The Bookseller(6)

What I’ve learned, what we’ve both learned over the years, is that nothing is as permanent as it appears at the start.


Before we opened our store, I’d worked as a fifth-grade teacher, a job that I told myself I was crazy for. I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I would silently chant to myself each morning as I bicycled from my parents’ home, where I still lived, to my school a few miles away.

How could I not love it? I’d ask myself. After all, I adored children, and I adored books and learning. What sort of person would I be, then, if I did not, logically, also love to teach?

But standing at the chalkboard in front of a large class of ten-year-olds made me as nervous as a novice musician who had somehow faked her way into performing in an overflowing concert hall. Small and alone, seated at the grand piano under the spotlight, that phony musician would realize too late that the moment she struck a key, she wasn’t going to hoodwink anybody.

That is how I felt, standing there in my classroom. My palms would sweat, and my voice would become too quick and high-pitched; often a student would ask me to repeat something. “Miss Miller, I didn’t catch that,” one would say, and then they all would take it up: Me, neither. Nor did I, Miss Miller. What did you say, Miss Miller? I felt that I was a joke to them. But not a good joke, not one that I was in on, too.

Every year I had a few standouts—thank goodness for the standouts—those students who could learn in any environment, students who were smart and adaptable and quick to grasp concepts all on their own, without much help from me. But such pupils were few and far between.

And then there were the parents. Oh, the parents.

I remember one particularly awful morning toward the end of my teaching career. Mrs. Vincent, whose daughter Sheila had just received a D in history on her midterm report card, stormed into my classroom before the first bell. She waved Sheila’s report card angrily. Sheila trailed behind her mother.

“What is the meaning of this grade, Miss Miller?” Mrs. Vincent demanded. “Sheila tells me that you don’t even study history in your class!”

“Of course we do,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. Crossly, I bit my lip; why should I have to defend something so obvious? “We’ve been learning about the Civil War all term.”

“The Civil War? The Civil War? What possible use does a young girl have for something as prehistoric as the Civil War?”

The question was so absurd, I could not even come up with an answer. Sheila stood smugly next to her mother, dark eyes challenging mine. I wanted to slap her. I knew I never would, but the impulse was so strong, I had to put my hands firmly at my sides to control myself.

“That is the curriculum,” I said. “That is what I am asked to cover, ma’am.” I walked to the classroom doorway as the bell rang, ready to greet my other students. “I am just following the curriculum.”

Mrs. Vincent smirked. “Well, that’s creative, isn’t it?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whirled around and left the room.

I was a wreck; honestly, it took me weeks to get over that one. Over time, I began to blame myself. Yes, I was just doing my job. But if my students couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn—why then, I was at fault. Learning had come so easily to me over the years; I assumed therefore that it would be easy to teach others. I didn’t know how to fix things when that turned out to be untrue.

During those same years Frieda, who had been my best friend since high school, worked in an advertising firm. It was demanding but glamorous work, and she was good at it. Her firm’s accounts were mostly local businesses, but many of them were sizable companies—the Gates Corporation, Russell Stover Candies, Joslins Department Store. She went to parties and grand opening events. She wore gorgeous evening gowns, which she would model for me beforehand, to see what I thought. I always thought they were fabulous.

On the surface, Frieda seemed to be having a fine time. But when she and I were alone, comfortable on the weekend in dungarees, low-heeled shoes, and sweaters, she’d confess that it was all too much, it was all a sham. It made her feel, she said, as if she were acting in a play. “Acting is fun once in a while,” she said. “But it’s tiresome to do it all day, every day.”

Frieda and I talked a lot about our situations. How much she hated the phoniness of her work. My fear that I was failing at the one thing I had thought I’d be good at.

“What would a different life be like?” she asked me one Sunday afternoon toward the end of March 1954, as we took a walk in my new neighborhood. I had moved out of my parents’ house the month before—approaching my thirties, I’d felt that it was time for me to be out on my own, so I had leased an apartment in Platt Park. My new place was not far from the school where I taught; it was also less than a ten-minute walk to the small house that Frieda had purchased two years earlier. It was a typical Denver spring—as usual, we’d had more snowstorms in March than in any other month. That year, as in most years, the storms were generally followed by several warm, sunny days, during which the snow melted into puddles and new grass poked up in muddy yards. The day before, we’d had one of these characteristic late-season snowfalls—but that Sunday, as Frieda and I took our stroll, it was clear and bright, with temperatures in the fifties.

Frieda watched heavy droplets of melting snow fall from a nearby house’s eaves. She turned back to me and asked, “What if the work we did was gratifying?”