Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Read Online Free PDF

selection) on the counter, my sincere and totalizing surprise erased any memory I had of my well-rehearsed question.
    Unable to stop myself from smiling, I picked up
Crime and Punishment
. “What brought this on?” I asked.
    “Oh,” he said, smiling in return his mother’s pained and pretty smile. “That one’s for Mom.” His omission of “my” preceding the word “Mom” tugged at my wildly beating heart. It seemed to me people who omitted possessive pronouns were capable of great intimacies, those that defied context and transcended possession. I opened the
Odyssey
case and scanned the barcode. He nodded slightly toward it and as he did so that small curtain of hair fell before his eyes again as if to indicate that any impending disclosures would be accompanied in equal parts by concealment. “Have you seen the movie
O Brother, Where Art Thou
?”
    “I have,” I said, racking my brain to remember the plot. “A long time ago. I saw it when it first came out,” I added, wanting to sound like part of his circle, someone who would see the film immediately upon its release, instead sounding the bell of alarm that I was going to movie theaters before he could read.
    “I read that
The Odyssey
was their inspiration for making the movie. So I want to check it out.” He had the look of a Romani who has been sent to prep school, well-scrubbed but out of place, eyes loaded down by memories of a childhood spent in Transylvania dreaming of films.
    “Very nice,” I said. Kindly, staid librarian thinking bold, prophetic thoughts:
You will be a filmmaker. You will fall in love. I see artistic accomplishment and forbidden love in your future
. “You’ll have to tell me how it is. It’s been even longer since I’ve read
The Odyssey,
” I said, withholding the phrase,
It was before you were born
. “These are due December 3,” I said, less to inform him of our policy than to elicit his customary rough-throated
thank you
, the aural pleasure of which I felt I should thank him for.
    It was our most protracted exchange. He had asked me a question. He had confided an interest. My inner rib cage was trembling, hands, trembling. Every centimeter of my face was flushed, my hairline and earlobes ablaze. I was so short of breath, I wondered if I had not become an instant asthmatic. Nella, working circumspectly at her desk, gave no indication of having heard anything. I suspected she’d heard everything. Like the only witness to a heinous crime, I felt the need to flee the crime scene.
    “I’ll be right back,” I said. She looked up from her papers just long enough to raise one eyebrow conspiratorially. I walked briskly to the children’s room where Siobhan was processing ILLs and stood rose-faced and trembling in front of her desk.
    “Help me to calm myself!” I commanded in a whisper, afraid that I would involuntarily cry out or erupt into uncontrollable laughter or break into enthusiastic song if someone did not bridle me at once.
    Siobhan took her tortoiseshell glasses off and let them hang on their woven cord.
    “What’s goin’ on?” she said, parodying her Midwestern drawl for my benefit. I blurted out the gist of what had happened, the effect of which was not unlike finding that one’s deeply transformative and endlessly complicated dream may be summarized in a single sentence.
    “Oh yeah,” she said. “I saw your friend. You like that big, dark eyes, dark, wavy hair thing, huh?”
    At least she had recognized him. It was more than I could say for the director, who, it occurred to me, might do well to get her eyes checked. “He’s a cute kid,” Siobhan conceded and then opened her stack of green cards into a fan and began to fan me. “You better cool off, lady! I can feel your heat from here!” Easy for her to say, she at least had the occasional “afternoon delight” while her teenage kids were at school. (
Honey, if I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have a marriage!)
    “I think he fancies me,”