by Jana Casale
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Jana Casale
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Casale, Jana, author.
Title: The girl who never read Noam Chomsky : a novel / Jana Casale.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017028589 | ISBN 9781524731991 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781524732004 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. | Self-realization in women—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.A826 G57 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028589
Ebook ISBN 9781524732004
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Janet Hansen
v5.1
a
This book is dedicated to my mom
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1 Chapter 1: Deciding to Read Noam Chomsky
Chapter 2: The First Innate Truth
Chapter 3: New Year’s
Chapter 4: Hollandaise Sauce
Chapter 5: Writing
Chapter 6: Workshop
Chapter 7: Showering
Chapter 8: Lunch with Elle
Chapter 9: Joining a Gym
Chapter 10: Loneliness
Chapter 11: Stars
Chapter 12: The Day After
Chapter 13: Remembering
Chapter 14: Success
Part 2 Chapter 15: Meeting
Chapter 16: The First Date
Chapter 17: The Phone
Chapter 18: The First Time Having Sex with John
Chapter 19: Really Good Sex
Chapter 20: Being in Love
Chapter 21: Christmas
Part 3 Chapter 22: San Francisco
Chapter 23: Attempting to Swim
Chapter 24: A Room with a View
Chapter 25: An Average Day in the First Month of Living in San Francisco
Chapter 26: Rochelle
Chapter 27: The Beginning of the Descent
Chapter 28: Fristmas
Chapter 29: The Reading
Chapter 30: Blackfish
Chapter 31: Routine
Chapter 32: Getting Engaged
Part 4 Chapter 33: Wedding
Chapter 34: Pregnancy
Chapter 35: Annabelle
Chapter 36: Other Mothers
Chapter 37: Vacation
Chapter 38: Walking to CVS in the Rain
Chapter 39: A Conversation with a Three-Year-Old About a Barbie
Chapter 40: Lunch with Elle
Chapter 41: Baby Number 2
Chapter 42: Annabelle Starts School
Chapter 43: Dee Dee
Chapter 44: Period
Chapter 45: School Play
Chapter 46: A Call from Elle
Chapter 47: Leda and Her Mom
Chapter 48: You and I
Chapter 49: Writing Group
Chapter 50: Horace
Chapter 51: Crying at Commercials
Chapter 52: The End of Forever
Part 5 Chapter 53: Waiting for a Table
Chapter 54: The Last Innate Truth
Chapter 55: Gardening
Chapter 56: Never Reading Noam Chomsky
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
Deciding to Read Noam Chomsky
“I’d like to read Noam Chomsky,” Leda said. At this point in her life she had a stack of books she kept by the bed and a splinter in her right hand. She should have thought more closely about cleaning out her microwave. She had class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Each week she’d sit in the window seat at the back of her school’s library and study. On this day she had cried listening to “All You Need Is Love” as she took the subway to school. She didn’t want people to know she was crying, so she took great care to blink away as many tears as she could, but she did so hope that there was nothing you could do that couldn’t be done. She ate a partially crushed scone as she studied that afternoon. Later she’d have another scone before bed. This was the only time in her life she consumed multiple scones in one day. As she ate she thought about the boy who lived in the apartment across the street and the word Umbria. The scone was blueberry, and after she finished it she folded up the wax paper and put it in her left coat pocket.
The only reasons she’d remember for wanting to read Chomsky were all the varied intellectual ones that took precedence in her mind: an article she’d read, a speech she’d heard, a professor’s suggestion. She didn’t think of that day or that boy in the coffee shop, but the influence was no less significant, as faint and feckless as it was, a startling, disintegrating moment between herself and this stranger bursting and scattering like any and all moments of her life. She gave little more attention to it at the time than to the scone or to herself crying over a song she loved.
The coffee shop itself was near her apartment and one she frequented often. “This café is so small, but its aesthetic is exceptional,” was the way it had been described by a middle-aged woman in trendy clothes who once stood next to her in line. The woman bought a large coffee and some type of vegan muffin. Leda thought the muffin looked tasty and bought the same one and then took a bite and realized it was vegan. From then on when she thought of the café she thought of it as so small with an exceptional aesthetic and terrible vegan muffins. Not long after, they’d started selling vegan donuts that were considerably better, but Leda would never find herself trying them. If she had, it’s unlikely she would have amended her perception of the place. It was already burned into her by the ephemeral moment beside that woman in line.
That day, though, she ordered a hot chocolate and sat at a table in the corner. What she loved most about sitting at the coffee shop was not the coffee or the shop but the brief, listless feeling it gave her of having her life together. She could sit beside the richness and warmth and see herself as something so divinely competent. This is what it is to be an independent person, and she’d take a sip. This is what it is to be a cosmopolitan person, and she’d take a sip. So easily could she lose herself in the sense. It was haunting and complicated and undeniably silly. Outside she watched as a woman picked up dog poop in a plastic bag. At least I know that I don’t really have my life together. At least I know that I don’t know, she thought. She sat for a while longer before noticing the boy to her right. He was smartly dressed, with flood pants and thick-rimmed glasses. His hands were larg
e, and he was reading American Power and the New Mandarins. She leaned forward in her seat and ran her fingers through her hair. Most days she held a very strong belief that her hair looked terrible except right after she’d run her fingers through it. She fixed her shirt and adjusted her boobs, which had been lost in her bra to some degree. The boy looked like he was about twenty-four and possibly went to Boston University or was applying to a funded graduate program. She hoped he’d come over and say something charming or witty, as she imagined a man with such nice glasses might. She cleared her throat to get his attention, but he didn’t look up from his book. She got her phone out of her bag as noisily as possible and then sighed loudly, but nothing. After waiting a bit longer, she got up and walked past his table, headed for the napkins. She took three. He didn’t notice her. She reached her hand down to the fourth napkin; for a second she had a sense that he might be watching her, but when she turned around she saw he hadn’t looked up. She stood there for what was an inappropriate amount of time to get napkins, but she couldn’t help it. Why can’t I just go talk to him? she thought. He had such a dumb sweater on and his face was sour. She considered that maybe he wasn’t even reading but pretending to read, seeking that same sense of solace she felt sitting with her hot chocolate. Who is he in this coffee shop? No one, just like me. Can’t we be no one together? In an unprecedented strike of confidence, she decided to walk up to him. It was impulsive and decisive. If you’d asked her then, she may have said her hair always looked nice and that she didn’t need to run her fingers through it at all.
“What are you reading?” she asked him.
“What?”
“That book.”
“What?”
“What are you reading?”
“Oh…It’s by Noam Chomsky.”
“Oh.”
The silence between them felt stale and all-consuming. She searched for the right segue into marriage and children, but there was nothing.
“I just needed a napkin,” she said, waving the napkins.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing…Can I have this chair?” she said, pointing to an empty chair that didn’t belong to his table at all but to the empty table beside him.
“…I guess so?”
She dragged the chair noisily in the direction of where she had been sitting. When she sat back down her hot chocolate was cold. She pretended she got a phone call and left.
That was her last encounter with the future BU graduate.
A few weeks later she bought Problems of Knowledge and Freedom in a small bookstore specializing in rare and overpriced books. Walking through the aisles, she ran her fingers down the spines of books and smelled the softness of paper over her, under her. She didn’t think of the boy or the napkins, but she did think of Noam Chomsky as the book cover grew sweaty in her palm. She relaxed her hand, wiped the sweat on her skirt, opened the book to page 53, closed it, and took a deep breath.
CHAPTER 2
The First Innate Truth
Nearing her early twenties, Leda had become obsessed with being linear. Latitude and longitude had formerly been ascribed to maps and a vague notion of Christopher Columbus she stored on the dwindling shelf of third-grade history in the back of her mind. To be linear was to be lines of thinness from her head to her feet. Lines and thinness. Thinness like her legs lifted over her head as she lay on the beach watching her legs, stinging sand in her eyes, blue everywhere. Lying down she could get away with it, but standing it was undeniable to her that she was not nearly linear enough. “Latitude Is Attitude,” she saw on a T-shirt once and never understood. Even as she was now so concerned with linearity and the latitude of herself, that T-shirt was still a confused lake in her mind. The girl who wore it had large breasts. And that was all she really remembered. I do not want to live in the horizontal of my stomach. I do not want to be my thighs. I want to be linear. This compulsion to be linear began at age twelve and would persist until her death. It was very important, VERY IMPORTANT not to be fat. This was the first innate truth of her womanhood.
CHAPTER 3
New Year’s
On her walk home she thought about a presentation she gave in class. She considered that maybe she talked for too long. The desperate face of the pretty girl in the front row plagued her. Why did that girl look so desperate? Was the presentation too long? Boring, maybe? She thought of herself standing and talking away like an idiot. She tapped her thigh as she walked and turned the music up in her earphones, then turned it down a bit. The song was about a girl getting a New Year’s kiss. New Yearsssss, she thought.
One New Year’s she got kissed by a boy she knew from childhood. His name was Sol, and he talked slowly. As children they had played at each other’s house here and there, until one fateful afternoon when Sol invited her into his parents’ room to sit on their waterbed.
“This…is…my parents’…room.”
The room was small, smothered by the oversized waterbed. The purple sheets worsened the skewed bed-to-room ratio. Sol sat down first and bounced lightly.
“It’s a…waterbed.”
She sat down next to him and felt the wave of the bed below; to her right was a framed picture of a cat on the nightstand, and to her left was Sol, smiling. She liked the waterbed and wondered what it must be like to sleep on. Then Sol’s father came in and said: “This is very inappropriate.”
That was the last time Sol and she ever spent any real time together, save for the New Year’s encounter, which could be described as brief at best. A girl she had only just become friends with her freshman year of college invited her to the party. “Come to my party!” the girl said as she wore a beige peacoat.
There wasn’t any dancing, and Leda spent the night standing around, awkwardly attempting to make conversation with strangers. A cognitive neuroscience major from Harvard talked to her for a while.
“What is it you study?” he said.
“Writing.”
“And what are your plans with that?” He was drinking soda but was taking small enough sips that it seemed like alcohol.
“I don’t know…I mean, I want to write, but I’ll probably teach. I’d like to write, you know, but I’ll have to teach.”
“Oh, well, it sounds like you’ve got it all worked out,” he said.
She wondered why this Harvard student was judging her. He had neglected to untuck a pant leg from his sock and his hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a considerable amount of time. She folded her arms and regretted wearing such a low-cut shirt. The neuroscientist (or whatever he was) eventually walked away and she thought, Don’t go. Being alone was decidedly worse than reevaluating her life choices. Then she saw Sol.
He looked the same as he did when he was ten, only maybe a little fatter. He was wearing what appeared to be a vintage shirt with the 7UP logo on it. What would ever possess him to wear that? Does he think it’s irony or something? she wondered, but didn’t fully want to consider because she was so grateful for the potential company.
“Sol!”
He turned to look at her and blinked hard.
“Oh…wow…I can’t believe…it’s you.” He blinked hard again.
“Yeah, it is. How are you? Where are you these days?”
“Oh…you know…around.” He blinked hard again. By now she realized he’d developed a tic. Maybe he’s been through trauma. Maybe he’s lived a life I couldn’t understand beyond waterbeds and 7 UP. She felt suddenly compelled to fix whatever it was in him that was causing all the blinking. She reached out, gently touching his arm.
As their conversation muddled on, she realized that he was as bored and desperate as she was fumbling through this New Year’s night, and such a realization led to the immediate bond of: we are both bored, lonely, and miserable. Had Sol more social understanding, he might have attempted to talk to someone else. Since he didn’t, she didn’t feel the need
to pretend she’d rather talk to anyone else either, so they stood together for the two hours leading up to midnight, mutually accepting each other’s forced but dearly appreciated company.
“I wish there was dancing,” she said.
“Like…Dance…Dance…Revolution?”
“No. I mean, like, real dancing.”
“Oh…I can’t…really dance.”
“I’m sure you’re good at it.” She looked at his pants. They were a little stained.
“Not…really…but I’d…dance with you…if you wanted.”
She thought that was sweet.
At 11:59:50 everyone started counting down to midnight. The sudden collective loudness was startling. She thought, Here we are all alone pretending to have time together. Then it was midnight.
There wasn’t a moment for her to think about kissing Sol. Before the party, she got dressed in the foaming need to have a New Year’s kiss. She watched her naked reflection in the mirror, and although she wished to be more linear, she traced the outline of her hip bone and thought of a boy holding her, kissing her. But standing there with clumsy, slow, ticking Sol, she didn’t think of kissing him. When midnight hit, she watched the crowd in unison undulation, and right in between “Happy” and “New Year” he kissed her as her head was turned. Just the corner of her lips. Slowly, clumsy, gentle. She felt a swell of warmth in her checks, his 7UP pudgy irony pressed against her. It was over by the time it began, and she didn’t know how to act afterward, but it would be remembered in her life as the single most erotic New Year’s kiss she would ever receive.
When leaving the party, she and Sol exchanged phone numbers in the ritual of feigned interest in further communication. They said their goodbyes for too long, and she stumbled a little as she walked away. She put on her red winter coat and thought about the waterbed. The rolling motion, and sleep, a dream about a boat, blue, and a feathered mask she bought and hung in her room as a child. Before leaving she held the doorknob for a moment, feeling the winter cold draft through the bottom of the doorway and her palm pressed against the cool steel of the knob. This is the New Year. As she went to push open the door, Sol called out to her.