Rockaway Beach, New York

You stood so erect and stately-still behind your artisanal popsicle cart and its wonky little umbrella, that no one could not be struck by you. But, this being the boardwalk of Rockaway beach on a mid-August Saturday, no one was. Children screamed and threw down their toy buckets, bros in board shorts cheersed their plastic cups, a walnut-colored old white guy cruised past on a bicycle that blared out Barry Manilow. Big women in bikinis bustled into the Ladies and you, statue-perfect, continued to read your book. You held it as if ready to declaim from it, its front half folded back to facilitate an elegant clamping between thumb and forefinger in your upraised hand. The gesture evoked a costume of morning coat and monocle, or toga and garland, but you weren’t an Edwardian aristocrat or a Roman orator, but a cute brown girl with baby blonde curls in a pretty sun dress. It became very important for me to know what you were reading.

My friend and I were slumped against the baking wall of the Ladies, bags at our feet, staring at you with salty sore eyes, deep in a sun-stupor after five hours on the beach. We shifted about in our damp shorts, feeling the sand abrade incipient sunburns, and waited for our men to emerge from the Mens. I kept squinting at you and your book, marvelling that your eyes never left it. My friend, however, was more interested in your popsicles. She returned with a piña colada flavored one and offered me a bite. Through teeth full of frozen coconut milk I asked her what you were reading.

“The Limits of Logic.”

“Did you ask?!” I asked, excited.

“I saw,” she said, implacable. (My friend is Russian.)

The Limits of Logic! What were they! It was just not logical to me that you should be reading such a book. That you should be on this boardwalk selling popsicles in the Saturday sunshine in your cute dress while reading a book with a title as arid as The Limits of Logic seemed, in fact, to push the limits of logic. Being a romantic rather than logical sort, I’d hoped you might be reading something like Middlemarch, proud and perfect in your solitude, high-minded as Dorothea. But I kept turning the title over in my head and here’s the foolish fantasy that crept in: maybe The Limits of Logic was not the dry, mathematical treatise I’d assumed, but in fact a refutation of mathematics, a book about all that was beyond logic — the many inexplicable and mystical phenomena which exceeded logic’s limits. That maybe your mind was being blown while you stood there above the piña colada popsicles. This, I knew, as my friend beside me sucked her popsicle stick dry, was not logical.