Read Online Taking It by Michael Cadnum - Free Book Online Page A

car.”
    â€œWe might as well see your driver’s license,” he said.
    He was still smiling. Each cop must learn to do this at some point, I thought. His face was a mask, friendly, but in an impersonal way. If he had to arrest me, he would still be nice. People were looking as they rolled past, observing my little moment of theater. When the policeman saw my hesitation he said, “There’s no infraction involved.”
    No infraction . The words barely sounded like English to me. I knew it was a variety of good news, though. I tugged open the door. I pulled my purse from the passenger’s seat. I gathered my nerve. I told myself to go ahead, open the purse and get it over with. The police weren’t going to know the difference. Doesn’t everyone carry a pair of binoculars with their lipstick?
    I opened the purse.
    There was lip gloss, wads of Kleenex, a Princess Marcella Borghese kohl pencil, and some Max Factor mascara. My Ray-Bans were folded around a mirror with a koa-wood frame, another gift from my aunt. There was a Bic pen and a snap wallet, some Turns, and a rhinoceros-head eraser. I unsnapped the wallet, slipped the license out of its holder.
    There was no pair of binoculars. I leaned against the car.
    The policeman thanked me and told me to drive carefully. I thanked him for his help.
    I drove very carefully, twenty-five miles an hour all the way home.
    There was nothing wrong with me. I had to calm down, and not lurch around in traffic like a maniac.
    I was glad to get home. I parked under a tree, in the shade.
    We have a two-story house, and we keep it the way it was when Mother lived here. There are pictures on the wall only Mother liked, gray people playing blue lutes, but we leave them up, straightening them when they start to hang a little crooked.
    Tina, the housekeeper, comes in a few times a week, washes, folds, cooks, freezes, and then vanishes. Once I saw her wallet when she was looking to see if she had enough change for the bus, smiling children and smiling adults, a complicated family life. Dad says she walks in on little cat feet, and even when she’s around you forget about her, one of those short, still people who eventually kill everyone with gopher poison.
    She makes me nervous. I suspect she is quietly disapproving of something about me, who knows what. I fold my dirty clothes, put them in the hamper like clothes in a suitcase, and don’t like to leave dirty dishes in the sink, signs that we eat and have lives.
    Talking to the policeman had convinced me that I was going to have to straighten out my life. That’s all I had to do. Just a little mental housekeeping, that’s all.
    I would start with a little real, hands-on housekeeping, cleaning up my room. It was wonderful to have something to do, dirty socks to bunch up, old magazines to put in a pile.
    I was cleaning up, picking up the book about the mustard gas and the guy going back home, saying hello to people in his neighborhood, hearing them say hello back in a strained way. Sometimes you can only tell that you have something really wrong with you by how your friends act. I would hate to be blind.
    I was getting two pimples at the corner of my mouth, a mother pimple and a baby. I kept looking into the mirror and hating my bad luck, but there they were. I dabbed some flesh-colored concealer on them, but that made them look even worse.
    I was folding up my fuchsia jogging outfit, thinking I should get one in some other shade, not red, because it fades so fast. I felt something in one of the deep pockets.
    My hand slipped into the pocket and came out with something hard and gleaming, a blue object with painted-on eyes. At another time the thing would have looked cute. The thing did not belong here, trespassing in my room.
    It was true that I had no memory of hiding it in my pocket. But I knew exactly how it had found itself there, and why it was in my hand at that moment. It was a part of Maureen’s