Free No Book but the World: A Novel by Leah Hager Cohen

of anointing with oil and wandering in the wilderness, of angels who rolled back stones and angels who guided a child’s hand to a white-hot coal—created in me my first sharp awareness of impoverishment, of being both an outsider and beyond the pale.
    “Don’t you
know
?” they would marvel, eyes widening, when I inquired about some aspect of their story that should apparently have been obvious (
Who are the chosen? It really turns to blood? Why couldn’t they eat the apples? What’s crucify?
), but here again, even the brashest and most supercilious of my peers would respond with a munificent patience they did not otherwise possess, as though it were on loan from another source. Whether such largesse was a mark of their concern for the egregiousness of my ignorance, or whether it signaled a special goodness engendered by religion, either way I was left yearning for what I did not have, and blaming Neel and June for the deprivation.
    “Why don’t we go to church?” I demanded at home, causing Neel to widen his eyes theatrically and work his lips ruminatively, a performance of contemplation. Then he went into full Socratic mode:
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Everyone else does.”
    “Everyone?” He raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Really?”
    “Basically. Most people. Church or temple.”
    “And you’d like it if we went, too?”
    “Yes.”
    “In order to be like everyone else?”
    But I was too clever to let him lead me down that path. “No, Neel. Not to be like them—because
I
think it’s important.”
    “What’s important about it?”
    I hesitated, then came up with what seemed to me a trump card: “God.”
    It must have been a good answer, because he tacked a little to the left. “And what is it you’d do at church?”
    “Pray.”
    “What does that mean, ‘pray’?”
    “Talk to God.”
    “Can’t you do that anywhere?”
    “It’s not the same as if you do it in church.”
    “What’s different about it?”
    And so on, until I was ready to heave my knapsack at him.
    In the end, though, they decided I should be allowed to experience it for myself, and a few weeks later June took Kitty and me to Quaker services on the other side of the county. I asked June to braid my hair, and Kitty and I both wore skirts and buckled shoes instead of our habitual jeans and sneakers. We rode silently along bumpy back roads, the snowy fields bathed in a thin broth of winter sun. I pressed my mittened hands together in my lap. My scalp felt tight with the braids.
    The Friends’ Meeting House turned out to be a plain white clapboard structure with a wide front porch and inside, an austere room with wooden benches arranged in concentric circles. There were only twenty or thirty people there, all of them grown-ups, many of them elderly, sitting mostly in silence for what felt like hours. Every now and then someone would stand and say something uninteresting and sit back down again. I was as bored as I’d ever been in my life. I played with my tongue for a while, tried to see if I could count my teeth with it. I kept thinking how lucky it was Freddy hadn’t come, how if he were there he’d be making noise, using his fingers as drumsticks, kicking rhythms against the bench in front of him, wailing if June tried to make him stop, and how the people, the Friends gathered in this room, would turn their elderly grim faces toward him, toward June, too, and Kitty and me, and silently determine that Freddy was wicked and June negligent, and Kitty and I distasteful by association, and how they wouldn’t understand about who he was, how unmanageable his ways, and how beyond his control because so thoroughly a part of him.
    These thoughts made me feel still and mysterious and ancient and sad, almost worthy of my tight braids and skirt and buckled shoes, and when at last people started shaking hands with those sitting near them, and we stood and stretched our stiff cold limbs, I felt as if I’d aged years since I’d