The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  All day long, Frieda is edgy, irritable. Her mood rubs off on me, and I notice that my hands shake a lot, even though I’ve only had two cups of coffee today. Perhaps it is just the memory of the dream, which lingers in my mind.

  “I need to get out of here,” Frieda tells me at four thirty. “I’ve had enough for one day. Will you close up?”

  I nod and watch her leave. Outside the shop, she furiously lights a cigarette and stomps down the street.

  “Sister, I’m so sorry,” I whisper, although she is long gone and cannot hear me. “I’m so sorry for the way things are going for us.”

  And then, after I close the front shades, as I am gathering the meager amount of cash in our register so I can store it in the safe out back, it comes to me.

  I know where I’ve heard that name before. Lars.

  The recollection dates back some eight years. It was just before Frieda and I launched Sisters’, during the phase when I began calling myself Katharyn. Back then I read with great interest the personal ads section in the Denver Post. And finally I ran an ad myself. It was something to do, I suppose, another brave something that went along with my new job, my new name, my desire to make myself over into someone different.

  Lars was one of the fellows who responded to my ad. In fact, now that I think of it, Lars was the fellow.

  What I mean is that, out of the twenty or so men who wrote, the eight or ten that made the first cut and to whom I talked on the telephone, and the few that I went on a date with (none of them to be repeated, generally not to my disappointment)—out of all those men, Lars was the only one with whom I truly thought there might be potential.

  Like all of the men, Lars wrote me a letter to introduce himself. But unlike many of the notes I received, Lars’s letter was more than a few lines scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed in an envelope, with little thought of the outcome. I could tell, just by what he’d written, that Lars had put a great deal of time and consideration into his letter.

  I am a saver. I have an enormous file cabinet at home, and I save every piece of paper that ever had meaning to me. I have letters, recipes, travel itineraries, magazine articles—you name it, and it’s in that cabinet

  So it is no surprise, when I rush home from work and go through my files, to find a manila folder marked, simply, “Ad Respondents.” And in this folder are a smattering of letters and pieces of paper with first names and telephone numbers scribbled on them. There is also a yellowing copy, cut from the newspaper, of my personal advertisement:

  Single Female, age 30, Denver. Optimist with faith in self, family, friends, abilities. Honest, forthright, loyal. Seeks gentleman who is playful but not silly. A man with interests (outdoors, music, books). Man should desire a family and secure home life, yet also enjoy adventures, travel, and fun. If this is you, please write.

  I think about that, what I wrote in that ad. How I presented myself to the world. Looking back, I see how the years have changed me. In those days, marriage still was on my mind. Kevin had disappeared from my life a few years prior, but the idea of finding someone just right with whom I could settle down and start a family—plainly, that idea still held appeal for me back in ’54.

  What I have now—running the store, my independence, the life of a single working woman . . . well. I may have wanted to start a business with Frieda. After the disaster my teaching career turned out to be, I may have wanted to surround myself with books all day, to spend my days on my terms.

  Evidently, however, I did not expect the years to pass in the manner in which they have.

  I ruffle through the rest of the papers in the file, until I find Lars’s letter:

  Dear Miss,

  I know you don’t know me, and I know that most people say that this is a foolish way to go about meeting someone. I have heard that it never works. For the most part, I have believed that, because I have not seen too many people succeed at it. But I read your advertisement (actually, I have read it about a dozen times now), and from your description, I think that I might be someone you would be compatible with.

  You said you were looking for someone who is playful, but not silly. Here are some things I like to do. One is to visit my nephew and niece and have football games in the street. Don’t worry, we use a soft ball and have yet to break an automobile windshield—and the kids are 12 and 8, so they are pretty good about watching out for oncoming traffic. I also like to build things for other people. When my niece and nephew were little, I built a swing set for my sister’s backyard. I built a doghouse for a friend’s dog that was spending its nights in the cold. Perhaps those are not playful things, but they are things that make others happy, and that makes me smile.

  You mentioned travel. I have not had the opportunity to do as much traveling as I’d like. I immigrated to the United States from Sweden with my family when I was a teenager. I’ve had to work hard to make my way in this country, but things are better now and I have the means to live a more comfortable life. I am hoping that will include more travel in the future, both within the country and internationally. Have you been to Europe? I have not been back, but I would like to go someday, especially if I were accompanied by a travel companion who might appreciate the Old World for all its beauty and history.

  Another of my interests, which you did not mention, is American sports, particularly baseball. Perhaps you are not a fan. I hope that if we were to meet and get to know one another, you would forgive me this indulgence. They say baseball is America’s pastime, and as an American myself now, I find that it has become mine as well.

  I’m glad you were not afraid to say you are looking for a man who wants a family. A lot of ladies seem afraid to admit that, as if they think it makes men desire them less. I guess they might be justified, because a lot of fellows (especially past a certain age) are either on the fence or adamantly say no to the idea of children. I don’t feel that way. I’ve always wanted a family and I hope it’s not too late! (I’m only 34, so I suppose there is time.)

  So you see, miss, why your advertisement appealed to me. I hope you’ll respond. I would love to get to know you.

  Sincerely,

  Lars

  I sit there, rereading the letter. I stare at the telephone number he wrote in a postscript. And then I read the letter through a few more times. True, he is not Shakespeare. But it’s clear why I wanted to contact him. There is something there; I can’t deny a connection, just through those few pages of written words.

  Later, while cutting up vegetables for my dinner, I telephone Frieda. Although I am worried that she’ll still be in a mood, I need to talk to her. Perhaps, I think as I dial, her brisk walk will have cleared her head.

  She answers on the third ring; her voice, when she hears mine, is friendly. “Miss me?” she asks. “I know it’s been almost two hours since you saw me.”

  I laugh. “Of course,” I say. “But that’s not the only reason I’m calling.” I plunge in and ask her, “Do you remember a fellow named Lars? From the personals?” There is no response, so I ask again.

  “Thinking,” she says. “Yours or mine?”

  When I ran my personal advertisement, I realized—after skimming a few of the initial replies—that not all of the respondents would turn out to be likely suitors for me. “I am wunderfull. Pleeze call me” was the entire content of one rather revealing letter. Sadly, it was not an anomaly.

  There were others, too, in whom—while they were capable of stringing basic sentences together—I did not feel a spark of interest. My reasons varied: too tall, too talkative, too slick sounding.

  One evening Frieda came over to my apartment, and we went through the letters one by one. We made three piles: “Kitty,” “Frieda,” and “Discard.” Into the Kitty pile went letters from those who intrigued me. “It’s my ad, after all,” I told her, laughing. “I get first dibs.” Into the Frieda pile went letters from the fellows for whom my initial reaction was lackluster. Frieda selected several of these to contact. “Why not?�
�� she reasoned. “They’re just going here otherwise.” And she waved her hand at the Discard pile.

  Ironically, she had better luck than me with the letters. She went on quite a few dates, and actually went steady for several months with a man she met through my personal ad. I thought they were going to get serious, but it was not meant to be. When she told me their relationship had ended, Frieda shrugged flippantly. “He simply wasn’t good enough for me,” she’d said. “He didn’t think as highly of me as you do, Kitty.”

  You might think that with a name like Frieda, my best friend would have wiry red hair and be a little self-centered, like the Frieda in the Peanuts comic strip. And while Frieda has her vain moments—don’t we all?—she certainly looks nothing like that little girl. Tall, with long, straight dark hair, she is nearly the opposite of me. She is athletic and strong; she played softball and was on the swim team in high school, and to this day she still swims a few times a week in the field house pool at DU. She strikes up conversations with everyone she meets, from the teenage girls who sell movie tickets at the Vogue to the occasional confused passerby who stumbles into our shop looking for directions to an entirely different part of town. Other shopkeepers on our block call Frieda “the sales-y one.” I am “the bookworm.”

  “Lars was one of mine,” I tell her now. “I know you don’t remember mine that well.”

  She laughs. “I can barely remember last week. You want me to remember who you went out with—what was it—eight years ago?”

  I select a carrot from the refrigerator and start to peel it. “I was just hoping.”

  “Why? Did you run into him again?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” But I don’t speak it, because even telling Frieda seems ridiculous.

  “Did you run another ad?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I cut the carrot into small disks. “Look, I have to go. I’m about to start cooking dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  After we hang up, I reread Lars’s letter and my advertisement. I’ve read them over and over since I got home.

  And then I remember something else. We talked. We talked on the telephone.

  It was just once. I called him, because that’s the smart thing to do in these circumstances—that’s what Frieda told me. “That way,” she said, “if they sound like they just escaped the loony bin, no harm is done. They can’t call you back.”

  So after reading Lars’s letter several times that evening, I took a deep breath, picked up the telephone, and rang the number he’d given me. He answered right away.

  “This is . . . Katharyn,” I said, testing the name on my tongue. It felt fresh and tingly, like a breath mint. “From the . . . the ad.”

  “Katharyn.” In his voice, the name sounded magical, unique, special. “I knew it would be you.”

  This scared me a bit. “How did you know?” I asked nervously.

  He laughed. He had a nice laugh. “I just knew.”

  I turned down the radio, so I could hear him better over the line. Oh, good heavens—now I remember when that Rosemary Clooney song was number one on the charts.

  It was playing on the radio that night. The night when we talked on the telephone.

  Stars in one’s eyes, indeed.

  Lars asked how my day had gone, what I did for work. “I’m actually between jobs at the moment,” I said. Then I told him about the bookstore, which was scheduled to open a few weeks later.

  “What an exciting prospect,” he said. “You’re very impressive, Katharyn.”

  Impressive. I can honestly say that never before in my life had anyone described me using that word. Smart, yes. Friendly, yes. Impressive? That was a tall order, one I’d never considered myself having the shoes to fill.

  “I’m actually thinking of opening a business myself,” Lars told me. “But not nearly as thrilling as yours. Just an architectural firm.”

  I laughed. “That sounds plenty thrilling to me,” I said. “How did you get into that line of work?”

  “Oh, I’ve been at it for years,” he replied. “I’ve always loved building things. Back home in Sweden, my father was a carpenter, and I used to help him on his jobs. In a small town like ours, when you built someone’s house, you designed it, too. Over here, after my parents passed, I took odd jobs. Finally I saved enough dough to attend UC-Denver. I knew by then that I wanted an architectural degree. I graduated college late for my age—in ’forty-four, when I was an old man of twenty-four. I was hired by a small firm here in town, and the rest just came naturally.”

  “’Forty-four.” I thought for a moment. “Didn’t you serve?” Everyone I knew, Kevin and every other boy I went to DU with, or knew from high school or church or my neighborhood, was serving in ’44.

  He didn’t say anything for a few moments. I asked softly, “Lars? Are you still there?”

  “I couldn’t serve,” he said quietly. “I was Four-F.”

  “Why?”

  I could hear him take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I have a heart condition . . . arrhythmia,” he said, and then quickly added, “That’s not as terrible as it sounds. But it does mean . . . it means . . . my heartbeat is irregular.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “It means I have a bad heart.”

  I didn’t reply. I thought of my father, easily the most patriotic man I’ve ever met. During the war his plant went on strike, and he was the only worker who broke the picket lines and went to work side by side with the scabs. The plant had ceased making home electric meters, and the workers at that time were assembling electronics for the war effort instead. My father said that anything he could do to help our soldiers was worth more than a few extra pennies in his pocket. I wondered what he would think of me going out with a man who’d been 4-F during the war.

  “Katharyn?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that all right? That I didn’t serve?”

  I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. And then I replied, “Well, it hardly sounds like you could have done anything about it.” I laughed lightly. “Tell me more about being an architect.”

  “I tend toward commercial projects,” he said. “Office buildings and the like. Not as glamorous as residential work, but there is more demand for it. So many houses are prefabricated these days, the same layout over and over. I’d love to design and build my own house someday, make it one of a kind.” He sighed, and I could hear the longing in his voice. He went on to tell me about the architectural firm he was thinking of starting on his own. “I know as much as the bosses at my current firm,” he explained. “The only difference between what they do and what I do is the name on the doorplate and the amount on the pay stub.”

  “Well, good for you,” I replied, and I meant it. I admired him for wanting to branch out on his own. I knew from my own experience, mine and Frieda’s, that even thinking about going out on a limb like that is not the easiest thing to do.

  The conversation went on for over an hour. Finally, I said it was getting late. “This has been truly wonderful,” Lars said. “I’d love to speak with you again, Katharyn.”

  I hesitated a moment, and then I said, “Oughtn’t we just to meet? It seems silly to keep talking on the telephone. We ought to just meet in person and see how things go.”

  “Really?” He seemed surprised.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, Katharyn, let’s make a date.” We made a date to have coffee two evenings hence.

  “All right, then,” he said after our plans were finalized. “I guess this is good-bye for now.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “Katharyn . . .”

  I paused, and then said, “Yes?”

  His voice was soft. “Nothing . . . I just . . . I’m really looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I’m looking forward to it, too.”

  He didn’t answer. I could hear his breathing; it sounded a bit rapid. “Is there anything else?” I asked.

  Slowly, he said, “No, I . . . no
, I suppose not. Good night.”

  “Good night,” I replied. And we both hung up.

  I hold the letters, the papers, the file folder. I sit in my desk chair, staring out the window. My lips are pressed together. A little hot burst of anger forms under my skin.

  Because that was it.

  He never showed up for our date.

  Chapter 3

  Of course, it’s all just silly. I imagine things like that happen all the time. Dating through the personal ads was a bumpy business. I learned the hard way that there are a lot of strange birds out there—men who might sound perfectly normal in letters, even on the telephone, but get in the same room with them, and you realize that something is off. Maybe they have no notion of what it means to be a gentleman. Maybe they have a girl already. Maybe they think they want to be attached, but what they really want is to be able to tell their mother or sister or whoever that they are trying. But deep down, they just want to be left alone. The last thing they want is a steady gal—or, heaven forbid, a wife.

  So I was disappointed, but not all that surprised, when I sat alone in that coffee shop eight years ago, dutifully drinking my coffee, waiting it out for fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty-five. Through the plate-glass window, I people-watched. Couples strolled by, old ladies with little dogs on rhinestone-studded leashes, mothers with chunky infants in prams. I wondered if Lars was sitting in his car across the street, hunched down, watching me. I guessed that he could be deciding based solely on my looks—which weren’t all that bad, I told myself rather contritely; just that afternoon I had gotten my hair done, and I’d spent extra time on my lipstick—that it wasn’t worth squandering an hour of his time to have coffee with me.

  Finally, two refills later and my coffee cup again empty, I stood. I pulled on my coat and walked out the door with my head held high. I put a bright, brave smile on my face. If he was watching, I wanted to be sure he knew that I didn’t care.