BipolarLawyerCook

A lot of cus­tomers– they all think they’re wags– ask if they sell any good books.  Har-dee-har, har, she wants to reply.

One of her cowork­ers– the cool artsy-school grad, female drum­mer, was in a band, if she’s describ­ing her in a screen­play, wears chi­nos and button-down shirts and worn Vans(-ish, they might be Skech­ers or some­thing, she’s not hip enough to know the dif­fer­ence among non-clog brands of footwear) that our “hero­ine,” (note that the quotes are sar­cas­tic) snarked once on the break room that instead of Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Pirate Day, there should be Talk Back to Cus­tomers Day.

That would be fuck­ing awesome.

Total, com­plete anar­chy, but awe­some, as long as it lasted.

Her own incli­na­tion, when­ever any­one asks if they sell some­thing good, is to just say “No, only trash.  All Dan Brown, Twi­light and Fat Busters diet books all the time, noth­ing else.”  The rest of the time, she just smiles and asks what they like to read.

Mis­an­thropy, thy name is retail.

–

The day she walked into the store and applied for a job was the first day in two– maybe three– she’d taken a shower.  She was in the midst of a slide down after an uptick fol­low­ing a fam­ily cri­sis had forced her to be pro­duc­tive again– the need for her atten­tion and ener­gies out of the house had been some­what of a boon, and that and a wed­ding had made her exter­nal­ize things for a bit, long enough to engage with mere humans and stop being so damned with­drawn.  For a bit.

Her hus­band– poor, long suf­fer­ing bas­tard, we’ll come back to him later in far fur­ther detail– had gen­tly sug­gested that if she wasn’t going to go back to the job she’d spent far too much money going to grad­u­ate school for, then she should at least try to get out of the house.

She’d liked wait­ress­ing.  (What?  She actu­ally had.)

Then again, she’d always wanted to work in a bookstore.

Some mir­a­cle of energy hap­pened, and she got in the shower, dried her hair, put on a twin­set and skirt and some san­dals and looked more than halfway pre­sentable– she’d learned quite a lot about keep­ing up fronts, and again, more on that later– and before she quite knew what had hap­pened, because the dis­so­ci­a­tion thing with this depres­sion was a new fea­ture, she’d walked into the store and filled out the form.  (She did apply at a few places besides– they never called back.  She won­ders if it was fate.)

The man­ager was around and heart in her mouth she pasted on a smile as she tracked her down to per­son­ally hand over her appli­ca­tion because as a for­mer pro­fes­sional, she knew about sell­ing her inter­est– that and the old les­son learned, smile until you mean it.  She’d told her­self that when she was a fat kid in school, and she remem­bered it once again.  She talked to the very nice woman and it seemed to go well.

Three weeks later, she had her first day at the store.

–

She can’t decide if the store’s more a sit­com or a genre-defying full hour.  There are enough employ­ees to take up a full hour, the cast of full and part-timers a self-writing rou­tine.  There are the shelvers who are both drum­mers, both seem­ingly quiet, both rau­cously funny once you get them going.  There’s the cafe employee who interns at the smutty book press.  There are the brother and sis­ter who kvetch and kvell until you just want to take notes– the femme minor­ity les­bian man­ager, the man­ager who’s teeny and maybe a witch.  Then, there was the one who’s obsessed with manga and all that kind of stuff– she was sus­pi­ciously perky, but she doesn’t work there any more.

Of course, there’s also the snarky weird guy, the one who seems unpre­pos­sess­ing until, as he said that day she gave him a ride home in the snow­storm, when she told him her the­ory about the store being a sit­com– “Yeah, I’m the guy who steals the show after three episodes, the one who says stuff that’s totally ran­dom and no one can fig­ure out and is all ‘what the hell?’ until some­one says– ‘His par­ents are shrinks.  World famous ones.’”

She said “Oh,” much as she imag­ined the audi­ence would, and they both laughed their asses off most of the ride home.  They also spent a lot of time jok­ing about whether super­heroes have super­tai­lors and super­clean­ers, because someone’s got to keep their clothes clean and repaired– and debated whether it’s good or it’s evil to deprive the rest of the world of bul­let­proof capes.

She was firmly of the belief that it’s evil.  He wasn’t so sure– then again, though– child of two shrinks.  Oh, indeed.

There aren’t any vil­lians, per se– but there are peo­ple who are unremit­tingly stu­pid, a few of whom work for the store.  It leads to what she’s begun to call “short­bus cashier­ing” moments, when she and some of the oth­ers who all get along (and gig­gle too much to really be all that’s com­pletely pro­fes­sional) flash the “what­ever” sign her friend’s five-year-old niece showed her, though really it’s only funny if you’re right there– but it’s good times.

It sees them through the hol­i­days, and the ridicu­lous­ness of peo­ple shop­ping at Christ­mas.  What?  You want to return some­thing and expect to get the max­i­mum price with­out a receipt?  Sure, we’ll give you back the full price.  We don’t need to make any profit.

She’s begin­ning to feel the urge to be a box­ing nun pup­pet in her next life.

There are times when she’s so tired at the end of the day, so blither­ingly sub­ver­bal and fuck­ing exhausted that she won­ders what the hell she was think­ing– not that there’s really much choice, she burned a lot of her bridges when she left her other career.  The fact remains, though, that she laughs her ass off with these peo­ple who get her ref­er­ences to Air­plane and Python and her fel­low book sell­ers all roll their eyes to one another in com­mis­er­a­tion when a cus­tomer once again acts sur­prised that they seem to know that Fagles and Lat­ti­more both are trans­la­tors of Homer.  It’s a book­store.  In the most wealthy sub­urb of Boston, the one home to how many col­lege pro­fes­sors?  They prob­a­bly have more freak­ing Homer than half the book­stores in Athens.

It just makes her want to say, utterly straight­faced, “No.  We don’t have any good books.”

The man­ager she refers to inter­nally as “Madam Drill Sergeant” (in a good way, and she makes the best fudge) says things like “Gird your damn loins, peo­ple, we’re get­tin’ ready to open” first thing in the morn­ing, and every­one gig­gles like morons down in receiv­ing when she declares that she is the Banana­grams Queen because she has a back­stock with her at the reg­is­ters thanks to the spe­cial arti­cle in the paper.  Seri­ously.  Peo­ple act like she’s grant­ing a boon when she says yes, they may have another.

It’s the lit­tle things, stu­pid stuff, really, none of it really orig­i­nal, and who’d want to watch a sit­com about a national chain book­store any­way, there’s already Chuck and the Buy More, which is excit­ing because that’s about spies.  This’d be about a washed-up lawyer hav­ing a ner­vous break­down before her thirty-fifth birthday.

Kind of bor­ing, she thinks– except that she loves all her col­leagues, her made-for-TV cowork­ers, the ones who chor­tle and gig­gle and snort when she jokes about writ­ing “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Book­store” or some­thing.  They make her feel young, like she’s not such a wash-out, even though she’s only been there a bit and doesn’t know all their stories.

She doesn’t know if they’re hid­ing from other things, if this is their job in the mean­time, if this is what they’re doing until they fig­ure things out, or if this is it because this is what they can han­dle.  And she’s scared to ask, mostly because she’s scared to find out what the answer will be for herself.

On New Year’s Day, though, after three and a half or so months’ worth of work, she gets one kind of answer.

The place is kind of cliched.  It’s a small­ish book­store in a much larger chain, the red-headed stepchild in the dis­trict, she thinks.  Maybe.  They might really be the Isle of Mis­fit Toys, though no one’s declared the desire to be a den­tist, not an elf or a mer­chan­dise man­ager or what­ever the hell. The fact still remains, though– they’ve got no music or video depart­ment, they’ve half of the floor­space of the five clos­est stores, and their pub­lic events bud­get is prac­ti­cally nil– but damn, their peo­ple are clever and funny and she loves them to bits.

At the end of the shift, she stops to con­fer with her cohort and pass on a wee bit of not so much gos­sip as news of pos­si­ble changes, to share what she thinks.  She does this, not because she wants to tell her col­league what she wants her to do– it’s just to pass on the word.  Her col­league, how­ever, just gives her the gor­geous Mona Lisa smile that she wears and says “That’s fine with me, you’re the Supreme Allied Commander.”

She laughs and replies.  “Girl, I’m way cuter than Eisen­hower, and you know it.”

Her cohort smiles, shakes her head.  “You are finer than Ike, that is true.”

Her col­league– who has the same job title and many of the same duties– and the cashier, give her lit­tle salutes as she walks out the door at the end of her shift.

And– it’s a shock, albeit pleas­ant– to be seen as the one in command.

She returns the salute.  She’ll be back in the morn­ing.  Those bas­tards who don’t have receipts for their returns won’t know who hit them.

She will, though.  She’s Ike, the Banana­gram Queen.