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20 chapter seven Good lucy Iwas considered good-tempered when young, and my parents appreciated this in a house full of irrational children. My oldest sister was mean; my next-oldest was sad; and my brother was, you might say, slow to develop. It was left to me to be inoffensive—easily done as I considered life to be simply enchanting. When I was seventeen, I decided to marry someone. It was not considered normal to get married so young, in that modern time. Perhaps it was my one moment of rebellion—a desire for early, good marriage! My parents never said that they hoped for us girls to marry so young,as they themselves had very well done. In fact, it was something I knew might not please them. Yet what else was there for a happy girl to do but get married, I wondered. (My older sisters had different ideas about the tradition of marriage: Ketzia feared it, and Merry despised it of course.) It’s not so much that I longed for or loved the idea; I just had a kindly relationship to it, as I did to everything possible under the sun. One night, I invited a neighbor over for dinner—his name was Sam Han. I had been in love with him since third grade. 21 My mother put Chinese take-out—dumplings, egg rolls, and rice—onto the table and my father announced, “She’s a true Jewish princess, this one. Wants Chinese every weekend.” “So airy she sees the wind coming. Such a fairy she hears the flies coughing,” my mother addended. “None of what they said about me is true,” I confided to Sam. This was a lie: I could hear the flies coughing, the wind coming; as for the moniker of Jewish princess, I found it quite pleasing! And I always have adored the Chinese. Sam nodded his head. “I know, Lucy,” he said, and he took my hand under the table. “If you really cared, you wouldn’t be in the Blue Classroom at school.” My school was public and progressive and didn’t believe in calling some children gifted, advanced, or honored. Instead we were put into classrooms of colors—pink, violet, blue; and blue was the lowest achieving. Sam was in pink and it was rumored that he knew the Latin names of all wildflowers native to our small suburb; the precise distance between the earth and the moon; and the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It is not true that I wasn’t smart, but I didn’t feel a need to prove my intelligence to anyone; either it would shine or would not shine to them, no matter as I knew that the light that shone upon us all was divine and was wondrous. Unlike my older sister Merry, who was very smart but so mean she could only do math and not reading, and unlike Ketzia, who felt so sorry for herself she couldn’t think about numbers and only could think about books, I was good, my mind free and untarnished. I was a child in the light of the world. 22 The truth is, I didn’t bother to try or not to try at my schooling. I could not understand the convention of proving I had or had not mastered certain inventions, however interesting they could surely be proven to be, like math or like spelling. It is difficult to explain, but always there was something else that interested me ever so much more . . . something just out of reach, like heaven, horizon, or dream. I murmured a thank you to Sam for understanding that I was not stupid or smart,but rather neutral—I mean,sort of abstract. I had the flatness of a grey stone in the hand of a spirit, I think. I mean this in a good way, as an essence of being. Of course I allowed Sam Han to hold my hand as I walked him up the street to his house. He was not as small as his stooped-over father, but he did have to stand on the sidewalk to kiss me goodnight, while I stayed on the cobblestone street. “Lucy Gold,”he said,“I will never forget you. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a very long time that you are most important to me, and you always will be. You have been a loyal friend who has never questioned my interest in wildflowers...

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