The Meadow 25 against the front door. That ought to do it. Finally, and with clear reluctance, Mom asked, “Any questions?” I felt sure I had filled the gaps in her sketchy explanation of the sex act well enough, so I shook my head no. Somehow, I knew it would be silly, or at least frowned upon, to ask for details about the sleepwalking, epileptic neighbors—by far, the only interesting part of this entire sordid tale. Since she hadn’t discussed the neighbors directly, I assumed their nightly forays were another taboo, unmentionable subject. When Mom left the room, she pulled the door shut behind her, as if to quarantine me with my dangerous, new knowledge. I opened the first book of The Life Cycle Library and felt almost flattered at how drastically my mother had overestimated my reading ability. The book was as dry and technical as a furniture assembly manual, with fewer pictures. Furthermore, its chapters discussed all kinds of irrelevant topics like fallopian tubes and cervixes and gestation periods. There was nothing in the book at all about the real issue we had just not discussed. I stuck the stupid books on a shelf and contemplated my grand, four-poster canopy bed, where I used to feel like a princess and now felt like a sitting duck. I lifted up the coverlet’s edge to examine the empty space beneath the box spring. While it still seemed vaguely plausible that a penis could go to a matinee, I felt it highly unlikely that sleepwalkers would crawl under beds. The minute I hear an intruder, I thought, I’ll just dive under there.
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