which he would purse up when he listened. Ask him a question, ask him if he has Dombey and Son or Marivaux’s Life of Marianne in translation, and watch his mouth draw up. It was like pulling the string of a little sack or poking a sea anemone. And no matter how ordinary the question - ‘Who wrote War and Peace?’ or ‘Where is your restroom?’ - he would incline his head so as to look at you over the tops of his glasses, purse his lips, and in general act as if yours was the most profound of inquiries. Then the anemone would forget its fear, the drawstring would relax, his mouth would open in the gentlest of smiles, and raising an extended index finger as if testing the wind, he would say, ‘Back room, lefthand shelves, third shelf from the bottom, toward the end,’ or some such precise thing. With his bald pate and horseshoe of bushy hair, he looked like a jolly friar. I sometimes mixed him up with Friar Tuck.
On Saturday afternoons, especially when the weather was fine, the shop would be crowded with customers, and Norman would leave his desk by the door and move about the store helping people find what they wanted. He was beautiful then, moving gracefully among them. He was like a musketeer. He was Athos, quiet and reserved, slow to anger, but deadly when provoked. Assaulted by a question from behind, he spins about, thrusts his rapier at a top shelf, and draws down, impaled and flashing like a fish on a spear, Death in Venice . Another request might send him charging down an aisle, a turn at the corner of a shelf, a left feint in the direction of juvenilia, and then, crouching, a lunge to the right - and there, skewered by his sword point, is Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book . A third request, this time from an old woman in a mackintosh, bent and ugly, meets with the usual deference. A deep bow, a chivalrous pirouette, two lightning jabs, and The Power of Positive Thinking and Arthritis and Common Sense lie at her feet. Bravo, mon vieux Athos, bravo. But Norman’s most endearing moments occurred on rainy days, with no customers in the store, when he roamed the aisles armed with a large turkey-feather duster, and dusted to the right, dusted to the left, and hummed or whistled as he went. Seeing him then made me think how nice it was to be human. Rainy days were pleasant ones for me too. Lulled by the watery pit-a-pat, I occasionally dozed off at my post. And sometimes I had nightmares in which I died excruciating deaths, crushed beneath Webster’s unabridged or flushed screaming down a drain. And then I would wake up in the warm store to the gentle hissing of the rain and the whispering of the feather duster and feel happy again.
Meanwhile, the world outside the bookstore was looking more and more like a place I did not much want to be part of. During our orientation trip up top Mama had complained a lot to Luweena and me about our lack of gratitude for all she was doing for us in showing us the great scrape-and-scrounge spots. Which was ridiculous. From my point of view she had shown us mostly a bunch of death traps and not much to be grateful for. The one exception was the Rialto Theater, and for that even to this day my gratitude knows no bounds. No Rialto, no longing. No longing, no Lovelies. No Lovelies, and . . . what? No Lovelies, and a lonely rodent, at the closing of the garden, mulling the quality of his despair. The rest of my family were blessed in a way. Thanks to their dwarfish imaginations and short memories they did not ask for a lot, mostly just food and fornication, and they got enough of both to take them through life while it lasted. But that was not the life for me. Like an idiot, I had aspirations. And besides, I was terrified. The Rialto stood out as the one moderately safe place in the whole depressing neighborhood where you could still pick up something to eat, and eat it calmly without worrying about what calamity was going to fall on your head and turn you into a rug like
On Saturday afternoons, especially when the weather was fine, the shop would be crowded with customers, and Norman would leave his desk by the door and move about the store helping people find what they wanted. He was beautiful then, moving gracefully among them. He was like a musketeer. He was Athos, quiet and reserved, slow to anger, but deadly when provoked. Assaulted by a question from behind, he spins about, thrusts his rapier at a top shelf, and draws down, impaled and flashing like a fish on a spear, Death in Venice . Another request might send him charging down an aisle, a turn at the corner of a shelf, a left feint in the direction of juvenilia, and then, crouching, a lunge to the right - and there, skewered by his sword point, is Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book . A third request, this time from an old woman in a mackintosh, bent and ugly, meets with the usual deference. A deep bow, a chivalrous pirouette, two lightning jabs, and The Power of Positive Thinking and Arthritis and Common Sense lie at her feet. Bravo, mon vieux Athos, bravo. But Norman’s most endearing moments occurred on rainy days, with no customers in the store, when he roamed the aisles armed with a large turkey-feather duster, and dusted to the right, dusted to the left, and hummed or whistled as he went. Seeing him then made me think how nice it was to be human. Rainy days were pleasant ones for me too. Lulled by the watery pit-a-pat, I occasionally dozed off at my post. And sometimes I had nightmares in which I died excruciating deaths, crushed beneath Webster’s unabridged or flushed screaming down a drain. And then I would wake up in the warm store to the gentle hissing of the rain and the whispering of the feather duster and feel happy again.
Meanwhile, the world outside the bookstore was looking more and more like a place I did not much want to be part of. During our orientation trip up top Mama had complained a lot to Luweena and me about our lack of gratitude for all she was doing for us in showing us the great scrape-and-scrounge spots. Which was ridiculous. From my point of view she had shown us mostly a bunch of death traps and not much to be grateful for. The one exception was the Rialto Theater, and for that even to this day my gratitude knows no bounds. No Rialto, no longing. No longing, no Lovelies. No Lovelies, and . . . what? No Lovelies, and a lonely rodent, at the closing of the garden, mulling the quality of his despair. The rest of my family were blessed in a way. Thanks to their dwarfish imaginations and short memories they did not ask for a lot, mostly just food and fornication, and they got enough of both to take them through life while it lasted. But that was not the life for me. Like an idiot, I had aspirations. And besides, I was terrified. The Rialto stood out as the one moderately safe place in the whole depressing neighborhood where you could still pick up something to eat, and eat it calmly without worrying about what calamity was going to fall on your head and turn you into a rug like
Similar Books
