by Sue Halpern
A very attractive (as much as I could tell behind the surgical mask) woman was knocking on the window and gesturing.
“I think she’s looking for you,” I said to Cal. “She’s a babe—why don’t you marry her?”
“Because I want to marry you. Not her. You. Kit.”
“Why?”
“Because we fit together,” he said.
I guess I must be, or must have been, literal-minded, because before I could stop myself, I said—and loudly—“But we haven’t even slept together!”
Cal stood up. A knowing smile appeared on his face. This was not the reaction I expected. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and ran a finger through the coin pouch and pulled something out. I shut my eyes for a second. Had he gotten a ring after all? Was this whole thing a setup? Opening them, I saw, on his outstretched palm, a small square foil packet. It took a second to see that it was a “ribbed for her pleasure” Trojan. In my experience, most guys kept a Trojan in their wallet. It was aspirational. For all I knew, Cal had had this thing in his wallet since high school, though I doubted it. It looked too new. “That,” he said, “is something we can do something about.”
Who was this self-possessed Cal Sweeney, this man who was so easily—no Sturm, no Drang—suggesting we sleep together? It suddenly occurred to me that I was the one who had been afraid to have sex with him, not the other way around. He was a real person. The sex would be real, too, and that was terrifying. I thought about what John said about jumping off a cliff together, about how essence might actually precede existence.
“You have to get back to work,” I said. That was it.
There is this thing that women do, consciously and unapologetically, when they reach a certain age, which is check out men as potential fathers. I must have reached that age, because after Cal went back into the lab I found myself wandering around campus thinking about Cal’s clear skin and straight teeth, and thinking, “Good,” as in “That will be good if we have kids.” I tried to get myself to stop thinking like this, but it must be some evolutionary, hardwired thing, because just as soon as I redirected my thoughts, this accounting would come skittering back to mind, and even Cal’s deficits would turn up on the positive side of the ledger. He wore glasses—bad—but they were magnifiers—good, our children wouldn’t be nearsighted. Cal had no siblings (and neither did I)—bad, no cousins—but good, his mother and father would be doting grandparents. Cal was going to be a doctor. Cal was normal. Cal was musical. Cal was solid. Cal was steady. Was there a better recommendation than that? He would be the dad who got up uncomplaining in the middle of the night to change a diaper. He was the parent who would keep meticulous records of shots and vaccines. He would take off the training wheels at precisely the right moment, and make sure our kids could tie a half hitch and would say their prayers at night. I was not a prayers-at-night kind of person, but it was reassuring to know that Cal was. He’d be a great father. Not that I knew “great” firsthand. My own father was a glossy photograph of a young man with wavy brown hair and aviator glasses dressed in grimy fatigues standing by the Huey helicopter in which he was shot down a year or so later over Laos during Operation Lam Son. I was a year old when he was killed, and my mother must have been the least sentimental person on earth, because by the time I was old enough to realize I had had a father but didn’t anymore, almost every bit of physical evidence of his existence was gone from our house. When I was older and asked her about this, my mother said, “You are all I need of him,” and that was that.
So all I was going on was instinct and TV, and Cal seemed to have all the attributes that great TV dads had.
I showed up at Cal’s dorm room that night around eleven. I told him to put a sock on the door so his roommate would know not to come in. I told him to turn off the lights and take off his clothes. There was just enough light coming through the window that I could see his narrow white shoulders and the small spray of hair on his chest. He was wearing tighty-whities. He didn’t take them off.
I pulled my shirt over my head and threw it on the floor. I turned around and instructed him to remove my bra. As he leaned in, I could feel the effect I was having on him. He was breathing deeply.
“Did you ask me to marry you in order to fuck me?” I said quietly, provocatively—a twenty-one-year-old trying to be sexy.
He let out a small groan. My eyes were closed. I imagined his were, too. Which is why we didn’t see it, the firecracker that someone had rolled under the door, and the smoke that was beginning to fill the room.
“What’s that smell?” Cal said, and then there was a sizzle and then a flash of light and an explosion a few feet away, and we both screamed and fell back on the bed and could hear Cal’s suite mates laughing hysterically in the hallway.
“Look at the wrapper,” one of them shouted.
We did. It was called the banger.
“Fuck you!” I shouted.
“No,” a male voice replied. “Fuck you!” and more laughter.
Cal was sitting there with his head in his hands. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
This was in the late spring. We put our clothes back on and walked through the gauntlet of leering boys and out into the soft and dewy night. There is a hill near campus, a grassy knoll that looks out over the town and the farmland that rings it, and we climbed up there and sat side by side, listening to the occasional owl search out a mate. It seemed propitious. Cal pointed out Orion in the night sky and Aquarius and Leo and Lyra, the lyre, the favorite, he said, of musicians everywhere. He took off his jacket and we leaned back on it, not to kiss, but to stare up at the stars, making wishes when we saw one falling toward us. I don’t know what Cal wished for—wishes shared out loud never come true—but mine were generic and huge: happiness, easiness, love. For a while we both fell asleep, our heads touching, waking when the slightest sliver of light cut through the darkness like a filleting blade. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t have to, or we couldn’t. The beauty of another day, rising, infused us. We watched the sun come up as if we’d never before seen the sun come up, watched the beads of dew on the grass refract the light, becoming little prisms, and watched them disappear, gifts returned to the universe.
Cal’s stomach rumbled. “Let’s get breakfast,” I said.
“Let’s not,” he said, and pulled himself up till he was resting on his elbows, his face inches from my face, and kissed me.
“Not here,” I said, “not now,” which was possibly the least romantic thing I could have said at that moment, and Cal looked crestfallen, but I led him back to my apartment, a half-step ahead, holding his hand like a mother might, and like a mother told him to undress and get in bed. The sheets were cool and smooth, and within seconds we were asleep, our bodies curled around each other. Cal was right: we fit together. It was still early when we woke up to a soothing chatter of rain on the roof. And then Cal Sweeney made love for the first time in his life. And so did I.
Chapter One
6.7.10–6.13.10
There is no Frigate like a Book . . .
—Emily Dickinson
The girl looked like an orphan. Not that Kit, forty-four and childless, or Kit, ever, knew what a real orphan looked like. This one resembled a movie orphan: wispy blond hair, thin shoulders, a whiff of neglect. The girl, Sunny, was wearing ripped jeans, black high-top sneakers, and a boy’s white undershirt with a large question mark, drawn with a black Sharpie, down the front. She said she made the shirt in case people who came into the library had any questions. “I got the idea from those signs on the highway,” she said, her eyes cast down at her fingers, which were entwined, the thumbs windmilling around each other like a cat chasing a mouse. Sunny didn’t say which signs and nobody gathered at the morning staff meeting, where the head librarian, Barbara Goodspeed, introduced her, asked.
“You’ll be shadowing Kit,” Barbara said, and when the girl said nothing, Barbara pointed: “That’
s Kit.”
Sunny looked up, nodded quickly at the unassuming woman with curly hair and a pair of glasses sitting lopsided on her nose, looked down again, and said, “Okay,” but under her breath, so that only Evelyn Mosher, the permanently grumpy circulation clerk, whose hearing aids were at full volume, picked it up.
“This should be fun,” Evelyn said, smirking at Kit, who was trying to think of a way out of it. Kit moved forward in her chair, just about to protest, and then she saw that Chuck, the building and grounds guy, had his hand over his throat, the sign he was about to speak, so she slid back again, defeated.
“How old are you?” Chuck said to Sunny, his words huffing out in a pneumatic monotone from the mechanical voice box embedded under his jaw, the result of a two-pack-a-day habit he still hadn’t kicked. That got her attention, and the girl looked at him, her slack expression suddenly taut, reeled in by fear or surprise or both.
“Fifteen,” she said.
“Judy’s got two fifteen-year-olds,” Evelyn said to no one in particular. Judy was one of her daughters, the one on her third marriage. “There’s her Tiffany—breach birth, blue baby, pretty much failed those tests they give newborns so everyone thought she’d be slow, which Judy probably wishes she was now—and that one of Chester’s they call Beaner. Teenage boy and girl in the same house? Nightmare.” But everyone sitting around the table except Sunny already knew this—they had heard the stories.
“Fifteen,” Chuck repeated. “A juvenile among the dinosaurs.”
“Juvenile delinquent,” Evelyn muttered, but if Sunny heard her, she wasn’t showing it, and anyway, it was basically true. Sunny had been sentenced to work at the Riverton Public Library for the summer after she was caught trying to steal a dictionary from the bookstore in the mall.
“You’ll keep an eye on the girl,” Barbara said to Kit as the meeting was breaking up, after Sunny had shuffled out of the room and was flipping aimlessly through a book someone had left at the circulation desk.
“Yeah, she might try to steal our dictionary, too,” Evelyn said, and let out a short, unfunny laugh. “You want me to ask the boys to put a tail on her?” The boys, Evelyn’s sons, Jeffrey and Jack, were one-third of the local police force.
“I’m sure Kit will be fine,” Barbara said, wrapping up.
So it was settled. Sunny would be Kit’s responsibility. For the next twelve weeks, fifteen-year-old Sunny would be hers.
* * *
Sunny/convicted
So in our county they have this thing called kids’ court, which is how I ended up at the library for summer vacation, even though I don’t have summer vacation since I’m no-schooled. No-schooling is what it sounds like—you don’t go to regular school or follow a curriculum. The idea is that the whole world is one big school and you can learn biology from looking at frogs and worms, you can learn fractions from making pies, and you can learn history from talking to old people. But you don’t have to. You study only what interests you. “No-schooling is about awakening your passions and following them down whatever path they lead,” my mother likes to say. It’s also, basically, my parents’ philosophy of life. The two of them met at a Rainbow Gathering, and when it was over they hitchhiked for a couple of years, crisscrossing North and South America, stopping to barter or do odd jobs when they needed food or cash.
Kids’ court is a real court, with a real judge and a sheriff who yells, “All rise,” when the judge walks into the room, though from what I could see, this was less about getting people to stand up and more about the fact that kids’ court starts at 6:45 in the morning so parents can get to work afterward, and everyone is really sleepy. It’s the place where good kids, or kids who haven’t yet gone bad, are sent when they do something wrong, or dumb, or both, like try to slip a book down their jeans at Barnes and Noble when they are sure no one is looking. The book cost $22.95, which was $12.63 more than I had on me at the time.
“Well, Solstice,” the judge said, looking down at the papers on his desk before looking at me. He was a black man with a round face and round wire-rimmed glasses, whose head was completely bald and shiny on top, and whose chin was decorated with a woolly gray beard that sprung off his face like coils of steel wool.
“Sunny,” I said, my right leg shaking nervously. When I’m nervous I have a tendency to butt in.
“Excuse me?” The judge frowned, making it clear that he was not pleased to have heard from me so soon.
“Solstice is the name on my birth certificate,” I continued, speaking quickly (nerves). “It’s my official name. But everyone calls me Sunny.” I smiled at the judge. He did not smile back.
“Solstice,” the judge began again, “can you tell me why you stole”—he looked down at his papers, squinted, and then cocked his head the way dogs do sometimes when they are confused—“the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary?”
Okay, easy question.
“Because I didn’t have enough money to buy it,” I said. People laughed, but I wasn’t trying to be funny. I would have bought it if I could.
“Order!” he growled, and threatened to bang his gavel. “I understand that’s why you stole. But why did you steal a dictionary of all things? I’ve had a lot of thieves in my courtroom, but this—this is a first.”
The thing is I could afford the paperback, but paperbacks don’t last. Their pages fall out, and what good is a dictionary that is missing a page now and then? You go to look up a word and it isn’t there and you can’t prove it ever was. The hardback was solid and sturdy, and it was beautiful, with gilt edging, which made the book itself look twenty-four-karat-ish. Did I say that my mother makes jewelry that she sells at a kiosk in the mall—the same mall where I sucked in my stomach and tried to cram in a 532-page book between my belly and the waistband of my jeans?
“I’m waiting,” the judge said, startling me.
“Okay,” I said, inhaling deeply. “I was tired of always having to ask someone when I didn’t know the meaning of a word. Like ‘sesquipedalian.’”
“Which means?” the judge said.
“That’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t know.”
People behind me tittered in their seats. I thought I heard a boy say, “She’s crazy,” and someone’s mother whisper harshly, “Why couldn’t you be like that?”
“What about the Internet?” the judge said. “There are dictionaries on the Internet.”
“We don’t have a computer,” I said. “We don’t believe in it.”
Actually, it’s my parents who don’t believe in it. I believe in it completely. My father says that screens rot brains and make us stupid and lazy and behave like herd animals. He says it’s already happening. Every time there is a school shooting or some crazy story about people parachuting off tall buildings, he says, “See, screens. Those people all spent too much time on screens.” I used to argue with him about this—how could he know they did these things because they spent a lot of time playing video games or looking at the web? how could he know it wasn’t because they drank milk when they were five or wore shoes or once had the flu?—but there was no talking him out of it or talking him into a PC or iPad or cell phone. “Read this,” he said, the last time I asked, which was more than a year ago because I’ve learned that asking only makes him launch into a lecture on how the government is using all these electronic devices for mind control and to spy on us. He handed me a copy of 1984. It’s not like I didn’t already know all about Winston Smith and Big Brother and doublespeak; 1984 is like our family bible. So no computer, no phone, no discussion.
“Are your parents or legal guardians present?” the judge asked. “If so, I’d like them to stand up.”
“My mother is here,” I said, pointing to the woman sitting next to me, wearing a sleeveless blue-and-green-striped dress so long it skimmed her sandals. Maybe the judge could see the rainbow tattoo on her left shoulder, maybe not, or the yin-yang symbol on her right one. Unless she spoke or smiled, he probably would not notice her pierc
ed tongue.
As my mom stood up, the judge looked down and shuffled the papers on his desk. “Mrs. . . .” He paused, scanning the pages for a last name—which he wasn’t going to find.
“We’re not married,” my mother said. I was waiting for her to explain how marriage was a construct of the state and how it was false consciousness—words I’d been hearing all my life until I stopped asking my parents why they weren’t married or when they were going to get married.
“Of course,” the judge said with a sigh, and then turned to me.
“Solstice. Sunny. Young lady.” He pulled on his beard. He frowned. He tapped the back of his pen on the top of his desk. “Stealing a dictionary is a very unusual act of petit larceny. I assume you know what ‘larceny’ means, but for those who do not, I will tell you. It means taking something that does not belong to you. Sneakers, phones, money, cars—pretty common. Books, rarely. Dictionaries, as far as I know, and I’ve been doing this for over a decade, never. It’s admirable to want to expand your vocabulary. It’s admirable to want to know the meaning of words. It’s a rare thing these days. I know that. But theft is theft. You can’t just go around taking things because you want them. What kind of world would that be? This is not a rhetorical question. It has an answer. And the answer is that it would be a world without laws. A lawless world. A scary, lawless world. Do you understand me?”
I nodded. So did my mom, even though I knew for a fact that neither of my parents was a big fan of laws. Or, at least, of laws they didn’t like. But he didn’t ask them, he asked me.
“Say it out loud,” the judge said.
“I understand,” I said.
“It’s a slippery slope,” he said.
