For three hours, until my buzz wore off and our quarters drained, we washed and dried and folded our linens.
By the time we started back it was almost dark again. Ann said she wanted to see the rich people’s luminaries along the river, so we walked with our baskets the long way home, through an alley and down a winding line of shops. Between a closed camera store and a bank, we passed a crow pecking at a frozen breadstick in front of a lonely lit shop. The shop had science and health marked in blue chalk in the window, and inside a Victorian lady with a brooch smiled placidly from a poster. The sidewalk crow hauled its breadstick up to a telephone wire, and as it did, Ann paused with her basket and lingered by the glass. She had gone to camp with some Christian Scientists, years back, which made her think she was some kind of authority—and she stopped for a moment, reading silently through the window. “I thought they’d closed most of these reading rooms down. There’s, like, hardly any churches left.” Then she shook her head, shifting the weight of her basket from one hip to the other. “I mean, the thing I never understood, the thing that doesn’t make any sense, is how you can have a religion that offers absolutely no explanation for the origin of evil.”
I kept walking.
It was another dreary snowless night. Almost no one was out—we could have walked straight down the middle of the street. Where were those luminaries? I wondered. My arms were aching under the weight of our lemony-smelling towels. Had we gone too far? Had we missed them? But no. Within a block we caught sight of the first of several long lines of brown paper bags lit up, all flickering orangely with candles.
“Ah!” Ann cried, stopping short.
Hipping her basket so she could touch my arm. “Look-it that! Look.”
At some point that year—maybe that night, maybe a few weeks later—I ended up telling Ann about Loose River. I told her about the competing nativity scenes at Christmas, the Lutherans’ sandbag Jesus and the Catholics’ ice one. I told her about the gym roof that collapsed in eighth grade and about Mr. Adler, who loved the Russian monarchs more than anything, even America. I may have even told Ann about my parents eventually, and about beautiful Lily—Lily who left us to have her baby—but I never said a thing about Patra and Paul, and I never told her what I really thought about Christian Science, which is that from what I know, from what little I know, it offers one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil.
This is where it comes from, Ann.
I think, now: That’s the story I’m trying to tell here.
When Paul was excited, he ran with big moon-landing steps. He always looked as if he were concentrating very hard, saying to himself run, run, and each time the word went through his head he’d take a slightly more determined leap into the air. When I told him to run faster, he’d just run higher, and his pace would slow way down. He’d do all this useless work, hiking up his knees, pumping his fists.
It was great to watch, and I was only a little cruel in provoking him.
“Run!” I’d say, and he’d slow down to a near crawl, almost stopping between each stride.
“Faster!” I’d say. His lips would pinch shut. He’d shunt one arm forward and one arm back. He was a kid who’d learned to run by watching dwarves in their mine, from TV, from cartoons.
“Race you to the house!” I said to him once, and, as if he’d finally figured it out—that day, at last—he’d stayed put on the dock. So I took a few exaggerated steps to encourage him. “I’m going to beat you!” I said, offering that irresistible threat, doing a thump-thump-thump with my boots on the planks. No dice. When I looked back again, he’d slunk to a lying position, belly down, his arms curled up under him on the boards.
“What’s up?” I said.
I closed in on him, casually prodded him with the toe of my boot. “This bear has gone into hibernation, looks like.”
After a moment: “I’m bored.”
“The bear is bored?” I asked, mock incredulous.
“And—” He turned his neck so his face pressed into the boards, the skin of his lip pushing out in a loop. “My tummy—”
Something about the way he said it made me crouch down and look at him more closely. Then I pulled him up to sitting. I lavished on him all I had in my little reserve. “Then you don’t know about the wolf.”
“I don’t want to pretend,” he groaned.