The Why Not? Bookstore was located in the eastern end of Carytown, a stretch of boutiques and restaurants filling the old houses and commercial buildings between the expressway and Boulevard. Red-tipped Bradford pear trees lined Cary Street and littered the sidewalks with dead leaves and miniature fruits which flattened of their own accord into small brown disks of mush.
Cary Street was quiet in the pale morning sun. The only consumers were a few late risers dashing into the coffee shops for stimulants. The yawning hipsters who ran the other shops were unlocking doors, setting out wooden signs on the sidewalks, and sweeping ineffectually at the squashed fruit.
Alice parked her car on a side street and the girls walked past several shops and crossed the street to the bookstore. Elizabeth lagged behind her sister to look in the shop windows and admire hand painted scarves, psychedelic skateboards, and a bizarre selection of extremely uncomfortable looking footwear.
In the shoe store, appropriately called "Drastic Steps", a Goth girl clad in red velvet trimmed with black lace ran a desultory feather duster over an arrangement of black candles, stiletto-heeled slingbacks, and black vinyl platform boots with steel-capped toes. She blew her gum into an enormous, insolent bubble when she saw Elizabeth looking in at her. Somewhere this girl had found black bubble gum. She sucked the gum back into her mouth and sneezed, then blew her nose on the feather duster. Elizabeth wrinkled her own nose in disgust and caught up with Alice.
Alice tried the door of the bookstore and found it locked. She pulled out her rattling key chain, on which hung no fewer than six fobs, including a Chinese hopping ghost and a compass, but only three keys, and unlocked the door. "Miss Price? Are you here yet?"
A tiny, birdlike woman flitted from the back room. "I'm only just getting here myself. Is this Elizabeth? Alice, honestly, Halloween isn't until Saturday."
Alice spun, her skirt flaring out and knocking some bestsellers from cardboard display. "Don't you like it? Or does it bring back bad memories?"
Miss Price planted her hands on her hips. "I'm not that old. Really, I should be offended by how drastically you overestimate my age."
Alice made the introductions while she picked up the books and replaced them. "Glinda Price, Elizabeth Stringfellow."
Elizabeth shook hands with her new boss and the two women assessed each other. Glinda Price's nose and chin were beaky, and her bright round eyes were framed by cat's-eye glasses which did nothing to detract from the sense she gave one of being an only slightly oversized sparrow. Her chestnut hair, with a single streak of platinum, was bound in a chignon and her gray A-line skirt and cardigan screamed mad librarian. Elizabeth found herself speaking in a whisper. And her name was familiar.
"Didn't you use to teach English at Monacan High School?" Elizabeth asked.
Miss Price blinked and cocked her head to the side with such an avian motion that Elizabeth had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. "Yes, that's right. You weren't one of my students."
"No, but I heard about you. Everybody loved your class, I'm surprised you're not still there."
"Yes, well, I enjoyed teaching, but society voted with its dollars and decided that I was worth more selling pap to the masses than I was selling teenagers on Thomas Hardy." Miss Price flicked her fingers at a stack of books titled Chicken Soup for the Iconoclast's Soul.
"I thought all good teachers became real-estate agents."
Miss Price ducked her head unabashedly. "I tried, but I was the world's worst real-estate agent. I never sold a single house. People aren't very comfortable with real estate agents who spontaneously launch into soliloquies from Macbeth. So here I am. And here you are," she said, rubbing her hands together with glee. "Ready for your part in the Why Not? Bookstore's plan to take over the world? Come upstairs to the Mail Order Department."
From her place behind the register, Alice snickered.
Elizabeth followed Miss Price up a set of narrow creaking stairs covered with worn berber carpet and into a large room filled with row after row of gray metal bookshelves loaded with books of every imaginable size and color. The slick, shiny spines gleamed and offgassed a bracing, new book smell.
Miss Price led her to the back of the room where a door rested across two stacks of boxes. On top of the door sat an antique Macintosh computer and a pile of manila folders from which slips of paper protruded in every direction. In front of the entire assemblage sat a single metal folding chair. A long folding table held a number of unfolded boxes and a packing tape dispenser. A huge box of foam worms was shoved beneath the table.
"This is it," said Miss Price. "We've made up the catalog and we're going to send it out as soon as we can get the mailing list in order. That's where you come in."
Elizabeth eyed the folders and an unpleasant realization dawned. "You need the names and addresses entered into the computer?"
"Yes, did Alice tell you everything? We are looking to expand into Internet sales, but we sort of inherited the catalog, so we figured we would do that first."
"No, Alice didn't tell me." Elizabeth tried to ungrit her teeth. She hadn't been expecting the data entry, and when Alice had told her she'd be the Mail Order Manager, she had neglected to mention that she would also be the entire mail order department. Crow pie. I'm going to kill you, Alice. Elizabeth forced a pleasant smile onto her face as Miss Price explained her duties (stick: data entry, carrot: the opportunity to take the mail order department online) and perks (coffee, a bottomless cookie jar in the office downstairs, and a health plan). From what Miss Price said, Elizabeth suspected that Alice had greatly exaggerated her e-commerce qualifications. It was just as well they weren't going online immediately, because Elizabeth would need the time to learn how to do the job she had been ostensibly hired to fill.
Miss Price trundled off to make a photocopy of her Social Security Card and get the assorted paperwork Elizabeth would have to fill out in order to be officially employed. Elizabeth plopped down in the folding chair and rested her face in her hands. The peanut butter sandwich nestled in her stomach like a warm, cuddly lump of lead and she felt faintly ill every time she looked at the folders. After wallowing in self-pity for a few minutes, she pressed the button to wake up the computer and pulled the first folder towards her.
She went cross-eyed after an hour of typing names and addresses. Leaning back in the hard metal chair, she stretched her arms out and tried to focus on something more than eighteen inches from her face. The desk faced a window which afforded a view out the back of the building. Across the alley and the narrow strip of parking spaces that ran behind the row of shops, she could see the backyards of single story clapboard houses. Laundry flapped from a line and brushed the tops of deep purple pokeweed. A pink tricycle minus its front wheel rested on a pile of rusted metal scraps overgrown with weeds. The houses themselves were comical, she saw later when she went for a walk around the block. The one-story houses were in the Victorian style and had the same octagonal bays and dentils under the eaves as a three story house. However, these architectural features had not been scaled down for the smaller houses, giving an overall effect of the upper story of a huge house sliced off and deposited on a low brick foundation.
A low roar drew her attention from the forlorn laundry. Preceded by whiskers of smoke threading out of its grill, a battered Cadillac of an indefinite color that had probably been pink twenty-five years ago eased down the alley and pulled into the parking spaces behind the shoe store. A lanky woman unfolded herself from the car. Her clingy black dress whipped in a chill wind and its bell-shaped sleeves blew back to reveal chapped, knobby wrists. She shambled from Elizabeth's field of view.
The same chill wind rattled the window in its frame.
Elizabeth shivered. Time for a cookie, she decided.
Downstairs, she found the shop was nearly empty, except for two women in ski sweaters huddled over a coffee table book of retriever puppy photos. Alice was seated behind the register on a tall stool. She was engrossed in a book entitled Tarot for Your Inner Fairy.
"So what's the deal with the shoe store?" Elizabeth asked around a mouthful of molasses cookie. "Is it run by the Addams Family or what?"
Alice marked her place with her finger and closed the book. "For real. They're the worst neighbors: they generate huge quantities of trash which all seems to end up behind our shop, they take up more parking spaces than they're allowed, and the shoes are just terrible. I bought a pair and they hurt my feet so much I couldn't wear them. Marla, the owner, wouldn't let me return them even though I didn't wear them outside the house or anything. Of course, that was after I called her 'Morticia', but only by accident."
"What did you do with the shoes?"
"Nothing. They're at the bottom of my closet. You want to try them on? Maybe you could wear them."
Elizabeth hastily declined. Alice had a proclivity for exotic footwear, and if she found the shoes unwearable, then they must be beyond excruciating. She suggested, "Why don't you tie them together and throw them over the telephone wire in front of their shop?"
Alice's eyes widened with delight. "I never thought of that. That's a good one! It'll be so obvious that the shoes are from their store too. When should we do it?"
"Alice, I was kidding."
"Oh, that's you all over. You come up with all kinds of wicked things to do and then try and get other people to do them. No wonder I was the one who always got in trouble." Alice sulkily returned to her book.