Terrorist

III

THE PHONE RINGS. Beth Levy struggles to extricate herself from her favorite chair, a rocker recliner called a La-Z-Boy, covered in a dull-brown vinyl imitating creased cowhide and equipped with a lever-operated padded leg rest, in which she has been sitting eating a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies-low in calories compared with chocolate-chip or sandwich creams-while watching All My Children on WABC before switching cha

Also, at some level she doesn't want to make her life any physically easier for herself than it already is; she needs every pitiful ounce of exercise she gets. When she was younger and married, she spent all the morning ru

A lot of her colleagues at the Clifton Library and all the young people who come in and out have cell phones right in their purses or clipped on their belts, but Jack says it's a racket, the charges add up, like on cable TV, which was something she wanted, not him. The so-called electronic revolution, to hear Jack tell it, has brought about a wealth of schemes for painlessly extracting money from us in monthly charges for services we don't need, but with cable the picture is certainly clearer-no ghosts, no wobble and twitch-and the choices are so much more there was no comparison; he himself turns on the History Cha

They are special, the Bible wasn't wrong about that. At work in the library, tJiey make all die jokes and have the ideas. Until she and Jack met at Rutgers, it was as if she had never been touched by human electricity before. The other women he had known, including his mother, must have been very clever. Very Jewish-intellectual. He thought she was fu

Who knows where he is now, out somewhere on this impossibly sticky hot summer day when she can hardly move. She'd rather be at work, where tJiey at least have effective air-conditioning; the one tucked in their bedroom window mostly just makes noise, and he has always begrudged the electricity for one downstairs. Men, they roam, participating in the society. She had always tended to be quiet, certainly next to Hermione, prattling away with her theories and ideals. Their parents drove her crazy, she said, always stodgily accepting whatever the unions and the Democrats and The Saturday Evening Post dished out, whereas Elizabeth found their stodgy passivity comforting. She had always been drawn to quiet places, parks and cemeteries and libraries before they became noisy, some of them even with background music like restaurants, half of what people checked out were tapes and now DVDs. As a girl she had loved living on Pleasant Street, within an easy walk of Awbury Park, so much green space and, a little beyond, the Arboretum off Chew, the weeping beech like a great green igloo around you and her notion of Heaven somehow caught up in the swaying tops of those tall, tall trees, the poplars showing white undersides in the slightest breeze as if there were live spirits inside, you can see how primitive people worshipped trees once. The other direction took you, by the trolley that ran on Germantown Avenue just a block away, to Fairmont Park, which was truly endless, with the Wissa-hickon flowing through, the stop at the Lutheran Theological Seminary widi its sweet old stone buildings and the seminarians so young and handsome and dedicated; you could see them on the walks, in the shade, tliere wasn't all this guitar music and women clergymen and talk about same-sex marriages then. The young people in the library talk out like they're in their own living rooms, it's the same at the movies, tliere are no ma

Working four days a week at the library, she can't watch enough of the midday serials to follow every twist of the plot, but the plots, three or four plots intertwined tiie way they do it now, move slowly enough she doesn't feel left out. It's become a habit with her lunch, to take the sandwich or the salad, or the microwaved leftovers from a few nights ago, Jack never seems to finish what's on his plate any more, and for dessert a bit of cheesecake or a few cookies, oatmeal-raisin if she's on a binge of being virtuous, and settle in the chair and let it wash over her, all the young actors and actresses, usually two or three at a time in one of those sets that look too large, with everything new-bought, to be a real room, with a stagy echo in the air, and that kind of tingling music they all use, not organ music as in die old radio serials but a synthesized, she supposes is the word, sound almost like a harp at moments and then at otJiers like a xylophone with violins, everything on tiptoe to convey suspense. The music underlines the dramatic confessional or confrontational utterances that leave the actors staring at each odier in stu