Critical Thinking - The Bookstore

The white, square building sat under the ancient oak tree with all the grace of an over-grown utility shed. Inside, fans futility circulated the dim, hot air. Racks and shelves ran the length of the room, holding tightly to nursing books, rubber finger-tips, and cigarettes. In the back office, the bookkeeper hummed to herself. A clerk straightened the magazines, slipping out the “Women’s Day” to read later. And behind the desk stood the third Musketeer. Late forties/early fifties; five-foot-four; dark hair rapidly showing its inevitable progression to bright white; pale blue eyes peering out of black, sharp-rimmed glasses. Eyes that could cut you to shreds one minute and claim you as her own the next. Margaret May Fitzgerald. My grandmother.

Peggy started working at “The U,” as she called it, long before I was born. She took no guff from anyone. She sparred with priests, supported a nun in following her heart to leave her orders, and “adopted” half the male students that walked through the door. One of whom arranged the flowers for my wedding and, later, her funeral. She was a life-long Protestant who fiercely defended her Catholic friends. On one occasion, she took the purchase of a student who hailed from a culture that didn’t respect women as much as she would have liked. She rang up his items and told him the total. He removed the money from his wallet and threw it on the ground behind the counter. She calmly picked it up, made change, and threw his coins on the floor beside him. That was the only time he ever gave her any problems.

During the busy seasons, she called on her family to help out. Mom and her sister both worked there. And I remember a story my dad told me, about how he opened a box of textbooks with a box knife. But the shipper hadn’t packed the books properly. They weren’t stacked in columns with a protective piece of cardboard on top—they were lined, spine-up. I don’t know how many spines he cut through, or what exactly grandma said to him, but he walked around her gingerly their whole lives.

Mom would bring us to that dark, dusty, austere room. I remember sitting in that back office, on top of the safe, entertaining Betty and Dorothy—the other two grande dames of the bookstore. Even then, I don’t think I could tell them apart by name, just by their roles. One was the “Cookie Bear” and gave us cookies. The other was the “Cookie Monster” and tried to steal them away.

Peggy retired shortly after, and our visits came to a standstill. The old, square, white building was replaced by the expansive Pilot House, complete with a restaurant, campus security offices, and a large lobby. I didn’t enter again until August of 1988.

From the time I was very small, I had three goals. I was going to live with gramma and grampa. I was going to the University of Portland. And I was going to work at Buster Brown shoes in Janzten Beach. Buster Brown was long gone by the time I was of working age, but I made the other two.

When I signed up for the work-study program, and they asked me where I wanted to work, it seemed like a no-brainer. I showed up during the Rush, the busiest time of year. Dorothy and Betty were still there—and I still couldn’t tell them apart—as was the safe. Everything else was different. The dark, cramped room had been replaced by tall ceilings, plenty of light—a fireplace, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t much like running the cash register, but I loved unloading books from their cardboard carriers, stamping the prices onto the first page with charcoal, and making neat stacks on the shelves. Everything else intimidated me—the established employees, the manager with his frustrated, New York sigh, and all the people. People everywhere—students searching for books, parents looking for clothes, instructors demanding to know where their orders were. Over all, however, was the sense that more than the employees or the manager, certainly more than the students, and even, perhaps, more than the long-standing professors, this bookstore was mine.

Yeah, that lasted until the Rush was over and the manager didn’t need me anymore.

But I was back for good at the end of the semester. They’d changed the desks around, the manager was always re-arranging, and I didn’t like it. Yet another alteration to a place that I didn’t think needed it. Over the next two-and-a-half years, I learned the ropes well enough. When to vacuum, how to do returns (which I still hold is the reason my signature is so illegible), which regular insisted on the unfiltered cigarettes and which took only the Marlboro hardpack.

I learned that teachers’ summer conference attendees were annoying. And that they apparently come from places without clean tap water. Truck drivers liked delivering there because the good looking co-eds helped unload the boxes. Working on a Tuesday was a great way out of wearing the ROTC uniform until class. And that Betty is the bottle-blonde with cracked hands from years of shuffling paper who vacations in Alaska and Antarctica, while Dorothy orders the candy, buys us Mint Milanos every Friday, and reads “Women’s Day” the moment the new magazines come in.

I was there the day another clerk spilled her cup of coffee on a pile of freshly-unpacked sweatshirts—while a district supervisor was talking with the manager. And I was there when the manager, horrified, found “The Kama-Sutra Pop-Up Book” in the boxes of trade books the company regularly sent for us to unload from their inventory. And one Saturday, just once, when a soccer game caused an unexpected throng to clean us out of snacks, I got the combination to the safe to dig out some quarters.

I have explained, countless times, why used books don’t earn much money back (it depends on if the professor ordered it again for the next semester, if the publisher has a new edition, if the moon is properly aligned with Betelguese…). I have lamented over the price of engineering paper—until I found out the manager took a loss on every package. And I, perhaps single-handedly, kept Dorothy’s supply of king-sized Mr. Goodbars from stagnating on the shelf.

There was something about the place in winter. You’d take your breaks in front of that fireplace, drinking something hot from the Cove and sneaking chapters from a trade book off the rack. It was comforting to know my world extended beyond the Engineering Building and the ROTC rooms in the basement of Kenna Hall. More than those, more than the brick carved with my great-uncle’s name set in the WWII memorial, this place had history for me. Even with the new building filled with plaid flannel boxers and Salvador Dali prints.

The bookstore was the last place I saw my grandfather alive. He and grandma came in to see me, having just returned from a trip. He hugged me. Three days later, he was dead of a massive heart attack. I moved back in with grandma within a week.

I agonized over the decision to quit. Unlike many students, I lived in the neighborhood year-round and kept my job over the summers. But my grades were horrid and, living with my grandma two blocks away, I didn’t really need the money. I told the manager I’d be back for Christmas break. When I returned, three months later, he simply said, “I don’t think we need you.” My heart was broken.

Four years later, I married Tom. He’d spent summers working at the campus bookstore in his hometown. At the time, his dad worked there, and his mom filled in during Rush. Strange to meet a family just as familiar with Missouri Book Services and Yellow trucking as much as I was.

Grandma died several years ago, but we went back to Portland this summer to see my brother and some friends. We carved out time to show the Creature my school and stopped by the bookstore. I got a blue sweatshirt, Tom got some golf balls. The Creature picked out his own calculator. They’ve expanded the store into the lobby of the Pilot House. Everything was rearranged. Betty and Dorothy have long since retired. Even the safe is gone. I read it’s now in a museum in the basement of one of the dorms.

Not that I would want them to go back to that squat, white, square building with the dim fluorescent lights and the useless fans—I do like the fireplace. I just wished they’d asked us.

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Kersley Fitzgerald is a wanna-be writer in Colorado Springs. At the occasion of this typing, her husband is registering her son for a third year of baseball. Kersley isn't sure how she feels about this. While she appreciates not falling into the genre of "soccer-mom," her alma mater is known for its soccer program, not having a football team for the last sixty years.