“Every bookish girl in the world is Jane Eyre,” he said. “Every girl who wants to be good, anyway.”
“But I’m not bookish,” Casey said. She had read some old books from a short list made up by Mrs. Mehdi, her favorite librarian from the Elmhurst Public Library, and a few that Mary Ellen Currie had recommended over the years, but the problem was that when Casey liked a book, she’d habitually reread the same one. It was hard to explain why she did this exactly, but to her, the books she liked were better on the second and third readings. Virginia Craft had read everything, including Dante in Italian and all those volumes of Proust in French. Jay had read dozens of Shakespeare’s plays. He could recite Shakespeare’s sonnets and chunks of Baudelaire’s poetry. Casey had read only Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. And as for poetry, which Ella and Jay adored, she understood almost none of it. She was an econ major, and she had read about twenty Penguin classics on her own without any real instruction as to how to read them. However, she enjoyed hearing her friends’ opinions on books, and she admired how confident they were about their likes and dislikes. When her friends talked about books, she asked lots of questions. Those conversations were like good lessons to her. Her friends who’d gone to private schools and majored in comp lit and English seemed to possess the ideas inside books and felt free to argue with them. Before walking into this bookshop, Casey hadn’t realized just how much she’d coveted her friends’ authority and ease with literature.
Each morning, Casey read the Bible, and on the subway she reread her same books like a little child with a favorite storybook. She was not an intellectual or an aesthete like Virginia; she was more at home in front of a sewing machine or standing behind a counter. At Kearn Davis and at Stern Business School, no one she knew read novels, and at Sabine’s she’d met salespeople who were writers and artists, and they didn’t talk to her, pegging her as a girl who liked to wear over-the-top hats and expensive shoes. And they weren’t wrong, exactly. Many of the people she’d met with Wall Street jobs wanted to possess fancy things, eat in new restaurants, and go away on exclusive trips, and artists she’d known expressed contempt for those things. Casey didn’t feel she belonged in either camp.
She cradled Jane Eyre in her hands. Her high school copy of it was somewhere in the middle of her book pile in Unu’s apartment. There was no need for this old book. Yet she wished to put it in her purse, to go through it alone, the way she wished she could stare at a good painting by herself without the bustle of a museum crowd.
Joseph looked at the girl in the hat. She had such a sad expression on her face, and he wanted to make her happy. He closed his eyes and raised his arms dramatically. He waved his hands—hocus-pocus—like a circus magician in the direction of Casey’s handbag.
“In your bag, you have a worn paperback of Middlemarch.”
“What?” she said out loud. The zipper of her bag was closed. “How?” she asked.
Joseph burst out laughing, unable to contain himself. “We wait at the same bus stop on the corner of Seventy-second and Lexington. Until last fall, from Mondays through Fridays, you wore office clothes, and on the weekends, you wear sublime hats and extravagant dresses. Nowadays, I don’t see you during the week. But on Saturdays when I see you on the bus, you are always reading. Sometimes I worry that you’ll get hit by a car because you’re not paying attention. This year, you read Thackeray, Hardy, and Eliot. Either you’re a slow reader or you read the same books over and over. Last year, you read Anna Karenina for a long time. You’ve read some of the Americans: Cather, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis. Nothing past 1945, almost. Almost never anyone French.”
Casey opened her mouth but felt confused as to what to say. Was she in danger?
“I love Madame Bovary and Cousin Bette,” she said finally, her statement sounding like a question.
“Very fine books,” Joseph said approvingly. He felt energetic. “Though Flaubert is superior to Balzac, of course.” He tipped his head to the side and adjusted his blue eyeglasses.
Casey smiled, not saying anything. She’d read only one book each by those authors.
“But you often return to Middlemarch. Last Saturday, you were reading it. I figured you’d probably still be in it.”
“But I never noticed you,” she muttered; then it occurred to her that she might have hurt his feelings. She’d been ignored before in places, and she hated to think she had not paid attention to him. She didn’t feel afraid of him exactly, but this had never happened to her before. She’d never thought of herself as someone to observe.