Tag Archives: small town secrets

My Grandmother, What Big….

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Weep and wail, you procrastinators. Our last trilogy of 50 Shades of Grey has left the bookstore. It went out in a brown paper bag inside a recycled “Books a Million” polystyrene bag. And the buyer—who of course was purchasing it for her grandmother, not herself—was careful to let no one observe her.

In fact, when “Liv” came into the bookstore during Christmas vacation from university, she walked straight to the trilogy’s star place on the “holiday specials” shelf and plucked them up. “I knew these would still be here,” she grinned. “This town’s too small for anyone to buy them from people they know.”

How right she was. ‘Tis the curse of a small town bookshop that one cannot sell books on addiction or copies of the Kama Sutra to customers one knows by name—and goes to church with, or attends the annual gala at the college with, or otherwise could make a lot of trouble for if one were to start naming titles. We swear ourselves to secrecy, but it matters not; people don’t buy “iffy” titles from us unless we don’t know who they (the customers) are.

But we were startled that young Liv, an intelligent, self-confident young woman who’d worked the shop for us many times during her high school summers, wanted the Shades of Grey trilogy.

“No, no,” she said, waving the paper bag concealing them in negation. “My grandmother wanted to read them, and I told her I knew where I could get them without anyone knowing, and that I’d do it for her for a late Christmas present.”

For her grandmother. Of course. We tried to shake her, but she stuck to this story, repeating it several times over our shared cup of tea and general catch-up in village gossip. Which included lots of names, but no titles.

And for those of you who hesitated to enter the bookshop and carry away these treasures of grammatical insight—sorry, I meant anatomical—please be advised that we don’t plan to restock those…books.

 

No Secrets……

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So it’s mostly true that in a small town there are no secrets.

Mostly.

I’m in Richmond to present a carefully constructed speech on the cultural elements of violence in deaths in rural Virginia. I’m about to negotiate–without negating or upholding–stereotypes that have stood the test of time. And one of the worst is: yes, we do protect our own.

We like to be self-policing, but the problem is just how uneven that enforcement becomes. Miners who emerge from the shaft smelling of cigarette smoke and sporting two black eyes, “just fell down.” Women who appear with funny little five-point bruises on their arms, hit a wall. “Clumsy me.”

In a small town, if you’re the bad guy, you are also part of an insular group that believes it has to guard itself against the rest of the world. So if you happen to be the guy who stalks women when they go for sunset walks, who frequents the playground during school hours, who sells the used cars that are actually auction wrecks filled with engine honey–well, if you’re “one of” somebody’s particular clan, an old family, a special group, then the consequences might be less.

I love living in a small town, not least because of the cheerful, common-sense outlook on life that prevails; the ways we can laugh at ourselves; the things we still value that other places have let slide. And it is funny that we know each other so well, we read clotheslines to spot new pregnancies. Or extramarital affairs.

Perhaps it is not funny that we sometimes refuse to read each others’ faces? Or read each other the riot act?

That’s the part of small town life that sucks, the special dispensation of privacy for some at the expense of others. Because in a small town, there are no secrets. Unless the town wants there to be.