Track 5 Delilah
Delilah
Smith: There’s something liminal about a queer bookstore, don’t you think?
Gold: Is this going to be a joke about fairy realms?
Smith: It wasn’t, but now it almost feels like a missed opportunity.
[laughter] What I mean is that a queer bookstore is like a pocket of time out of time.
Space out of space. Separate from reality, you know?
Where every connection is somehow both so unreal you’re not sure it happened, yet also so much realer and more true than anything you’ve felt before.
There’s a stripping of armor. The lines are thinner—the lines we draw around ourselves to keep ourselves safe.
Cohen: Not to lean too hard on the joke you weren’t making, but I thought that was supposed to be what made those fairy rings so dangerous.
Right? You let your guard down, you taste the food—whatever that’s going to be a metaphor for, I don’t know, sapphic poetry or Baldwin or something—and then you can’t leave again.
Smith: Is it that you can’t leave, or is that just what they say, when the truth is that you don’t want to?
All I’m saying is that the veil is thinner there.
It’s inherently a threshold. How many of us are the same person within the walls of a radically queer space that we are outside one?
You walk inside and you get to make a choice between who you’ll be from one step to another, the moment you cross the boundary.
Everywhere else, you can choose how you want to be seen, to a point anyway.
How you want someone to see you. But you step into those stores, lined with pages and pages of history and story and love, there’s something in your soul that’ll turn visible no matter what.
Something that calls out to be recognized.
Cohen: As what?
Smith: Well, you tell me. You walk through the door of one of those places, the little bell rings, the person at the counter looks up and sees you. What do you want them to see?
Cohen: [after a pause] I don’t know.
Smith: [gently] You do, love. We all do.
—Always Here with Delilah Cohen and Iris Gold, season 2, episode 7: “Space Stations,” featuring Professor Aja Smith, astrophysicist, poet, and author of Made of Stardust: Speculative Futures of Queer Identity
Their first stop in Philadelphia is the oldest queer bookstore in the country. Once a stand-alone bookstore named for the James Baldwin classic Giovanni’s Room, it’s now part of a larger Philly nonprofit, with proceeds from the store and events going to other local HIV/AIDS organizations.
The fliers and flags adorning the brick building are visible from across the street as they make their way over from the municipal lot where Delilah found a spot for Roscoe, the bright blue door like a beacon against the prim and proper grays and burgundies of the rest of the neighborhood.
A few teenagers with brightly dyed hair peruse the ninety-nine-cent books in boxes laid out on tables tucked up along the sidewalk, while a small dog tied to the nearest signpost—which seems to be wrapped in a crocheted tube sock in pride flag colors—looks on curiously, attracting pats on the head from passersby.
Emmett, predictably, is one of them, crouching down to give the dog a generous round of ear-scratching.
The dog wags its tail in enthusiastic response, and before she can stop herself, Delilah takes out her phone and snaps a photo.
It’s a good picture, she thinks. Emmett’s face isn’t visible, but it’s a good angle for his long, lanky frame, the sunlight catching on his dark hair and surrounding the rainbow yarn wrapped around the signpost.
Plus the dog is cute as hell.
She briefly considers posting the photo online—obviously just because of the dog—but decides against it.
She still only has access to her private accounts, but there are enough people who follow her there to cause problems if someone decides to be an asshole.
And anyway, her mom will start blowing up her phone if she sees it, even if Delilah makes it seem like it’s just a shot she happened to take, with no connection to the person in it.
No, she thinks, putting her phone away as Emmett gives the dog a last pat and gets to his feet, better safe than sorry.
“So why here?” Emmett asks, following her into the store. “I mean, how’d this place get onto your destination list?”
“A couple of reasons, actually.” Delilah waves at the person behind the desk, feeling relieved when the girl’s face registers no sign of recognition, and beckons for Emmett to come with her over to the music section.
“I mentioned that I’m kind of a history nerd, right?
” At Emmett’s nod, she continues: “So, this place got started in the seventies, when Philly’s queer community was blossoming—post-Stonewall, you know, when everything was here and queer and fuck you if you don’t like it.
There’s a ton of history here, and like, I’m not saying I believe in the supernatural or anything, but in places like this, you can really kind of feel it, you know?
Like the floor and the walls have been soaking in all the energy from every baby gay and queer elder and trans egg and nervous ally who’s come in over the last forty-whatever years.
” She shrugs. “I’ve always liked the idea that places hold memory just as much as people do.
Maybe more.” She huffs a laugh. “Sam used to hate that idea, honestly. She said it freaked her out.”
Emmett shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I agree with you.”
Delilah glances at him, surprised. “Yeah?”
He nods, not looking at her as he reaches out to touch the nearest bookshelf, fingers trailing over the spines. “I think there’s more memory in the world than most people like to think,” he says. “I think…I think more of the world holds memory than doesn’t.”
There’s something about the way the words leave Emmett’s mouth that makes Delilah curious about just what he’s thinking, and what he’s not saying. She thinks about how often Sam shut her down whenever she didn’t like something Delilah was talking about, and wonders if Jacob was the same way.
She has a feeling the answer is yes.
“What was the other reason?”
Delilah blinks. “Hm?”
“You said there were a couple of reasons you wanted to come here.”
“Oh.” Delilah picks up a copy of David Bowie Made Me Gay and flips through the pages. “Sam and I met here, actually.”
Emmett goes still beside her. She hadn’t even really noticed he was in motion until he stops, a perfect quiet coming over him, until it almost seems like he isn’t even breathing.
Delilah looks at him and finds him watching her in return, his face unreadable.
After a moment, though, Emmett inclines his head in obvious invitation.
Delilah puts the book down again. “She doesn’t remember it,” she admits.
“When people ask her how we met, she tells them about an industry event in LA, some party for up-and-coming artists. That was where Alex introduced me to her, and we started properly talking after that, mostly about music—we worked together before we started dating, did I tell you that?—and I guess that’s what she actually remembers.
But the first time I met her was here, a few years before. ”
“And she doesn’t remember meeting you then?”
Delilah shrugs. “I asked her once, but she just gave me this blank look, like—” She tries to imitate it and gets a snort of laughter in response, which makes her smile despite herself. “Yeah. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t memorable.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Emmett murmurs. “You make an impression.”
“You’re only saying that because you had to pull me out of traffic.
” Delilah crouches down to start flipping through records, mostly just to have something to do with her hands.
“I was here with Iris. This was before we really got into our research era—we just took a weekend trip from New York. I think one of us had just gotten dumped; I’m not sure who.
Probably me, though. Just, y’know, statistically speaking. People don’t really dump Iris.”
“Why?”
“She’s basically perfect.” Emmett scoffs. “Hey, I said basically.”
Emmett’s voice is wry. “If you say so.”
“Anyway, she brought us here for…I want to say a poetry event? Some local thing. I left halfway through for a smoke break and ran into Sam outside.”
She’s replayed that night a thousand times over the years, the multipage, self-indulgent journal entry she’d written when she got back to her hotel room proving to be her most effective weapon against her usually horrible memory.
It’s purple prose of the worst kind—as a writer, she can’t look at it without cringing—but reading it over and over again has helped her paint a Technicolor memory of the entire night.
She can pull the half-memorized pages up in her mind, and all of a sudden she feels nineteen years old again, self-medicating her anxiety with a mix of coffee and cigarettes and alcohol, constantly feeling large and ungainly and uncool around her new college friends, all of whom had seemed like supermodels she’d half convinced herself were just keeping her around to make themselves feel better.
“If you say that one more time, I’m going to push you into traffic,” Iris had said to her, arm in arm with Delilah as they hurried down the sidewalk to the poetry reading, Iris’s heels tapping a sharp click-click-click beside Delilah’s clunky boots.
She’d held the door open for Delilah to duck past her into the crowded store.
“Honestly, we have got to do something about that self-esteem.”
They’d sat side by side in the kind of rickety folding chairs that always made Delilah feel conscious of the size of her hips.
She tipped her head against Iris’s shoulder, taking in the words and soaking in the feelings of the room around her.
It was an event for local poets, amateur and professional, and their poems were good, but none of them really spoke to her.