Sourland

& unbuttoned — a chic, expensive designer coat purchased at an after-Christmas sale at the East Shore Mall — my face is stony & composed & in fact I am very uneasy — I am very excited — pushing open the rear door that bears on the outside the admonition No Admittance — Library Staff Only — & at once the man in the herringbone coat steps forward to take hold of the door & pull it farther open, as if I required assistance. In a thrilled voice saying, “May I help you, Ms. Erdley? Let me get this door.”

“Thank you — but no. I can manage the door myself.”

“Then — let me carry this bag for you.”

“No. I can carry this bag myself.”

On my crutches I’m strong, capable — swinging my Step Up! legs like a girl- athlete in a gym. On my crutches I exude an air of such headlong & relentless competence, your instinct would be to jump out of my way.

No I tell him. And again No. Almost I’m laughing — the sound of my laughter is startling, high-pitched — a laughter like breaking glass — it’s astonishing to me, this sudden sexual boldness in the man in the tweed coat & white shirt who’d been so polite, earnest & proper, inside the library. No one is close by — no one is a witness — he can loom over me, taller than I am by several inches — he can coerce me with his height & the authority of his maleness. Very deliberately & tenderly he appropriates my leather bag — slips the strap from my shoulder and onto his own.

“Yes. This is very heavy. I can carry this.”

I can’t tug at the shoulder bag — I don’t want to get into a struggle with the man. We’re walking together awkwardly — as if neither of us has a sure footing — the sidewalk is wet, icy — my crutches are impediments, obstacles — my crutches are weapons, of a kind, & make me laugh, so ugly & clumsy & this man isn’t sure how to appropriate me, armed as I am with both crutches & prosthetic lower limbs that clearly fascinate him even as they frighten him — I can’t help but laugh at the situation, & at him — he’s trying to laugh, too — but agitated, embarrassed — daring to grip my arm at the elbow as if to steady me.

“Ms. Erdley — maybe I should carry you? This pavement is all ice…”

“No. You can’t carry me.”

“Yes. I think I should.”

“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Where is your car?”

“I don’t have a car.”

“You don’t have a car?”

“I said no. Now leave me alone, please.”

“But — how are you getting home?”

“How do you know I’m going home?”

“Wherever you’re going, then — how will you get there?”

“The way I got here.”

“Ms. Erdley — how is that?”

“I think that’s my business.”

“Just tell me — how? You’re not walking home, are you?”

“And what if I am?”

“Well — are you?”

“No. I am not walking home.”

“Then — where are you going?”

“I’m taking the bus.”

“The bus! No — I’ll drive you.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“I’ll drive you.”

How we meet, people like us.

He tells me his name: Tyrell Beckmann.

He knows my name: Jane Erdley.

He was born in Barnegat Sound, thirty-seven years ago this month. Moved away for all of his adult life & just recently moved back for “family & business reasons.”

He has a wife, two young daughters.

Matter-of-factly enunciating Wife, two young daughters in the stoic way of one acknowledging an act of God.

A miracle. Or a natural disaster.

Solemnly he confides in me: “After my father died last fall the family put pressure on me to return to Barnegat — to work with my brothers in the family business — ‘Beckmann & Sons’ — I’d rather not discuss it, Jane! In February I enrolled in a computer course at the community college — anything that’s unknown to me, I’m drawn to like a magnet. Also it’s a good excuse for getting out of the house in the evening. Until I came into the library. Until I saw you.”

His breath is steaming in the cold air. Shrewdly he has shifted the heavy shoulder bag to his right side so that I can’t tug it away from him, & he can walk close beside me unimpeded.

Here is a surprise: the man’s long-legged stride is a match for me on my crutches. Despite my so-called disability I normally walk a little too fast for other people especially women in impractical footwear — it makes me smile to hear them plead laughingly Jane! For heaven’s sake wait — but Tyrell Beckmann keeps pace with me, easily. Though he doesn’t seem very coordinated — as if one of his legs were shorter than the other, or one of his knees pained him. His head bobs as he walks, like the head of a large predator bird. His forehead is creased with the intensity of his thoughts & the corners of his mouth have a downward turn except when something surprises him & he smiles a quick startled boyish smile.

Already I take pride in thinking I will make this man smile! I have the power.

As we walk, Tyrell does most of the talking. Like a man long deprived of speech he tells me how as a boy he took out books from the Barnegat library — how he loved the children’s room, & read virtually every book on the shelves. He tells me about the writers he’d read since boyhood & most admired — Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London (The Call of the Wild), Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick — then in high school Henry David Thoreau, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Dostoyevsky — the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground & not the massive sprawling novels. As a “mystic-minded” adolescent he fell under the spell of the Upanishads & the Vedantists — the belief that the individual is one with the universe. As a young man in his twenties he read Soren Kierkegaard & Edmund Husserl & at Union Theological Seminary — where he’d enrolled with the vague intention of becoming some sort of Protestant-existentialist minister — he fell under the spell of the theologian Paul Tillich who’d once been on the faculty there & whose influence prevailed decades later.

Tillich was a Christian, he says, for whom Christianity wasn’t an encoded religion but living, vital. So too Tyrell is a Christian in principle though he finds it difficult to believe in either Jesus Christ or in God.

“‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.’”

These beautiful words! I wonder if they are from the Bible — the Old Testament, or the New.

I ask Tyrell do these words mean it’s what people do that matters, & not what people are, or in what state they are born; & Tyrell squeezes my hand, awkwardly & eagerly as my fingers grip the crutch — “Yes, Jane. That is exactly what that means.”

He has called me Jane. His hand lingers on mine, as if to steady me, or himself.

By this time it’s beyond dusk — nearly nighttime. We didn’t walk to the bus stop but as if by mutual consent we made our way behind the library parking lot along a path through tall rushes & dune grass & spindly wild rose & descended to the wide hard-crusted beach where a harsh wet wind whips at our faces &