Gerald and Rita's Secondhand Book Shoppe
by Steven Stowell
Sean’s bedroom door was open just a sliver; a thread of warm light peaked out, framed by the shadows of the upstairs hall. Nudging open the door, I found Sean sitting on the floor, leaning his bare shoulders against the side of his bed, facing away from me. He contemplated something held in his hands, blocked by the corner of the bed—a book or a magazine, perhaps. His room was filled with the sweetly sour smell of sleep.
“Sean?”
“What?” he said, glancing over his shoulder.
“What are you up to?” The distant sounds of the washer and dryer rumbled in the basement, where our mother was doing laundry. It was just past lunchtime, Saturday.
“Nothing. Probably going out.” He moved, and the pages of whatever he held in his hands were flipped closed and nudged somewhere beneath the bed. In the cool light that shone through the window, his slim shoulders looked pale.
“Where’re you going?”
“To get some comics,” he said. He stood up and puffed out a little bit. At twelve, his frame was just starting to broaden, so that it seemed like the small muscles around his chest were being pulled uncomfortably toward his shoulders, like stretched worms. The firm edges of his bones pushed beneath the skin, unlike my own soft and rounded frame. Seeing his naked torso at mid-day in winter brought about a sickly, out-of-place feeling, as though I had just touched the clammy flesh of a chicken breast.
“At the drugstore?”
“Naw. There’s a place near the bluffs,” he said coolly.
“Why’re you going all the way there for comics?” Going to the bluffs meant taking the bus past the familiar boundaries of our neighbourhood, the strings of newly built houses, the wide-open school yards; it meant travelling down suburban roads filled with shopping plazas and old stores, lined up like rows of crumpled shoeboxes.
Sean looked away.
“There’s a store there. Derek told me.”
“What’s so good about it?”
“I dunno. They’ve got lots of comics there. They’re cheaper. Why do you care?”
“Can I come?”
Sean turned away to fish a sweater out of his closet. “Okay. But I’m going, like, now.”
We boarded the bus at the small turn around by the edge of our neighbourhood: a paved loop next to an undeveloped lot where a handful of trees watched over lumbering vehicles, coming to drop off their last passengers. The houses thinned out at the edge of Scarborough, where we lived, like the last drops poured from a watering can. The brick homes were bright and fresh but they ended abruptly next to grey, empty fields. Stores, too, were new and clustered by the edges of roads. The signs that hung above them in the plaza were still vivid and crisp: the luminous orange of the pizza chain, banana yellow at the video rental.
Sean and I sat silently at the back of the empty vehicle, looking out the window as we travelled into the older, more cluttered heart of the city. It was neither truly a city nor a suburb. The rows of bright detached homes were replaced by townhouses built of mustard-coloured bricks. Further west, driveways, parking lots and rusting chain-link fences encircled tall apartment buildings; their balconies were cluttered with old gym equipment, forgotten clothes, and Christmas ornaments reaching upward, layer upon layer.
The shopping plazas that lined the avenue were more numerous than where we lived and filled with strings of incongruous stores: real estate agents, karate studios, bridal boutiques. The roti palace with hand-drawn signs on the door; a bakery with aluminum foil taped inside the windows. Sprawling parking lots were filled with circling cars crawling like ants around a piece of fallen fruit.
The bus groaned as it heaved itself from one stop to the next, gathering more passengers. The people who boarded were more varied than the indistinguishably middle-class, mostly white families of our neighbourhood. A woman who wore sneakers with a long, puffy winter coat sat next to the driver and chatted, sipping coffee from a lipstick-stained paper cup. Large families, perhaps recently immigrated, boarded the bus as a group, carrying a week’s supply of groceries. The son or the daughter from one of these families might appear in my class at school someday, be teased mercilessly and then transfer to another school a year later, having made no friends. And finally, jealously occupying the only single seats on the bus, a couple of lone teenage boys sat hunched over, with overgrown hair falling in front of their eyes, fiddling with cassette players.
The comic book store was tucked away in the far corner of a dilapidated strip mall, a block away from the main road, and in the shadow of a larger, newer plaza. Thin, rusting columns made a portico in front of fossilized shops: a hair salon with the silhouette of a beehive hairdo stencilled over the door; a dry cleaner with yellowing lace curtains in the front window. “Gerald and Rita’s Second-Hand Book Shoppe” was hand-painted on the front window of the store we entered.
Bookshelves filled with paperback novels lined the walls: cheap thrillers with paintings of snakes, skulls and gem stones on the cover, or romances with brooding heroes leaning strangely bosomy chests over blousy women. No one attended the cash register by the front door, and in fact no one was in the store as far as I could tell, though classical music tinkled through the radio. The walls of books and the grey carpeting seemed to absorb all sound, as though we had stepped into a hushed funeral parlour.
“Where are the comics?” I whispered.
“Downstairs,” Sean said, and I followed him down a narrow flight of stairs at the back. This took us to a cavernous basement with unfinished walls, and bare metal support beams every few feet. Stacks of comics and magazines stretched out the length of the building. Many lay simply on the floor in piles that looked as though if nudged they would cascade downward like a mudslide, others were more neatly sorted into bins.
At the bottom of the stairs, a slim young man sat primly by a cash register. With his smooth pale cheeks, he might have been a teenager. Or, perhaps he was already in his twenties, because of the formal clothes he wore: a faded green dress shirt buttoned up to the neck and down to the cuffs, like a cloistered nun. The sleeves hung loosely around his wrists, he was so thin. He sat with his legs folded one over the other like a pair of twisted pipe-cleaners, and peered through spectacles at a paperback novel held open with one hand. He barely glanced down from his perch when we walked in.
“What are you gonna get?” I asked Sean.
“I dunno,” he replied, irritated. “I gotta look around first.”
I knew there were limits to how much of my presence Sean would endure, so I stood back while he disappeared into the stacks like a ferret. Only two other people were in the store: a middle-aged man in a brown raincoat, patiently picking through a pile of old Sports Illustrated magazines stacked in a corner, and a teenaged boy with shaggy hair who flicked quickly through comics, as though looking for new arrivals amid familiar contents.
The subterranean room smelled of mildew and I hesitated to touch the dusty pages stacked along the walls, which left a sticky, powdery residue on my fingers. Keeping my hands to myself, I walked down the aisles trying not to disturb the other clients, sifting meditatively through magazines as though panning for gold.
Certain, perhaps more expensive comics, pinned to the walls in clear plastic sleeves, caught my attention. A dizzying number of details were delineated in black ink. Dark lines hugged the contours of bulbous muscles in bright leotards, the swooping curves of capes and lassoes. Faces grinned or scowled, bodies launched themselves through the air like carnivalesque dancers. The images were as impenetrable to me as a medieval stained-glass window. Speech bubbles alluded to characters I didn’t know, plot lines I was unfamiliar with. Their swollen, fortified bodies looked down from the covers like a race of glistening aliens. I knew they were simply the characters from cartoons Sean used to watch, years earlier, on Saturday mornings, but their universe felt more somber and darkly sensual, here, as though it had been transposed into a different key.
I lingered over a discount rack of Archie comics, whose vacant, ever unchanging eyes were more familiar.
After about half an hour I found Sean, sorting through some issues of Spider-Man.
“What are you getting?” I asked him.
“Probably a couple of X-Men.”
“Are we going soon?”
“In a minute. I wanna look at everything,” he said, annoyed.
Eventually leaving the shop, the Saturday afternoon busyness of the city had retreated. As dinnertime approached with darkening skies, shoppers had withdrawn back into their houses, leaving the parking lot as empty as the bald surface of the moon. We sat waiting for the bus in the shelter at the intersection, while wind howled through its papery aluminum walls.
“Wanna see something?” Sean asked me. I nodded and he pulled out a magazine from his backpack, something tucked behind the brown paper bag the clerk had put his comics into. This was not a comic, however, but a glossy magazine, with a full-colour photo on the cover of a woman with frizzy blond hair and pursed lips as red as a candy apple. She pushed her large naked breasts, like swollen cantaloupes, upward toward her cheeks, seeming to stretch the skin painfully. The title Swank was emblazoned over the top. I had never seen an image of a woman so plainly naked before. Once we had found a discarded copy of Playboy Magazine mysteriously at the bottom of the ravine, covered in mud and rain. The glimpses of nudity I had caught in those pages, however, retreated behind a veil of dirt, evaporating whenever I got too close to recognizing a thigh or a breast among the splattered muck.
“How’d you get that?”
“I swiped it. Everyone does it.”
“How?”
“Easy.” Perhaps noticing the worry in my voice, Sean added defensively: “That guy’s not watching. He doesn’t care.”
He flipped through the pages showing images I was even more unprepared to see. Similar women, with distended breasts and large nipples like slices of pink ham were buckled into strappy garter belts and dainty lace fringes. They looked out to the viewer meanly with exaggerated, almost taunting expressions, as though making a parody of themselves. Red fingernails spread open reptilian folds of skin covered by tufts of pubic hair, delicately shaped and trimmed as if they were hedges in an English garden.
I was excited at first, looking at images that had always been kept hidden, tucked on the top shelf of the magazine rack. Here they were now, peeling away not just their clothes, but discarding all the banal cheerfulness of girls in swimsuit calendars or lingerie ads. My heart raced and Sean and I laughed as we flipped through the pages, seeing something so totally concealed now thrown into the open: messengers of the shadowy, indulgent world of adults. Bodies with abundant flesh made themselves unthinkably available, as though shedding the invisible architecture of gentility that normally constrained them. My temples tingled as page after page offered up a sea of jiggling pink.
After a moment, however, their grinning eyes started to turn sinister, and the buzzing sensation between my ears began to feel unpleasant. A presence arose in the background, as if these pictures of writhing women had brought with them something that filled the air and now watched from the shadows.
Then the bus appeared.
“Don’t tell mom and dad,” Sean said slipping the magazine into his backpack.
The bus was less crowded than it had been earlier. The families and shoppers had gone, and now only a couple of people rode along with us. We sat down and the images I had just seen resurfaced in my memory: the mess of limbs, hair, and veiny flesh. As the bus continued down the avenue, coming nearer to our neighbourhood and its orderly rows of houses, the images began to cling to me like a sticky oil on the skin of a fruit.
Sean dangled his feet carefree and gazed out the window. The bus seemed very different than it had that afternoon, with the enjoyable commotion of large families, chatting passengers. Now, the bus carried only a retired man with a cane, possibly dressed for dinner, and a young woman with coiffed hair and a powdered face. She wore a blazer and skirt beneath her winter coat, so I thought she might be on her way home from work, perhaps a receptionist.
I stared at the young woman bundled into her seat. She sat near the driver and hugged a shoulder bag near to her chest while squinting to see the dim street signs, anxious not to miss her stop. It seemed impossible to believe that the bodies spread out on the pages of Sean’s magazine lay also beneath the clothes of a woman like her. She had the meek eyes of a woman who might apologize to clients on the phone, or anxiously organize her files in case her boss should ask to look over them. These were the eyes of someone always inwardly fortifying herself against some anticipated conflict; so unlike the drunken, mocking eyes of the women in Sean’s magazine, playfully fondling their nipples. My stomach quaked to think that the bright cotton clothes adults wore were an elaborate scaffolding, camouflaging a private world beneath, where innards squirmed like worms.
We walked home from the bus stop quietly, beneath heavy clouds that hung low, as though about to precipitate.
“You two are awfully late,” our mother said as we walked in the door. “I thought you were just going to the drugstore.”
“We took the bus out to the bluffs,” Sean replied.
“You said you were going out to buy comics.”
“We did. There’s a store out there.”
My mother glanced in my eyes, as if searching for confirmation.
“Well, you should have been clearer about that, Sean. I was starting to get worried. Anyways. Dinner’s almost ready.”
I sat on my bed with the Archie comic I had bought, resting my eyes on their cheerful faces. I was not really reading the story, the mechanical movements of characters in and out of the soda shop, the expressions of laughter and surprise, all of which were as hollow as coin rattling in a tin can. Instead, I waited, hoping that whatever loomed in the shadows would retreat.
“Dinner’s on,” my mother said, peeking her head into my room.
“Okay.”
“So you and Sean went out to the bluffs?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“What kind of a store do they have out there?”
“It’s a bookstore. With comics in the basement.”
“Is that what you got?” she said, leaning over to see the open pages of my Archie comic.
“Yeah.”
She paused as if thinking of more questions. “What kind of things do they have there?” she might have asked. “I hope they don’t sell any…rude magazines, do they?”
She simply said, however: “Better wash your hands and come down for dinner.”
She closed the door and I sat, silent. It seemed cruel that Sean, and all the men who bought such magazines at news stands and bookstores, should delight in this secretive world where women crawled on their knees. An enormous joke at their expense. Then, the magazine images began finally to harden in my memory, as though the curves of the bodies were being smoothed over and simplified, flattened out. Eventually they settled in with the rest of the images in my mind, crowding for space. I went down for dinner and the world began to resume its normal shape, though in the days that followed I sometimes had the morbid wish to call the photos back to memory in all of their freshness, if only to experience the same mixture of disgust and excitement they had provoked the first time.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Steven Stowell is Associate Professor of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal and is the author of The Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance (Brill, 2015). His academic writing has appeared in Word & Image and Dante Studies. He is also a practicing visual artist and fiction writer, who has been published in The Windsor Review.