Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Read Online Free Page A

given the life card, and what was I supposed to do with it?
    I had to stop running. The answer to those questions would not be found in constant activity. I had to stand still and take time to merge my two parts back together again, the one caught in my sister’s hospital room and the one stuck on a treadmill set to the highest speed. There was a link between the life I had before and the life I had now. My sister was the link. In that link I would find my answers.
    I looked back to what the two of us had shared. Laughter. Words. Books.
    Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that “words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
    I had been reading a lot in the three years since my sister died, but the books I chose were closer to torture than to comfort. The raw clarity of pain in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking , her account of her husband’s sudden death, intensified my own sorrow. Then there were the weeks I read only the ridiculous but sweet and addictive Aunt Dimity mysteries by Nancy Atherton. Aunt Dimity may be dead, but she still has the power to communicate her very wise advice to the living. How I wished—I cried!—for such communion with Anne-Marie.
    I read all the Barbara Cleverly novels starring Joe Sandilands because Anne-Marie had read them all and told me they were great, and I wanted to know her again; I wanted to understand what she loved and what she found worthy of her hard-to-get respect. I reread one of her favorite books from when she was just a little kid, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. I had her Scholastic Book Club copy, priced at fifty cents but priceless now with “Anne-Marie Sankovitch” written in her handwriting on the inner flap. The last pages of the book had been lost over the years. I hunted down a replacement copy on the Internet so I could finish the reading of it.
    I’ve used books my whole life for wisdom, for succor, and for escape. The summer before I entered middle school was the year I began to step away from childhood and toward who I would become as an adult. I suffered my first heartbreak, my first death up close, and my first inkling that life was just not fair. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh held me together during those bewildering and scary rites of passage.
    The summer began with my best friend, Carol, moving away from my neighborhood. Throughout elementary school Carol and I played together after school, almost every day. I’d first noticed Carol in kindergarten. I’d noticed her because she had a thick, soft, woolly bath mat for her napping rug while I had a rag rug, thin and flat like a pancake. Carol allowed me to place my rug near hers during naptime, and even to rest my head on a fluffy corner of her mat. We became best friends, walking to and from school together every day. Afternoons were spent playing together at her house or mine. Fifth grade was our Gilligan’s Island year. Every day after school we would watch a Gilligan’s Island rerun on TV and then we would play, pretending we were the ones cast away on a deserted island. I was always Ginger, and Carol was always Mary Ann, and the gist of our play was how we both loved the Professor. All our adventures on the deserted island revolved around the Professor. Because we were friends, best friends, we both got to have him in our afternoon games, using the doorjambs of rooms as stand-ins for the straight and narrow Professor. We kissed those doorjambs and laughed like hyenas. The thought that he might prefer one or the other, Ginger or