by Abbi Waxman
Nina had developed a special fondness for these kids, because she knew the world would soon begin telling them other things were more important than the contents of their heads. So she started the elementary book club, and once a month after the store had closed at seven, she would sit there with a group of eight-to-twelve-year-old girls and talk about books for an hour. It was the club she wished she’d had when she was their age, and if she occasionally sat there making friendship bracelets and talking about A Mango-Shaped Space with even more enthusiasm than the ten-year-olds, what’s your point?
Young Adult Book Club: This one was all Liz. She loved a darkling teen.
There had been some discussion of starting a regular, adult book club, but Nina didn’t have time, because she already belonged to a weekly adult book clubs—of which more later—and that commitment, along with the elementary book club, her exercise regime (if you can call sporadic exercise classes and fervent promises to do better a regime), and of course the trivia team, meant she had no free time. Liz refused to do it, and the part-time girl who worked there, Polly, hated reading. Why does she work in a bookstore, you ask? It’s a long story.
Anyway.
Despite not having a child herself, Nina enjoyed watching other people handle the unsuspected responsibilities of parenthood. The baby wasn’t the biggest problem at all, it turned out; it was the other parents. There was a definite learning curve over the first few years, and Nina had a ringside seat, because so many of Larchmont’s parents were parishioners at the Church of the Dust-Jacketed Hardback and brought their kids in all the time. She’d watched dozens of little kids graduate from Goodnight Moon to Bedtime for Frances to Junie B. Jones to whatever YA series was trending, and with them went their parents, learning to navigate the intricate social networks of neighborhood and school.
Take when two moms met in the store at reading time. Standard school-mom rules of engagement applied: If your children were friends and you met while both of you were standing, you hugged, of course. If one of you was sitting on the floor already and your kids were good friends, with an actual, out-of-school playdate under their tiny rainbow belts, then the one sitting would start to stand but the other would wave her back down and bend from the waist to half hug. If your kids were really good friends, with multiple playdates and maybe a sleepover in their shared past, then the one sitting would scooch over to make room for the other, and they would hug once both were down. Nina studied these things, because they didn’t come naturally to her. And working in a store where people tended to aimlessly wander around looking at books gave her ample opportunity for observation.
Nina’s special favorite was watching people handle introductions. It played out like this: A woman would be browsing in the store, trying to decide whether she had the balls to get something vaguely pornographic or if she’d have to stick with something worthy (note: this is where that online bookseller really triumphs, undercover purchasing), and notices someone she knows has come in. In a split second, she has to decide whether or not to acknowledge their existence, the decision depending on how well she knows them, how well they know her, and whether or not she can get away with ignoring them (i.e., they definitely haven’t seen her yet, or she’s disguised as a pirate).
Their eyes meet, and now she has to decide whether to say hi and keep browsing, or actually approach and greet. She decides she can’t get away without actually greeting, but then realizes the other woman has someone else with her, someone who looks vaguely familiar, but she can’t remember why. Nina had seen this scenario so often she’d gotten used to the flicker of panic in a woman’s eyes as she walked forward while desperately wishing she weren’t. It was hilarious, but only when it wasn’t you. Anyway, now the friend is committed, too, whether she likes it or not, so she says hey, the original woman says hey, hug regulations apply as previously described. Then the friend says, so, whatever your name is, this is Bindy Macaroon, I think you two might already know each other. (Moms of a certain age know dozens and dozens of people through various channels, so they have to perform this human equivalent of canine butt sniffing all the goddamned time.)
ORIGINAL WOMAN: Oh, hi, Bindy. Do we know each other? (Here there would be a lot of head movement and facial expressions that alternated between friendly openness and self-abasement, playing it safe until the connection is clarified. If it turns out they know each other because one of them slept with the other one’s boyfriend in college, then, you know, awkward.)
BINDY: I think we do! You look so familiar! (Similar head bobbing and approach/withdraw body language.) Do you have a kid in Miss Rectangle’s class?
ORIGINAL: No … My daughter, Elephantine (pronounced the French way, of course), is in Mr. Elevator’s class. Does your child do swimming at the YMCA with Professor Bubbles?
BINDY: No … Art class on Saturdays at Brushlicious?
ORIGINAL: No … Preschool? We were at Harmony House of Love and Kindness, were you?
BINDY: No, Urethra went to Mandarin Immersion Buddhist Chakra Preschool. In the Valley.
And with that they would give up and shrug and would never, ever realize they knew each other because one time they bumped cars in traffic and stood on the street for ten minutes exchanging insurance information.
If you had walked into the bookstore after lunch that day, you would have seen Nina making a pile of books on the counter that might have struck you as dangerously unbalanced, and shortly before two in the afternoon, she suddenly knocked it to the floor. It made an incredible noise.
The man who’d just walked through the door paused and narrowed his eyes at her.
“Is Liz here?”
Mr. Meffo was their landlord. Larchmont Boulevard was broadly owned by three or four people. A large family had owned properties in one section of the boulevard since the ’60s, and they were generally mellow and much loved. Another landlord was an investment bank that kept out of it, for the most part. And the third was Mr. Meffo. He was a popular villain on the boulevard, but of course he was just a regular businessman trying to make a profit, which would be the actual point of business. If he’d been a sheep farmer, he would have been carrying a lamb around and wearing a bonnet, but as he was a landlord, he was carrying an iPad and a cell phone.
Unfortunately, the rent had gone up precipitously, and business hadn’t followed suit, so Liz had taken to hiding whenever he came around. She paid the rent, more or less; she just took generous advantage of space and time. She also called the poor man Mephistopheles, which wasn’t nice.
“Sorry, Mr. Meffo, she just left.” Nina hoped the book fall had been sufficient warning. Once Liz had been trapped with a customer when Mephistopheles walked in and had had to pay the rent on time.
Mr. Meffo sighed. He wasn’t a bad man; he was simply a good businessman. “Can you tell her to call me, please? The rent is overdue.”
Nina nodded and smiled, glad she’d worn a nice, professional outfit. Liz had told her they needed to look successful, so it wouldn’t cross Meffo’s mind to cancel their lease. “I’m sure she knows, Mr. Meffo. We’ve been very busy with lots of customers lately.”
He looked around at the empty store. “Really?”
“Oh yes, you just missed a rush.”
“Did I?” He looked at Nina, doubtfully. “Well, tell Liz I’ve had several inquiries about the store, and one or two buyers interested, which is appealing.” He sighed. “Being a landlord isn’t as much fun as you’d think.”
Nina said nothing, having never thought being a landlord would be fun.
He left, and Nina waited ten or twenty minutes until Liz peered around the office door.
“Is he gone?”
Nina nodded. “You must pay the rent,” she said.
“I can’t pay the rent,” replied Liz.
“You MUST pay the rent,” Nina insisted.
“I can’t pay the rent,” said Liz, again.
Nina assumed a Dudley Do-Right voice. “I’LL pay the rent!” and Liz sighed, �
��My hero!” and then they went about their day.
Later that day, Nina finally reached her mom. She had to get the timing right in order to catch her mother when she wasn’t ignoring her phone, which was most of the time. Candice Hill had grown up in the darkest Australian wilds of the 1980s, where, reportedly, the women glowed and the men plundered, but no one had a cell phone. These days, she was remarkably cavalier about turning hers on. “I don’t want to make myself too easy to find, darling,” she would say, as if being thousands of miles away wasn’t enough.
Nina had decided 7 A.M. in China was a reasonably good bet, so she stepped into the bookstore office a little before four in the afternoon, before the high school kids came in to moon around the graphic novels and peep at one another over the shelves. The phone rang and rang, and Nina was getting ready to leave a sarcastic voice mail when her mother picked up.
Of course, modern telecommunications made it sound like she was across the street. “Good morning, lovely!” Candice yelled, as she often did. “Everything OK?”
“Well, mostly,” replied Nina.
“What can I do you for, my love? I have to be at work in an hour. Spit it out.” She issued an order in Mandarin, multitasking as usual.
“William Reynolds is dead.”
There was a pause, then the sound of her mother exhaling. She gave it a shot, though. “Sorry, who’s that then?”
“My father, William Reynolds.”
Candice could tell Nina was mad, but she was still blasé, because she’d been born that way. “Oh, that William Reynolds. Yeah … I was hoping you’d never find out about him.”
This was one of the things Nina actually loved about her mother. She would lie or make up crap and then, if you caught her at it, simply admit defeat and move on. She didn’t seem to experience shame or regret in any form.
However lovable her mother was, though, Nina was being firm with her. “Well, I did, so how about you fill me in? Why on earth didn’t you tell me I had a father? You knew I wondered. Why did you think it was a good idea to keep us apart? I have brothers and sisters!”
“You do? That’s nice.”
Nina’s voice went up an octave. “Mom, I have more than half a dozen relatives living in the same city as I am! Just think of all the playdates and birthday parties I missed out on.”
Her mother laughed. “You didn’t need anyone to play with; you were fine. Other people are overrated.”
“I generally agree, Mom, but I would have liked the option.” Nina noticed her other hand was clenched tightly, and reached for a pencil. She twirled it back and forth through her fingers, a nervous habit she’d refined into a party trick. Assuming she was at the kind of party where pencil twiddling would be impressive.
Her mother paused, then said defensively, “He wouldn’t have been a good dad, Nina. He was a player, he was full of himself, he had a wife.”
“A wife is not a character trait, Mom. And what about you, sleeping with a married man? What the hell? What about hos before bros, dude?”
“I beg your pardon? Nina Lee Hill, did you just call me a ho?”
Nina laughed, suddenly, and tossed her pencil away. Her mother always made things seem lighter. It was partly her Australian accent and general “let’s get on with it and stop making a fuss” approach to everything, and partly her personality. Candice Hill had no patience for drama, or overblown feelings, really, of any kind. Which made her superficial and frustrating if, like Nina, you wanted to have a conversation about emotional topics like discovering your entire life had been a lie, but which also made things clunk back into perspective.
“No, Mom, I didn’t call you a ho, but please take a second to think about how this might feel to me?”
Candice clicked her tongue. “Nina, this all happened nearly thirty years ago. Your father was very handsome; we met on a photo shoot of some kind, I don’t even remember; we stayed in my apartment for a long weekend; and then I found out he had a wife, who was actually pregnant at the time if I remember rightly; so I cut him off and moved on. Two months later, I found out I was pregnant and decided to keep you. He wasn’t really part of any of it except for a sweaty forty-eight hours at the start.”
Nina badly wanted to cover her ears and say la la la, but she was holding the phone.
Candice continued, “I had enough money and time to take care of you, and I didn’t want him involved, because I didn’t know him at all and he’d already exhibited bad judgment by cheating on his wife, so I made him sign something promising to leave you alone and that was that. I never saw him again. I’m amazed he even remembered my name.”
“Well, to be fair, Mom, your name might have been slightly less memorable than the fact he had an actual child. That one’s a little harder to forget.” Not everyone finds it as easy as you did.
“What a pain in the ass. I knew he was bad news.”
“It would have been better if he hadn’t been news at all. I hate surprises; you know that.”
“Yeah, I know, which is something you must have inherited from him, because I love surprises.”
Nina rolled her eyes. “We were talking about me.”
“I have to go. Are we done here?”
“Yeah. Any chance you’re going to say, ‘Sorry, Nina, you’re right, I should have prepared you for this sudden shock’?”
Her mother made a huffy noise. “None. I didn’t expect him to break his word after three decades. If anyone owes you an apology, it’s him.”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“Serves him right.” Candice sighed. “I’m sorry he was a loser, Nina. But you’re a big girl now; you can handle this.” And with that she hung up.
Nina sighed and wondered if she would ever be a mom herself and, if she were, if she would be any better at it than her own mother was. As a child, Nina had been sad her mother wasn’t there, because everyone else seemed to think it was sad. Then, as a teenager, she’d been angry with her absent mother, and blamed her for her own anxiety and shyness. Now, as an adult, she’d come to the conclusion that her mother being away all the time had probably been a blessing. Her nanny, Louise, had been a wonderful mother, and her mother had been a wonderful photographer. Biology is not destiny, and love is not proportionate to shared DNA. Of course, she reflected, as she put down the phone and returned to the store, she could be totally wrong about this. She was wrong about so many things.
Five
In which Nina attends a book club meeting
and gets an e-mail.
Nina went home after work and Googled the crap out of William Reynolds. It was a common name, but she decided he couldn’t have been a professional tennis player from the early twentieth century, or an English lord of the seventeenth century, and was more likely to have been this lawyer guy who lived in Los Angeles until he died a week or two earlier. She guessed she’d missed the funeral. Seeing as she’d missed everything else, this wasn’t a stinger. All the obit said was he’d been seventy-eight and was survived by a widow and young daughter. She knew the last part wasn’t accurate, although she’d already forgotten how many children there actually were. She found a few pictures of him online, usually attending a charity function of some kind, always in a tux. He didn’t remind her of herself, but, to be fair, she was a slender twenty-nine-year-old woman with dark red hair and freckles, and he had been a rounded old man with white hair and wrinkles, so it wasn’t exactly apples to apples. More like grapes to raisins.
Nina wondered if she and her siblings would like each other, and if they’d have things in common, like a fondness for The Simpsons and sandwiches. Maybe they’d become good friends, or maybe they’d start a family feud like a TV reality show. She drifted off for a moment creating title sequences for Reynolds vs. Hill: Sibling Wars, which for some reason had mid-’80s synthesizer theme music and the kind of credits that whoosh in from the side. Would she appear as herself, or would she be played by someone more telegenic? She didn’t photograph well, which was a bigger problem f
or her generation than it had been for any generation prior. Her friend Leah, who was all about Building a Personal Brand, had told her to keep still more often.
“Your face is too mobile,” she’d explained.
“I’m talking and laughing and being an Active Listener,” Nina had replied.
“Well, quit it, because you look like you’ve been poked with a pin in every picture.” She’d pulled some faces to illustrate her point.
“I do not look like that,” protested Nina.
“You do. I have photographic evidence. You might only look like that for a few seconds at a time, but that’s when the shutter clicked, so to speak, so that’s what you look like online.”
“Well, great, I can use it as a first line of defense. If a guy doesn’t look beyond my pained expression to see the real, pain-free me, then he’s not good enough to date me.”
Leah had shrugged. “Or you’ll filter out the regular guys and be left with those that like seeing women in pain, and then who’s going to be sorry?”
Remembering this conversation now, Nina decided William Reynolds must have had similar advice, because if he’d ever smiled or laughed or actively listened in his life, the photographer never caught it.
It had taken Nina quite some time to investigate the state of Los Angeles book clubs, and after months of study, she’d decided to form one club that discussed a different genre each week, rather than four different clubs that each met once a month.
First Wednesday of each month was Book Bitches (contemporary fiction).
Second Wednesday was Sneaky Spinsters (Golden Age mysteries).
Third Wednesday was District Zero (young adult fiction).