angry, ecstatic, or lonely, but always human. Annotations forge a kind of intimacy, a record of a reader’s fight with the text. At other shops, I linger over the marks, wondering about the person who wrote them. Today, I avoid them as I am carrying a large enough load of my own, and do not need to borrow them.
If I keep working steadily, my mind stays blank. If I pause, even for a second, the world seeps back through the crevices: the nausea, the dull ache in my hips I can’t medicate, the running loop ofdon’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t. The body, despite my best attempts, refuses to be managed like a shelf of uniform text. It’s a crumbling paperback, yellowed at the edges, its sentences derailing in the margins. One day, it will all be for a purpose, a story of its own. I just don’t like not knowing where I will be cataloging it.
I am so focused on my Tetris of Penguin Classics that I don’t hear Noelle until she’s right next to me, her eyes telegraphing that particular flavor of concern she reserves for strays and overachievers. There are a lot of ways to intrude on a person’s solitude, but she’s mastered the art of doing it so quietly that it feels like a kindness instead of an interruption,perhaps because it is.
She stands close enough that I can smell her, cocoa butter, coffee, and the pages. Noelle is the kind of person who wears corduroy without irony and looks like she might have a secret life as a woodland creature. At the moment, her expression is all warmth, a lamp against my hermit’s tunnel vision.
“You’re going to give yourself a repetitive stress injury,” she murmurs.
The words land softer than fleece, but I can feel her taking a slow inventory of my face, the raw skin under my left nostril,the faded stain on my cardigan where I missed my mouth with a decaf.
“I’m fine,” I say, because it’s the truth.
She glances down at my hands, which are gripping The Sun Also Rises. I force myself to put the book back on the shelf, gently.
“You’re not,” she says, not unkindly. “You’re doing the thing again.”
I want to ask what thing, but I know exactly what thing. Over-working, over-focusing, trying to shove my mind between the covers.
Noelle doesn’t push. She just waits, hands in her cardigan pockets, rocking back on her heels with a patience that would shame the Virgin Mary. She is not the owner of Pembrooke Books by accident. She is the axis on which the little store turns, and the axis on which I do, apparently, as well.
The clock over the register says 5:16, which means she’s technically off the clock. I don’t know why she’s still here—she has a man who adores her at home, a self-imposed manuscript deadline, and exactly zero obligation to babysit me—but she is. It’s a kind of love I have trouble deciphering, or maybe just receiving.
She nudges her chin at the back office, where the light is on and the ancient kettle is already hissing. “Why don’t you sit with me for a few.”
I follow her through the narrow maze of stacked boxes and discount bins, hugging myself to keep my arms from shaking. The backroom is a cinderblock cell crammed with so many paperbacks, the walls look like a deranged librarian’s hoard. “Tea?”
“I’ve had enough for the day. I’ll never sleep tonight if I have another.”
“There,” she says, setting a bottle of water. “You are officially off the clock.”
Noelle perches on the edge of the battered desk and studies me, her mouth twitching in a half-smile that’s more concern than amusement. “You want to talk about it?”
I shake my head, eyes fixed on the way the steam curls off the surface of her cup of tea. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You sure? Because you look like someone vacuum-sealed your soul and then put it on the shelf.”
I laugh, but it comes out ragged. “I’m just tired.”
She’s not buying it, but she lets me keep the fiction. We sit in silence, the kind that is not empty but dense with all the things neither of us will say aloud. I sip my water she drinks her tea. The ache in my hips eases, but the nausea doesn’t. I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.
After a few minutes, Noelle says, “I know you’re handling a lot. You always do. I just want you to know you don’t have to do it alone.”
The words hurt as much as they intend to soothe, because I adore Noelle, she’s a genuinely great human being, but those girls and their men are an even stronger team than the Brooklyn Bears, and when things come to blows I will lose them all. What they have done for me, for Lucy, I will always be grateful for, and I will not break up that family.
She stands and smooths her dress, then squeezes my hand with the kind of fondness that is sisterly. “If you need anything, call me, no matter what time it is,” she says, then leaves the door ajar when she goes.
I finish the water and force myself to sit for five more minutes, just to take the time I need to gather myself, gather Lucy, and face what I must.
I glance at the books on the desk and they stare back, their titles a silent Greek chorus:Oedipus at Colonus,Tess of theD’Urbervilles,The Bell Jar. So many tragedies. So many girls left holding the consequences of other people’s doings. All of them were acted upon, silenced, or destroyed.
