One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

Teenage girls don’t get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It’s written off—we’re written off—as silly, but it’s the opposite. We understand instinctively that, like me, change is slow. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.

One thing that is good about librarians is they listen to what you need and want and think of a way to help you which sometimes is by ignoring what you need and want. Maybe they do not have the book you requested because their library is nothing but leftovers. Or maybe what you requested is wrong—people often are, even smart people who read—but it is okay because librarians have witchlike librarian magic to pick the right book for you.

There are so many people who have sinned a little and a lot. There are so many people who deserve some of the blame. But that means there is never anyone whose responsibility it is to take responsibility. There is no one who must make it right, no one who must make amends. There is so much, therefore, that stays wrong and unmended.

I hate this metaphor. It’s offered all the time, but it’s apt as balloons at a funeral, suggesting, as it does, that if only you were more nimble or more right or more good, you would prevail. Suggesting, as it does, that you are destroyed not by other people’s shortsightedness, other people’s greed, or other people’s deciding you’re disposable, but by being yourself too slow, morally compromised, wicked, and weak. Goliath is not at fault in this story. Goliath is just a giant, following his giant nature, laid low by nothing more than a lucky shot. And David, David’s just a boy with a sling and a stone, kind of whiny and moralistic, a little bit of a pissant. In fact, I think it is a metaphor perpetuated by the Goliaths themselves. Because really Goliath is not the size of a giant. Goliath is the size of the sky. Goliath is the size of a mountain from the base of it, so it takes up everything, everywhere you look, all the room, all the air, all the past and the future as well, until there is nothing anywhere but him, and you have no choice, can’t remember ever having had a choice, and this is just the way it is, unfortunate but inevitable, inarguable, like how someday we’ll all die, Goliath taking, and taking up, everything, including you, including yours, including even the whisper of a suggestion that he might not be right or fair (for a mountain is not right or fair, it just is), including even the whisper of a suggestion that this might not be good for us, for any of u...