The Cure for Dreaming(40)

I FOUND FRANNIE PERFORMING HER FAVORITE BOOKSHOP duty: arranging new arrivals in Harrison’s display windows. I rapped on the glass, gave her a quick wave, and hurried inside the store. The jangling bell above the shop door announced my entrance.

“Good morning, Livie.” Frannie stood up straight with a book in each hand. “Is everything all right?”

I poked my head around shelves to check for eavesdroppers. “Where’s the rest of your family?”

“Carl is out delivering a rare book, and the rest of the children are at Grandmother’s. My parents took a riverboat ride to celebrate their anniversary.”

“I thought they were celebrating with a fancy supper tomorrow.”

“They are, but Papa wanted to treat Mother today, since she’ll be cooking the meal tomorrow.”

I sighed. “Such a good man. Such a beautiful man.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I darted my head behind another bookshelf. “There aren’t any customers here, either?”

“No, it’s just me here at the moment. Why? What’s happening? More hallucinations?”

I approached her and lowered my voice, just in case anyone should emerge from out of nowhere. “Frannie . . .”

“Yes?” she whispered back.

I swallowed and summoned a burst of courage. “I’m ‘A Responsible Woman.’”

“Yes, of course you are, Livie.” Her tone and nod were patronizing. “Except for when it comes to your relationship with Percy Acklen.”

“No.” I scowled. “I’m talking about the pro-suffrage letter printed in today’s newspaper. I’m ‘A Responsible Woman.’”

Her brown eyes swelled as round and bulgy as my largest prized marbles. She exhaled with the sound of a deflating bicycle tire. “Egad, Livie. Really and truly?”

“Did you read the letter?”

“Of course I read it. It was the talk of the breakfast table this morning, and every woman who’s walked through the shop door has asked for publications by Abigail Scott Duniway or Susan B. Anthony.”

“They have?”

She set down the books she was holding and pulled me toward General Literature. “We’ve sold every single copy of Duniway’s women’s rights novels in the past two hours. See the gap?” She pointed to an empty space toward the end of the D section. “People think she’s the one who wrote the letter.”

“Holy mackerel.” I breathed a sigh that whistled through my teeth. “Maybe this will mean women won’t give up the fight. Maybe there’ll be another referendum.”

“Maybe.” She raised her eyebrows. “But does Percy know you’re the one publicly making his father sound like a buffoon?”

“Oh. Percy.” I growled and held my head between the tips of my fingers.

“The party didn’t go well?” she asked.

“Tell me honestly, did he touch you?” I asked in return.

Frannie turned her face away and ran a knuckle across Charles Dickens’s spines.

“Frannie?”

“Are you still in love with him?” she asked.

“Not anymore.”

“Then, yes.” She dropped her hand from the books. “I admit, he grabbed me last year when I was retying the lace of my shoe in the school stairwell. He came up the steps behind me, gave me a spank and a squeeze, and then continued up the stairs without even looking back. I hated myself the whole rest of the day.”

“Oh, Frannie. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was never sure if he simply confused me for someone else, or . . .” She fussed with the end of her braid. “I don’t know. It happened a whole year ago. I hoped he might have matured a little.”

“No.” I folded my arms over my chest. “He’s still a grabber . . . and a biter . . . and a terrible kisser.”

“You kissed him?”

“He kissed me, and it was awful.”

The shop door opened, and a woman and her twin daughters—girls no older than twelve or thirteen—strolled into the store.

“Do you have The Awakening by Kate Chopin?” asked the mother.

“I believe so,” said Frannie in a professional tone. She reached up and took hold of a tan book with green grapevines laced around the title. “Yes, ma’am. Here it is.”

I wandered to one of the front-window displays and thumbed through a Kipling book while Frannie proceeded with business. In addition to Chopin’s novel, the woman and her daughters purchased The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. I hadn’t read The Yellow Wallpaper, but I knew all three of the texts questioned the subordination of women.

After the sale, each of the customers retreated with a book wedged under her left arm, and before they reached the door, a transformation occurred. The little family brightened. Their faces, like those of Agnes and the other suffragists at the restaurant, shone with some sort of internal brilliance, and their hair—fluffed and pinned beneath a small straw hat in the case of the mother, long braids for the daughters— became the bold yellowish orange of firelight.

The door shut behind them, and the little bell punctuated their exit with a jingle. The illusion ended.