Teresa Eleanor Eagleton (teresaeagleton) wrote in watersedge, @ 2009-01-03 20:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | samantha rigby, teresa eagleton |
WHO: Samantha Rigby and Teresa Eagleton
WHAT: Bookstore loitering and perhaps some flirtation
WHERE: Times New Roman Bookstore
WHEN: Saturday morning
The Times New Roman Bookstore was Teresa's favorite place in town. She loved everything about books, new and old. The smell of them, the feel of the pages and the ink, except, of course, for the books that had been printed on that smooth, thin paper, where the ink smudged every time one happened to run her fingers across a sentence. She had several copies of John Irving books with that paper, and it was frustrating as hell to try to go back and read them again. Perhaps, now was the time to buy another copy of The World According to Garp or A Widow for One Year. They had always been her favorites until Until I Find You came out. She pulled a new copy of Widow off the shelf and opened it, sniffing the pages before looking down at it fondly. It was the part where Ruthie hid in the closet of the prostitute in the Red Light District of Amsterdam; the prostitute who pointed all of her shoes facing the room. The last time she had read this book, she had been with Elizabeth.
She closed the book but did not put it back on the shelf. It had been bookstores, like this one, that had gotten Teresa through the gross intolerance of the school board, as well as many of the people in Lake Flannery Township during the whole ordeal surrounding her retirement. She could enter a bookstore and disappear from the world for a few hours. She used to talk to the old manager about everyone from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Leonard Cohen and Kurt Vonnegut. But around a year ago, he had been replaced by a new manager, Samantha Rigby, who Teresa could only describe as drop dead gorgeous. Teresa was a little intimidated by her, yet since Samantha had started working there, she had found another reason to hang around so often. She decided to bite the bullet and just go over and talk to her. Since when had Teresa ever been shy? She was being ridiculous. She was a fifty three year old woman. She should be able to conduct herself like a grown-up, not stalk around like a seventeen year old girl with a school crush.
"Excuse me?" she asked, approaching Samantha. "Do you have Joseph O'Neill's Netherland? I hear that Michicko Kakutani calls it the new Great Gatsby."