Books in the living room were for grown-ups and not to be touched. My mother had a few coffee table books, which she guarded fiercely. I was allowed to read Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life only under supervision, turning its pages gingerly and never removing it from the coffee table. My aunt had given it to my mother as a gift, and it was made clear that, despite appearances, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life was not a children’s book.
My older brother Roger’s books were not exactly children’s books either; his were the literature of defiant male adolescence. What he liked to do was read Jaws when my mother forbade him from seeing the movie. Of all my family members, Roger was most like me; we even looked alike, though, as he liked to point out, my face managed to be both too long and too fat at the same time; his was merely too long. Roger and I shared the same twisted sense of humor that made other people frown when we laughed. My chief ambition was to get him to laugh against his will, sometimes achieved by adopting my signature Glazed Look during a staring contest or performing a spirited jig so foolish that merely glimpsing it as a passive observer proved embarrassing. Neither of us was socially successful. For his part, Roger blamed the chess club. “Thus sealing my social fate forever,” he said.
According to some tacit regulation, Roger controlled the bathroom reading. Its inventory remained stable for years: The Twilight Zone Companion, an episode-by-episode guide complete with creepy stills (“Eye of the Beholder” in particular provided the stuff of nightmares); Stephen King’s Christine, riveting despite being about a car; The Fiske Guide to Colleges, which gave me early and strong opinions about the undesirability of Swarthmore (all those nonliterary requirements!); Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, never as rewarding as its title suggested. I read them all, cover to cover, over and over.
None of it was enough.
Whenever my bank account managed to reach the double digits, I’d bring my blue passbook to the local branch and bike up to the used bookstore off Main Street to buy Nancy Drews. These purchases were carefully considered. “Do you have any new Nancy Drews?” I’d ask when I walked in, by which I meant old Nancy Drews, but not too old. I wanted nothing to do with the reissued paperbacks and their loathsome “contemporary” illustrations; the really ancient ones with their dark woven blue covers were also unacceptable.
But oh … the yellow-bound Nancy Drews, with their broody cover paintings and pen-and-ink interior images of the girl detective and friends, pixie-haired George and “plump” Bess. They sold for about a dollar a copy, an incredible bargain. Nancy Drew taught me that a book wasn’t merely about the words within, it was everything—the quality of paper, the intoxicating smell of the binding glue, an older formulation that you didn’t get in newer volumes, the decorative end pages. It was the book as object, the vase as much a pleasure as the flowers.
If the shopkeeper had no yellow Nancy Drews, I’d depart in haste, shrouded in remorse for having wasted his time. The poor guy with his forlorn shop that nobody ever went into. He probably lived for those precious moments when the bells jangled on the front door, dreaming of customers less particular about their mysteries. He probably scraped by on lunches of peanut butter and jelly and cursed the chain bookstore at the nearby mall. I constructed an entire narrative around the shopkeeper and my sorry role in his professional travails. Only after I’d graduated from high school and left town did I mention to my best friend, Ericka, how I’d suffered on his behalf.
“The used bookstore owner?” she replied, incredulous. “He was a millionaire! He just kept that shop for fun.” Ericka knew all kinds of town stuff because her parents were entrenched in the community whereas my mom was strictly the commuter type.
I had one other book-buying opportunity and I shamelessly abused it. On Divorced Dad Thursdays, after I’d finished my strawberry French toast and strawberry milk shake and strawberry cheesecake at the diner, my father would often let my brothers and me run amok in the Barnes & Noble at the Roosevelt Field mall. My father was a construction contractor—“small jobs, Pammy”—and didn’t have a lot of money to spare. He would warn on arrival that I could pick two or three books and no more, which he paid for with folded bills or hastily shuffled credit cards. I would nod, almost intending obedience, and then set out. An hour later I’d show up at the cash register with a tower of books wedged determinedly under my chin.
There was no helping it. Series like Choose Your Own Adventure were meant to be consumed whole, and the library must not have considered them worthy for its collection. Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, both erratic presences at the library, beckoned in long, gleaming rows, breathless plots teased enticingly on their covers, brand-new, sometimes with embossed letters. I was really, really sorry but it was impossible to narrow things down.
“I don’t want to have to say no to you when it comes to buying books,” my dad would say, as I lobbied for please just one more. “If I’m going to spend money, then it should be on this.” It was the best thing he could have said. I never forgot it and I never stopped feeling guilt ridden about taking it so literally.
But it still wasn’t enough. Frustrated by my failure to gain employment at the library, I threw myself into the project of making money, not to buy clothes or makeup or records, but because I wanted not to have to depend on others—not in life, not in stories, not for books.
This wasn’t always easy. When I was twelve, I started babysitting, but while my friends got to babysit toddlers who were already asleep in houses with poorly cataloged liquor cabinets, my wards were bad sleepers whose health-food-nut parents came home early and paid $3.35 an hour, precisely minimum wage, and never rounded up, rummaging through their pockets for the appropriate coins. In eighth grade, I was fired from my first “real job” at a real estate office for subpar typing, a stunning blow to my already tenuous self-conception. I couldn’t type!