Mrs. Charles' Bookshop
by Hanne BlankSylvie Charles was not a particularly handsome woman, nor particularly young, but she was happy. Sylvie owned a bookshop, a narrow warren on Chestnut Street wedged between a homely but well-patronized Greek restaurant, on whose soup Sylvie sometimes subsisted for days, and a clothes shop that aspired valiantly to the au courant while struggling with the rent. Her apartment, just above the bookstore on the second floor, meant that she was never very far away, but Sylvie didn't mind. She had to mind the shop.
Inside Sylvie's shop the groaning shelves wound backward along the walls and round the corner, down the steep stairs and into the cellar, curling into labyrinthine passages and culs-de-sac, each with its worn old chair whose cushions were liberally frosted with cat hair. This last was courtesy of Pumblechook and Madame Defarge, who had moved in without ceremony shortly after Sylvie opened the shop, sent by whatever minor deity it is whose charge it is to see to it that every respectable used bookshop is adequately populated by cats.
Sylvie had never really planned to open a bookshop. She had not in fact ever planned to open a shop of any kind. When she'd found herself in a rush to do so she had not had time to plan ahead for cats, though she knew that the shop would be incomplete without them. She had been pleased when they arrived. They were affectionate cats in their way, once in a while deigning to spend a bit of time in her lap while she sat behind the high counter of a slow afternoon, paging through one of the innumerable tomes of her stock. Perhaps most importantly, the cats got along with the bookshop, and it got along with them.
Sylvie was glad of that. She hadn't been sure they would. She knew now that she needn't have worried, but in the beginning she hadn't been at all sure. She had never kept a bookshop before, after all, nor cats, nor had she ever intended to. In fact, one could, without the slightest inaccuracy, say that Sylvie Charles had come into her occupation entirely by accident.
"They're useless, you know, ninety-eight percent of them," Mr. Charles said one typical Saturday evening, gesturing at the shelves while he worked on his fifth bottle of beer. "Romantic claptrap and stupid stories about people who aren't even real. I don't see what the point is."
Sylvie picked up a knick-knack, gave it a swipe with her dust cloth, and bit the tip of her tongue as she nervously cleaned the already spotless bookcases. She hoped her motions might distract Mr. Charles from realizing just how many layers of books were really there, smaller ones stuffed behind taller volumes whose spines stood like fence pickets, perfectly even with the outermost rim of the shelves. But no matter how she tried to draw his eye he eventually noticed some new acquisition among the hundreds of volumes that filled the shelves that lined every available wall in their second-story apartment.
He slammed down his beer bottle and picked up the book, opening it at random with a disgusted look. "Damn it all, Sylvie, don't tell me you've gone and spent more of my money on this. . . on. . . on poetry books! Well, if that doesn't take the cake!"
He thumbed through the slender volume for a moment, his features sliding hideously from rant toward rage. "Look at you! How pathetic! It's all you care about, this crap. I don't know why I married you, Sylvia Green. I always knew I should've married your sister. She's five times the woman you'll ever be and I'm ten times the man you deserve!"
Sylvie, who probably wouldn't have married him either had she not been desperate to get out from under her father's roof, tried again to grab the book from his hand, to yank down his arm. But Mr. Charles was too tall, too drunk, too angry. Cackling, red-faced, he opened the book above his head and held it in two hands, twisting the binding, threatening to rip it in two.
"Don't you dare, Burton Charles! Don't you dare destroy that book! I bought it with my own money and you know it! Give it to me this instant!" Sylvia did her best to be stern, but her throat was so tight she sounded like she was choking.
With a cruel laugh and a crueler sneer, Mr. Charles flung the book across the room as hard as he could, hitting the endtable and knocking something off that shattered when it hit the floor. Sylvie flinched, but she wasn't really surprised. She stood with clenched fists while he growled something about finding a real woman instead of a dried-up librarian. He kicked the door shut behind him as he stomped out the door and down the stairs. When his steps ceased to echo, Sylvie forced her fingers to uncurl.
Although she'd never used it to hold anything but a few wrapped peppermints and some limp, faded memories of her honeymoon at Weeki Wachee Springs, Sylvie gazed sad and sorry at the broken ashtray. She brushed the cover of the book her husband had abused, flicking slivers of cheap porcelain from its cover.
"I'm terribly sorry," Sylvie said slightly self-consciously to the scarred copy of The Town down the River. "I really do try to keep him from doing that. But he always does that sort of thing when he's in his cups. Begging him not to just seems to make it worse. It's a shame you can't defend yourselves any better than I seem to be able to."
A plopping noise from behind her made her jump. Sylvie whipped around. The hardbound copy of Gaudy Night she'd been rereading now lay on the floor. Before Sylvie could get to her feet, a third book plummeted off the end of a high shelf as if pushed by some errant breeze. It fell like a shot bird.
"What on earth!?" Sylvie grabbed for a dog-eared copy of Alice's Adventures Underground as it teetered on the edge of its shelf, catching it just before it fell. With a yelp, she dropped it. It had wriggled. Like a salmon in a bear's mouth, like a worm on the sidewalk, like the dancers in the bar down the block where her husband was by now drinking his paycheck, it wriggled right out of her hands and onto the floor, where it evidently wanted to be.
Like ripe fruit, other books plopped down from the shelves, landing on the threadbare carpet with sinister, heavy thuds. Riffling their own pages, they traveled slowly, surreally, as if pulled on invisible strings. Their covers crunched and scraped softly over the bits of broken ceramic.
"What are you doing?" Sylvie demanded, her voice again choked. "You've never done this before! You're going to scratch your covers!"
The books did not answer. Feeling faint, Sylvie sat down in her favorite reading chair and tried to think. She closed her eyes, but when she opened them, the books still rustled, still moved. Maybe she was hallucinating. Had Burt hit her? Or had she perhaps fallen and hit her head? She gently felt her scalp, but no painful lumps presented themselves.
"All right then," she announced, "I'm going to go into the kitchen and get a glass of water, and when I come back, I'll see what's really going on in here."
Walking back into the room, Sylvie nearly dropped her glass. My Antonia and Murder on the Orient Express were dispatching the last of the ashtray, sweeping their pages rhythmically. The Holy Bible (King James version) appeared to be tugging a wilted old copy of the Daily News from the kindling basket next to the fireplace, and indeed seemed to have eaten half of it already. Gaudy Night sat halfway atop the torn-off emptied cover of that week's TV Guide. Apparently the book hadn't cared for the glossy cover, only the juicy pulp inside. Mr. Charles had left it lying on the floor, and now Sylvie giggled nervously as she tried to imagine herself explaining to him that now it was less of a guide and more of a digest. Sylvie stared hard at the novel, as if daring it to show its teeth. It didn't, but she could have sworn she heard a soft belch.
"All right then," Sylvie said, picking the book up from the floor. Feeling the need to hang on to something solid, she wrapped her arms around it, holding it to her chest. The book was still, but oddly warm. "I'm not sure what's going on around here, but if you need to eat, there's old newspaper in the kindling box and I'm sure I've got a box of old magazines in the broom closet. I'll put them behind the chair. Just make sure you stack yourselves neatly when you're done eating, or Mr. Charles will trip over you, and Heaven only knows what he'd do to you then. So make sure you're out of the way by the time he comes home, and I'll shelve you in the morning."
Sunday mornings were quiet in the Charles household. Mr. Charles needed it that way, given that even the noise of feathers shifting in his pillow sometimes made him groan in agony. Sylvie tightened the belt of her wrapper and shelved silently, amazed at the number of volumes that had apparently attended the feast in her living room while she slept. The box of magazines was nearly empty, and all that remained were copies of The New Yorker. She gasped. Oh, dear, I should've known better than to offer them that. They must think I'm a barbarian. That's like offering me a plateful of roast missionary. Hastily, she removed the New Yorkers from the box of magazines and placed them respectfully on the table where the radio used to be.
Used to be? Oh, no. Burt would be furious.
Sylvie picked up the pile of periodicals carefully, lifting straight up so as not to disturb what lay below. The faint outline of the radio was preserved in a fine layer of brown dust, all that was left of its hard plastic shell. The radio-or the last morsel of it that remained, at any rate-was still plugged in to the socket in the baseboard, a scant inch or two of well-gnawed cord still protruding from the glossy black Bakelite plug.
Sylvie pulled back, eyes searching the room. She looked at the closed kitchen door. Perhaps Burt had taken the radio in there to listen to the end of the ballgame while he had a midnight snack, then left it there. Sylvie stopped the thought firmly. She forced herself to look at the table where the radio had been. It was no use. What had happened was obvious. The fact that it was impossible was beside the point.
Hurriedly, Sylvie extracted the remains of the electrical cord from the outlet and shoved it into the pocket of her dress. She'd have to tell her husband that the radio had broken and she'd taken it to get it fixed. Perhaps she could find the same model to replace it with - and if she couldn't, well, she'd think of something.
Wondering what else her rapacious library had decided to eat during the night, Sylvie canvassed the apartment room by room. Every room had its bookshelves, and every room, as it turned out, had something missing. She made a mental note to tell Burt that he'd already thrown out his Daily Racing Form if he asked, and she made another to buy more toilet paper. She had been sure there had been five spare rolls the previous day, but now there were only two. The pen next to the flip-top phone directory had vanished too, but she was always losing that anyhow.
Mr. Charles was still fast asleep, snoring and drooling into his pillow while Sylvie dressed herself, combed her hair, and put on a touch of lipstick. Scribbling a note to her husband to let him know that there were orange juice and fresh eggs in the icebox and doughnuts in the breadbox and that she'd be back after church, she cast a watchful glance at the cookbooks that stood innocently on the shelf above the stove, then at the variegated travelogues and biographies that filled the thin tall bookshelf between the kitchen windows.
"I don't want any monkey business while I'm gone, do you understand? Eating things no one needs is just fine, but you mustn't eat things like the radio. Or the toilet paper. Sometimes I need that, so leave me some."
Sylvie got up and tiptoed into the living room, shifting her voice from a low murmur to a whisper, somehow sure that the books could still hear and understand.
"I apologize for putting out The New Yorker. But it was still very naughty of you to eat the radio. I'll say it once more so there'll be no misunderstanding. Things no one needs are fair game. But leave the important stuff alone. Got it?"
Nothing stirred on the shelves. Sylvie chose to interpret the silence as agreement. Picking up her handbag and taking her hat from the top of the bookshelf by the door, she looked around the living room once more, her eyes pausing momentarily on the spines of the books she'd reshelved that morning. Then she was out the door, closing it as silently as possible behind her, marveling at her library's secret life and hoping that it'd behave itself while she was away.
Tomorrow, she thought with a private grin, she'd go around to the newsstands and see if she could get them to part with their outdated stock. The books had seemed to enjoy TV Guide and Time Magazine and The Ladies' Home Journal. If she said she was collecting them for the church, for the Sunday School program maybe, they might even give them to her for free. Yes, that ought to work. In the meantime, she hoped that her books had gotten enough to eat. She didn't like the thought of coming home from church to a decimated davenport or a sudden and inexplicable absence of pots and pans. Explaining the absence of the radio to her husband was one thing. The couch would be quite another.
Sylvie Charles mounted the stairs to her apartment with a spring in her step and a soft smile on her lips. Church always did her good, in a sort of nonspecific but uplifting way, and the walk home in the warm spring air had afforded her the chance not only to browse the windows of her favorite department store but also to stick her nose into the purple effulgence of several lilac hedges along the way. The living room, she was happy to note when she entered it, looked quite normal, the couch in its accustomed place, both her chair and her husband's where she'd left them, the television set thankfully unmolested.
But where were her books? Entire shelves were missing, and not only the books whose spines faced outward. The books she'd shelved behind them were gone too, as if someone had come in and carted them off by the boxful, indiscriminately mixing the big hardbacks that fronted the shelves with the smaller volumes she'd hidden behind them. Sylvie's heart lurched into hummingbird overdrive, her stomach clenching as if it were trying to wring itself dry.
It was Burt's idea of revenge. It had to be. Or a very bad joke, maybe. She knew how much he resented her bookishness, how much he hated it that she knew more than he did, that she had this whole private life that didn't have anything to do with him at all. But to take the books and. . . do what with them? Sell them? Burn them? Dump them in the river? He wouldn't dare, would he?
"Burt! Burt!" She yelled it, loud, then louder as she flung open the kitchen door to see if at least he'd left a note. Perhaps he had finally left her for some barmaid and was selling her books to pay for a ring and tickets to Reno. She wouldn't put it past him.
There was no note. There was no sign he'd even been in the kitchen. The bottle of orange juice stood untouched in the refrigerator, an even dozen eggs still cuddled in their carton. It didn't seem like he'd been in there. But on the other hand, some of the cookbooks had clearly gone out. Only The Joy of Cooking remained, standing sentinel above the stove.
"Burton Charles, if you're in this house, answer me right now!" What kind of game could he be playing? Sylvie burst back through the living room, and nearly tore the bedroom door from its hinges, so sure she was that she would find Burt sitting in there with a cigarette in his hand and that insufferable smirk on his face, ready to laugh at her just like always.
Except that he wasn't. The only thing stirring in the bedroom were books, dozens and dozens of books, sliding snail-like over one other in a gently rustling heap on Burt's side of the bed. Dumbstruck, Sylvie lifted a limp paperback edition of Brave New World that had fallen sated to the floor and set it down on the bureau. There was hardly any blood, only a few tiny splotches on the pillowcase, as if Burt had cut himself shaving. Sylvie repaired to the kitchen to let the books finish their meal. Several cups of coffee and a leisurely reading of the Sunday Times later, all that remained of Mr. Charles were his dirty undershorts and his wristwatch, lying limp amidst a circle of bloated, puffy-looking books. They'd even eaten the label out of his Fruit of the Looms.
The police were helpless. There was no body to be found; it was as if the earth had swallowed Burton Charles whole. There were plenty of suspects, though. He had had a tendency to pick fights down at the bar, it developed, and hadn't been above trying to act on his taste for other guys' girls, either. Investigations kept the nice young detectives busy, and that was something with which Sylvie had no quarrel. Newly alone as she was, she had other things on her mind.
As it turned out, the local news agents were quite relieved to have someone willing to take their backdated stock, and aside from the chore of lugging it all up the stairs, it all worked out rather neatly. Her only problem was that she was running out of space for the babies. Nearly every morning now when she got out of bed, Sylvie would find another clutch of offspring huddled in a pile next to their mother. Or was it simply "parent"? Sylvie couldn't tell which was which, and neither title nor the author's sex were any help. Lady Chatterley's Lover had spawned a half-dozen chapbooks of blank verse the day prior, and the King James Bible had thus far given birth to two concordances, a book on Chinese snuff bottles, three Dashiell Hammetts, and an edition of Bach's B-Minor Mass of which it seemed exceedingly proud. None of the Agatha Christies, on the other hand, had done anything but sit on their shelves and look smug.
Even with the abstainers, the shelves were full to overflowing, and each time Sylvie was compelled to stack a book on the floor she feared she was merely encouraging further promiscuity.
And so Mrs. Charles opened a bookshop.
The life insurance settlement provided the capital for her to buy the building whose second floor they'd rented for so long, and to pay the carpenters to put in the shelves and build her a nice high counter to sit behind as well. She'd been in a bit of a rush to get it all finished, but at least she hadn't had to worry about stock. Now all of her charges had shelves to sit on and customers to browse them and occasionally take them home and love them. That was what mattered.
For the rest, the bookshop took care of itself. If once or twice in the time since she'd opened her doors Sylvie heard the noises of attempted burglary coming from below her apartment, she just sat tight and listened. There would be a thud, a flutter of pages, perhaps a muffled scream or two, and Sylvie would go back to her book. Why bother the police with some trivial tale of broken glass and a forced lock when she knew nothing had gone missing but the burglar?
No, she didn't care for policemen. They caused too much havoc around a place. Sylvie might not have been a particularly handsome woman, and she might not have been a young one, but the cats got along well with her bookshop and it got along well with them and it was far, far better to replace the glass and fix the lock and forget about things that went bump in the night.
It was not a glamorous life, no. But it was quiet and congenial to a bookish sort, and Sylvie Charles liked it like that.
© Hanne Blank
Hanne Blank is a writer, historian, and public speaker. Her newest book, Virgin: The Untouched History, will be out from Bloomsbury in March 2007. She needs more bookshelves.