Limbo by A. Manette Ansay Page B

Well, he wasn’t about to put up with this nonsense! No ma’am, I could take a foreign language when I got to eighth grade like the rest of my classmates. Who did I think I was, acting as if I were better than everyone else?
    I thought about The Chosen walking home after school, leaving by the side door to avoid the popular kids, cutting through the clouds of cigarette and pot smoke released by the stoners. I even thought about it at the piano where, usually, nothing could distract me. I understood, for the first time, what literature could be: an opportunity to live beyond yourself, to be bigger and brighter than you’d ever hoped to be. To see your face reflected back, framed within a broader context. To stare at that reflection, and begin to dream.
    â€œIs everything all right at school?” my mother said.
    â€œEverything’s fine,” I said.
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    I decided that I would teach myself to study the way Reuven and Danny studied. I would make study part of my daily life, like prayer, like practicing the piano.
    I had a desk in my bedroom. It was white, with baby blue drawers and gilded drawer pulls. It didn’t seem like the kind of desk Reuven and his father would have used, but I figured it would have to do. First thing Saturday morning, I cleaned out the drawers, wiped the top with Windex. I set out a single, pristine notebook, a couple of freshly sharpened pencils, and my copy of The Chosen . Then I set about hunting down the dictionary. I discovered it with the Scrabble board, in the cupboard underneath the wet bar, where we kept the rest of the household’s intellectual property: the Bible, the World Book Encyclopedia , a guide to seashell identification, and my father’s plastic label-maker. The dictionary’s cover was missing, and the front pages were lined with Scrabble scores, but its insides were intact.
    When I had my desk set up, I paged through The Chosen and made a list of the scholars and philosophers Danny and Reuven had mentioned. Then I stuck the list in my pocket, put on my coat, and headed for the library. I hadn’t bothered writing down the names of any fiction writers; I was done with such frivolous study. I was going to dedicate myself to psychology, religion, and mathematics. But when I opened the card catalogue, I discoveredthere were no books by Freud in our library. There were no books by Aristotle, or Spinoza, or Kant; there was no copy of Principia Mathematica . Reuven had been reading a book on logic by Susanne Langer: no listing. Danny had been upset by a writer named Graetz: nothing. It crossed my mind that I could simply study the Talmud. But when I asked at the desk, the librarian, without changing expression, said that she’d never heard of such a book. Who’d written it again? she said, and I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was like the Bible, that nobody had written it.
    God, the librarian informed me, had written the Bible.
    I wandered back to the card catalogue. Briefly, I considered reading the Bible, but it seemed too ordinary, too familiar; I wanted to start with something that would shake me up, the way Freud had shaken up Danny. It occurred to me that Chaim Potok might have invented the books he’d mentioned in The Chosen , the way he’d invented Danny and Reuven. But no—I knew that Freud, at least, was real. He was the guy who’d figured out that what girls really wanted were penises. Even I knew that. It didn’t seem to me that I’d ever wanted a penis, though I could clearly remember a group of us girls teasing Buddy Burmiester because we could have babies and he couldn’t. This had been in fourth grade. We’d taunted himuntil he cried. But maybe things had been different in Freud’s day.
    Not that I was going to be able to read him and find out for myself.
    I thought as hard as I could, riffling through the flotsam and jetsam of six years of public school education. Somewhere in