DISSIDENT No. 2
POLITICS AND DEMOCRACY
The Myth of Mandates
The Priority of the Visible: How Democracy Empowers Terrorists
Straight Talk about Economic Illiteracy
The Poverty of Good Intentions
BOOKS + IDEAS + PROVOCATIONS
Buddhist Capitalism
Theory Gets a Reality Check: Power, Money, and a Little Bit about Love
ARCHIVE
BY SHTERNA WIRCBERG discuss this article At the end of this story, I find myself without friends. I wish to blame politics, for it
seemed to start with a Take Back the Night Rally, but in truth, it began much earlier—when I
was still a Lubavitcher Hasid in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But as people say (at least I do)
that beginnings are always too long, feel free to skip ahead—after all, in their own lives, people
are free to skip through their memories, and what right do I have to make you sit through mine?
However, when you meet me, don’t tell me that you skipped or I will have a lesser opinion of
you. On the other hand, as I have no friends, I will not suffer from the loss of your friendship.
“There will be many inappropriate things in the museum,” our teacher, Mrs. Lipsky, told us on the bus,“including graven images and idols. Avert your eyes until we reach the parts that are relevant to us.” As she stood in the aisle I tried to look at her midsection. She wore a loose brown dress with large silver buttons, one of which was directly over her belly. I would often stare at her to see if I was imagining that her belly button stuck outward, but her loose dresses made it difficult to know. My best friend, Mimi, said she had seen it stick out and that this meant that she was pregnant. I knew this wasn’t true; my older sister’s stuck out and she wasn’t pregnant. But the matter concerned me greatly, because I thought my sister’s defect was the reason she didn’t have many friends. “It’s babyish to make fun of that,” I said to Mimi. She turned away and pretended to hum under her breath. I wondered if my own belly button had popped out since I’d checked it that morning. Mrs. Lipsky was still talking. “There will also be rocks that the goyim try to trick us into believing were animals that once existed. Don’t look at those either.” Mimi was sitting next to me on the bus. She was much taller than I and often swaggered. Unlike my parents, who had become religious in their twenties, her parents were third-generation Lubavitchers and allowed Mimi to wear short socks, listen to classical music, and go to the public library. I felt smarter than Mimi but she knew things like how bumblebees flew and what caused strange eruptions on mountains. Her parents were always relaxing—“idly lounging around,” my mother said—and I never heard her mother or father sigh. “My brother has a book about idolaters,” Mimi said after Mrs. Lipsky was done with her warnings,“Catholics who pray to pieces of plaster!” Not to be outdone, I made up a detail. “Some religions pluck their eyebrows and feed the hairs to goats. They believe ‘god’ is a goat.” “Yeah?” she said, “There’s people who light candles to water their crops and build castles to their G-d.” I imagined them as I had imagined the people who built the tower of Babel—men with huge arms and bare chests squabbling like chickens. “The most farkakte thing,” my father had once told my family over dinner, “was not that they tried to build a tall enough tower to fight G-d, but that they thought that G-d was only in the heavens.” I was glad to be reminded otherwise. I too found it more natural to think that G-d was in the heavens than that He was in other places, especially the bathroom. I had been especially prone to thinking that God was lodged in the sky since we had begun studying astronomy. My name, Rakiya, meant heaven, so I spent many hours on our porch staring upwards, but had only seen a few dusty lights. To deal with that, I planned to buy a telescope when we won the lottery. The museum was a circular white building that made me feel as if I were entering a pagan sanctuary. Inside, the floors were shiny and waxed and I imagined sliding on them. This thought seemed irreverent in the majestic hall. The other people waiting on line shamelessly displayed their elbows and knees and carefully manicured nails. They knew nothing about the fear of G-d. While Mrs. Lipsky bought tickets for us, I looked around the corner of the ticket booths and saw a monster. Stretching to the ceiling, it was a pile of impossibly long bones that started with legs double my height, and a tail with plate-like protrusions. As I tilted my head back, its body seemed to go up forever, until finally I saw its tiny, hideous skull. Its arms clawed the air. It looked like it was about to rear down, bite me open and chew my innards like Tangy Taffy. I had been to the Bronx Zoo several times but had never seen a creature like this. The rest of my classmates were staring at it as well, looks of horror and fascination on their faces. Mimi sidled up to me. “This is a ‘dinosaur,’” she whispered as she read the plaque, “a bar-o-saur-us.” My teacher had finished with the tickets and clapped her hands, “Girls! Remember what I said, cover your eyes!” A museum guide approached, speaking briskly and authoritatively. “Hello young ladies! You are admiring the five-story-high Barosaurus defending its youngster from an attacking Allosaurus. This display is the tallest free-standing dinosaur mount in the world.” He gestured toward the skull and prepared to continue, but Mrs. Lipsky interrupted him. “Thank you, but we are religious Jews and do not believe in that.” The guide pulled his suddenly wide eyes into his head and backed away. My teacher shepherded us out of the rotunda. Her mouth moved in a grimace of mockery. “The goyim believe all sorts of strange things,” she told us, “for instance they believe that dinosaurs existed and are millions of years old even though G-d created the universe only 5,000 years ago.” Her features smoothed into an expression of delight that I imagined we would all feel once the Third Temple was built in Jerusalem. At that moment a group of slightly older non-Jewish students came in and stared up at the dinosaur. “It’s so scary!” I looked at the girl who said this. She had black hair like me and wore the same exact shoes I did. She stood next to a boy with flaming red hair. He tried to impress her: “Dinosaurs used to have gigantic wars with each other and if we were around they’d kill us too.” I guess it worked, because the girl grabbed the boy’s elbow as she stared up in fear. I poked Mimi in the back and saw that she too wanted to laugh. We held it in until we had gotten farther along in the museum. That night, I thought about the barosaurus. Its long mysterious body still scared me, but less now that I realized it was merely a trick. I remembered the gentile girl in the museum and wished I could tell her that it wasn’t real, that she had no reason to be afraid. Why did people believe in such things? My father told me the next day that it was because Jews have higher souls than gentiles.
My father explained that the Rebbe was subtly indicating
that he was Moshiach, the Messiah—a conclusion
we reached as well. The Rebbe, to whom we now began
referring as Melech HaMoshiach—King Messiah—would enter the huge synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway
and begin speaking to whatever audience happened to
be there, distributing dollars or holy books. My parents The Moshiach siren would go off as well, for the benefit of those who didn’t have beepers. Its thin shriek made me feel both terror and wonder. As the siren wailed, the streets would start filling up and often we passed Mimi’s house just as her family came out. We would walk as fast as we could, eating from Mimi’s bag of treats, and see our other classmates marching with their families. Once I even found myself hurrying alongside Mrs. Lipsky and her husband. She introduced herself to my parents. Her voice with them was young and light, as I’d heard it only rarely, like the time she was mocking the museum guide. When the Moshiach marches occurred at night, the street lamps would glow like the burning bush and the light fell across people’s faces as if they were prophesying. Excitement overcame my sleepiness. I clung close to my parents in the growing flood of the devout. I would watch as the men rapidly adjusted their shirts, their black coats flapping behind them like the wings of great birds. Many of the women had forgotten to change into their wigs and hastily tried to stuff stray hairs under their scarves as they pushed a stroller with one hand and clutched a yawning child in the other. People would shove hard in order to be able to enter 770 and get a better spot to see the Rebbe, but out on the street, where loudspeakers brought his pronouncements, there was a festive sense of calm and unity. Some of the men would start singing a wordless tune while others, like my father, stayed in meditative silence as they tried to clear their minds of all thoughts but the wonders of the Rebbe. Sometimes he said to me in an awe-struck voice,“The Rebbe, the Rebbe, the Rebbe!”
“There are four reasons why someone would say they’re not Jewish,” Mrs. Lipsky told us. “Either they are really not Jewish, but this would be rare because most people in the city are Jewish. Or they are Jewish but are in a rush. Or they are Jewish and embarrassed. Or they are Jewish but don’t know it.” The pamphlet we were to press into the hands of busy or embarrassed Jews was about lighting shabbos candles. “Light up the world,” it said, and had a picture of a beatific mother and daughter in front of a candelabra.“Their smiles look so innocent and peaceful,” my mother said. She attached a pamphlet to the refrigerator door with a magnet from Leibowitz Storm Windows. Whenever I would talk back to my mother, she would say, “Why can’t you be like her!” and point to the daughter in the picture, who looked incapable of contradicting anyone. The pictured girl, Fraydel, was in my class, and because she was now famous, she acted snooty and tried to hand out the most pamphlets. I suspected that she handed them out to non-Jews, so that everyone could see her. “I’m glad I’m not Fraydel,” I told Mimi, “I would pop from all that extra air.” But secretly I was jealous. Even at her most intolerable, she really did seem to be at peace with the world. I imagined her in just a few years as a devoted wife with three children and at least seven more on the way. Some day she might even pose in a new pamphlet as the blissful mother. “Don’t stop the men,” Mrs. Lipsky told us. “I know of one case when a woman stopped a man and instead of influencing him in the proper direction, this particular individual ended up throwing away her skirt and committing sins too heinous to mention.” I wanted to ask Mrs. Lipsky what kind of sins she meant but she was already partnering us up on different street corners. The streets felt cold and unyielding, far removed from the streets I had walked on the night before as the Moshiach siren blared. As I waited on the corner I stared up at the tall buildings around me. “I wish I worked right there,” Mimi said, pointing to a top floor. “Yeah, right,” I said, “all they want is money and to talk to people of the opposite sex.” “While they take their kids to see dinosaurs!” Mimi said.“This is serious,” I scolded. “These are Jews but they’re living like Canaanites.” I couldn’t understand how they could be so ignorant and stupid, especially if they had higher souls. The first person to come our way was a woman in a very short skirt out of which poked enormous thighs with no stockings. Below her skirt, she wore military boots so tall it seemed that with one motion she could flatten me into a gum smudge. “No way am I asking her,” I told Mimi, “she’s definitely not Jewish.” “Of course she’s Jewish,” Mimi said, “why else would she try so hard to hide it?” She marched right up to the woman and I moved back. Mimi’s body, which had always seemed large in comparison to mine, was almost invisible beside the woman’s. “You Jewish?” Mimi asked. The woman smiled but kept walking. “Of course I’m Jewish. One of your pals just gave me something on the other corner, k?” She continued on. Mimi was triumphant. She walked up to someone else, but the woman ignored her. I stopped an elderly lady with a cane who looked like my grandmother and seemed kind. “Excuse-me-are-you-Jewish?” She paused, glared at me, and said “That’s none of your business.” I imagined her voice grating a carrot. “Stop bothering strangers.” I wished I were very far away. Thankfully, an hour later Mrs. Lipsky gathered us for the bus ride home. “Look how we’re brightening the streets,” she said, “We’ll go every two weeks.” I did not feel like I had brightened anything particularly. In fact, I was so humiliated that I hoped desperately to be relieved from this duty. Why should I have to face harsh looks just because some Jews chose to be heathens? I made up a special prayer in preparation for the next outreach trip. “Please help me get all the yiddin to become religious. Let them quit their jobs and elevate the world so Moshiach can come and everyone smiles at me. And plus, make a camel fall on the lady with the cane so she’ll repent and be nice to me.”
“This is a good opportunity to revitalize your intestines,” my mother said after she read the memo on the new school lunches. She wrote a note asking if we could be excused from eating the school food and packed a healthy lunch for my sister and me. During lunch she and I huddled in the back of the cafeteria, nauseated by the smell of 400 salami sandwiches being eaten. I put my hands over my brown bag so no one would know what was inside. I stared at Mimi, hoping she would come join my sister and me, but after she looked in our direction, she began talking to the girl next to her. I turned to my nori balls stuffed with brown rice and umeboshi. The thin seaweed of the nori, which we would vie over at home, now looked like dried caca. I wondered if I could somehow apply the higher-souls theory to explain that my sister and I were eating these strange foods because we were better than everyone else. I looked at my sister and saw in her eyes the humiliation I felt. She was in seventh grade, two grades ahead of me. “Are they the weird ones?” I asked her, “or is it us?” “Everybody in the world thinks they’re weird,” she said. Her voice was hard. I conceded that this may be true but it didn’t make me feel any less of an outcast. She brought the nori to her mouth, took a big bite and then, with a stuffed mouth, said, “They don’t know what’s good for them. They’ll die from that stuff.” This echoed my mother’s more elaborate repudiation of cold cuts, but I could tell that in a few seconds my sister would be wiping her eyes. When I came home from school that day my mother was making miso soup, steamed broccoli, and buckwheat.“No one in my class has miso,” I told my mother,“and I’m not taking any more lunches to school. Everyone looks at me like I’m growing a beard.” “When the rest of your classmates get sick from their bad eating habits,” she said, “you will rest secure that you had the healthiest diet known to man. You will thank me then.” I had heard this before, and I had secretly pitied all the people I knew who ate meat. But now my mother’s theory seemed suspect. If anything, I was the least healthy of my classmates. I got out of breath the most quickly and often had to sit on the side while other kids threw a ball around as easily as tossing clothes on the floor. I always had colds. Everyone would choose me when they wanted an easy victory in arm-wrestling. Also, we had learned in science that milk builds bones. I had the smallest bones of anyone in my class and had broken my wrist three times. I imagined myself in twenty years, unable to cut my nails because my finger flesh had grown half a foot past the end of my finger bones. Macrobiotics, I decided, was a hoax. My mother was still talking. “And you have to treat your body especially well, because it is G-d’s vessel. Sugar rots the teeth, destroys the pancreas, and causes cancer.” My mind wandered. If she’d made such a big mistake about food, how did I know she was right about other things as well, such as my body being G-d’s vessel? As soon as I thought about that one, it seemed absurd. What would G-d need with my miserable little body? She looked at me lovingly. “When we moved here people thought we were lunatics for not eating brisket. I know how it feels, believe me. But everyone on my side of the family died young and I don’t want you to. My mind is made up!” she said, and I was no match for this logic. Back in the lunchroom, my sister managed to ignore everyone else but I was unable to stop looking at the other children’s lunches. What had before nauseated me now started to seem divine, wonderful, and unattainable. I no longer tried to catch Mimi’s attention. At home I would lock myself in the bathroom and stare at my reflection. I looked like a despicable moth in the coat closet, burrowing further and further into the dark cloths so as not to be seen. A week later I was once again relegated to a street corner, this time with both Mimi and Fraydel. Before I could move, they zoomed up to a woman in large hoop earrings that looked like pieces of twisted tinfoil. “Are you Jewish?” Mimi asked. The woman wrapped her arms around her chest and hurried on. I felt myself blush. It could’ve been me she was looking at contemptuously. I saw Mimi and Fraydel as the woman must have seen them—as slightly foolish—and she suddenly seemed to me, except for her gaudy earrings, to be extremely reasonable. It was silly, wasn’t it, to expect to bring Moshiach by handing out pamphlets? Wouldn’t it make more sense to light shabbos candles for these heathen instead of trying to get them to do it? I watched Mimi and Fraydel continue handing out pamphlets. They giggled and grinned. They are, I thought, congratulating themselves on what good clowns they are without realizing how stupid it is to be a clown. I developed a new routine. When Mrs. Lipsky wasn’t watching I would stand on the corner with the pamphlets behind my back, pretending I was just one of the many people waiting for the light to turn green. When I would see her looking at me, knowing that she couldn’t hear what I was saying, I would nod and mumble to the passing strangers, “Have a good day.” But whenever possible I would just hold them out mutely. Passersby would unwittingly take them as they took fliers from the other hander-outers standing around, with ads for glasses or shoes. I thought of dumping some of the pamphlets into the garbage but I envisioned a wind that would whip the papers out of the trashcan and over to Mrs. Lipsky.
“Are you going to deny the truth which Jews have accepted for over three thousand years?” my father asked me when I left. He thought I had gone insane and offered to pay for a consultation with a very respected rabbi. “He also knows about psychology,” he said. I didn’t want to explain that I was leaving because I’d concluded that it was his world, my world, that was insane. But after several months in the secular world, I thought of going to the college therapist for free. Having been forbidden to talk to boys all my life, I had no idea how to do so now, or even look them in the eye. I did not know how to dress, for I had worn hand-me-downs that had covered every part of my body except my hands and head. I didn’t have TV or movie references in common with anyone, since I had seen only videos of the Rebbe and heard only tapes of Torah stories. In an introductory course on politics and culture, someone compared the president to the Wizard of Oz and everyone laughed. “The Wizard of Oz?” I asked. “You know, Dorothy . . .?” someone said. “The Tin Man?” she continued, trying to jog a memory I did not have. “Earth to Rakiya, wake up,” someone else joked. Professor Lodger asked me to stay for a minute after class. “I’ve just finished grading the first batch of papers and I’ve never seen anyone use the word scrame or say‘Amn’t I.’ How can I help?” “We didn’t learn how to write papers in school,” I said. “I grew up speaking a mixture of Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, and English was the least important.” I told her how I wasn’t allowed to see movies or watch TV. “Like the Amish?” she asked; but I didn’t know who they were. Very shortly, she had assigned herself to be my mentor and lent me books that I should have read in high school. I also went to the public library every week to read children’s books to catch up. I began using the Writing Center, too, and soon I was doing much better in my classes. I had decided to major in astrophysics in order to more thoroughly study the stars that fascinated me. Every Thursday for a couple of hours, the astrophysics department would allow students to go up to the rooftop observatory to use the telescope. Most times I had the telescope to myself, and would try to locate the different constellations. Mostly, though, I would just stare at the bright lights, pretending that each was a person and each constellation a community. From so far away, the peculiarities of each star were invisible but I would try to spot myself, to find a star that looked like it was moving from one galaxy to another. Professor Lodger—who now insisted that I call her Angela—invited me to her house to discuss how I was settling in. I told her about the latest dumb remark I’d made in class. “It’s like being an immigrant,” she told me,“the culture shock. Often they think they’re crazy.” She described the time she had gone to France for a study-abroad program in college. “There were all sorts of niceties that I felt stupid for not knowing and I made all sorts of faux pas.” She stared at the table cloth, remembering. Her hair was very light, her eyes were very blue, and her nose was very round. “And then of course there’s the language. I had taken two years of French but once I got there my tongue became stupid. I couldn’t help myself; the wrong words would just come. It wasn’t simply that the language was new; it was that I was so lonely and just needed to talk, to say anything to get people to look at me.” She was quiet again. “That’s why it’s really important that you meet new people. You have to stop feeling that people won’t understand you—take a chance.” “Sometimes when I go to the bathroom I automatically start saying the prayer for the bowels,” I said. “Or when someone says that they love their boyfriend or even a movie or a book I want to tell them that it’s not right to love anything but G-d. . . . And even though I don’t really believe in Him any more, sometimes when people are talking about gender roles and social forces I’m really excited because all I know about is divine forces, but I don’t even get half the discussion because I’m thinking it’s the Yetzer hara that makes people oppress each other—that’s the ‘evil inclination.’” Angela nodded. “Critical thinking is often the first thing to go in fundamentalist communities.” Her little boy, who had been clanging a pot on the floor, began to cry. She scooped him up to change his diaper. “Hey,” she said as she went into the other room, “there’s a Take Back the Night Rally on Thursday. You should go—a new experience for you.” I nodded, thanked her, and left. I wished I could just run up and hug her and tell her how nice she was, but I still felt shy around her. I thought about Angela’s comment about critical thinking. I used to think my father’s thorough explication of Biblical texts was critical thinking, even though we didn’t have that term.
The girl right behind me shouted loudly. The bottom of a banner she was holding with three other girls kept bumping against my calves. The girl to my left had a big sign, which she carried in front of her as if she were a bride showing off her wedding dress. The sign said,“Hey hey, ho ho, Larry Summers has to go!” This girl wasn’t yelling, so I asked her what her poster meant. “He’s the Harvard president who thinks women are inferior,” she said. She was smiling and though I had never heard of Larry Summers, I smiled back. I was about to ask her another question but at that moment I saw a flash and realized that someone had taken a picture of us. I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting. I couldn’t help but remember my younger self, marching with my whole community. A moment before, this memory had made me happy, but I now remembered that the reason for the march—the expectation that Moshiach would arrive at any moment—was laughable. The photographer hovered on the edge of the crowd like a big firefly. I watched him suspiciously, and I comforted myself: there is nothing foolish about protesting rape. When we returned to campus for a “speak-out,” the street lights were turned off to foster anonymity. Student after student recounted how she had been sexually harassed or abused. I could stay for only a half hour because then the observatory opened. Up on the roof the angry words of the speakers below made the brightness of the stars seem stale and stupid. I remembered the years when I was younger, when I had believed that if I just prayed hard enough, we would win the lottery. It had not seemed at all foolish, and I had ridiculed people who didn’t believe in prayer. I thought of the horrible stories I had just heard at the speak-out and suddenly wished to believe again in magic.
“No one but children can be that happy,” Angela said. “Modern life allows no certainty. I’m scared of the kind of world he’ll face as an adult. Things only get worse and worse.” We were silent, watching the boy. He hovered for another moment and then fell down with a plop. I sat down at the table and pulled him into my lap. The kettle whistled and Angela made tea in two enormous black mugs, not the chipped little teacups I was used to. When she sat back down, her face danced. “I see you were at the rally!” she said. “You’re on the front page!” She showed me the campus newspaper on the table. I looked down and sure enough, there I was, but if Angela hadn’t told me, I might not have recognized myself. The smile on my face looked familiar—but not like me. Or at least it wasn’t the suspicious look I imagined myself always wearing. “You look adorable,” she said. She was right, I thought, but that made it worse because it still didn’t look like me. I pushed the paper to the side. I remembered one of the questions I had about the march. “They were protesting the president of Harvard,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?” “He’s a sexist,” Angela replied, putting down her mug to concentrate. “He believes that women are inherently inferior to men and that’s why there’re so few of them in math and science.” “Yes!” I said. “In calculus and astrophysics classes, sometimes I’m the only girl.” I told Angela about the absurd higher-souls theory I had once believed. It sounded like Summers believed that theory about men. “It’s crazy to think it’s an innate gender difference,” she continued. “We’ve just trained young women to be average. We’ve trained young men to be adventurous.” Angela went on, but I kept thinking about adventurousness. There was nothing about sitting in a lab or even in a rooftop observatory that seemed adventurous to me, and the men in my science classes were timid and not inclined to feats of heroism or even charm. Maybe I was the only girl there because topics like calculus were often very dry, and maybe girls who were more adventurous than I—I thought of the leaders of the Take Back the Night March, and the speakers—were impatient with sitting around thinking about numbers. Or what if it was something else? I knew that during my period, I had difficulty with equations that were easy on other days. Maybe it was hormones? But in that case, men and women do have innate differences. This made more sense than the higher-souls theory. But I used to believe in that just as calmly as Angela believed what she did. I didn’t figure it out, but thinking about it made my lungs expand, as if I had just breathed in purer air. I looked up, afraid that Angela might have seen me doubting her, but she too was just looking up, from the end of a sentence about gender roles. My eye landed on my picture again and I noticed the banner that had been bumping my legs: “No to Capitalism, No to War, I Am Not Your Goddamned Whore!” “What’s this about?” I asked Angela, turning the picture in her direction. “Oh, one of them carrying the banner is Molly, another of my best students! She’s writing a senior thesis on pacifism. The point of the banner is that all the forms of social injustice are connected.” I was beginning to feel uneasy. “What about a war that helps people?” I asked. “Wars kill people, they don’t help them,” she pointed out. “But World War II—the Holocaust?” I said. “FDR didn’t do a thing about the Holocaust—he could have bombed the railroad lines to Auschwitz and he looked the other way,” she replied. This seemed both shocking and beside the point, since at least the war had killed Hitler and ended the Holocaust. I felt like I was batting around interpretations of the Torah with my father again. I was going to ask about the “Capitalism” part of the banner, but as I looked at it, I caught sight of my face in the picture again and my fingers and toes felt cold. I realized what was familiar about it: my face had the same angelic expression Fraydel had worn in the pamphlet on shabbos candles. Angela continued speaking about pacifism, her eyes as complacent as her baby’s. I was suddenly aware of how fragile my heart was under my ribcage. I couldn’t stand looking at Angela or at myself for one more moment. I excused myself, wandered out, and never went back to Angela’s house. I eventually got an A in her class, but in the three weeks before the end of the semester I sat in the back row and tried to avoid seeing the bewildered hurt on her face when she looked in my direction. As she spoke about how popular culture fosters complicity with capitalism, I was mostly preoccupied with myself. Why did I feel nauseated by the political salami Angela was serving? And why was I the only one who was reacting that way? Was everyone else crazy, or was it me? Whenever I sneaked a look at the other students, I saw nothing but Fraydel. I knew that I had been just as dazzled by Angela’s ideas—and the ideas all around me in college—as the other students in her class now were. I had been, that is, before I saw the smile on my face in the newspaper. Just like my mother had said, it was an innocent smile. Innocent of other galaxies.
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