Then, in 1970, something almost more miraculous than a library came to town. The Warwick Mall opened, just a mile from my house, an easy walk on a Saturday morning. Boston department stores Jordan Marsh and Filene’s anchored each end of the mall. And on the path from one to the other stood the first bookstore I had ever seen. Waldenbooks was a small rectangle tucked between a fast-food steak house and a Spencer’s Gifts. Although the lure of a $3.99 steak and a lava lamp were great, nothing called to me more than that bookstore.
At the front, a wooden display showed hardcover bestsellers, face-out. Beside it, a spinning rack held paperbacks, more than I ever imagined existed. Sometimes, I went there and touched every single book, the smell of incense and French fries from the neighboring stores filling my nose, all of it intoxicating.
On one of those visits, the novel Love Story caught my eye. The book was slender, white, with the title in big red, blue, and green letters. I still remember how Erich Segal’s name sat beneath it in red, and how the words “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” seemed more profound than anything I had ever read. That spring and into fall, Love Story remained on the bestseller list, securing its spot on the front display of Waldenbooks. Although I cannot remember how much the book sold for in 1970, I do remember that the price seemed—no, was—astronomical to an eighth grader in West Warwick, Rhode Island. If my mother thought spending $1.99 on a Nancy Drew book was a waste of money, what would she say if I brought home this beautiful, expensive hardcover book? I was not a kid who got in trouble, but I could imagine my mother’s wrath at such a purchase.
One day, as I stood fondling the book and pondering how love meant never having to say you’re sorry, it occurred to me that giving a book to Gloria-Jean would be the most wonderful present anyone had ever given her. Even though we already owned those Nancy Drew books, this book, Love Story, was a real book. A hardcover! A bestseller! Imagine owning such a thing! I remember that the cold weather had arrived, and I was wearing my pale blue winter jacket. Yet I shivered at the thought of it.
I saved my allowance until the December day I could go into Waldenbooks and buy Love Story, the first real book I’d ever bought, and the first book I would give as a gift. Could the shaggy-haired, green-eyed boy who rang up the purchase understand how important this moment was for me? I don’t think so. After all, he stood behind that cash register all day selling books, as if it were nothing special. Muzak Christmas carols filled the air. Lights twinkled from every storefront. I had never felt the Christmas spirit as much as I did at that moment. But when he asked me if I wanted the book gift-wrapped, I hesitated and shook my head, even though the wrapping paper there was much more beautiful than the kind we had at home from Ann & Hope.
Instead, I tucked the slim book in its Waldenbooks paper bag inside my jacket, and walked home along the snowy streets, past the dilapidated mill houses with their flashing blue Christmas lights, over the bridge that crossed the sluggish Pawtuxet River, past the three churches, and up the big slippery hill. Once inside and warm, I pulled my treasure from the bag. Then I carefully opened the book the tiniest bit, and read it from beginning to end without cracking the spine. I think I began to cry at the first line: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” By the end, when Jenny dies of leukemia and her young husband, Oliver, delivers that iconic line—“Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry”—to his wealthy father, I was sobbing.
Certainly I was sobbing because Jenny died, and because Mr. Barrett had acted so mean to her and Oliver, and because the father and son were together again. But looking back on it now, I think too that this story of a blue-collar girl from Rhode Island falling in love with a rich Harvard jock made me—perhaps for the first time—aware of deep class differences. In my town, though there were a few wealthy families with lawyer or businessman fathers, most of us were varying degrees of middle class. We were used to the kids, many of them, on welfare; we barely took notice of the kids who couldn’t afford rain or snow boots and came to school with Wonder Bread bags tied around their shoes with rubber bands. Jenny and Ollie, I realized, came from two different worlds. And those worlds didn’t easily accept each other. What would my place be in this big world I wanted so desperately to see? Through teary eyes, I closed the book and wrapped it in the flimsy Ann & Hope Christmas paper, topping it with a big silver bow.
Since that long-ago day, I have given more books than I can count as Christmas presents. But none have meant as much to me. That first one showed me something I already knew—that owning books is not a waste of money, not at all. But I now realize that it was my first step toward a kind of independence, entering into that world of books and language that was so foreign to my family. But not to me—no, I understood that I would always buy books, that I was a reader and a writer and that to be surrounded by books would always bring me comfort.
THIS SUMMER, I FOUND myself in the throes of upheaval. Newly divorced, I was leaving my home of almost twenty years, a cozy red Colonial built in 1792, and moving across town with my twelve-year-old daughter Annabelle to a big bright loft in a renovated factory. Of course the week I had to pack and move was the hottest one of the summer, with temperatures and humidity in the nineties, and that old house had no air-conditioning and windows that stuck shut when they swelled. In those hot, airless rooms I packed up my married life—the carefully saved art my kids had made, my enormous stash of yarn, the Fiestaware and Italian pottery I’d collected. My final task: the rows and rows of books that lined three walls of one room.