The Unwitting Read Online Free PDF

mother. Lying about my age and dressing me in clothes that were a few years too young for me to make her look younger was not a life-threatening crime. Parking me in movie theaters for hours at a time when Mr. Richardson or one of his predecessors came to visit was not even a scarring misdemeanor. Eventually it turned out to be a blessing, because once I was old enough to find my way around town, and after a man sat next to me in a movie and put a raincoat on his lap—I didn’t know what he was doing, but I knew it wasn’t pretty—I discovered that libraries were a safer haven. I might have been de trop —a phrase I learned from my reading—at home, but in the light-filled reading room of the Epiphany Branch Library, Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, and Daisy Buchanan were always happy to see me.
    And the one time my mother suspected I was in danger, she figured out a way to protect me. When I graduated from high school, she suggested that I enlist in the Women’s Army Corps. The idea was timely and practical. I would be helping the war effort. I would be earning a living. And I would not be rattling around the apartment. She had seen the way Mr. Richardson, who paid for the apartment a stone’s throw from Stuyvesant Square—thanks to him, we had moved up in the world—had begun to follow me with his eyes.
    As it turned out, I was grateful to my mother for urging me to enlist. As long as I’d lived at home, I was a misfit in the world. My mother was not like other mothers. My father was nonexistent. In the Army, my parents did not matter. I stood or fell on my own. The experience had given me confidence. It had also given me, as I’d told Charlie, the G.I. Bill. Without it, and without those long afternoons in the library, I never would have gone to any college, let alone to one of the Seven Sisters. I still marveled at my good luck, despite the fact that Barnard had turned me back into a misfit.
    I was different from the other girls, even from my roommate, Natalie, who was supposed to be my best friend. Secretly, I prided myself on the fact. It was partly my past—I was a couple of years older and had been in the service—but it was also my future. They had their lives mapped out. I had plenty of aspirations, but few plans. In late-night talks, their scrubbed faces, framed with freshly shampooed hair set in metal clips, glowed as they spoke of their prospective husbands, some already being reeled in, others still in the fantasy stage. Those men were sure to do well. I was more interested in finding someone who was going to do good, though I wasn’t stupid enough to tell them that. They thought I was odd enough as it was, with my picketing and political passions and negro boyfriend.
    Then there was the bartering. Those girls in their innocent cotton pajamas with embroidered monograms over their hearts were as crafty as the most seasoned seller in a Middle Eastern souk. A handful of sweatered breast for a fraternity pin. Bare flesh for a promiseof marriage. Under-the-skirt privileges for a blue-white diamond on the third finger of the left hand. But I had neither the head nor the heart for haggling. I was reckless. That was what had gotten me in trouble with Woody. That was what would get me in trouble with Charlie. A month after that first night when I refused to go to his room, I went.
    Like everything else having to do with sex, the forbidden climb to the fourth floor of his boardinghouse was riskier for me than for him. If we were caught, he might be evicted. I could be expelled. As I said, I was reckless.
    I was also, in the weeks since I’d met Charlie, in a state. I was raw with sensation. In class or at the library, I could not sit still. My mind wandered, my senses throbbed. One night when Natalie went home for the weekend and I returned to the deserted room still aching from the thwarted pleasure of being with Charlie, I managed to gratify myself in the privacy of my narrow dormitory cot, but it was no