Sonia had lived here for three years, but she hadn’t accumulated much. Her clothes were dumped willy-nilly in the closet. Most were shapeless, sweats and polyester probably pulled from a donation box. She had a few good pieces, a red sweater with navy piping and a well-known label in the neck. The drawers and shelves held an assortment of underwear, toiletries, and a dozen or so books. She also had printouts of articles on weapons disasters of all kinds—biological, chemical, nuclear.

I gathered those up along with the books, which ran the gamut of conspiracy theories, from who killed JFK to reports of UFOs descending on Roswell. Clouds Without Witnesses: Secret Weapons Tests on Human Populations was a thick volume, but heavy even for a book. I opened it to find that Sonia had cut out the interior. A pint of vodka, almost empty, nestled inside. Sonia had written “You’re So Ignorant” on the endpaper with a broad-tipped red Magic Marker, accompanied by an R. Crumb–like caricature of a man in a U.S. Army uniform.

I flipped through the rest of the books, but they were all just that, books. I lay on the floor to look under the bed and pulled out her two suitcases. One was empty, but the other held a jumble of legal pads and notebooks, covered with a sprawling hand.

I put the books and articles inside and sprinted down the hall and stairs. I made it back to Free State just as the receptionist was starting to lock the outer door.

42
Sonia, April 1983

“Sustain me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love.”

Hidden under her bedclothes, she murmured the words into the T-shirt. All the little hairs on her arms stood up, almost as if his hands were there, stroking her. The shirt smelled of ash and sweat, not myrrh and lilies, but she knew her beloved’s sweat, and it was sweeter than wine.

One of the girls at school was born-again, and she thought it was her duty to convert Sonia. Apparently bringing a Jew to Jesus earned you buckets of brownie points in heaven. Gerri thought Sonia’s family were doubly damned, because not only were they Jews but Sonia’s father was a scientist who believed in evolution.

Gerri had left a Bible on Sonia’s desk, with a letter that explained her mission: “Read Genesis and you will know the truth about the creation of the world.”

Sonia thought the creation stories were ridiculous. They were followed by pages and pages of who was whose daddy. The rest of it looked equally dull—long lectures on how wicked everyone was, or page after page of genealogies. Still, she’d toyed with pretending to be converted—it would drive Daddy and Mother into a frenzy of shouting and door slamming and screaming at each other over whose fault it was that their only daughter was such a loser.