Sorry I'm Late - I think you should move to Scotland and take a lover
and I'll just hug this water bottle
A group of Germans came into the bookshop last week. I was in the middle of photographing a pumpkin spice latte next to a book of autumn poems (for the bookstore’s Instagram – not for my own extraneous personal tweeness, though I mean, I would) when they came inside from the rain.
I had asked Lottie to make the coffee, because she’s the best at latte art, and she must’ve nailed it because the Germans ordered three pumpkin spice lattes, an espresso and a hot chocolate while they browsed the books.
One of the Germans, a guy in his twenties, slid a greeting card across the counter and said quietly, “Can I buy this quickly? So my girlfriend doesn’t see?” His head tilted towards a woman with dark hair and glasses in the back of the store.
This happens a lot – these secret purchases while a beloved browses. I love being part of the surprise.
I rang up his card and glanced down quickly, curious to see what romantic message it conveyed.
It was a birthday card with an elephant holding a balloon that says, “You’re 4!”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………?
I cannot make this make sense, no matter how hard I try. She really likes elephants? This is how Germans celebrate anniversaries? Her pet elephant turned 4?
Or was he merely buying this birthday card for a love child he has with another woman, in which case that makes a lot of sense. He better hide this from his girlfriend forever.
Lottie, my fellow bookseller for the day, sat at the table in the front of the bookshop to take her lunch. Legs crossed and one elbow propped up on the table holding her book, Lottie always finishes lunch by eating an apple.
I sat at the register, talking to another person in the German group. Apparently, they’re from Munich but now live in Denmark. He told me how they much prefer Denmark to Germany. “Work-life balance. Better healthcare.” I told them about how I had just visited our Dutch friends in Germany and how our Dutch friends much prefer Germany to the Netherlands. “Beer garden culture, lots of great hiking spots.”
(So if the Dutch prefer Germany and the Germans prefer Denmark, where do the Danish prefer? Or is Denmark just peak life quality, as is declared yearly in every happiness survey? Can Helen Russell please advise?)
The German girlfriend bought Lessons in Chemistry and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – she asked me to pick one for her but I couldn’t choose, so she got both, which is the correct choice. Then the Germans left, but not before one declared the bookshop “super-cute” in his German accent, something that I cannot stop saying in the same tone.
“You’re very chatty today,” Lottie said, taking a big bite of her apple.
Lottie looks so much Audrey Hepburn and has long hazel-brown hair and bangs. With delicate features and slim limbs, she looks 19, but is 31. I can’t imagine a future where she doesn’t always look 19. Today she wore a white t-shirt tucked into a mid-length plaid skirt and Mary Jane shoes.
Her mother runs a different independent bookshop in London, and Lottie reads on average one book a day. She illustrates children’s books – her sketchbooks full of chubby adorable children with oversized red scarves, fuzzy baby seals, sleepy polar bears dreaming under the stars. I’ve seen her unfasten the navy blue ribbon around a box of fancy books and then tie it into her hair while humming, like she was actual Cinderella.
It sounds like I made her up, doesn’t it? But I can assure you I have not. Why? Because Lottie is mean! And I would not have thought to imagine her that way. I would have had her say things like, “Do you want to see the fairies that live in my garden?” or “Do you want to borrow my skirt and be best friends?”
I once brought a coffee into the bookshop and she said, “Isn’t it stupid to bring a coffee into a place where you can get coffee for free?” She continued stacking books in her magenta dungarees.
Did it sting more because she said it in a posh British accent?
It did.
Lottie has an Irish boyfriend, and I asked to see a photo of him.
“It doesn’t really matter what he looks like, because he’s Irish. I love his accent,” she said. She glanced up from her book, thoughtfully.
“I like all accents.” She looked at me.
“Except American.”
I mean, she didn’t have to tell me that American accents aren’t charming. Why do you think I live in the UK, Lottie? (I’ve written about this a lot over the years.)
It begs the question: if Americans like British accents, and the British like Irish accents, what accents do the Irish like?
“French,” says Lottie.
I text my college best friend, Rachel, who lives in Paris, “What accents do French people like?”
She replies, “I only know of all the accents they hate … if fact I can’t think of a single accent they like more than their own.”
On a sweltering hot day during the summer, we were trying to subtly usher customers out of the shop so we could close the bookshop. I asked Lottie if we should close the blinds on the large storefront window, because the sun was blazing down on them. She glanced at the customers and said, “Leave it. If they burn, they’ll leave faster.”
But then she laughed and closed the blinds.
Maybe calling Lottie “mean” isn’t correct, though Rebecca agrees that she can be "savage.” I now just think Lottie exerts strong “oldest sister” vibes, with her unwavering frankness, but is actually secretly nice. She’s always ordering in books for her boyfriend or her mom or her sister (everyone who works at the bookshop has the same love language: giving books). I’ve also noticed that when a small child comes into the shop, Lottie’s cold exterior melts. I hear her saying “Awww,” an awful lot to crying babies.
And she can lose her cool sometimes: one time the actress Elizabeth Debicki came into the bookshop, and Lottie was so flustered helping her that she smacked her head on a shelf.
Anyway, sometimes I wonder if Lottie is only “savage” on Mondays, the day we work together. Maybe she’s a delight the rest of the week.
Even here at the bookshop, the good place, Mondays are still worse than other days. Customers are slightly grumpier, we’re tired, deliveries are messed up, things just go wrong. We also have to haul the big recycling bin down the cobblestone alley, a task Lottie and I both hate and are constantly trying to talk the other one into doing.
On this particular Monday, I was re-arranging the cookbooks and found myself saying, “I HATE YOU!” over and over again to a book about fancy toast that kept falling over.
A bunch of bookmarks and key chains arrived. They were all very sweet designs, like labradors or owls and then there was this one in the mix:
Why would even the biggest phallus enthusiast want this on their keychain? And who is this nude man waving at? Where is he off to? And yet…and yet, they sell.
Maybe you read last week’s dispatch from the bookshop, and I’m here to tell you that if I feel like I’m the accidental mother to twenty-somethings Cara and Rebecca even though I’m only in my thirties, then Lottie is my aloof eldest daughter, who still needs me but doesn’t want to hang out with me.
One day she comes into the bookshop and is wincing every time she leans over, so I ask her what’s wrong. She tells me she feels a weird pain in the left side of her hip.
“Like your liver hurts, if that’s where your liver actually was?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Like someone’s stabbing you with a dull butter knife every fifteen minutes, but only on your left side?”
“Yes.”
“Like your ovaries are sporadically crying out?”
“Yes.”
I tell her I think it’s probably ovulation pain, something called Mittleschmerz, and that it should go away in a few days, and it does. On another day, I see her studying her phone and it turns out to be results from a recent blood test. She finally relents and lets me see the results.
“Omigod, your folate levels are abysmal!”
“What even is folate?!”
“I don’t know but yours is LOW. And your iron."
Lottie always drank out of the same single-use plastic bottle from Itsu, and it slowly drove me crazy. I couldn’t help ranting about chemicals leaching out of flimsy plastic until I realise that by becoming the mother at the bookshop, I have actually become my own father.
And then one day, Lottie sends me a photo. It’s of her grimacing but posing with the stainless steel water bottle that I’ve been trying to get her to buy for months. The exact same one I have. I think, “If I die tomorrow, at least I’ll have achieved this.”
When I was 23, I was a writer at an expat magazine in Beijing. I’m half-Chinese, but it’s my father who is Chinese (my mother is American with roots in Eastern Europe). The closest I’ve ever come to having a Chinese mother is when two Chinese-American women in the office, Michelle and Lilly, acted as my surrogate mothers at work. Michelle said things like, “I’m going to teach you what compound interest is,” and, as a journalist who had worked at Slate and the Wall Street Journal, she would glance around our chaotic office and say, “This isn’t a job – this is summer camp.”
She was my editor and sometimes she’d send things back to me where she had written, “I don’t think you meant to send this to me, as it’s clearly not ready.” Which is probably the best training a journalist can have. I still feel like I have Michelle over my shoulder, judging everything I do.
Lilly, my other substitute mother, also changed my life. One night late in the office, she explained the concept of introverts versus extroverts. There was no reason to do this, but I think she just knew I was an introvert - that she had noticed that I preferred to work alone, that I never spoke in big meetings and needed a break from the constant socialising in our expat life. If Lilly and I hadn’t had that conversation, I would never have written my book about my introvert/extrovert adventures.
It makes me wonder what my legacy will be with these women I work with at the bookshop.
A few months ago, Lottie says out of the blue, “Do you want to know a secret?” I feel giddy. The beautiful, mean girl is confiding in me.