This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (24 page)

M
y grandparents moved from California to Tennessee in 1975 so that my mother could help take care of her father. He had already lost a leg to poor circulation, and he had become too difficult for my grandmother to manage alone. I do not believe my grandmother loved my grandfather, a thought that didn't occur to me until I was in my thirties. Although she didn't complain about him after he died, none of the stories she told contained proof that he had ever shown her much kindness. She raised his children like her own, and they had one child together, my mother. Her happy memories were about her friends, her children, her sisters, especially Helen and the nights they did each other's hair and worked on their dresses for the dance. When my grandmother thought of my grandfather at all it was how he had raised his voice to her in front of other people, how he had made her feel embarrassed and ashamed. When she began to forget the people she had known in her life, my grandfather was the first to go.

M
y mother had kept my grandmother at home for sixteen years. She had wanted to keep her at home until she died. But the thing about death is that you never have any idea when it's coming. I used to think all the time: If only I knew when she would die, I could pace myself. My grandmother was ninety-two. Could I do this every day for another five months? Absolutely. Another five years? I wasn't entirely sure. My mother and I went to the hospital twice a day. That was the point at which I learned how to fix my grandmother's hair.

When my grandmother was discharged from the hospital, we put her in assisted living. She was perfectly aware of what was happening to her, and I wish it had been otherwise. I cannot remember a worse time for any of us. We woke up in our separate beds, under our separate roofs, all of us in a state of despair. I went to New York to speak at a memorial service for a friend on September 10, 2001, and then was trapped in the city by the attacks on the World Trade Center. My grandmother could not raise any concern for what had happened to the country. She only wanted to know why I wasn't there. “Where is Ann?” she would cry.

My grandmother adjusted, after a fashion, but it never held. As soon as a new normalcy was established and each of us adapted to it, everything would change again. I changed along with it. Anything I thought I couldn't do turned out to be something I managed fine. I stayed in the room with her and held her hand when the dentist pulled out her tooth. I turned back her eyelids to clean out a persistent infection. I swabbed out her ears. I learned how to remove impactions. I brought my grandmother over to my house in the afternoons and fixed her lunch. I'd put her in my bathtub and scrub her down, then I'd haul her out again and dry her and cover her in lotion and powder. Every Tuesday I washed her hair in my kitchen sink and pinned it up after it was dry. I did her nails and rubbed her neck and took her back to where she lived.

“Don't leave me off at the front door,” she'd always say. “I won't be able to find my way back.”

“Have I ever dropped you off at the front door?” But then I always wondered if that wasn't exactly what I was doing. What would have happened if my grandmother had stayed in Kansas and lived in an old hotel that was falling down around her but full of her sisters and nieces? What if I was there with her? Would she remember where the bathroom was? Would her teeth all be splitting in half? Would she open her eyes when she walked?

O
ne day when I took her back after lunch she told me she had never been to this place before. “You've made a mistake,” she said, holding my wrist with both hands. “We have to go back. This isn't the place where I live.”

I brought in several of the women who worked there and we showed her the things in her room and talked to her gently, but nothing would calm her. After that I came and ate lunch in the dining room with her. A few months later, my mother took her home for the day and my sister drove in from South Carolina where she was living, and together with her son we moved the contents of my grandmother's apartment from the third floor to an identical apartment on the first floor in a locked dementia unit called “The Neighborhood.” I had drawn a chart of all the pictures on her walls so that we could hang them up in exactly the same spots. Everything was in the same spot except the room itself, and when we brought my grandmother back she never knew the difference.

My mother and I were nervous about The Neighborhood the way anyone is nervous about places that are locked. We had hoped to be spared that. At first it seemed like a madhouse, but in a few days we were all much more comfortable. It was so much smaller, and no one expected my grandmother to figure out how to go to lunch by herself. My mother and I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's
Little House
books out loud to her, turning the page down when we were finished so the other one could come along and read the next chapter the next day. The Ingalls family gave us a place to put our anxiety. Instead of worrying about my grandmother, I could worry about the blizzard that came up out of nowhere and buried Pa alive. I worried about the threat of Indians, and poor Jack the dog, who was later kept on a chain. It was a pleasure to encounter so much diverting hardship. Of all the books in that series,
The Long Hard Winter
is the most brutal. The Ingalls family was trapped in their cabin with less and less to eat while their supply of firewood dwindled down to twigs. Their suffering, even in the face of our own suffering, was overwhelming. Then one day I went to see my grandmother and found the book had been shredded. Somehow she had picked up this one volume instead of any of the others and ripped apart every single page, ripped them down to individual words, so that her entire room was covered in a drift of tiny letters. I had to admire that. I didn't want to hear any more about that winter either.

I never tried to associate my grandmother who lived in the dementia unit with the grandmother I had known years before. I resolved to love the woman I had. I put aside all memories of her feeding the quail in her backyard in Northern California. I made a point to forget about her cherry trees and the friends she had who came over to drink gin and tonics in the evenings. That person, the careful seamstress of dolls' clothes, the generous sharer of S&H Green Stamps, the one who made stews and loved her dogs and washed my hair in her kitchen sink—she was gone. But this person I had in her place still loved bananas and was capable of very sweet moods. She slept most of her days away, and sometimes I would wake her up and feed her a piece of mango mousse cake that I told myself was her favorite. She would barely have the last bite swallowed before she was asleep again. When my grandmother fell out of bed in the middle of the night and broke her hip, I learned to call her Eva in the emergency room instead of Gram. For Eva, she would turn her eyes towards me and sometimes say yes. I hoped that she was Eva again, and that her dreams in those long days of sleep were full of dance halls and the blacksmith's shop and her mother's kitchen in the old hotel.

T
he hip replacement didn't kill my grandmother, who by then was ninety-five. Neither did the monthlong stay in the dreaded nursing home, where my mother and I took turns sitting with her in the afternoons after physical therapy, spooning bites of applesauce into her mouth. She went back to The Neighborhood in a wheelchair, and everyone kissed her and praised her for coming home. My grandmother had forgotten most of her words by then, but she always said thank you and please. She would tell anyone who showed her kindness that she loved them and for that she was greatly loved. The two subsequent falls that sent her back to the emergency room (where doctors would see me and say, “Ann, you're back!”) only left her badly bruised. She could not remember that she didn't know how to walk anymore, and so she kept getting up.

What killed her, finally, was a fever caused by sepsis, which was caused by the bedsores that no amount of turning could prevent. For four days she sweated and shook and said nothing, giving my sister enough time to drive in from South Carolina. Heather and my mother and I stayed in her room together during the days, and at night we went home and waited. The last morning I came in early and my grandmother and I were alone. There were things I had wanted to tell her that up until then had seemed too sentimental and foolish to say out loud, but there is a time for everything. I told her a story about Helen, how she and Helen were young again, how they were beautiful. “You and Helen are going to the dance together now. From here on out you'll always be together.” Helen had been dead for fifty years. If it was possible that one soul could wait around for another, I felt certain that Helen would have waited for Eva. I felt certain about nothing. I felt certain that this had been one of the greatest loves of my life, and I climbed into the bed and held her in my arms and told her so. Her eyes were open, and she touched her finger to her lips. I was crying and then that was that. I got up to call my mother. The nurse came in.

I
married Karl a few months before my grandmother died. It was a decision that had been nearly eleven years in the making. I never would have moved back to Tennessee without him, and I never would have stayed long enough to make up my mind without her, and so together they did me, and each other, a great service. By the time we finally married, love no longer seemed like such a romantic thing, though I understand that romance is part of it. Since my grandmother died, I have dreamed about her every night. I go back to The Neighborhood and I find her again. Her death was just a misunderstanding. She is better now, walking and laughing, telling me stories. She doesn't need me to take care of her anymore, and she has not come back to take care of me. We are simply together and glad for it. There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, “How far would you go for me?” you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, “Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.”

(
Harper's Magazine
, November 2006)

The Bookstore Strikes Back

I
N LATE
F
EBRUARY
of 2012 I am in my basement, which is really a very nice part of my house that is not done justice by the word
basement
. For the purposes of this story, let's call it the “Parnassus Fulfillment Center.” I have hauled 533 boxed-up hardback copies of my latest novel,
State of Wonder
, from Parnassus, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, into my car, driven them across town (three trips there, and three trips back), and then lugged them down here to the Parnassus Fulfillment Center. Along with the hardbacks, I have brought in countless paperback copies of my backlist books as well. I sign all these books, and stack them up on one enormous and extremely sturdy table. Then I call for backup: Patrik and Niki from the store, my friend Judy, my mother. Together we form an assembly line, taking the orders off the bookstore's website, addressing mailing labels, writing tiny thank-you notes to tuck inside the signed copies, then bubble-wrapping, taping, and packing them up to mail. We get a rhythm going, we have a system, and it's pretty smooth, except for removing the orders from the website. What I don't understand is that no matter how many orders I delete from the list, the list does not get smaller. We are all work and no progress, and I'm sure something must be going seriously wrong. After all, we've had this website for only a week, and who's to say we know what we're doing? “We know what we're doing,” Niki says, and Patrik, who set up the website in the first place, confirms this. They explain to me that the reason the list isn't getting any shorter is that the orders are still coming in.

You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say, Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.

The reason I am signing and wrapping books in my basement is that more orders have come in than the store can handle, and the reason so many orders have come in is that, a few days before, I had been a guest on
The Colbert Report
. After a healthy round of jousting about bookstores versus Amazon, Mr. Colbert held a copy of my novel in front of the cameras and exhorted America to buy it from Amazon—to which I, without a moment's thought (because
without a moment's thought
is how I fly these days) shouted, “No! No! Not Amazon. Order it off Parnassus Books dot net and I'll
sign
it for you.” And America took me up on my offer, confirming once and for all that the Colbert Bump is real. That explains how I got stuck in the basement, but fails to answer the larger question: What was a writer of literary fiction whose “new” book was already ten months old doing on
The Colbert Report
in the first place? Hang on, because this is where things start to get weird: I was on the show not because I am a writer, but because I am a famous independent bookseller.

Let's go back to the beginning of the story.

A year before, the city of Nashville had two bookstores. One was Davis-Kidd, which had been our much-beloved locally owned and operated independent before selling out to the Ohio-based Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain ten years ago. Joseph-Beth moved Davis-Kidd into a mall, provided it with thirty thousand square feet of retail space, and put wind chimes and coffee mugs and scented candles in front of book displays. We continued to call it our “local independent,” even though we knew it wasn't really true anymore. Nashville also had a Borders, which was about the same size as Davis-Kidd and sat on the edge of Vanderbilt's campus. (In candor, I should say that Nashville has some truly wonderful used-book stores that range from iconic to overwhelming. But while they play an important role in the cultural fabric of the city, it is a separate role—or maybe that's just the perspective of someone who writes books for a living. We have a Barnes & Noble that is a twenty-minute drive out of town if traffic is light, a Books-a-Million on the western edge of the city near a Costco, and a Target that also sell books. Do those count? Not to me, no, they don't, and they don't count to any other book-buying Nashvillians with whom I am acquainted.)

In December 2010, Davis-Kidd closed. It had been profitable, declared the owners from Ohio who were dismantling the chain, but not profitable enough. Then, in March 2011, our Borders store—also profitable—went the way of all Borders stores. We woke up one morning and found we no longer had a bookstore.

How had this happened? Had digital books led us astray? Had we been lured away by the siren song of Amazon's undercut pricing? Had we been careless, failed to support the very places that had hosted our children's story hours and brought in touring authors and set up summer-reading tables? Our city experienced a great collective gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but to what extent was Nashville to blame?
Both of the closed stores had been profitable
. Despite the fact that our two bookstores were the size of small department stores and bore enormous rents, they had been making their numbers every month. Nashvillians, I'd like the record to show, had been buying books.

The Nashville Public Library organized community forums for concerned citizens to come together and discuss how we might get a bookstore again. Our library, and I will bless them forever, immediately jumped up to fill the void, hosting readings of orphaned authors whose tours had already been scheduled to include trips to Nashville (including mine), and in every way trying to responsibly tackle the problems we faced as a city in need of a bookstore. Someone went so far as to suggest putting a little bookstore in the library, though selling books in the same building where books were free struck me as a bad plan. Surely, I thought,
someone
would open a bookstore.

My secret was that I did not much miss those mall-sized Gargantuas. The store I really missed had been gone much longer than they had. Mills was the bookstore of my youth. My sister and I used to walk there every day after school, stopping first to check out the puppies in the pet shop across the street, and then going on to admire the glossy covers of the Kristin Lavransdatter series, which is what girls read after they had finished the
Little House
books, back before the
Twilight
books were written. Mills could not have been more than seven hundred square feet small, and the people who worked there remembered who you were and what you read, even if you were ten. If I could have that kind of bookstore, one that valued books and readers above muffins and adorable plastic watering cans, a store that recognized it could not possibly stock every single book that every single person might be looking for, and so stocked the books the staff had read and liked and could recommend, if I could re-create the bookish happiness of my childhood, then maybe
I
was the person for the job. Or maybe not. I wanted to go into retail about as much as I wanted to go into the army.

“You're like a really good cook who thinks she should open a restaurant,” my friend Steve Turner told me over dinner. I had gone to Steve for advice, because he has a particular knack for starting businesses, which has led to his knack for making money. He was trying to talk me down from the ledge. “And anyway, you already have a job.”

“I wasn't thinking of working in the bookstore,” I said.

He shook his head. “Don't ever think you can start a business and just turn it over to someone else. It never works.”

In truth, I left that dinner feeling relieved. I'd been to the oracle and the oracle had told me that mine was a bad idea, which must have been what I'd wanted to hear.

I
n fact, it was exactly Steve Turner's admonition I was thinking of when I met Karen Hayes the next week. We were introduced by our one friend in common, Mary Grey James. Karen was then a sales rep for Random House, and Mary Grey had been a rep for Harcourt. They had both worked at Ingram, a large book distributor outside of Nashville. Karen, who is tall and pale and very serious in a way that brings pilgrims or homesteaders or other indefatigably hardworking people to mind, meant to open a bookstore. Her plan was to quit her job and devote her life to the project. All she lacked was the money. I suggested, having never considering investing in the book business, and not having been asked to do so, that I could pay for the store and promote it. Karen and I would be co-owners, and Mary Grey would be the store's general manager, thus solving the problem of how I could
have
a bookstore without having to actually
work
in a bookstore. We hammered out a tentative plan in the time it took to eat our sandwiches. Then Karen pulled a prospectus out of her bag and handed it to me.

“It's called Parnassus Books,” she said.

I looked at the word, which struck me as hard to spell and harder to remember. I shook my head. “I don't like it,” I said. How many people would know what it meant? (In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus is the home of literature, learning, and music, and, I think, a few other valuable things.) I had wanted a store called Independent People, after the great Halldór Laxness novel about Iceland and sheep, or perhaps Red Bird Books, as I believed that simple titles, especially those containing colors, were memorable.

“I've always wanted a bookstore called Parnassus,” Karen said.

I looked at this woman I didn't know, my potential business partner. I wanted a bookstore in Nashville. Why should I get to name it? “You're the one who's going to work there,” I told her.

That night, after talking it over with my husband and then securing a more detailed character reference from Mary Grey, I called Karen. According to her numbers, three hundred thousand dollars would be needed to open a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot bookstore. I told her I was in. This was on April 30th, 2011; in two weeks, I was to leave for the U.K. leg of the
State of Wonder
book tour. The U.S. leg of the tour started June 7th. Karen was working for Random House until June 10th. “Should I announce this on book tour?” I asked her. I knew I'd be giving interviews all day long during the entire month of June. Should I tell people what we had planned over lunch? That we had a name I didn't like but money in the bank, that we were strangers?

“Sure,” Karen said, after some real hesitation. “I guess.”

W
hen I look back on all this now I'm dizzied by the blitheness that stood in place of any sort of business sense, the grand gesture of walking over to the roulette table and betting it all on a single number. Anyone I mentioned this plan to was quick to remind me that books were dead, that in two years—I have no idea where “two years” came from, but that figure was consistently thrown at me—books would no longer exist, much less bookstores, and that I might as well be selling eight-track tapes and typewriters. But somehow all the naysaying never lodged itself in my brain. I could see it working as clearly as I could see me standing beside my sister in Mills. I was a writer, after all, and my books sold pretty well. I spoke to crowds of enthusiastic readers all over the country, and those readers were my proof. More than that, I was partnered with Karen Hayes, who wore the steely determination of a woman who could clear a field and plant it herself; and with Mary Grey, my dear friend who had opened a bookstore before. Moreover, our two giant, departed bookstores had been profitable every month; there was the roulette ball bouncing up again and again until finally coming to rest on the number I had chosen.

I would leave soon on my U.S. tour, but Karen and I managed to look at some possible spaces. We were like a couple of newlyweds in an arranged marriage looking for our first apartment. We didn't know what the other one would like, and our conversations were awkward exchanges followed by long periods of awkward silence. One place had only studded two-by-fours for walls, a forlorn toilet lying on its side in the center of the dark room. Karen could see the potential. (Karen, it quickly became clear, has a much greater capacity for seeing potential than I have.) She saw it again in a restaurant space that had been empty for four years. We picked our way carefully towards the kitchen, letting the beams from our flashlights slide over grease-covered refrigerators and stoves. I had eaten in this place as a child, and it was disgusting even then. It was also huge. “Maybe we could partner with someone who wanted to start a cooking school,” Karen said, looking at the hulking appliances. We were open to all possibilities. I was certain that some of the men who showed us these spaces had failed to secure bit parts on
The Sopranos
or in
Glengarry Glen Ross
but were still practicing for the roles. Often I was grateful for the lack of electricity, certain I would see things in those rooms I didn't want to see. I wanted someplace whistle-clean and move-in ready, preferably with built-in cherry shelving. Karen, however, was in the market for cheap. The place we both favored had once been a sushi restaurant and now had a lien against it. When the manager finally got around to giving us an answer, it was a pronouncement that bookstores were dead and that he wouldn't rent to us at any price.

And so, without a location or anything like an opening date, I left for my book tour, and on the first day announced on
The
Diane Rehm Show
that, along with my partner, Karen Hayes, I would be opening an independent bookstore in Nashville. I was vague on every detail, but when asked about the name, I managed to say “Parnassus.”

Early in the tour I got a phone call from The Beveled Edge, the frame shop in Nashville where I had long done business. They asked if I wanted them to sell my new book. My alterations shop, Stitch-It, followed suit. I was extremely grateful to be able to tell people in my hometown where they could go to find my novel, but the experience made me feel the loss of a real bookstore more acutely. Parnassus was a good idea for Nashville, yes, but selling books was also in my own best interest.