This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (25 page)

State of Wonder
was my sixth novel and eighth book, and while I've been on many book tours, this one brought with it an entirely new sense of purpose. I was going out to bookstores to read and sign, sure, but I was also there to learn. I wanted to know how many square feet each store had, and how many part-time employees, and where they got those good-looking greeting cards. Booksellers do not guard their best secrets: they are a generous tribe and were quick to welcome me into their fold and to give me advice. I was told to hang merchandise from the ceiling whenever possible, because people long to buy whatever requires a ladder to cut it down. The children's section should always be in a back corner of the store, so that when parents inevitably wandered off and started reading, their offspring could be caught before they busted out of the store. I received advice about bookkeeping, bonuses, staff recommendations, and websites.

While I was flying from city to city, Karen was driving around the South in a U-haul, buying up shelving at rock-bottom prices from various Borders stores that were liquidating. I had written one check before I left, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I kept asking if she needed more money. No, she didn't need more money.

At the end of the summer, Karen and I finally settled on a former tanning salon a few doors down from a doughnut shop and a nail emporium. Unlike the property managers we had encountered earlier in our quest, the one responsible for this location was a business-savvy Buddhist who felt a bookstore would lend class to his L-shaped strip mall, and to this end was willing to foot the bill to have the tile floors chipped out. The space was long and deep, with ceilings that were too high for us to ever dream of hanging things from. The tanning beds were carted away, but the sign over the door stayed up for a ridiculously long time: TAN 2000. I went to Australia on yet another leg of my book tour, leaving all the work on Karen's head.

The word had spread to the Southern Hemisphere. In Australia, all anyone wanted to talk about was the bookstore. Journalists were calling from Germany and India, wanting to talk about the bookstore. Every interview started off the same way: Hadn't I heard the news? Had no one thought to tell me? Bookstores were over. Then, one by one, the interviewers recounted the details of their own favorite stores, and I listened. They told me, confidentially and off the record, that they thought I just might succeed.

I was starting to understand the role the interviews would play in that success. In my thirties, I had paid my rent by writing for fashion magazines. I found
Elle
to be the most baffling because its editors insisted on identifying trends. Since most fashion magazines “closed” (industry jargon for the point at which the pages are shipped to the printing plant) three months before they hit the newsstands, the identification of trends, especially from Nashville, required an act of near clairvoyance. Eventually, I realized what everyone in fashion already knew: a trend is whatever you call a trend.
This spring in Paris, fashionistas will wear fishbowls on their heads.
In my hotel room in Australia, this insight came back to me more as a vision than as a memory. “The small independent bookstore is coming back,” I told reporters in Berlin and Bangladesh. “It's part of a trend.”

My act was on the road, and with every performance I tweaked the script, hammering out the details as I proclaimed them to strangers: all things happen in a cycle, I explained—the little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore. Seeing the potential for profit, the superstore chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased. I promised whomever was listening that from those very ashes the small independent bookstore would rise again.

What about the e-books, the journalists wanted to know. How can you survive the e-books?

And so I told them—I care
that
you read, not
how
you read. Most independent bookstores, and certainly Barnes & Noble, are capable of selling e-books through their websites, and those e-books can be downloaded onto any e-reader except for Amazon's Kindle, which worked only for Amazon purchases. So you can support a bookstore in your community and still read a book on your iPad.

Say it enough times and it will be true.

Build it and they will come.

In Melbourne, I gave a reading with Jonathan Franzen. I asked him if he would come to the bookstore. Sure, he said, he'd like to do that. Down in the Antipodes, my mind began to flip through my Rolodex. I know a lot of writers.

M
eanwhile, back in Nashville, Karen and Mary Grey had hired a staff, and together they washed the warehoused Borders bookshelves again and again while they waited for the paint to dry and the new flooring to arrive. In a burst of optimism, we had hoped to open October 1st. Lights were still missing when we finally did open on November 15th. We had forgotten to get cash for the cash register, and I ran to the bank with my checkbook. That morning, the
New York Times
ran a story about the opening of Parnassus, along with a photo of me, on page A1.

Imagine a group of highly paid consultants crowded into the offices of my publisher, HarperCollins. Their job is to try and figure out how to get a picture of a literary novelist (me, say) on the front page of the
Times
. “She could kill someone,” one consultant suggests. The other consultants shake their heads. “It would have to be someone very famous,” another says. “Could she hijack a busload of school children, or maybe restructure the New York public school system?” They sigh. It would not be enough. They run down a list of crimes, stunts, and heroically good deeds, but none of them are Page One material. I can promise you this: kept in that room for all eternity, they would not have landed on the idea that opening a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot bookstore in Nashville would do the trick.

The bookstore that does in fact open in Nashville is so beautiful I can't even make sense of it. While I've spent the summer talking, Karen has taken her dreams out of the air. She has made the ideal bookstore of her own imagination into a place where you can actually come and buy books. I realize now my business partner is something of a novelist herself. She attended to the most tedious details, and then went on to make a work of art. Through every color choice, every cabinet, every twinkling hanging star, she had conjured a world that was worth inexpressibly more than the sum of its dazzling parts, the kind of bookstore children will remember when they are old themselves. Parnassus, I could finally see, was perfectly named, as she had known all along it would be. Every time I walk through the door I think, Karen was the one person I met who wanted to open a bookstore, and how did I have the sense upon meeting her to sign on for life?

On opening day, National Public Radio wanted an interview from the store. They wanted background noise, but too many people made too much background noise and we had to retreat to the back corner of the storage room. Then
CBS This Morning
called at four o'clock that afternoon. I would have to get on a plane in the next two hours to be on CBS in the morning. When we had our grand opening the following Saturday, an all-day extravaganza that stretched from early-morning puppet shows to late-night wine and cheese, an estimated three thousand Nashvillians came through the store, devouring books like locusts sweeping through a field of summer wheat. All of us who worked there (not a number I normally include myself in, but in this case I was among them) had waited so long for customers that once they finally came we could not stop telling them what we wanted them to read. One more joy I had failed to consider: that I can talk strangers into reading books that I love. The shelves we had so recently washed and dried and loaded down were startlingly empty. Karen kept running back to the office to order yet more books, while I kept climbing onto a bench to make yet another speech. Every local television news program came, every local newspaper, along with
People
magazine. I was interviewed so many times a person walking past the window of our bookstore on his way to the Donut Den might think that we had won the Derby, or cured cancer, or found a portal to the South Pole.

“You know,” I had told Karen early on, “you're going to wind up doing all the work and I'm going to get all the credit. That could get really annoying.”

But she didn't seem annoyed, either by the abstract concept or, later, by the omnipresent and unavoidable reality. “You just do your job,” she told me. “I'll do mine.”

My job has become something I could never have imagined, and while it surely benefits Parnassus, Parnassus is not exactly the point. Without ever knowing that such a position existed, let alone that it might be available, I have inadvertently become the spokesperson for independent bookstores. People still want books; I've got the numbers to prove it. I imagine they remember the bookstores of their own youth with the same tenderness that I remember mine. They are lined up outside most mornings when we open our doors because, I think, they have learned through this journey we've all been on that the lowest price is not always the best value. Parnassus Books creates jobs in our community and contributes to the tax base. We've made a place to bring children to learn and to play, and to think those two things are one and the same. We have a piano. We have a dachshund. We have authors who come and read, and you can ask them questions, and they will sign your book. The business model may be antiquated, but it's the one that I like, and so far it's the one that's working.

And maybe it's working because I'm an author, and maybe it's working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions; the people can make them by how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.

(
Atlantic Monthly
, November 2012)

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

M
Y GRANDMOTHER WAS
a good Scrabble player, and a patient one. She would play with me after school when I was ten and eleven and twelve. I was a bad speller and she was always working to improve my skills.

“DRAIN,” I said, and put my tiles down.

She thought about it for a minute. “I don't like the word
drain
,” she said. “How many points?” Scrabble was, after all, a lesson in simple arithmetic as well.

“Why don't you like drains?” I asked, though I was already picturing things clogged in the sink, toothpaste and hair.

“It used to be my name,” she said. “When I was married before.”

Children have a real failure of imagination when it comes to thinking of the adults in their lives as having done anything of interest, anything at all, in the time known as
before
. My grandmother told me the story, trimmed for an eleven-year-old sensibility: she and John Drain were married for ten months. They lived in Kansas. When she went home to Ogden to take care of her sick mother, John Drain did not remain unoccupied for the two weeks of her absence. “You didn't love me enough to stay home with me,” he said. Soon thereafter, a petition was filed for divorce.

“When I went into the lawyer's office, the lawyer shook my hand and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Drain,' ” my grandmother said. “And when I left his office, he shook my hand again and said, ‘Goodbye, Miss Nelson.' ”

I went home later that evening and broke the news to my mother: her mother had been married before. My mother said she already knew this.

While I hadn't known the story about my grandmother's first marriage, I knew the one about her father's first marriage by heart. My grandmother's father, Rasmus Nelson, had had a wife and two sons back in Denmark. He came to this country and settled in Kansas to work as a blacksmith. He worked and saved for years until he had enough to send for his family, and when he did, he wrote to his wife and told her to come. His wife wrote back to say she wanted to move to Kansas, very much, but first she had to tell him that she had three sons now.

The invitation was rescinded.

Sad as it was, that wasn't the part that kept me up at night. My grandmother remembered that once a young man with yellow hair and blue eyes came to Ogden, Kansas, looking for his father, and that his father—my great-grandfather—refused to see him. That pale young man who had done nothing wrong came all the way from Denmark to find his father and was, in Ogden, denied. “What was his name?” I asked (this was a story I insisted on hearing many times, as opposed to the one about John Drain, which I left alone). But my grandmother was just a little girl at the time and she hadn't thought to ask her brother's name.

This is just to say that without doing a moment's work in genealogy, I know that a minimum of four generations of my family have failed at marriage. On my father's side, six out of the seven Patchett children, my aunts and uncles, married, and five of them divorced. My sister and I have both divorced. Our parents divorced when I was four. I have many memories from early childhood, and though there are plenty of scenes in which both of my parents are present, I was too young to understand that they were married. They simply existed in the same house to take care of us. The explanation of what marriage was, and that it was over, all came in a single afternoon.

“T
ell the story of your marriage,” my young friend Niki says to me. “Write down how it is you have a happy marriage.” But the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale—the German kind, unsweetened by Disney. It is a story of children wandering alone through a dark forest, past shadowy animals with razor teeth and yellow eyes, towards an accident that is punishable by years and years of sleep. It is an unpleasant business, even if it ends in love. I am setting out to tell the story of a happy marriage, my marriage, which does not end in divorce, but every single thing about it starts there. Divorce is the history lesson, that thing that must be remembered in order not to be repeated. Divorce is the rock upon which this church is built.

A
fter my parents divorced, my mother moved my sister and me from California to Tennessee. We were going to Tennessee because Mike had moved there and she was dating Mike, that much we knew, but once we arrived that relationship seemed difficult. We relocated several times before landing in a tiny tract house in the unfashionable town of Murfreesboro, outside of Nashville. One night my mother and Mike came home from dinner and announced that they were married, which, much to our horror, seemed to mean he wasn't going home. Several months later, I came in from playing to find a boy a few years older than I was in the kitchen. I told him to get out of my house and then he told me to get out of his house. That was how I discovered I had four stepsiblings. That was how my stepbrother Mikey discovered his father had remarried. I can only assume those books about how to discuss divorce and remarriage with your children had not yet been written, or that no one in this time-strapped, cash-strapped family consisting now of six children had the resources to go to the bookstore.

My father and his second wife, Jerri, seemed to have a happy marriage out in California with no additional children, but we only saw them one week a year. My sister and I adored Jerri and her mother, Dorothy. The house they lived in together was the site of some of my happiest childhood memories. One day before Jerri and my father were married, during our annual visit, I found Jerri with her sewing machine set up in the living room, making a dress. By what I could tell from the picture on the front of the pattern, it was a wonderful dress. “What's it for?” I asked.

“The wedding,” she said.

“Whose wedding?” Jerri wasn't looking at me, she was pushing the gossamer fabric through the machine.

“My wedding,” she said.

At that point I burst into tears, begging her not to get married, to wait, please wait, because sooner or later my father was bound to marry her. Which he was. He had just neglected to tell us.

The marriage of my father and stepmother, however appealing, was beside the point. It was the marriage of my mother and stepfather that I grew up in. They were together in some fashion, though not always married, from the time I was five until I was twenty-five. Mike also had a first wife, JoAnn, whom he had left behind in Los Angeles along with four children, ages eight, six, four, and eighteen months (the aforementioned Mikey being the oldest). I once asked Mike why he had divorced JoAnn, and he told me that she was a terrible housekeeper. Maybe that's as good a story as any to tell a kid why you left your wife. The truth would have been inappropriate, and the excuse could also serve as a cautionary tale since I wasn't the neatest child in the world. Still, I am ashamed to say it was many, many years before I woke up and thought,
Wait a minute! She had four children and she was
messy?

Back at our house, there was a constant complaint about the alimony and child-support checks that had to be written, and that dialogue kept this first family present in our daily lives. Mike's children, who came from the West Coast twice a year to spend summers and Christmases with us, went to public schools, lived in a small, battered house in the San Fernando Valley, and had very little in the way of niceties. My sister and I went to Catholic school, had better clothes, and were brought along on the occasional vacation. When we moved to the country, my sister had her own horse and I had my own pig. We also had to live full-time within the walls of the second marriage, so that I imagine if you sat the six of us down now, the four Glasscock children and the two Patchetts, none of us would be able to say for certain who had really gotten the short end of the stick.

I don't think that anyone, not even the two principal players, thought this second marriage was going to work. It had the sharp smell of insanity from the get-go. There were fights and splits, reconciliations, intractable depression, and a large stash of firearms. Fidelity was not the order of the day. My mother was willing to put up with a lot, but she was not willing to be twice-divorced. That, she told me later, was her own personal line in the sand. Even when she and Mike did finally manage to divorce, they began to date each other again and then became engaged, complete with diamond ring. In fact, they were engaged when I got engaged, and stood together at my wedding, even though a few months after that they were done with each other for good.

This story would be more neatly convincing if it were about my mother marrying a crazy man she should have divorced right away, but nothing is ever as simple as that. My stepfather was crazy in those days, he'd be the first person to tell you, but his craziness was closely linked to his appeal. He was also an extremely successful surgeon, and despite the burden of six children and two wives he did not stay poor for long. He flew a helicopter that he landed at the hangar he'd built in the front yard. He bought racehorses and drilled for oil and lost piles of money on both endeavors. He tried his hand at novel writing, sculpture, ironworking, tennis, fencing. He built a houseboat. Of his many interests and many children, I was his favorite. He sent me to college. He was furious with me when I said I wanted to put myself through graduate school, because he didn't want me to have to worry about money. More than twenty years after he and my mother finally parted company, he and I are still very close. “Who is this wonderful man?” my stepsister, Tina, likes to say. “And what has he done with my father?”

My mother, for her part, was overly beautiful, and if you don't think excessive beauty is a problem you should try living with it for a while. The bag boys at the grocery store tried to kiss her at the car. She couldn't have her phone number printed on her checks. People came to our table in restaurants to comment on her beauty; people let her go to the front of the line at the bank. Along with her looks came an overly sensitive nature that made people want to both protect her and run away with her. She did very little to try to put out the many fires that were started in her wake. When I first read
The Iliad
in high school I had a better understanding of my life: my mother was Helen of Troy.

I don't blame my mother and father for getting divorced, nor do I blame my mother and stepfather. But I had about as much coaching on how to conduct a happy union as a rattlesnake. I had two best friends through junior high and high school; both had parents who divorced and both were in the custody of their fathers, which, given the fact that these two divorces took place in the 1970s, speaks volumes as to how bad things were at home. We weren't the products of our parents' happy marriages; we were the flotsam of their divorces. In the house of my mother and stepfather, my sister and I were the spoils of war. I was still in high school when I decided I didn't want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.

This is not to say that people who have watched their parents perfect the craft of divorce will necessarily divorce themselves, any more than the offspring of happy marriages will necessarily wind up being happily married. As evidence, read the wonderful companion memoirs of Geoffrey Wolff (
The Duke of Deception
) and his younger brother Tobias Wolff (
This Boy's Life
). When their parents divorced, their father got Geoffrey and their mother got Toby. The boys were raised in their parents' very different and equally disastrous second marriages, yet both boys grew up and married well. The Wolff brothers, with no discernible examples to draw upon, proved themselves wonderful husbands and fathers. They figured out the skill set for decency and commitment on their own. Clearly, we are not all ruined, and if we are, at some point it becomes our own responsibility.

Which brings me to my first marriage: not the happy one we have come to discuss, but the other one. I would like to wrench it out of the narrative but it will not be budged. Even though it appears that this is a wedding feast and should therefore mark the end of the tale, we're only just getting started. We are, in fact, still alone in the forest of the blinking yellow eyes.

Dennis and I met at the beginning of graduate school. I had a crush on him and so I invited him to my house for brunch. Because I didn't want it to look like I was asking him on a date, I cleverly invited a smart, pretty girl named Julie whom I had also met on the first day of school. Dennis left the brunch with Julie, and for a time they were happy together. Many months later, when they ceased to be happy together, he started going out with me. I moved into his small garage apartment during our second year. Thanks to twelve years of Catholic girls' school and four more at a practically all-women's college, thanks to my own nervousness about matters regarding men and women, my experience going into the first serious romantic relationship of my life was close to nil. If this were a deposition, I would like the record to state that I didn't know any better, and the things I thought I knew were just cataclysmically wrong. For example, I could see no end of good things in Dennis; he just couldn't see those things in himself. I knew that he was funny and smart and talented, even though he often came across as angry. If I could show him what a wonderful person he really was, I could introduce his fine qualities to the world. All he needed was a little fixing, and I was just the person for the job.

It was as if I had been born before Freud. I existed in a world without psychology, and by psychology I'm not talking about therapy or analysis (both of which were big elements in the marriage of my mother and stepfather but were not services extended to the children of the house); I'm talking about the very simplest levels of self-awareness that can be picked up from an hour of
Oprah
or a few articles in women's magazines. There are women who want to be saved (charming prince, big white horse), and women who want to do the saving (Beauty, Beast). If these archetypes go all the way back to fairy-tale land, then it's safe to say I wasn't breaking new ground. I thought that men were like houses, that you could buy one on the cheap that had potential and just fix it up, and that fixing it up was actually better than getting a house that was already good because then you could make it just the way you wanted it. In short, I was an idiot, but I was also twenty-two years old. I was pretty and good-natured. I worked hard at everything I did. I should have been treasured for those things alone, which was not the case. I was not treasured, not one bit.