1
A girl named Emily, who sounded austere when she spoke in the high school social studies course we were both taking, made a point one day of walking with me to my next class.
“Are you looking for a reader?” she said.
It happened I was. We scheduled twice-weekly sessions for the period before social studies. She’d meet me in the book closet set aside for my readers and me by the school library.
In the library closet, despite the cold metal surfaces of the shelves holding row after row of dusty books, she was warm and even funny, in a quietly ironic way.
One reading session, I said I was surprised I hadn’t really been aware of her before this year.
“I choose to spend my time on my own or with my family.”
“Do you ever find it—I don’t know—limiting?” I said.
“Sometimes I wish my parents didn’t expect me to entertain guests. They’re always hosting corporate parties. But they’re the two best people I know. I have a duty to them.”
“I’d hate that,” I said, my words gliding over the awareness she’d just given me that she lived in a different world from mine.
Then she said, “But about your not being aware of me, to be honest, your disability made me nervous.”
“No longer?”
“No.”
She’d told me before that she kept her deepest feelings to herself, and so I was pleased she’d opened up to me.
Our teacher assigned Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night without giving me enough notice to arrange to have it taped. I’d enjoyed the talking book narration of Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago. But the only way I would get any sense at all of Armies of the Night was to skim, and the only way I could think to skim was to have Emily read the first sentence of each paragraph. The alternative was reading none at all.
At the start of our session before the class discussion, I explained what I needed.
Emily said, “Are you serious?” She sighed, then viciously turned pages as she jumped from paragraph to paragraph. Distracted by her annoyance, I got even less out of the book than I’d hoped.
A favorite subject in school and among parents was “maturity,” as in, “She’s so mature,” or, “How can he be so immature?” It went alongside that other scientific-sounding judgment, “socially awkward,” the euphemism for “strange.”
I said to Emily, “People are always talking about maturity. Are there many mature people in our grade, do you think? What is maturity anyway?”
She sighed. “You know, the things you talk about are either too intellectual or stupid, or both.”
I got the “too intellectual” part, but “stupid”? Did it mean I was at last fitting in?
My next, and by far the worst, mistake was to ask how she’d feel about getting together after school. “Just to talk,” I added quickly.
She sighed with exasperation. “Not only do I not want to be more than a friend; I don’t even want to be a friend.”
Nothing I said in response could have done justice to her impromptu, amazingly grammatical rejection, which I wrote down word-for-word as soon as I could.
In the days that followed, mortification transformed into respect. By being so honest, she’d shown how “good” she was. I was hardly the only high school student who fetishized honesty. It had begun with my reading Dostoyevsky’s novels about the saintly Prince Myshkin and Alyosha. But even I recognized my obsession was eccentric.
2
“You shouldn’t have told Emily you were interested in her,” another classmate named Molly scolded me on the phone.
“I didn’t. I only suggested we meet after school.”
“It could have felt like the same thing to her.”
“Are you saying it did?”
“I’m not speaking for her. I’m telling you what I think.”
“Okay, so what if I had been interested in her, to use your phrase?”
“It would be wrong.”
“You’re saying I shouldn’t be interested in a girl?”
“You’re entitled to be interested in a girl. But she’s doing a job.”
Molly had read for me for two years before getting irate with me over, of all things, Albert Camus’s The Stranger. We’d since fought like cats and dogs, but at least she wasn’t accusing me of having behaved badly with her.
I said, “She volunteered, like you. She can un-volunteer, like you did.”
“She’s doing the right thing by you. You need to do the right thing by her.”
“All I did was suggest we meet after school. If I asked you the same thing, would you interpret that to mean I was interested in you?”
“That would be different.”
“How?”
“Because we’re friends.”
I was touched Molly said that. But instead of telling her, I stayed on point. “I’d thought Emily was becoming a friend, too, so how is what I said to her wrong?”
“Like I said, by your asking her when she was trapped.”
“I didn’t trap her!”
“She’s in that tiny closet with you, all by herself. How could she not feel trapped?”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Kind of.”
“She told you I made her feel trapped.”
“She told me the situation made her feel trapped.”
“Which means I did.”
“I guess. Yeah, you made her feel like she had two choices. Either she walked out or she stayed but rejected you. No one likes to be put in that position.”
“She had a third choice,” I said: “‘Yes, let’s get away from this prison cell of a closet and talk.’”
“But she didn’t want to, so it wasn’t a real choice.”
“This is ridiculous. If I’d said, ‘Wanna sleep together?’ maybe, just maybe, I could see your point.”
“No need to be crude,” Molly snapped. But she didn’t hang up.
My rhetorical point made, I said, “It wasn’t as if I was trying to hurt her. Couldn’t she just as easily have been pleased that I thought of her as more than a reader?”
“You can’t put people on the spot, that’s all.”
Stalemate.
Because Molly felt so strongly, I had to take seriously the possibility that I’d created a bad situation. Conceding even this much would be to deny my own feelings. I thought I’d been brave to broach the idea with Emily.
A popular question of the day was whether men and women were fundamentally different, one of those annoying either/or, “nature versus nurture” imponderables. Other than physiological differences, I believed we were all human beings. The differences were between people, not between men and women. But Molly’s harangue gave me a glimmer of how men might be different from women, or at least boys from girls. If Emily’s and my situations had been reversed, I’d have felt complimented.
But then I thought about it some more. If I were working for a girl from an impulse of sympathy and without any feeling of attraction, and then she tried to take it beyond that… Well, yes, I might find it awkward.
I hated to think Emily was reading for me out of sympathy. But why else would someone like her volunteer? Besides, sympathy was an emotion that reflected a person’s better side. It was up to me to transform myself into more than just someone in obvious need of assistance.
Meanwhile, I concluded I had to cut back on honesty.
3
Emily didn’t show up for our next reading session. I’d need to find someone to take her place, but held off until the following scheduled session, just in case. When I walked into the library closet that next time, she was waiting.
Sitting down across from her, I debated whether to say something. I decided it would come between us if I didn’t.
“I hate to put you on the spot, but you do realize we missed our last session, right?”
“How can that be? What day?”
I told her, even though she was too compulsive not to have known.
She got out her notebook. “I don’t see it here.”
“But we always meet then.”
“I guess I was in language lab. I totally forgot.”
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