Closing Hours

Why on earth am I lying here sleeping on the floor? thought Elinore Hawkins, waking with a startle and an ashen taste in her mouth.

Her turkey neck, grown large and ever more flabby, hung like a deflated balloon, anchoring her shrunken head to the floor. She could barely see, her eyelids bulging from years of inflammation, her narrow eyes pink and dry.

Late afternoon light streamed in through the slats covering the shop window. Had she fallen or fainted? she wondered, her mind as confused as her vision. Were any bones broken? She tried to move her legs again and pivot herself up with one hand. Though skeletally thin of late, she couldn’t budge an inch, let alone lift herself up.

I don’t remember falling, she thought. I don’t remember falling, she thought again. What was I doing last? Did I slip on my way to lock up the bookshop? No. No. No. Can’t be that. But I must have fallen. She tried to move again, even an inch. Impossible.

This won’t do at all, she said to herself, noticing a thick layer of yellowish dust clinging to the faded gray linoleum floor. I’ve got to get up right this instant and mop. Such a mess. What would my customers think?

What customers? she scoffed silently.

Most of the regulars had died long ago or switched to e-books, which in her mind was as good as dying. She’d borrowed one of those new-fangled electronic readers from her gangly, obviously gay (but yet-to-know-it) grandson just to see what all the fuss was about. All that glare! And tapping a hard screen with your finger – about as sensual as cold plastic wrap covering a box of beautiful strawberries. Holding the corner of real paper between your forefinger and thumb, now that was something. Especially 100% cotton rag paper that fine books were once commonly printed on, with deckled, feathery edges and sensually ribbed surfaces. She kept a collection of such books in her back room for select customers to peruse. Turning their pages gave you an electric charge, like touching the skin of a new lover for the first time.

New lover indeed! she snickered to herself.

She hadn’t had sex with anyone since she’d accidentally conceived Eric, her only child, twenty-some years ago. Or was it thirty? Or forty? Hugh, her husband, was on leave from serving in the United Nations peacekeeping force on Cyprus, where the UN established a mission after tensions between the Greek and Turkish communities exploded in the mid-sixties. He’d come out of retirement from the military reserve to take on this new challenge. During his brief visit home, Hugh and Elinore made love just once, if you can call it love—quick, cold, incidental. The next day he returned to duty and weeks later died in one of those “friendly fire” incidents that leave suspicion in the minds of surviving families. Not that Elinore was curious about his death any more than she’d been about his life. The meager widow’s pension she received for his service kept her barely alive, supplemented by her small government pension. Profits from the shop were swallowed up in its upkeep.

Fortunately, she received a little additional money from a modest annuity she’d bought before her marriage, when she managed an office for two middle-aged lawyers. Hugh was the nephew of one of them. It was an arranged marriage. He was a loner, a bit of a nerd, interested only in his military reserve duties and fiddling with his ham radio and the primitive early home computers he bought from ads in Science News Letter. Marrying him seemed as inconsequential as placing a new file in one of the lawyer’s filing cabinets. You go through the alphabet, one letter at a time, and when you reach M for marriage, you do it. No one who knew them would think of them as a loving couple, not that they had many friends. They had remained as isolated socially as they were emotionally from one another.

Elinore’s employers specialized in estate law but ironically had failed to write wills for themselves or put any savings aside. Heavy smokers, they both died from lung cancer before they retired, leaving their families in near penury. The memory of their carelessness galvanized Elinore’s resolve to become financially independent after Hugh’s death.

Why am I on the floor? she wondered as she awoke again with a startle. I can’t move at all. I’ve got to get up. What if a customer comes in?

Newly widowed, with a child to support, she had decided to start her own business, just as her parents had done when her father returned from military service at the end of the War. They opened a flower shop in the city’s central residential neighborhood, in the west end of the downtown peninsula near the famous park. The business prospered and enabled them to buy a modest two-and-a-half-story Edwardian house with a gabled roof, overhanging eaves, and a covered front porch. The house was on a quiet street lined with old red maple trees, also near the park, a five-minute walk from the shop.

An only child, Elinore had a small bedroom to herself in the house’s A-shaped top floor, her own little domain. There she would spend hours after school reading voraciously, ignoring her parents’ appeal to come down for dinner or meet visiting relatives. She rarely socialized with classmates, preferring to go straight home to her room, to her books. Don’t you have any friends you’d like to play with, her mother would ask, standing at her daughter’s bedroom door. Elinore would hold up the book she was currently reading and point to it. Books were her only friends and confidants.

After her parents died in a car crash early one dark morning on their way to the flower auction, down by the river, Elinore continued living in the house. She’d recently graduated from a secretarial program at the city college and readily secured the job with the two lawyers. I’m going to keep the place, she told an uncle who advised her to sell. She loved the old house, its musty scent, the fall colors of the maple trees out front, her little room upstairs. The house was one of hundreds that had sprung up in the city’s early boom years, after the turn of the century, when lumber and fishing were big industries, and working-class people had money. From the late 1960s onwards, nearly all these single-family homes were torn down to make way for rental and condominium towers, one concrete and glass façade indistinct from the next. Elinore lived in one herself now, after finally selling the family house to increase her capital after Hugh was killed.

If she stood in the far corner of her small apartment’s living room, she could see the snow-covered mountains to the north through a narrow slot between adjacent towers. She would have liked a unit with a southwest view toward the beach and inlet, but the rent for those cost more. She could afford it but preferred putting extra money into one of several savings accounts she kept at different banks to spread out the risk. She knew misfortune could strike in one form or another and you had to be prepared – earthquake, fire, employers’ death, widowhood.

On her own now, with little Eric to raise, she pondered what sort of business to start up. She didn’t fancy the idea of running a retail business, having to deal with people all the time, but what choice was there? Methodically, she walked up and down the streets in her neighborhood, compiling a list of all the independent shops. Two bakeries. A butcher shop. Three restaurants – Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek. A small store crammed with every conceivable spice, condiment, and baking ingredient. A tiny hardware and paint store. A shoe repair shop. Several small Chinese-owned groceries. Her parents’ old flower shop, now half the size, and soon to become a dollar store. But no bookshop.

She’d laughed. Of course, why didn’t I think of that right away?

She had continued reading voraciously into adulthood, always a book in hand – biographies of famous people, 19^th-century fiction, natural history, psychology, self-help books, popular science. She delved into spiritual subjects too, more out of curiosity than any pull in that direction. Once, when reading a book about Buddhism, she came across a reference to “hungry ghosts,” the lost souls who can’t cross over into nirvana because, in life, they were consumed by desire – for food, sex, fame. Even for reading, she thought, more amused than alarmed by the thought. Living life vicariously through books seemed ideal to a recluse like Elinore, and she wasn’t about to change. Running a bookshop, she figured, would at least allow her to continue indulging her passion for reading.

The closest bookstore at the time was beyond easy walking distance, in a large downtown office tower. It had two full floors, one at street level, where customers entered, and the second in the basement. It had a knowledgeable staff and was well stocked with new and old titles. (This was before the big box bookstores arrived, with all their scented candles, greeting cards, and stuffed animals competing for space with real books.) Obviously she couldn’t compete with a large bookstore. But running a small bookshop catering to her local neighborhood, that might work, she decided.

Three blocks away from her apartment she found a narrow commercial space, formerly a laundromat. Available for lease, it was near the beach, at the south end of a busy street that ran north from there to the large park. In the evenings people strolled along the street in an ersatz version of a Spanish or Italian paseo. People would stop at the beach to watch the colorful sunsets over the bay. Nearby was a small park with a bandstand dating from Edwardian days, when the city was small and people knew each other by name. These days the city was growing rapidly with immigrants mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But the downtown neighborhood had retained its original laid-back character, only now, besides pensioners, the area was popular with upwardly mobile young people, yuppies they were called, many of them gay. Yuppies, gays, and seniors – people who still read books.

—

I’ve got to let in some fresh air and clear away this God-awful moldy smell, thought Elinore, struggling again but failing to move a single muscle. Maybe I had a stroke, she thought. That must be it. That’s why I don’t feel anything. But what can I do? I can’t reach the phone to call for an ambulance or call Eric for help. Not that he would come. He’ll be glad to be rid of me, she thought. Can’t blame him either. I wasn’t much of a mother. But this smell. This terrible reeking stink.

A young couple stopped and peered in through the slats of wood covering the shop window. They had long hair, the man’s gathered in a pony tail, the woman’s blond and unkempt. Young people, thought Elinore. New customers. She shouted silently for help. Look over here, she begged. Help me.

She’d never noticed the moldy smell in her shop before, not when books were quickly selling out and new stock arrived weekly. Of course business hadn’t been so good at the start. For the first couple of years, few people would venture into the shop let alone buy anything. A bookshop in the neighborhood was a novelty; people were accustomed to shopping at the big store downtown. Determined to stick with it, she drew from her savings to keep the business afloat. She would sit there in the shop, thoroughly engrossed in reading, oblivious to Eric nursing from her breast. He would look up at her while she just kept reading. She’d be relieved when he was old enough to go to daycare.

Business gradually improved once she started devising ways to attract attention to the shop. At the start she displayed stacks of books in the window, mostly titles she was interested in herself. Eventually she got the idea to change the décor to reflect each new season or upcoming holiday. She featured current bestsellers with appropriate displays – brooms and cobwebs for Halloween, artificial snow and a miniature tree at Christmas, dyed eggs in confetti-filled baskets for Easter. She continued to showcase classics as well, like Jane Austen, made newly popular by film and TV adaptations. Often she would stay overnight to change the display before morning, hoping to surprise people who regularly passed by. Sales improved, but she rarely spoke to customers, sitting instead on her high stool in a corner of the room, reading by herself.

One day an elderly lady, one of her few regular customers, complained that Elinore didn’t remember the last book she bought. “You should keep a record of my purchases,” the retired English teacher suggested. “That way I wouldn’t accidentally buy the same book again. And you could recommend new books for me when they come in. Really, you should take greater care.”

That evening Elinore set up a ledger to record what books sold, who bought them, and their address. In future, when similar books arrived, she would send a postcard to the customer bringing it to their attention. The effect was immediate. Word got around and books began selling faster. Soon it was all she could do to keep up with the demand. Instead of sending individual postcards, she started up a monthly flyer, listing new books with a brief summary of each. Her workload grew. It was hard keeping up with her own reading.

She tried hiring assistants, but none met her expectations. They never remembered one customer from another. And they hadn’t read widely enough themselves to make informed suggestions to the expanding customer base. She was better off running the shop all on her own, even if it left her no free time.

Fortunately, little Eric was no longer so little. Time sped by and he was already in middle school, growing more independent. Elinore was happy to let him fend for himself, fix his own meals, put himself to bed. She had decided to stay open until eight at night six nights a week in order to attract younger, working age people who couldn’t shop during the day. She would pack herself a simple lunch and dinner and remain in the shop ten or twelve hours at a stretch.

With no one to back her up, she relied on the honor system whenever she had to step away, go to the toilet, or pick up groceries. She would post a note on the door saying she’d be back in ten or fifteen minutes, leaving the door unlocked. Once in a while books would go missing, no payment left behind. But far more often she would return after a break to find money left on the table with a scrawled note saying what the customer had bought and their name for her record. How wonderful the sense of belonging, she thought. I look after my customers and they care about me.

Business became so busy she had to give up reading herself in order to keep up with the number of literary publications she went through every week, perusing reviews to identify books to order and feature in her newsletter. The New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review section, Publishers Weekly, and the Canadian journal Quill and Quire.

After Eric left home to start a family of his own, Elinore spent more and more time in the shop. She set up a cot in the backroom, sleeping over occasionally so she could open up earlier. She extended the hours, opening at eight, and then seven in the morning, and closing at nine, and then ten, thinking to appeal to people walking to and from work and strolling in the evening. Occasionally she forgot to close up entirely.

For years the business thrived. A coffee shop opened next door, capitalizing on the bookshop’s trade to attract its own customers. People would pick up a new book and sit and read it at the coffee shop while sipping a drink or eating lunch. Elinore let people take a book out without paying for it first so they could relax over a coffee and leaf through the pages, casually deciding whether to buy it or not. Occasionally someone would walk off without paying. Most people could be trusted, and she preferred cultivating a climate of trust.

Although at the start she’d avoided talking to customers, she’d gradually loosened up. Now she chatted with her regulars, even the odd one-time shopper, those visiting from abroad, or venturing into the shop by accident. Never outgoing before, she was good at simply listening to people’s stories and occasionally repeating, in slightly different words, something insightful they inadvertently revealed about themselves. It made people feel comfortable around her. Some would ask for her advice not only about books, but about problems they were having at home, work, or school. New mothers would ask her questions about childrearing. Couples with marital issues sought her counsel. As she had once consumed books herself, now she absorbed real-life dramas, family histories, tragedies and comedies.

Before long she began keeping the shop open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, like a convenience store. She would take short naps in the backroom. Customers would ring a bell sitting on the counter, and she would hurriedly get up to answer questions or complete a transaction, or just sit with someone who wanted to talk, sometimes in the middle of the night. Homeless people would come in as well, and Elinore would go next door and bring back coffee and cookies for them. Once the weekly neighborhood paper featured a profile of her and the shop, which brought in more customers.

Around the same time, the first chain coffee shop appeared just down the street. And then a second. After a few years, the independent café next door couldn’t compete and closed up. The same pattern was happening all down her street with one old business after another going under. An independent dry cleaner gone. And then the little hardware and paint shop. The bakeries were replaced by an international chain from Australia. Soon enough, all the little independent shops she’d listed when surveying years before for a vacant spot were gone, leaving her the last holdout.

Now it was all chain stores. Every city in North America, increasingly the world, had the same stores. Different brands might all be owned by one conglomerate. Yes, there were new enterprising shops and restaurants opening, but few seemed to survive longer than a year or two. Not like the independent shops that had once endured for generations, managed by people who remembered your name and your tastes, who’d ask about your family. Nowadays you could buy anything, it seemed: chocolates flavored with pomegranate or Indian spices, seven kinds of croissants, underwear made out of bamboo, bicycles lighter than a man’s suit. The choices seemed endless. But who needed all this variety?

The first “big box” bookstores had also arrived, first one in the suburbs and then one downtown, with their fake friendly names like Booklovers and Cuddles. What a laugh, she thought. They don’t cuddle and they don’t even know books, let alone love them. But never in a million years could she match the discounts they offered. Nor could the old large independent bookstore downtown, which after failing to compete went bankrupt. These new bookstores made more money selling greeting cards, candles, stuffed dolls, pillows, throws, and all sorts of other things that had nothing to do with literature. The profit margin on books had always been modest; but items like shawls, teddy bears, scented candles, and greeting cards were marked up 100%, even 200%.

Soon enough those businesses were killed off in turn as online sales took over, monopolized by faceless companies with names like Titan and Cyclops. You could order virtually any title from them – in fact, any product whatsoever – but try talking to someone personally, like Elinore’s customers had done with her, asking for recommendations, talking about the last book they bought, or gossiping about the neighborhood.

She struggled on as her sales dwindled. Her son had pestered her to modernize the business, like replacing her archaic manual cash register with a computerized version. They read bar codes, record your sales automatically, and set up reorders for books that do well, he tried to explain to her. Later he pressed her to shut the shop altogether, saying she was losing money, that she’d be better off quitting and renting out the shop, which she’d had the good sense to buy outright years before when her lease first came due.

And he was right. Only a few niche bookshops continued to flourish, specializing in sci-fi and comic books, the occult and spiritual books, or gay books, where she heard they made more money selling sex toys and lube than books. Those were destination shops; hers was a neighborhood store dependent on locals and passers-by.

Maybe Eric’s right, she’d thought. It was getting harder for her to manage the physical labor required to run the business, unpacking shipping boxes, placing books in the lower and higher shelves. But the neighborhood had become far busier, and she was convinced she could attract a new generation of customers, although most of the newcomers living nearby were foreign students taking crash courses in English as a second language, young kids from Korea, China, Brazil, Japan, and Taiwan. They couldn’t be bothered to read any books, even in their own language. Except for graphic novels, which she had refused to stock, horrified by their minimal amount of text. Young people in general couldn’t be bothered to read more than 140 characters on their smart phones. Smart, hah! laughed Elinore when anyone mentioned smart phones. Doublespeak. Like Orwell’s 1984. Well, 1984 had come and gone and the world kept ticking on, 140 characters at a time.

—

Get up! she told herself awakening again. Get up, Elinore! But her head felt thick and heavy, like aged honey stuck in a squeeze bottle. And her shrivelled up legs didn’t want to budge an inch.

She remembered walking to the glass door to flip the sign to CLOSED. It had been time to close, wasn’t it? She remembered looking at the old brass clock on the wall, staring at it, forgetting for a moment how to read Roman numerals. Did it say four-thirty or five-thirty? She was sure she’d glanced at the time. Had the hands stopped moving? Maybe the electricity had switched off. Wait a second, she thought, I never close up.

She wanted to fall back asleep, remain lying on the floor, cold as it was, and forget the past, forget all those who’d died, forget the old shops where she’d bought her groceries: the butcher with ten kinds of smoked ham and homemade oatcakes and haggis; the cheese shop run by an old Dutchmen who gave you tips on what had freshly arrived from abroad; the baking supply store that stocked everything, even after its original English owners were replaced by East Indians. All gone.

No, I’ll never close, she told her son. She had no other reason to live – apart from Eric’s family, and they were practically strangers to her anyway. Her life centered on her shop and long-time customers, even as they too, like all the old shops, began to disappear, die off, or move into suburbs or assisted living. Hah, if you can call that living, she laughed. Her shop was now the last holdout from the past on a street filled with sushi bars, ramen restaurants, and Korean barbecue joints.

—

I absolutely must get up; no more foolishness. Will Eric check up on me? I should phone him. If I could only move my arm and pull out the cell phone from my pocket. (She’d finally given in to Eric’s plea and bought a smart phone, though she’d only used it to phone, never for the Internet or any apps. Who needs apps, she had laughed when Eric tried to explain them to her. She hated the very word, app; hated all sorts of abbreviations. What ever happened to the King’s English, she would bemoan.)

The young couple with long hair peered in again through the slats. They looked familiar. Had she seen them before? And who had boarded up her window anyway? That’s the first thing I’ll do when I get up – have those torn down.

The man and woman stood talking to each other. If I could only invite them in, Elinore thought, and offer to make them some tea, inquire about what sorts of books they like. Encourage them to drop by regularly, and take up reading real books. They were talking again. She thought she could read their lips.

“Do you remember what used to be here?” asked the young man with the ponytail. “Was it a Chinese restaurant?”

“No,” answered the woman. “I think there used to be a small bookshop here. You remember, it was called Gracie’s or Beth’s Books. Or something like that.”

“Oh, right, now I remember,” said the man. “It was called Elinore’s. But it’s been closed for months. A year or two maybe.”

“Right. Wasn’t there a fire or something?”

“Yeah. Or was it a robbery that got violent? I don’t remember. But the place has been boarded up ever since. It’ll probably get torn down. In fact, now that I think of it, someone told me a new mall is planned for the whole block.”

“Yeah, it’s impossible to remember when old buildings get torn down these days what used to be there before.”

“Who cares anyway?” said the man.

—

“Got to get up,” thought Elinore Hawkins, waking with a startle and a dry ashen taste in her mouth.