24 The Meadow bear glad tidings on lazy summer days. No. The whole idea of accidental pregnancy simply made no sense at all. My mother then presented me with a boxed set of books called The Life Cycle Library, which she instructed me to consult, should I have any further questions on the matter. Questions? Yeah, I had a few, but “inferring information from the context” was a scholastic skill at which I excelled, so I felt confident I could read between the lines here. The only explanation for all this came to me quite clearly. Our street must be chock-full of incurable somnambulists who roamed, zombielike, up and down the length of Finlandia Court at night, wandering into one another’s houses and launching into epileptic seizures in other peoples’ beds. Any pregnancy resulting from such an event, I deduced, would certainly qualify as accidental. I thought perhaps Mom’s admonishment to avoid accidental pregnancy was simply a roundabout warning to lock the front door. I resolved to lock my bedroom door, too, and perhaps push a chair up against it, just to be sure. As a final precaution, I thought, I could make a habit of sleeping in three layers of clothing, although I didn’t really want to. Strangely, my mother used to pat my bottom sometimes when I came downstairs in my nightgown to say goodnight. The idea was to make sure I wasn’t wearing underwear. “The body needs to breathe!” she used to say, creating an uncomfortable intimacy that existed in no other context. Now, with the marauders to fear, the requirement for the body to “breathe” made even less sense. I had no idea how I was supposed to prevent pregnancy while also letting my body breathe but deduced the expected precautionary measures must have more to do with locked doors than extra clothes. Thus far, however, I hadn’t seen Mom being overly concerned with fortifying the premises each night, so I thought perhaps the responsibility for this fell to me. I imagined, with the setting of the sun, I’d shove our massive dining room table up
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