I walked there, wearing a sleek shearling coat I dug out of the back of the closet, vestigial layering from last year�s cold. I pulled on my old knit hat with the tassel, but I pulled it off before going inside. I didn�t want to look crazy.
I walk inside, right on the five minutes early dot, and the place is empty. Who would be in a local bookstore in such terrible weather on a Saturday?
Sarah is filing purple-red nails behind the counter and flicks a bird glance at her simple silver watch. �You�re just a bit early, Jon, but we can start the interview now, I guess.� She frowns slightly, to indicate that she hadn�t been planning on starting the interview four minutes early but that she�ll just have to sacrifice that plan, huh Jon? She calls out for someone named Devon to come to the register already and a smilingly huge black boy stilts his way to the counter. He is easily six foot six, with narrow shoulders and immensely delicate wrists. He says a quick hello to me and segments himself into five parcels to fit on the stool behind the register. His face calls to mind the gentle Rastafarian men carved out of wood and sold on highways.
Sarah leads me to a semi-hidden back room with a pair of chairs and a coffee table and produces a clipboard from thin air, and a pen from her intimidating hairdo. She asks, briskly, if I have any preferred work times, and I realize that the interview has begun. I say that I would like to do afternoon work, maybe from one to four, and that I�m fine with weekdays or weekends. We do important logistical things like this and then move on to the personal questions. She splits a dagger in half on my ribs with, �Why does working in a bookstore attract you?� and I stammer out that I have always had a love of books, and that I am in fact a writer. I see the letters begin to suspend themselves in the air over my head, slowly fluorescing to a brilliant yellow-green. THIS MAN IS A WRITER, they remind people. Sarah smiles a painful smile, and then I explain more about books and how I have a knack for helping people decide books they might like. Her red red read eyebrows raise.
�Really?� she pulls a coquettish face. �What do you think I might like?�
I ask if she�s read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and she looks pissed. "Right, because I have an eyebrow ring. Yes, I have.�
I say that she might like Bone Games, which covers the same ideas of Zen transcendence, only applied to extreme athleticism. She pauses.
Then I recommend some more. David Sedaris�s Me Talk Pretty One Day, Ray Bradbury�s Martian Chronicles�my tongue just runs away. And she sits there grinning and says that she�s read them all. And that she�ll call me by Monday to let me know if I have secured the position, but the smile she gives me suggests that I have.
I go to the grocery store, which is just down the street, and buy a sack of birdseed. It�s not too heavy, so I just hoist it up on my shoulder and head on home. Halfway there, I realize that it�s leaking out the back, so I grab a loose thread from my jacket and wrap it tightly around the burst corner, tying it tightly, but nearly a quarter of the bag has left a gleaming trail on the street. I see a solid line of crows, cardinals, sparrows, and those small filthy brown birds that have no names but are probably finches or something. They just keep going back through the corner, a line of birds feeding on a line of birdseed. It�s almost Zen. I trudge on home.
Once inside, I put down the bag of birdseed and have a cup of coffee with Nina, and then I fill the birdfeeder and go back in, and she looks so sad, sitting on the stairs, so I sit next to her, and give her a hug. I get a blanket and wrap it around her shoulders and ask if she�d like a backrub or something, and she says, �no thank you,� and so I ask if she wants to come watch the birds with me on the couch, and she says, �no thank you� again. I am beginning to get a little tired of �no thank you.�
I don�t know what�s bothering her. I give her another hug and ask in her ear what�s the matter. I guess that was a mistake.
She looks at me, stormily, and her face is just a porcelain doll of beauty, the lips and cheeks ruddy with slight anger, the eyes snapping and sparkling that wintergreen color bursting out of her face, and she says that she�s going upstairs and doesn�t particularly want me to follow. I am so confused, and say something to this effect to her back as she moves up the stairs.
She comes back down, and for one wild minute I think she is going to kiss me and we�ll just talk about what�s bothering her. But she slaps me, hard, across the face. I am shocked.
So is she. She stares and stares and then jolts herself back up the stairs in a hurried, unfashionable leap. I hear the door close with the care that means she�s too angry to get any satisfaction out of slamming it, and I sit here on the stairs with my rapidly cooling coffee and wonder what I can possibly do.