The Bookish Life of Nina Hill(10)
Young Adult Book Club: This one was all Liz. She loved a darkling teen.
There had been some discussion of starting a regular, adult book club, but Nina didn’t have time, because she already belonged to a weekly adult book club—of which more later—and that commitment, along with the elementary book club, her exercise regime (if you can call sporadic exercise classes and fervent promises to do better a regime), and of course the trivia team, meant she had no free time. Liz refused to do it, and the part-time girl who worked there, Polly, hated reading. Why does she work in a bookstore, you ask? It’s a long story.
Anyway.
Despite not having a child herself, Nina enjoyed watching other people handle the unsuspected responsibilities of parenthood. The baby wasn’t the biggest problem at all, it turned out; it was the other parents. There was a definite learning curve over the first few years, and Nina had a ringside seat, because so many of Larchmont’s parents were parishioners at the Church of the Dust-Jacketed Hardback and brought their kids in all the time. She’d watched dozens of little kids graduate from Goodnight Moon to Bedtime for Frances to Junie B. Jones to whatever YA series was trending, and with them went their parents, learning to navigate the intricate social networks of neighborhood and school.
Take when two moms met in the store at reading time. Standard school-mom rules of engagement applied: If your children were friends and you met while both of you were standing, you hugged, of course. If one of you was sitting on the floor already and your kids were good friends, with an actual, out-of-school playdate under their tiny rainbow belts, then the one sitting would start to stand but the other would wave her back down and bend from the waist to half hug. If your kids were really good friends, with multiple playdates and maybe a sleepover in their shared past, then the one sitting would scooch over to make room for the other, and they would hug once both were down. Nina studied these things, because they didn’t come naturally to her. And working in a store where people tended to aimlessly wander around looking at books gave her ample opportunity for observation.
Nina’s special favorite was watching people handle introductions. It played out like this: A woman would be browsing in the store, trying to decide whether she had the balls to get something vaguely pornographic or if she’d have to stick with something worthy (note: this is where that online bookseller really triumphs, undercover purchasing), and notices someone she knows has come in. In a split second she has to decide whether or not to acknowledge their existence, the decision depending on how well she knows them, how well they know her, and whether or not she can get away with ignoring them (i.e., they definitely haven’t seen her yet, or she’s disguised as a pirate).
Their eyes meet, and now she has to decide whether to say hi and keep browsing, or actually approach and greet. She decides she can’t get away without actually greeting, but then realizes the other woman has someone else with her, someone who looks vaguely familiar, but she can’t remember why. Nina had seen this scenario so often she’d gotten used to the flicker of panic in a woman’s eyes as she walked forward while desperately wishing she weren’t. It was hilarious, but only when it wasn’t you. Anyway, now the friend is committed, too, whether she likes it or not, so she says hey, the original woman says hey, hug regulations apply as previously described. Then the friend says, so, whatever your name is, this is Bindy Macaroon, I think you two might already know each other. (Moms of a certain age know dozens and dozens of people through various channels, so they have to perform this human equivalent of canine butt sniffing all the goddamned time.)
ORIGINAL WOMAN: Oh, hi, Bindy. Do we know each other? (Here there would be a lot of head movement and facial expressions that alternated between friendly openness and self-abasement, playing it safe until the connection is clarified. If it turns out they know each other because one of them slept with the other one’s boyfriend in college, then, you know, awkward.)
BINDY: I think we do! You look so familiar! (Similar head bobbing and approach/withdraw body language.) Do you have a kid in Miss Rectangle’s class?
ORIGINAL: No . . . My daughter, Elephantine (pronounced the French way, of course), is in Mr. Elevator’s class. Does your child do swimming at the YMCA with Professor Bubbles?
BINDY: No . . . Art class on Saturdays at Brushlicious?
ORIGINAL: No . . . Preschool? We were at Harmony House of Love and Kindness, were you?
BINDY: No, Urethra went to Mandarin Immersion Buddhist Chakra Preschool. In the Valley.
And with that they would give up and shrug and would never, ever realize they knew each other because one time they bumped cars in traffic and stood on the street for ten minutes exchanging insurance information.
If you had walked into the bookstore after lunch that day, you would have seen Nina making a pile of books on the counter that might have struck you as dangerously unbalanced, and shortly before two in the afternoon she suddenly knocked it to the floor. It made an incredible noise.
The man who’d just walked through the door paused and narrowed his eyes at her.
“Is Liz here?”
Mr. Meffo was their landlord. Larchmont Boulevard was broadly owned by three or four people. A large family had owned properties in one section of the boulevard since the ’60s, and they were generally mellow and much loved. Another landlord was an investment bank that kept out of it, for the most part. And the third was Mr. Meffo. He was a popular villain on the boulevard, but of course he was just a regular businessman trying to make a profit, which would be the actual point of business. If he’d been a sheep farmer, he would have been carrying a lamb around and wearing a bonnet, but as he was a landlord, he was carrying an iPad and a cell phone.