I Went to Barnes, I Went to Noble

I had never been to one.

My writerly chums routinely reported that they all but dwelt in such sanctuaries, poring over the lit mags that just as routinely snubbed their efforts. I reckoned they stole time for Calvin and Hobbes, coffee and rolls and Italian juices. My friend Peggy, who writes only post cards and to-do lists, but who reads voraciously, insisted I come along with her. She was determined to further my own writing career, which had, in but a few short years, garnered me one hundred dollars and two bars of French chocolate.

Peggy had eaten the chocolate.

So many entirely disparate books and publications, I mused, pen gone to paper, plume to doom, garret agony and the giddy joy of a summer seller. Even the certifiably good writers, Shakespeare and Melville and Twain, all had to jostle for the primo shelf space with Miz Steele, with Cap'n Clancy, with the pair of imaginative fellows who had penned Molecular Biology Made Fun and Simple.

The checkout woman told me, "I never take home a paycheck." She was terribly proud of the fact. She wore some sort of apron, heavy muslin or lightweight canvas, and beneath it she resembled some aging serving wench, plump, all Henry Fielding. Do you know those porcelain characters produced in limited numbers by, oh, the Franklin Mint? Or all that Beatrix Potter crap? She looked like that, and I wished she carried a butter dish.

I thought, This woman could be my age. Conceivably, she and I might be anticipating our twentieth anniversary, out here in California in a house walled with books, fruit of her employee discount. I wanted to ask her if we would put up striped tents and awnings in the yard, fly pennants and rent an above-the-ground pool (earning the contempt of our neighbors, but fun for the children while we adults spoke French, spoke caramel apples, spoke a billion pasta noodles and looked at one another, remembering high school and the dead, smiling big to contain our tears).

There were blank books and talking books and magazines filled with astrology and naked women, all there at the counter for the impulse buyers. Another, younger woman had previously led me, yoked as an ox is yoked, over to the shelf of audio books. They were chatting amiably, Frost to Tolkien to Philip K. Dick, whose stock was soaring because of the movie deal, and the book deal, and the yackety compact disk deal, all being marketed together, like burgers, shakes, fries. Imagine Philip K. Dick off on a cheeseburger chat with Edith Hamilton, with Edith Wharton, with Edith.

Edith was a one-name poet I had earlier discovered on the table of cut-rate merchandise this behemoth was desperate to sell, and I was intrigued, and while giving one ear to my aproned wife, no paycheck but plastic dishes at the party, the madness of tents, I thought about the sort of life I might have had with Edith. She'd have been moody, I was certain, but pliable on occasions, as when we ventured out to the produce markets in Greece, in Calabria, in some Chinese Huang Zee Broccoli, back to our junk or tiny room for an afternoon of sex and conversation.

Her poetry was scattered like crows across the drab newsprint skies of little folios, five or six dollars each. It was evidently inspired by a studied hatred of nature, for she carried on about the bitch birch rattling in my gust of fury and some sorely troubled wolf that savages gobbets of my gut and so on. I decided against pets-God knows what horrors she might suspect a guinea pig of contemplating-but I was betting she was plenty hot.

I felt a certain amount of guilt for thinking such treacherous thoughts in the shopwoman's chattery presence. I wondered if she were married, but couldn't glimpse her finger. She was still rambling on: ". . . and an increase by one-half of my thirty percent in the week after Christmas-don't you love that week? Of course there's the inventory, but I have family here-do you know how to make a plum pudding? In a coffee can? Oh, we have three aisles of cookbooks, Emeril to Martha to that barbecue person, and Sharon-she showed you our talking books-well, I do go on, but she found a delicious recipe in a holiday cookbook by this fascinating old man in the Blue Mountains of-"

I had located an old paper volume by Least Heat Moon, and bought it for Peggy. It wasn't chocolate, but she wasn't choosy. She kissed me, there at the counter, in that enormous emporium of words and I leaned back and I returned the kiss, and lingered, and all anniversary plans were off, the poet sent packing, and I didn't have the eleven cents in change.


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Bob Arter loves sushi but it's damnably hard to locate fresh fish in the desert and he's getting sick and tired of fossilized trilobites. He plays first base for the Dodgers, now in his 37th season. lifetime obp: .908. his rookie card is worth a buck and a half. Oh yeah, and he faces weapons charges in three nations and is even now fighting extradition. According to his attorney, Maryanne Stahl, he is a tall, handsome fellow except for the...

He can be reached at: barter1@adelphia.net

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