Free Mean Boy by Lynn Coady Page A

as I have said, was twelve, and trying to talk about literature. Lydia, I had noticed, was the only person in my family who really read the way I did. She read for hours—it was the way she filled her days between meals and pots of tea. She didn’t quilt or do any of the crafty gramma stuff. She may have crocheted an afghan or two, but only as a begrudging nod to her gramma status. Mostly she went to her temperance meetings and to church. She had dinners with my family and Janet’s. But I always got the feeling that Lydia was like me in that everything she did when she wasn’t reading was, in her mind, just that—not-reading. That is to say, everything else in her life was, on some level, an interruption.
    I guess I thought Lydia might be a kindred spirit. I knew practically nothing about books, but I knew Milton was old and important. I had snuck a peek at
Paradise Lost
but found it impossible to follow. It was full of footnotes aiming to assist twentieth-century illiterates, but these just distracted and frustrated me all the more, seeming to taunt:
you don’t understand, do you?
Of course, I found this intolerable. I thought Lydia could help.
    It could be that I had been annoying her for the past half hour with my suggestions that we try putting half of a maraschino cherry on the cookies instead of a mere sliver—or, heaven forbid, why not an entire maraschino cherry. The slivers seemed to me minuscule—almost a cruel joke, considering the blandness of Lydia’s cookies in general. They were white and hard and, to be honest, sugar cookies only in name. To the twelve-year-old palate they more closely resembled dense, stale crackers. Lydia had told me once that her cookies were so hard because she made them for dipping intea. I remember being vaguely outraged by this. If the only confections my grandmother ever bothered to make were for dipping in tea, then whom, exactly, was she making them for? I figured out early on it couldn’t be me. If I really wanted to flatter myself, I might’ve conjectured that the maraschino slivers only came along once I started showing an interest in the cookies—Lydia’s idea of a grandmotherly gesture, perhaps. But please. If the slivers were for me, they were an insult. If anything, they were Lydia’s nod to aesthetics—mere decoration. Positively baroque in her mind.
    But at twelve, I still harboured hope for Lydia’s cookies—for me and Lydia in general. We both liked books, we both liked quiet. It seemed to me we had things to say to one another.
    Here’s where it gets vivid—insanely so. Late-afternoon streams of sunshine coming in through Lydia’s lace curtains, casting filigree shadows on the kitchen table. The perfect stillness of a summer afternoon in the middle of nowhere, just far enough away from the beach to not be bothered by the sound of breakers or people having fun. The only noise in the room was the dry rasp of Lydia’s ancient refrigerator. It seemed too hot outside for birds—some afternoons are like that, hot and still and birdless. I’d long since given up arguing about the cherries but thought it would be cute and endearing of me to try to sneak a couple of halves onto the occasional cookie anyway. Lydia was having none of it. She’d pluck the cherry from the centre of the cookie and flick it back onto the cutting board for me to dissect into respectable slivers. When I kept at it, she reached out to smack me on the hand.
    A low growl: “Stop the nonsense.”
    I did stop the nonsense after a couple of smacks on the hand—nobody can accuse me otherwise. Maybe I did go a little too far dissecting the cherries after that. My slivers eventuallybecame almost transparent—so insubstantial I could scarcely manoeuvre them from my fingers into the centre of the cookies. It got to be as though each cookie had a teeny-tiny red freckle in the middle of it. Anyway, Lydia did not complain or grunt “nonsense” over the freckles, so I assumed all was