The Evening News by Tony Ardizzone Read Free Book Online

put together a rally for peace in the school auditorium; Maria neatly lettered a rainbow sign that read WORLD PEACE — LET ’ S TRY IT ! She was attentive in class and did most of her homework, and each afternoon, after riding in a girlfriend’s mother’s car to a girlfriend’s house where the girls sipped Tab and talked about clothes and boys and new records, she got high. Maria is an expert smoker of grass. She can smoke a joint down so close to her lips it resembles a half-moon sliver of fingernail, and that’s not even using a roach clip. On the weekends she worked in a department store, selling mascara and lip gloss and cologne to large, overdressed women who already used too much perfume and makeup. Maria seldom uses makeup. She is naturally pretty, with good cheekbones, her eyelashes naturally thick. When Paul met her at a party after a Grateful Dead concert, she smelled like Ivory soap and marijuana smoke.
    Demonstrations frighten her, as do most overt displays of emotion. Why can’t people be civilized and just talk things out? Maria thinks. War belongs to another world, like boxing. She cannot see any sense in people hitting each other, even if they’re being paid millions of dollars to do it. It’s stupid, she thinks, and the people who watch it and cheer are stupider, and in most arguments she leaves the room or concedes. “You’re absolutely correct,” she agrees. But of course she isn’t convinced; her surrender is only a ploy that helps her get past the time when someone else wants to argue. She knows that Paul finds her behavior irritating, but that is his problem. Maria loves Paul because of it, because he is what she isn’t. Yin and yang. Though she tells him to change, to see life as more than mere sets of social and political theories, she realizes that hispersonality is set as granite. If she were a nation she’d be Switzerland. Neutral. Protected by snowcapped mountains. Maker of watches, peace talks, chocolate. No taste fills the mouth as darkly, as completely, as chocolate. When Maria studied European geography in tenth grade she turned in so many extra-credit reports on Switzerland that her teacher raised the white flag and gave her a 101 on her report card.
    In college she received a degree in library science. She is very serious about libraries. She finds them civil, even better than churches because in libraries you can move about. Everything has its place in a library. The Dewey Decimal System was as great an advancement as the discovery of the wheel. Everyone is equal in a library, and everyone knows it is improper to raise your voice. Whenever there’s any unnecessary noise, all a librarian has to do is say, “Shhh.” People are usually grateful when you help them find a book.
    The sole imperfection, Maria thinks, is the copying room. There the coin exchangers clank; the Xerox machines groan and whir. The copiers break the spines of books. The area is somehow impure, as sacrilegious as a Coca-Cola machine in a cathedral.
    Maria is fond of sitting on a ladder in the graduate stacks, surrounded by books, reading. The gentle hum of the building’s ventilation system is the only sound she hears. She imagines that she is the keeper of ideas, the custodian of civilization, and outside the walls of her fortress the barbarians wage war against the vandals, but the library walls keep her safe. All of the explosive issues rest quietly on their shelves. Sometimes Maria thinks of herself as a monk, sheltering the written word, in the darkest days of the Dark Ages. Except for celibacy, she might have liked the life of a nun. She is often overwhelmed by the brash cacophony of life. In traffic jams, when others around her impatiently inch forward and blow their horns, she shifts into neutral and slowly idles, concentrating on the stutter of
r
’s her engine continues to pronounce. Sometimes shesmokes a joint in the library’s