Now and Again Read Free Page A

better himself, but because he didn’t know what else to do. Sitting on the worn corduroy couch, he was suddenly assailed by questions of free will and self-determination that couldn’t be easily answered, not by the narrator, who was clearly reading from a script, and not by people who willfully stepped out of line but who were still completely bound by convention—if not the convention of going along with everyone else, then the convention of reacting against them—the way they were all bound—or were they? Suddenly the answers to such questions seemed critical before Will was able even to consider taking the next step.
    He sat for a while deciding what he would need to survive in the Antarctic, what he would take with him if he had only a sled dog and a sled to carry his gear, or if he had only snowshoes and a backpack and the clothes on his back—no dog, no sled, and certainly no GPS. He would take a down parka with a fur-lined hood, a box of matches, a compass, a pair of sturdy boots, a sharp knife in a leather sheath. He would take a magnifying glass because he liked magnifying things and because a full-sized microscope probably wouldn’t fit. Then, with a huge effort of will, he bent forward and stretched his right hand toward the remote control, clawing until he could just reach the edge of the envelope it had fallen on and slide it toward him, inch by inch, until both the remote and the envelope were cradled in his big outstretched hand.
    1.4 Tula
    A s a young girl, Tula Santos had been able to convince herself that her lowly birth was an advantage, that her feet were firmly planted on the hard rock of existence instead of on unstable elevations, but at sixteen, she knew she was deluding herself. She now suspected that she had been invited to join the Order of the Rainbow for Girls more as an experiment or an act of charity than as a statement of equality, and that her mother’s employer, who was next in line for the position of Mother Advisor and who had no children of her own, thought of her as a project. “I am fortunate to be in a position to give back,” Mrs. August Winslow would proclaim whenever the spotlight shone on her silken shoulders and well-coiffed head. Tula knew that Mrs. Winslow wouldn’t have chosen a project who was ugly or blemished, which is why she spent her pocket money on lotions and oils—not out of vanity, as her friend Sammi Green did, but out of self-preservation, as a stay against the sucking circumstances of her birth.
    It was her induction as a Rainbow Girl five years before that had first allowed Tula to see being fatherless as an advantage, for the Rainbow organization was meant to celebrate womanly virtues, and who was more womanly, a girl who spent her days in a house ruled by a man or a girl who had been raised solely by women?
    Tula had often fantasized about an eighth bow station with white as its color. There were already stations for virtues like love and patriotism. The eighth station would stand for purity, which in Tula’s mind was the epitome of the female principle, unmixed with anything hard or protruding or loud. She had harbored this idea ever since the Virgin Mary had come to her in a dream, but she was waiting until the end-of-summer ceremony to bring it up. If all went well, her idea would be adopted for the all-assembly project, which would solidify her position as a leader and set her up for eventual election as a jewel officer. She was confident that her plan for establishing an eighth bow station would far surpass the offerings of the other girls, who came up with ambitious but predictable projects like sending clothing to remote corners of South America or tutoring people with skin even darker than Tula’s skin while they cooed over them and called them cute. One of the girls wanted to plant a garden of biblical herbs in a weedy patch of land behind the church, and Sammi Green talked about honoring the famous men of Red Bud with handmade plaques