From a Bookstore's Armchair

With the ringing of the bell above the door, cold air rushed in to replace the dusty smell of books and the crashes of heavy machinery from the streets faded into the ruffling of pages.

Larimer’s, as the old wooden sign hanging out front designated, should have stood out amongst the glamour and clamor of the ever-evolving streetscape. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the rest of the world passed it by without so much as a glance. With each passing day the street grew unfamiliar; Mom and Pop shops became national chains and worn, rustic buildings made way for multistoried office complexes. Yet, an individual returning to the street years later would likely be comforted by the steadfast landmark that was Larimer’s.

The old woman, who responded to a variety of titles, including Ms. Larimer, Madam, old woman, or (by those lacking manners) “You over there”, had once thought that the dreary-eyed men in suits had finally stumbled past whatever curtain veiled her establishment, on a day left quiet by the stifling sun. Unbothered by the heat and oblivious to the pact of silence taken by the rest of the world, a gentleman in his late thirties stepped beneath the ringing bell. He talked quickly into his phone and proudly displayed his suit and watch, which Ms. Larimer guessed to be worth quite the pretty penny. He had walked in with a pace that was entirely atypical for someone walking into a used bookstore - on which Ms. Larimer was certainly the authority after forty-five years of firsthand experience - clutching a stack of papers he clearly meant to wield against her.

“Good, good. I’m glad to hear it,” the gentleman sputtered into his phone, “Alright Wilson, I’m gonna need to let ya go. Make sure Stevenson has that report on my desk by the end of the day.”

With that he hung up the phone and placed a well-practiced smile on his face that, while charming, was offset by his snakelike stare.

“Good morning, Miss” he said with an alabaster voice, “I was hoping to talk with you in regards to this lovely . . .” The man trailed off. Ms. Larimer watched him keenly as his predatory glare softened and found its way to a nearby pile of books stacked on the floor at the butt end of a shelf that rose clear towards the ceiling.

He knelt down, surprisingly unfazed by the layer of dust atop the floor, and pulled out a book which sat about a third of the way down the stack. He held the book out in front of him and then began to thumb through it with an unexpected reverence. If he felt the stare of Ms. Larimer, he made no show of it. After a moment of investigation, he stood and shuffled towards Ms. Larimer, never taking his eyes off of the pages.

“Excuse me Miss,” he said allowing his eyes to drift off the top of the page to meet Ms. Larimer’s, “how much would this one cost?”

Ms. Larimer flashed an impish smile and without bothering to look at the book responded, “Oh, why it’s your lucky day! Everything in that stack is free.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed with a smile, suggesting he had gotten away with something, “Well, thank you very much!”
With that, his eyes dropped back towards the pages and he walked out the front door at a pace which Ms. Larimer found far more appropriate for the shop.

She had not been interrupted since.

If you had asked Ms. Larimer what it was that made her shop special, how she had evaded the hounds of big business in a part of town that had fallen deep into their clutches, she would have answered with a coy smile and a shrug, or at least that was what I received when I had asked her just that.

I had stumbled my way into Larimer’s by pure serendipity. I had made the forty minute trek into the city for a meeting with the magazine I had been writing for, so that they could inform me that I no longer wrote for them.

“Don’t get me wrong, we have loved all of the pieces you’ve done for us,” said the editor to me as he absentmindedly used his fingernail to fish a poppyseed from between his teeth. “It’s just that, I’m afraid your style of writing and the content of your pieces just doesn’t quite fit with our brand going forward.” I thanked him for his time, and kindly advised he stub his toe every day for eternity. This circumstantial blend led to my staring up at a sun-bleached sign which read Larimer’s.

The glare from the sun on that cloudless day made it difficult for me to see through the windows, and the lack of description on the sign left me curious as to what I would find inside its weathered brick walls. With the title Larimer’s suggesting even the vaguest possibility of a pub, I made my way inside. The sudden assault of dust and must was not at all unpleasant when compared to the thick smells of an overcooked city.
Now, I am most certainly biased; an introverted life meant I often found solace in the private world of books and words. As such, I found myself quite excited at having stumbled upon such an archetypically rustic bookstore in a part of town deemed gentrified.

Upon entering, Ms. Larimer gave me a welcoming smile and resumed sorting through a pile of books on the desk in front of her. Glad to keep the interactions to a minimum, I gave her a nod of acknowledgment and disappeared into the shelves. One does not need be a bibliophile to find wandering amongst well-equipped bookshelves enchanting. There exists an appeal to the explorer in each of us who is too often silenced by a world already discovered. Uncovering a dusty edition of a book, first published a century ago, cracking open its weathered spine long forgotten . . . there is certainly magic in that.

So I explored, hunting for something that would catch my eye in that way which only the divine and the poets can explain. The shop seemed much larger than one would be led to believe, but perhaps it was instead an illusion created by the charming chaos of a room out of space.

After around half an hour, I looked back concerned - for but only a moment - that I would find my retreat blocked by shelves absent only a moment ago. Trapped in a Borgesian labyrinth with no thread to guide me out.

The further I wandered and with each book investigated, the more it seemed that the books were organized without any sort of system in place. I had thumbed through more than two dozen books when Ms. Larimer’s bespectacled face peaked out from around a shelf corner.
“I’m glad to see that you’re still standing, sir. Sometimes when people disappear into the shelves for too long, I get a bit anxious. I mean, in a shop like this … who knows? Trapped beneath an ill-balanced stack. Heart attack. Sucked into a book. I thought I’d better check on you just in case.”

I chuckled earnestly and thanked her for her concern.

“To be honest, getting sucked into a book right about now doesn’t sound too terrible, but no such luck just yet,” I replied. Apparently, I had not outrun my sour mood as easily as I had thought.

She gave me a pitiful look that lasted only a fraction of a second, and then reached for a book on a shelf that she had to get on her tiptoes to reach.

“Well I don’t know about that. I’m certain that your situation can’t be worse than some of the books that you’d be pulled into.”

With that she handed me a copy of the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and I immediately felt like a complete ass. Ms. Larimer seemed satisfied with this result, and then said, “I probably should have gone with something more like Marley and Me. A Holocaust book might have been a bit much to get my point across . . . Anywho, don’t be too hard on yourself, everyone’s allowed to feel sorry for themselves, just make sure it doesn’t last. Oh, and don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of books here that I would give my left arm to be sucked into.”

She turned towards a new shelf and handed me a copy of a Nicholas Spark’s novel with a man on the cover who was almost certainly named Fabio.

Ms. Larimer chuckled to herself and began to head back the way she had come only to pause and look at me from over her shoulder.

“I’ll be honest with you, Sir, most patrons find what they’re looking for much closer to the front of the shop,” she said quite simply.

In the moment it hardly seemed a strange thing to say. With that she placed a book on top of the growing stack cradled in the crook of her arm, and disappeared around the corner, leaving me in the heavy silence of overflowing shelves.

Pulled away from my exploratory revelry, I returned the book I was reading to its shelf and followed Ms Larimer to the front of the shop. It took me not even a minute to return down the path which had taken me nearly an hour to explore.

Back at the front, I found Ms. Larimer placing the stack she had been carrying on the floor near the butt end of a shelf which rose clear to the ceiling. I thought little of it, and it would not be until some time later that I found her constant replenishing of that stack of any note at all.
When she stood, she noticed my empty hands, and a slight frown rose through the lines etched in a face well-worn by cheer.

“Well darn! I’m sorry that you didn’t find what you were looking for, you’ll have to come back and try again sometime soon.”

I told her not to worry about it, that quite honestly it was the store itself that had pulled me in and that my shelves at home were filled with titles which, in the spirit of fairness, deserved my attention first. I thanked her and complimented her shop once more before I made my way for the door. Hesitant to return to a world already discovered, the sound of Larimer’s doorbell sung in the back of my mind.

I cannot say whether it was the smell of the dusty shop, or the ease with which I could disappear into its labyrinthine shelves, but there was something that pulled me back to Larimer’s time and again. Sometimes I’d wander the shelves, reading chapters of novels or pages of poetry, and other times I would simply sit in the armchair kept in the front and talk with the old woman for a while. Make no mistake, talking is the correct description for what I did with Ms. Larimer, as where I was full of random thoughts and stories, she was full of attention. Often when I would finish a story, a silence would stretch between us and then, if I was lucky, she would ask me to tell her another.

Throughout the early days of our friendship, Ms. Larimer gave me an opportunity to simply tell stories, and in all honesty to grant many of these musings the title of “story” is an undeserved generosity. She would sit through stumblings of words, careless plotholes, and mindless inconsistencies, until I wove my way to an ending more like tangled fishing line than the spider’s web I desired. Any individual who has sat through the mutterings of the unpracticed storyteller can attest that it is hardly different than listening to an individual attempting to relay the dream which is actively fleeing their memory. Yet, despite lacking the contractual duties of the proud parent or loving spouse, Ms. Larimer listened nonetheless.

I cannot tell you why she was willing to sit through these stories. Perhaps it was pity. I was hardly the shining example of success or dignity at the time, and so I truly thought that pity was the only rational conclusion. When I first began frequenting Larimer’s, I was dirt broke. I was a homeowner (which at the time was considered a sign of well-rounded maturity) but only through having been left the house by my parents. I lived there alone, and in the two years since I had moved back in had hosted only a handful of visitors, most of them friends of my parents who, in their old age, were looking for the company of conversation which I was happy to share. I had long since abandoned the dreams of my overly ambitious youth, and had settled for working as a modern-day renaissance man with medieval wages. I made money by performing an absurd variety of tasks all with passable execution. These jobs varied from selling blog posts on the internet, basic carpentry, a bit of automobile repairwork, and a few other jobs I was able to perform thanks to entirely random skills picked up in forty some years of life. In the end, it was enough to support a man who lived alone, had no rent, was fine eating rice and beans for multiple meals a week and wore the same eight-year-old pair of jeans day after day. It seemed to me that Ms. Larimer could without a doubt pick up on most of this; it was not as though I made an effort to hide it, and so it must have been out of the goodness of her heart that she was willing to sit through terrible story after terrible story.

Strangely, after two or three months of returning multiple times a week, another possibility struck me from the kinder part of my subconscious. Perhaps, Ms. Larimer, the bookstore owner, truly loved stories. Perhaps she had such a love of stories that she was able to put up with all of my misses on the chance I might tell a story worth listening to. Perhaps she knew that even in the worst story, something redeeming could be found. This revelation could not have come at a better time, as I had begun feeling that it was a bit cruel of me to keep bothering Ms. Larimer with my ineptitude. Perhaps she could tell I was losing heart or perhaps I just got lucky, but on the same day this thought crossed my mind, Ms. Larimer looked up at me after I had finished telling a story and said “Oh, I quite liked that one!” If it weren’t for that, this story, like so many of the ones I told from that leather armchair would have hardly been a story at all.

In the end, I never learned the true reason why she listened, but nonetheless she did. As we grew closer, she would, on rare occasion, make a point to briefly mention some bit of the story that she had fancied.

Perhaps she found its plot compelling, or it’s characters lovable. Maybe she found them detestable, the way that sometimes real people can be. Maybe she found it believable, as though in some other time or other place the story could really have happened. Perhaps she found a certain act heroic. Or maybe she found it’s tone nostalgic or hopeful or tragic.
Sometimes she would simply hate it for lacking any of the redemptions above along with any of the rest of her long list of redemptive qualities

That was how it went . . . I would show up at, well, who knows when, and find Ms. Larimer sorting a box of books at her desk or hear her shuffling through the shelves before a bespectacled face would peak around a corner, and say, “Oh! Well, welcome back,” as though she was entirely surprised at my return. Quickly disappearing back into the stacks and leaving me to wander before we took up our usual spots in the front of the store.

If I was there in the afternoons or on the weekends, then other customers would be wandering around the shop as we chatted.
Ya know, it’s funny, when you talk to people out in the world it seems like fewer people read books with each passing day, but when you sit in a bookshop, you struggle to believe that there is any truth in this supposition. As though for some reason, people are simply ashamed to admit that they read books, afraid that they will be criticized for having read nothing but cheap romance novels or gaudy sci-fi stories or cliche murder mysteries for the past fifteen years.

It was only the seasoned shoppers who would enter with confidence. The rest of the customers would walk in, trying to make themselves small and glance up startled by the ringing of the bell hanging above the door, unready for their presence to be betrayed. They might give us a smile or a nod before disappearing timidly behind the shelves or grabbing the first book that caught their eye and shuffling towards Ms. Larimer’s desk.

When they arrived at the desk to check-out, I noticed that Ms. Larimer would produce some idle chit-chat, but that she would never comment on their purchase. Never an “Oh, I loved this one!” or a “Have you read any of their other work?” She would simply hand the book back, wish them a pleasant day, and busy herself with something on her desk.

“A trick of the trade,” she told me once after I questioned her. “If someone wants to talk about their book, I won’t be able to stop them. If they don’t . . . well then, it’s hardly my place to press.”

These single-sentence anecdotes or lessons is how I came to learn everything that I now know about Ms. Larimer. She was a bit like a fortune cookie, if fortune cookies were not always filled with ineloquent nonsense. I told her this once, and she deprived me of fortunes for the rest of that day, which I took to mean that she did not appreciate the comparison.

We grew quite fond of each other during this routine. I had never had an audience for my stories. Or at the least, not for stories that I was fond of telling. She had not had a familiar voice to listen to for quite some time. Neither of us had much to offer, and yet we were both exactly what the other had needed.

After some time, I stopped trying to disguise my visits as a need for books, which due to the fact that I had never purchased a single tome she had begun to see through. I made up for it by bringing her a pastry from the coffee shop, which is how I learned that she was quite fond of anything with chocolate, or a fresh set of flowers for the vase she kept by the window, which is how I learned that she adored sunflowers. The other times I would simply bring myself, but she had a silent way of letting me know it was enough.

I feel that I must mention that Ms. Larimer was quite the honest critic. I fear that from my harsh self-reviews and repeated mention of Ms. Larimer’s kindness, one might believe that she put up with my stories for no reason other than company. I can assure you that this was not the case. There were plenty of occasions during which I would finish a story, perhaps a lengthy one about a trip that I had never taken to the Cape of Good Hope, throughout which she would give no sign of finding the story to be a poor one until, upon finish, she would look up at me through the tops of her glasses and say that she hadn’t liked that one in the slightest.

I can quite vividly remember the first time it happened. I had just finished telling her a story of an uncle who had once found himself trapped aboard a ship with a captain addicted to gambling. The ludomaniac would force my uncle to gamble each night, and in this particular instance practice indeed made perfect. About a week or so later they found themselves at a small port in a small foreign town; at which point, my uncle found himself forced to disembark the ship quite naked with nothing to his name, and being relatively certain that he may have even gambled a way a piece of that.

I had thought it was quite an entertaining story, but Ms. Larimer simply looked up from the stack of books she had been sorting during the tale and said that she had found that one quite egregious. She would only on rare occasion, delve into the details of her rating, so it was only through many attempts (oh so many attempts) that I began to learn just what she looked for from a story; the qualities a character needed, the twists that made her look at me with wide-eyes, or the absurdities that would bring a smile to the corner of her mouth. It is a testament to the subconscious that I picked up on these subtleties. Perhaps I owe my gratitude to some tribal instinct or some deep-rooted fear of having nothing else to offer. I, myself, have never delved deep enough into the Jungian depths of the unconscious to know, but I am most certainly grateful as it was only upon later reflection that I realized that it was through her that I learned to tell a story.

It’s a funny thing (although I’m sure that Ms. Larimer would not describe it that way) that in all my trips to Larimer’s I did not purchase a single book. Oh, I’m sure that I read a few dozen books’ worth of words, but never did I walk out of that store with anything more than the smell of dusty pages lingering on my clothes.

Ms. Larimer brought it up from time to time, but never in a way which suggested I needed to make a purchase. Just subtle statements like, “With all the books here, I’m quite shocked that you haven’t found what you’re looking for.” These were often accompanied by a coy smile and, if I was lucky, a wink. She would often direct me to a stack of books which was kept at the butt end of one of the shelves near the front, telling me that there was a title in that stack that she was quite sure I’d find enjoyable. I would kneel down inspecting each title as I quite valued Ms. Larimer’s opinion, for in all the time that I had known her, she never once steered me wrong. Sometimes I would find a book that would pique my interest or that I recalled fondly, and sit in the armchair to dive into it, placing it back on the stack before departing for the evening. She would make note, something like “Hmmm, not that one either? Well, I’m sure I’ll find you something.”

Truthfully, it is something that I will always regret. How easy it would have been to simply purchase a book.

In the end as it turned out, I had the good fortune to wander into Larimer’s almost a full three years before Ms. Larimer’s passing, and to consider her one of my closest friends for at least two and half of those. It was not necessarily unforeseen. She was an old lady and had lived a full life, and while she was “with it” until the very end, even the sharpest of us cannot outwit death forever.

Further evidence to my good fortune, I was able to spend some of her last few moments at her bedside, and this time, she did the storytelling.
She talked of her two brothers, masters of mischief in an age which pretended to be mischiefless.

She talked of the time that she fell in love with an Argentinian man, only to know the ache of a heart unfairly broken by a life lost too young.

She told me of opening the bookstore, and how she had learned that to surround oneself with knowledge and stories invites a bit of magic into your life that once found, she had been unwilling to give up.

She told a story of a man desperately trying to find a story of his own. A man who spent days wandering the shelves of both bookstores and his mind alike, yet would always walk out empty-handed.

She told me these stories and many others but all with one request, that I was not allowed to record the stories. I must only listen.

When she passed, I found myself in what I now know was a state of shock. I can’t fully explain why; I had been blessed with plenty of time to come to terms with what the future held for Ms. Larimer, but nonetheless, I was unable to process my next step. In a manic frenzy, I found myself sitting in the hospital lobby writing down everything that I could remember about Ms. Larimer on a pamphlet titled Grief Management. I wrote down the stories she told me in her final days, the story of how we had met. I wrote about the way she kept her glasses on the tip of her nose so that she would always have to point her chin up to get a clear look at anything eye level, and how giddy she got when talking about chocolate or handsome men. I failed to notice hand cramps or hunger pangs or the tears welling in my eyes, until my pen simply stopped. I stared unseeing at the paper for quite some time before acknowledging that there was nothing more. How strange to find everything you know about a person written out in front of you, and to know that anything else that they were, any other stories they had lived are lost but to the dead. I took a few shaky breaths, stood from my seat, and walked out of the fluorescent lights.

After returning home, I found I could not muster up the courage necessary to leave my house. I had unwittingly made Larimer’s my reason to travel into the city and without it, I could find no reason to go.

That held true until around three weeks after my friend’s death. I sat at my kitchen table in unwashed jeans, drinking stale coffee and sorting through two weeks of neglected mail when I found a letter letting me know that Ms. Larimer had left her shop to the only customer that she had ever had who never purchased a book. It took me another month before actually working up the nerve to step foot in the shop.

It was a sunny day, and I stood staring through the window, watching motes of dust float through a beam of sunlight funneling over my shoulder. The sound of construction helped to deafen the coward in my head begging me to flee. I took a deep, resolve-forming breath, and stepped beneath the ring of the bell.

I had never once been inside Larimer’s alone. I’m not sure what I had expected . . . perhaps books floating off shelves, or apparitions flipping pages that had held them prisoner. I found only silence and dusty shelves.

I couldn’t bear to place myself behind the desk. I was quite certain that I had not earned that, and so made my way towards my armchair instead. I suppose I was distracted. I think that was quite fair, but in spite of having walked to that armchair hundreds of times, I found myself tripping over the pile of books that was kept at the butt-end of a shelf that rose clear to the ceiling.

I knelt down to pick them up and was shocked to see that the entire stack consisted of the same book. To make things stranger still, they were quite easily the newest books that I had ever laid eyes on in Larimer’s. The title read “Short Stories from a Bookstore’s Armchair” written by . . . well, by me.

I stared dumbstruck, and cracked the spine of the one that I had picked up. On the inside cover was a handwritten note which read, “Perhaps this is the one you were looking for. That will be $14.95.” I quickly scanned through the rest of the book and found that none of the other copies contained a note.

I am hardly ashamed to admit that after a long moment of registering my shock, I burst out in a pathetic show of something between sobs and laughter. I would rather not say for how long that lasted, but when I finally found myself recovered, I sat in the armchair and read the entirety of the book.

Each story was one that I had a recollection of sitting in the bookstore’s leather armchair and reciting to Ms. Larimer, with a few edits that were to her liking. Each story, that is, until the last.

The last story was titled Larimer’s. It was about an old woman who owned an old bookshop. It was quite a short story and I had only read a few sentences when the bell above the door announced a customer’s arrival. He stuck his head in and asked if the store was open, to which I replied that it was. He gave me a grateful nod and disappeared amongst the shelves.

I turned my attention back to the final story and read the following,

Before he finishes his thought, a stack of books kept at the butt-end of a shelf that rose clear to the ceiling, catches his eye. He leans down, quite a far way, and pulls a book from the stack. Without taking his eyes from the book, he walks up to the desk and asks, “How much would this title-”

“Be?”

“Excuse me?” I stammered as the customer stood from a knee to face me.

“Um, I was just wondering how much this book would be?”

I glanced towards the stack at the butt-end of a shelf that rose clear to the ceiling and said “Oh! I’m sorry those are some books that I just hadn’t gotten around to shelv-”

I found myself stunned into silence. The customer held up a book which I had never seen before. Some old, weathered novel with gold plated letters for its title. I stood up and peered around him to get a better look at the stack and found that where only moments before there had been a stack of identical books, there now sat a stack made up of books that I had no part in writing.

A smile of disbelief spread across my face and threatened to become laughter. Instead, I looked back down to the pages of the open book on my lap, found my lines, and said,

“Oh, why it’s your lucky day! Everything in that stack is free.”