Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online Page A

whose name was not Wendy, in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens , a different book from Peter Pan. So he told Meg, showing her a copy in the university library where he liked
to stash his backpack and stretch his legs out and read during the day. He showed her the thick novel he had written. “Did you read it?” Sam said, because both of us could picture Meg taking it home and reading every word as she would her students’ papers. No. It was his only copy.
    No address. No job. I wouldn’t have put much thought into the words tall or short until Meg was looking for a husband. Kevin was too tall for comfort. Forced to travel along up above everybody else, too tall to be unnoticed, so tall his height might seem to account for everything he did or didn’t do. None of this could be uttered, and I was ashamed of the forebodings her father and I were sharing behind our smiles.
    It was all so old-fashioned, so tinged with the foreign; it had the flavor of the sluggish, mysterious comings and goings in an opium den, this search for a husband for Meg.
    â€œI’d like to meet this Lali,” Sam said. That would be a small step we might allow ourselves with Meg, some distance from announcing a wish to meet any of the three prospective husbands.
    â€œDon’t keep saying this Lali , please,” Meg said reasonably. The awful prose of Lali’s descriptions had made no impression on Meg, whose degree was in anthropology and comparative religion but who was teaching composition at the community college and should have noticed Lali’s style. In less than a year Lali had become her close friend.
    â€œIf she’s a friend how come she had to write up these . . . compositions?” I said. “Why couldn’t she just sit down with you and describe these guys honestly?”
    â€œIt was a formal arrangement,” said Meg with dignity. “And the descriptions were in her database.”
    â€œI think she knows our Meg is a bit too kindhearted for her own good,” Sam said.

    â€œA pushover, you mean,” Meg said.
    â€œNot what I mean.”
    â€œThese descriptions are honest,” Meg said. “If you read them carefully, it’s all there.” She grinned. It was after she met the third one, the borderline, that we were having this discussion, speaking openly about Meg’s decision to try to meet someone serious, someone to consider marrying.
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    BORDERLINE IS A PSYCHIATRIC diagnosis, not at all the ironic all-purpose label it is in lay talk. She’s really borderline, we say, meaning somebody is capable of going, and might go, too far. But in the field of psychology it means something specific. It means a person damaged in childhood, usually, who has formed a personality consisting of impulsivity, paranoia, and avidity for affection.
    â€œYou mean in this entire city all this Lali could find for Meg was three creeps? For Meg ?” Sam’s blood pressure was up because the third one had proved to be a crazy man. Filmmaker! Andrei worked as a busboy in a steak-and-lobster restaurant. He was almost forty, a student at the community college.
    That was when we asked if Lali was also a student there, and found out that she was.
    With Andrei, Meg’s good sense clicked in and she got away from him as fast as she could, though not before he wrote down her telephone number and started calling her apartment every hour. Then for some reason she agreed to go out with him, although she was already seeing Kevin.
    It was Andrei’s belief, as Meg assured us later it was the belief of many desperate citizens of Russia, bewildered and finally deluded by their own misfortunes since the collapse of communism, that the Jews were in charge and were intent on wiping
Christianity from the face of the earth. Christians must marry and produce children as fast as they could. Andrei had seen the card on the bulletin board advertising Lali’s service and was ready on the