Read Online The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler - Free Book Online Page B

and said to her—to rile her, to flirt with her?—that she was gay because she hadn’t met the right man yet. She stared straight at him and said, “I don’t like dicks,” and that was the end of a wonderful relationship.
    “I haven’t,” I say. “Mitchell—though—everything is over with Mitchell. I was going to tell him; I thought he had a right to know. But when I met him, I didn’t have the chance to tell him before he dumped me. He said that he liked me, but that the sex wasn’t all that great. So I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t see the point except to abase myself.”
    Stella opens her hands, to show that everything I am doing is obvious and obviously wrong. “You get pregnant, you are about to tell Mitchell—why are you about to tell him? Because he might be delighted? Because he might put you on his white charger andride off up Madison Avenue with you? But what he actually does is dump you without knowing about it—and the next thing you do is call the clinic? Stay still for a second, and think about what you want, from this point. Not because of what has happened, but because of how you want the future to look. You have to have time to see it and feel it. You have to stop, and you have to look.”
    “I am stopping, and I am looking,” I say.
    “Okay. But really stop, really look. We all spend so much time reacting—”
    I shrug again. “Of course. Things happen, and we react.”
    “Mitchell being an asshole and Mitchell being the father of your baby are two different things. And another different thing is that you are pregnant.”
    “I didn’t mean for it to happen . It was one time. I don’t want to change my whole life because of some guy’s— whim .”
    “Yes, but that’s what I mean, that’s a reaction to Mitchell. You need to react to the pregnancy .”
    “Stella, are you a secret pro-lifer?”
    “You are not listening; I am talking about choice. I am talking about choice in the most profound way. Be still. Be quiet. And then decide.”
    “I am not sure that there is a choice, or that there are ever choices. Everything that has happened leads up to the next thing. It can look like a choice, but the way we fall is always determined by what went before. So we can’t choose.”
    Stella is shaking her head. “Someone says that about photographs—about how the circumstances that lead to the shutter clicking mean that the photograph is a sum of all the events before it. But I don’t believe it—it sounds great, it’s really top-notch philosophical bullshit. But you do have a choice.”
    “Yes,” I say.
    She nods, and stands for a moment, considering me. “If you want to know, I think the whole business of this, all the guilt that you’re suddenly in the middle of, is, is . . .” She gives me a rueful smile, and then, with her head at a cutesy angle, says, in a singsongvoice, “A bourgeois social construct, imposed on us by men and internalized by us in the worst way.”
    I am quiet. The thick blue line isn’t a bourgeois social construct.
    “Aristotle didn’t have a problem with abortion,” she says.
    “Oh, well, good. That’s a comfort,” I say. There’s no point asking how she knows this. Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.
    “He thought it took time for the soul to get into the body.”
    “Well, if he’s right, all the more reason to take the cancellation,” I say. I say “cancellation” on purpose, to brutalize myself.
    Stella’s shoulders suddenly go down. She walks to me, and puts her hand on my arm. “I’ll go with you,” she says. “I will.”
    I feel hot quick tears come, and try to stop them. “Are you going to bring your camera?” I say.
    She looks how I feel. “I’ll restrain myself,” she says.
    She strides away back to the counter, and pours the strong black