Page 49 of Upstate

That’s why solidarity among country women is so crucial. From the quilting bee to the church supper, women gather for mutual support under the guise of trading scraps of fabric and tasting one another’s covered dishes. In the small towns scattered across upstate New York, though, there are no socially sanctioned spaces for single gals who choose career and accomplishment over housekeeping and motherhood. Ever since Salem times, too many of us gathered together for no good reason has put people in mind of Macbeth’s witches, toiling and troubling around a bubbling cauldron. Even a book club carries a whiff of feminist sedition. A card game, though? That’s something lottery-loving, bingo-playing locals can wrap their heads around.

You may be surprised to learn there are enough independent, unmarried, like-minded women in the vicinity of Schuywich to get up a competitive card game. You shouldn’t be. Consider the widow who runs the restaurant known by her dead husband’s name, or the worker at the bottling plant who stands shoulder to shoulder with men for half the pay. The traveling nurse who might drive to Albany one day and Plattsburgh the next but always comes home to care for her aging father. The retired teacher whose specially bred Holland Lops regularly win prizes at the county fair. The eccentric sculptor who creates pieces in her rural studio that neighbors find ugly but collectors clamor for in Fifth Avenue galleries. The spinster librarian who knows each resident well enough to recommend a read they’ll love. Our group might aptly be called the Old Crows, but then we’d be a murder instead of a bridge club.

Was I lonely before I began hosting our monthly card game? Sometimes, maybe. Not now, though. There’s a core group of eight or so, but sometimes friends bring friends until we have three or four tables going. I think of our bridge club as the equivalent of the golf courses and whiskey bars where businessmen meet to make deals. In fact, it was last October’s coven that spurred me to start a new venture of my own.

I was paired with the librarian against the sculptor and the rabbit-breeding teacher. We’d just won our rubber, and talk at the table was turning from cards to career when the librarian mentioned getting a call from someone wanting to donate a dead relative’s book collection. “I’m glad, of course, that people know it’s wrong to put books in the garbage,” she said, “but I’m the only full-time employee at the library. I don’t have time to sort through hundreds of volumes looking for the handful that might add value to our shelves.”

“Can’t people sell them?” the teacher asked.

“They could, but most antiquarian book dealers offer mere pennies per pound for the trouble of hauling away what might amount to tons of worthless paper.”

“Do you think people would give their books to someone who was willing to clear them out?” I asked.

“I’d be happy to,” said the nurse, speaking over her shoulder from the next table. They’d finished their rubber, too, and were listening with interest. “My father’s a history buff who’s hoarded books his whole life. When the time comes, I’d be grateful to anyone who came to take them away, as long as they ended up in the hands of someone who’d treasure them instead of tossed in the trash.”

Inspired, I turned to the restaurant owner and asked, “What does it take to start your own business?”

“Selling books?” She shrugged. “Compared to food service, books would be a breeze if you had the space to set up a store.”

It was a mild evening for late October, the moon rising bright in the purpling sky. “Would you ladies like to take a little field trip?”

We filed out the kitchen door and across the damp grass to the barn. A single electrical line strung from the house powered a handful of old fluorescent tubes that buzzed and flickered when I switched them on. When it was first raised, the timber-frame barn was home to sows and milk cows and the draft horses that were hitched to the dilapidated carriage and rusting plow the previous owners left behind.

“Ignore the stalls,” I instructed, leading them on a tour of the space. “Imagine all this opened up. What do you think?”

“The lighting is horrendous,” said the sculptor, “but I can envision the space becoming magnificent.”

“How many books could I fit in here?” I asked.

“A thousand?” ventured the woman who worked at the bottling plant.

“Ten thousand, at least,” offered the librarian, “if you could shelve them all.”

“I’ve been working at the veterans’ hospital in Albany lately,” said the nurse. “They’re about to relocate to a bigger building to accommodate all the young men who are coming home injured from Vietnam.” She paused to put a hand on the librarian’s arm. “I’m sorry, I know your brother is over there.”

“He’s not a soldier, though,” the librarian said. “He’s doing humanitarian work away from the front lines.”

“Thank goodness for that.” The nurse turned back to me. “Anyway, the entire basement of the old hospital is full of files they’ll be moving to their new location. The archivist mentioned they’d be auctioning off the metal shelves.”

“So,” I said, ticking off on my fingers, “I have the space, I can buy the shelves, and there are people who’d be willing to give me books. That sounds like enough to get started, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not that easy, Evelyn,” objected the librarian. “There’s an awful lot to learn about the book trade, not to mention the work it’ll take to turn this drafty barn into a cozy shop.”

“Learning fast and working hard is how I escaped the dead-end life I was born into,” I replied. “Besides, selling books sounds like a good fit for someone who’s paid by the word, don’t you think?”

Just like men hatch schemes over dry martinis and bloody cuts of meat, my women’s bridge club inspired me to start a new business. In addition to being a writer, I’m about to become a bookseller, too. I returned that call the librarian mentioned and promptly found myself in possession of hundreds of books, all for free. After a tip-off from the nurse about when the auction would be held, I placed the winning bid for a thousand linear feet of shelving that I hauled home in a rented truck. I hired the teenage boy from the neighboring farm to help me clean out the barn. A new member of our club — a no-nonsense notary who works at the county courthouse — helped me with the paperwork required to start a small business. I subscribed to a half-dozen publications about the book trade that have educated me better than any college course. Come June, I’ll be opening the first woman-owned bookstore this region has ever seen.

The learning curve has been a steep one, and I’m nowhere near the summit yet, but I’m invigorated to be embarking on a new venture. Besides, what better way to ward off loneliness than opening the doors of a shop to the book-loving public? If you find yourself upstate on a summer’s drive along the Battenkill, go past the village of Schuywich, take a left on Ridgetop Road, and look for the painted arrow pointing to Red Barn Books. I’ll be happy to show you what an unmarried woman can do.

Chapter 24

Independence Day passes without parades or fireworks as summer settles in upstate, green and hot and hazy. The viral tsunami that overwhelmed the city has crested. Positivity rates are lower, fatalities falling, the state’s metrics holding steady. Graves on Hart Island are covered over as the virus ripples north and west and south, seeking fresh hosts. A few months ago, New York was the nation’s pariah; now flashing signs along the Adirondack Northway exhort visitors from neighboring states to quarantine for fourteen days. The governor dodges reporters’ questions about nursing home deaths as he clears the region that includes Schuywich to enter Phase Four of reopening.

Business picks up as more and more people desperate for low-risk, family-friendly activities discover Red Barn Books. Lucinda streams a follow-up video of the Cozy Cozy Lady from my barn featuring a newly birthed lamb, inspiring parents to bring their children to see the famous flock of foundling sheep. City folk settling into vacation homes for the long haul snap up furniture from Wren’s antique shop. Craft books and cookbooks and books about self-sufficiency sell to shoppers newly obsessed with knitting and baking and gardening. Customers looking for historical precedents to the tumultuous present purchase books about the influenza epidemic of 1918, treatises on Mussolini’s rise to power, and biographies of American civil rights leaders. Boomers revisit their childhoods with clothbound sets of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Millennials scoop up vintage picture books for their screen-addled offspring. A van-life couple who park their Sprinter along Ridgetop Road buy a 1957 hardcover of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. An 1890 first American edition of Black Beauty, described by the Humane Society as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse,” sells to a jockey who’s come to Saratoga Springs to race in front of empty stands.

The in-person activity in the store is encouraging, but the summer season is short. Aisha, who’s been enticing digital nomads to work remotely at picnic tables on the lawn, will be starting college in the fall. Sandra, whose energy-medicine clients have become my clientele, too, will be snowbirding off to Arizona in October. The bicyclists who’ve spent summer nights on my lawn have already ordered Pelotons to get them through winter. Wren is close to running out of inventory. My online storefront, though growing, represents only a fraction of the thousands of books in the barn. Leaves of Grass, like many of the rare books I so painstakingly listed, still hasn’t sold. Once the bookshop closes, my meager stream of income will dwindle to an anemic trickle.

I dread falling through the safety net of my salary from the college. I guess that’s why I haven’t made my resignation official yet. It’s almost August, though—time, I decide, to cut that cord. I log in to my college email, intending to notify my department chair I won’t be returning to campus. My inbox explodes with messages I’ve been ignoring since I moved. After months of divisive debate, the college has concluded that protocols for distancing and disinfecting and testing will be impossible to follow. The president has decided to keep campus closed for the fall semester, possibly spring as well. All learning will be virtual, all instruction remote.