Part 8 (1/2)

a lawyer

an architect

an engineer

a nurse

a teacher ...

The list of possibilities for a diabetic didn't seem very long. And then, more darkly, there was a list of professions that were out-of-bounds. You couldn't be an airline pilot or a bus driver. Fair enough, I thought: you don't want someone flying a plane who might pa.s.s out. You couldn't serve in the military. Fine: I'd had enough of boot camp for a lifetime thanks to Alfred. And you couldn't be a police officer ... uh-oh. That one stopped me like a slap in the face.

You couldn't be a police officer? That meant you couldn't be a detective. This was a catastrophe! It's true that Nancy Drew manages without being a police officer, but she is an exception. She was also fictional. I knew enough about the real world to know that detectives are normally cops and not eighteen-year-old girls with charmed lives. And yet Nancy Drew had a powerful hold on my imagination. Every night, when I'd finished reading and got into bed and closed my eyes, I would continue the story, with me in Nancy's shoes until I fell asleep.

The young sleuth tools around in her little blue roadster with the top down. She is an incurable optimist who cleverly turns obstacles to her own advantage. Nancy Drew's father is a lawyer. He talks to her about his cases and gives her tips that help her solve crimes. They are like partners, father and daughter.

The world they live in is a kind of fairy tale, where people own houses on winding, tree-shaded driveways; visit summer homes at the lake; and attend charity b.a.l.l.s at the country club. Nancy travels, too. She's even been to Paris. What I wouldn't have given to see the Eiffel Tower one day! But even though Nancy Drew is rich, she isn't a sn.o.b. And even though it is fiction, I knew such a world did exist. It wasn't Cinderella and pumpkins turning into carriages. It was real, and I was hungry to learn about it.

I was convinced I would make an excellent detective. My mind worked in ways very similar to Nancy Drew's, I told myself: I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out. And I could be brave when I needed to be.

I could be a great detective, if only I weren't diabetic.

”JUNIOR, change the channel! Perry Mason's on.” Okay, so I couldn't be a police officer or a detective, but it occurred to me that the solution to my quandary appeared on that small black-and-white screen every Thursday night.

Perry Mason was a lawyer, a defense attorney. He worked alongside a detective, Paul Drake, but even so it was Perry Mason who untangled the real story behind the crime, which was never what it seemed. And it was once the trial started that things got really interesting. You a.s.sume, of course, that Perry Mason is the hero. He's the one the show is named after, the one who gets the close-up shots, who wins the case almost every time and gets the hugs and tears of grat.i.tude at the end. But my sympathies were not entirely monopolized by Perry Mason. I was fond of Burger, the prosecutor, too. I liked that he was a good loser, that he was more committed to finding the truth than to winning his case. If the defendant was truly innocent, he once explained, and the case was dismissed, then he had done his job, because justice had been served.

Most of all it was the judge who fascinated me. A minimal but vital presence, he was more of an abstraction than a character: a personification of justice. At the end of the hour, when Perry Mason said, ”Your Honor, I move to dismiss the charges against my client and release him,” it was the judge who made the final decision-”case dismissed” or ”motion granted”-that wrapped up the episode. You had to watch carefully because it was over in a flash, but I knew that was the most important moment in the show. And even before that final decision, it was the judge who called the shots, who decided whether it was ”overruled” or ”sustained” when a lawyer said, ”Objection!”

There was a whole new vocabulary here. And though I wasn't sure what every detail meant, I followed the gist of it. It was like the puzzles I enjoyed, a complex game with its own rules, and one that intersected with grand themes of right and wrong. I was intrigued and determined to figure it out.

I could be a great lawyer, I decided. But a part of me, I knew, would have preferred to be the judge rather than Perry Mason. At the time, with no knowledge of what either aspiration might entail, the one didn't seem any more outlandish than the other.

CHAPTER Ten

I WAS DOING my homework in front of the TV one night when my mother and her friends piled in to watch The Ed Sullivan Show. Ana, Cristina, and Irma were all there, chattering away. They used to give my mother a hard time for letting Junior and me do homework with the TV on, but she always answered them: ”Those kids are a lot more intelligent than I am. They study four, five hours every night, and they bring home good grades. Who am I to tell them how to study?” They couldn't argue with that logic. Still, they were not alone in their anxieties. The nuns at Blessed Sacrament had their own theories about the dangers television posed to impressionable minds. They could tolerate Ed Sullivan but not The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a G.o.dless Russian spy in the role of a good guy being too great a threat to the received cold-war narrative. It seemed lost on everyone that television helped broaden our horizons beyond the Bronx, where I was unlikely to have encountered a lawyer in action, or much else I could aspire to.

In any case, it wasn't as if I was actually watching the TV most of the time. It had now become just background noise, where once it had been a talisman to ward off the suffocation of an engulfing silence in the house. I'd long since learned how to concentrate with other things going on around me. Sometimes a bomb could have dropped on Bruckner Boulevard, and it wouldn't have distracted me. So Mami and her friends probably thought I had totally tuned them out that night in 1965 when Tom Jones was grinding his hips and growling, ”It's not unusual ...”

”Que guapo!” Ana said, whistling under her breath.

”If he asked me for a date, I wouldn't say no.” My ears perked up. Did my mother just say that? Okay, maybe it's not true that nothing could distract me.

Cristina topped them both: ”I wouldn't mind finding his slippers under my bed.” I must have turned beet red.

Not that I was innocent. I knew that my new friend Carmelo and his girlfriend did more than kiss in our bedroom when they came over; it was one of the reasons they liked visiting our house. Kids gossiped. Donna showed off her hickeys. Stuff happened. Stuff happened all the time, whether you wanted it to or not. But I, for one, wasn't there yet.