Last summer, my husband and I were invited to leave Manhattan and spend a weekend at my friend Val’s house in upstate New York. My husband resisted. Lex is a “real New Yorker,” which means he does not like to leave the city. Years ago a friend of ours hosted a birthday party for her one-year-old twins an hour away in New Jersey and asked me why Lex hadn’t come.
“What?” she asked me. “He doesn’t like kids?”
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t like the commute to see your kids.”
But Val had promised the trip to her place would be worth it. There would be a lake. There would be deer. There would be bridge played on the deck under the shade of mountainous crudités. There would be a visit to Woodstock to see James Taylor. But when we arrived and I wandered downstairs to the den and saw what I saw, I told her she’d been selling her place short. The hook was time travel.
Highlighted by a pair of sliding glass doors, dozens of mass-market paperback bestsellers from the eighties and nineties lay stacked along one wall like sun-bleached bricks. Their titles were faded, their spines creased from being bent back with abandon, their pages swollen from being dropped off a boat or into a bathtub. They had a whiff of Coppertone and more dog-ears than Westminster at Madison Square Garden. Val said she’d held on to them for sentimental reasons. They reminded her of when her adult daughters were children, off from school for the summers, and she’d read them with a flashlight in a bunk bed, her on the bottom while they fell asleep on top.
Nothing says summer to me more than juicy reads from such Southern authors as Gail Godwin, Dorothea Benton Frank, Pat Conroy, John Grisham, and especially Anne Rivers Siddons. These novels are full of Southern gothic goodness like forbidden lovers, fraught friendships, wicked mothers-in-law, crooked lawyers, and a pet tiger who tears apart a pair of home intruders like a four-pack of Charmin. But I also go for the scruples of Judith Krantz, the attic flowers of V. C. Andrews, and the “it” factor of Stephen King.
These books weren’t necessarily published in the summers that I read them, but I read them in the summers of my teens and twenties because I could afford the $4.99 price tag, or garage-sale four-for-a-dollar deals, or library loans. They remind me of a time when I had the time, or made the time, or passed the time while waiting for adult swim to be over at the University of Alabama’s old Riverside Pool. Or for the 6 train to pull into the August hellmouth of Union Square station in New York City. Or avoiding the outside altogether. Summer reading is called summer reading for a reason. The words are meant to get you hot and bothered.
How hot and bothered?
So hot and bothered, I stole The Shell Seekers from a United Methodist church in Jackson, Mississippi. For Halloween one year, I dressed up as Jackie Collins. I cofounded a Classic Trashy Book Club dedicated to the likes of Dominick Dunne, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, and Sidney Sheldon. I had a thigh-high bookshelf custom-made to go along the back of my sofa with seven-and-one-eighth-inch-tall shelves to fit my seven-inch-tall books.
I lust after these five-hundred-plus-page paperweights the way some women covet four-thousand-dollar Judith Leiber pink football clutches. Some I’ve never even read, but I love them because I associate them with who did. A summer camp counselor, whom I had a crush on, spent two months with The Mists of Avalon. One summer, Mama got into bed before sunset every night after she’d come home from work to read …And Ladies of the Club. My white-gloved, perm-and-set grandmother spent one Birmingham summer toting around The Clan of the Cave Bear.
These hunk-a-hunks of burning love remind me of a time when the world wasn’t at our fingertips. When the world was created by the fingertips of writers. When we spent our summers lost in those worlds.
So when I see these old softies, I buy them and display them as some women put thirty-two framed photographs of friends and family atop a piano. My friend Val stacks them like guest towels. And last summer, in the downstairs den of her lake house, I ran my hands over the beat-up bestsellers as if their pages were not pulp, but Egyptian cotton.
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