Mary and O’Neil

LIGHTNESS

March 1985

SHE THOUGHT OF IT AS the lightness; that was the name she gave it. The first time it happened, Mary was a little girl, alone. This took place in her bedroom in the apartment on Naomi Street in North Minneapolis, in a time before her sister, Cheryl, was born. Mary remembered nothing else about this place, for they lived there less than a year; the building was owned by a relative, and her father managed it, collecting rents and maintaining the apartments and grounds, while going to college at night. This was a difficult period for her parents, a time of small children and no money, and, as Mary later learned, her parents had nearly divorced. Her father would tell her about this on a trip they would take together to San Francisco, the year before Mary herself was married. Though the tale was meant to be cautionary-marriage is a long haul, he told her, like carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs and trying to wedge it through a narrow doorway-Mary also understood that the story was a happy one: her parents had, after all, stayed together, and by the end of that year her mother was pregnant again. She told him then about the hummingbird, her only memory of that year. They were standing together on the fantail of a ferryboat, crossing the choppy bay. A hummingbird, her father said, laughing and shaking his head in the wind. All that arguing, and what you remember is a hummingbird. My God, we thought we’d scarred you for life.

This was how she remembered it: yellow sunlight and the high, purple smell of the lilacs; her own tiny body, and the feel of a hummingbird’s wings beating inside her. Their apartment was on the ground floor; beneath Mary’s bedroom window was a lilac bush. On a summer afternoon, Mary was kneeling on her bed to look out the window when the bird appeared, darting between the blossoms on a blur of wings. Never had she seen such a bird. It seemed not to fly but to float-its long beak and inexplicable aeronautics made her think it might be a kind of insect-and yet whenever it moved, it seemed to disappear, reemerging at some adjacent spot of air as if it had not traveled through space but around it. Pure pleasure filled her, watching this wonderful new thing at her window, when suddenly she wasn’t watching: they were one and the same, Mary and the hummingbird and the lilac bush, and all the dense bright heat of the summer afternoon. She felt herself suspended; she seemed, like the hummingbird, to be both in one place and also everywhere, her consciousness joined to another, far larger than her own. The sensation was new to her-she had no words for it-and yet it did not frighten her; she wanted to close her eyes to make it last. She did, and thought: Who’s there? Who’s there? But when she opened her eyes she found no one; even the bird was gone.

The second time she was at a friend’s birthday party; Mary was nine, or ten. Hats, balloons, games that seemed childish but were still fun: The girl whose party it was, Simone, had invited no boys, or else they simply had not come. It was February, a Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, and the house, a rambler in the same subdivision where Mary lived, was a modest variation of her own. The party was held in the basement, a low-ceilinged room with brown paneling and shag carpet the color of moss. Mary’s mother kept a bag of presents in the coat closet for birthday parties, and Mary had selected Spirograph, which now embarrassed her: all the other presents were better, more grown-up. Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker, a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft, a poster of David Cassidy, a neon-purple Hula Hoop-the last a child’s toy but also something older girls did, girls who had hips and waists and could keep the thing spinning for hours. What could she have been thinking with the Spirograph? Still Simone had thanked her, pausing dutifully to open the package and insert the pen into the gears, drawing a single fleur-de-lis before putting it to the side. Spirograph, Simone said, smiling. Cool. I haven’t used this for years.

They sang “Happy Birthday” and ate the pink-frosted cake, and when Simone’s mother had left them in the basement, one of the girls, Simone’s older cousin Rose, showed them how to practice kissing with a pillow. They taped the poster of David Cassidy on the wall, and took turns kissing this as well, tilting their faces as they knew they were supposed to; you had to be careful, Rose instructed, not to go straight in, or you would bump noses. When this was done Rose took one of the empty pop-bottles and placed it, on its side, on the coffee table. The girls all sat around the table while Rose explained the rules and gave the bottle a lazy spin.

Mary watched as the bottle turned on the wood-it seemed to go around forever-and then it came to rest, pointing at Mary like a finger. All the girls laughed, though Mary knew this wasn’t personal: they were simply relieved that the bottle had pointed at someone else.

Mary curled her hair behind her ears. “Sure,” she heard herself say, “I’ll kiss you.”

“Remember what I said about the noses,” Rose warned.

It happened so quickly it was nothing. Mary had never been kissed on the lips before-her parents did not do this-and she leaned across the table, letting her eyes fall closed and trying to think of David Cassidy, and kissed Rose. So this is kissing, she thought. A pause fell over the room-Mary felt this silence, as she was also aware of the taste of pink cake-frosting and watermelon Lip Smackers-and when their faces parted Mary realized that with this kiss the game had ended. The bottle was a dare, meant to be accepted only once; because Mary had done this, the others were absolved.

“When you kiss a boy,” Rose said confidently, “you’ll want to use your tongue.”

Mary said nothing; this did not seem true. Use it how? Around them the girls laughed again; they had no idea either.

“You’ll see,” Rose said.

It was later, on the car ride home, that she felt it. Darkness was falling; the snow, in great piles beside the roadway and the houses, had turned a pale and lifeless gray. At her waist Mary was holding the small party favor that each of the girls had gotten, a jewelry-making kit wrapped in cellophane, and her father was smoking, tapping the ashes from his cigarette through a slender crack in his window. How was the party? he wanted to know. Did she have fun with her friends? What was that there, honey, that little thing on her lap? Was it a prize that she had won? The moment was common, and yet everything about it had begun to feel strange to Mary. More than strange: The smell of her father’s cigarette and the close heat of the car, the slipperiness of cold vinyl beneath her jeans, the remembered taste of Rose’s kiss-all of it was both less than real and somehow more, as if she were dissolving into sensation itself, like a lozenge on the tongue. A warm weightlessness flooded her, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and she wondered if she had responded to her father’s questions, though it seemed so; her father was beside her, nodding and puffing away. Mary closed her eyes. In school they had been warned about drugs, and all the girls had read Go Ask Alice, both thrilled and frightened by this story of a girl so like them who had sailed away as easily as a balloon cut from its string. Daddy, she wanted to say, Daddy, something is happening, but these words did not come. A new awareness filled her, a sense that someone was very near, inside her even, a presence without form or substance yet somehow known to her; she felt her lips move to speak its name but as she did, it vanished altogether, and when she opened her eyes she found only the lights of her own house looking back at her, glowing to greet her in the winter twilight. Her house. Simone’s party. The car in the drive. Just like that she was back from wherever she had gone.

“Honey-bunny?” Her father was looking at her. “The garage?”

The transmitter sat on the seat beside her. Opening the door was a badge of honor, the desideratum of a thousand squabbles between Mary and her older brother, Mark, and sister, Cheryl. Usually Mark was the victor-like all boys he had a way of getting what he wanted. Now, alone with her father, the privilege was Mary’s, uncontested, and yet it no longer interested her. Opening the garage door: so what? She pressed the button with her thumb; the door hauled itself open, washing the snowy yard with light.

“You seemed to go off into your own world there, kiddo,” her father chirped, pulling in.

But Mary was not alone; she knew that now. She was not, and would never be, alone.

The memory of what she’d felt in the car did not fade, and Mary waited for this feeling to visit her again. This did not take place until many years later, a year that began in the town of Twig.

She was twenty-two; on the hill above the town stood the college where Mary had graduated in June. She’d had friends and boyfriends, sung in the choir, failed one course (economics: a mistake), and passed the rest with A’s and B’s. At graduation the bishop of Oslo had delivered the keynote address, speaking through an interpreter before boarding a helicopter that lifted him into a June sky of flawless blue. His advice was sensible-walk modestly, cherish your families, obey the laws of man and God-but as his helicopter sailed away, washing the graduates’ upturned faces with the beating air of its blades, Mary understood, with a jolt, that she’d made a terrible mistake. How would she do any of this? While her friends had interviewed for jobs and filled out their applications to graduate school, Mary had spent the winter of her senior year writing a long paper on Baudelaire and taking walks through the snowy sanctuary of trees and prairie grasses behind the campus. She had majored in French, because it was easy and beautiful, but it had prepared her for nothing, and now, behind the mask of her sunglasses, her robe still fluttering from the wind of the helicopter, she felt her face warm with the shame of this discovery. After the ceremony she drove north with friends to a rented cabin on an icy lake where they spent a week drinking beer and waterskiing, but she no longer felt herself to be a part of them; when the week was over, and these same friends drove off to Chicago or Minneapolis or even Los Angeles to begin their lives, Mary returned to the town of Twig.

The bar where she worked was called the Norway, and she shared an apartment over a shoe store with two boys, Curtis and Russell. They had been roommates at the college, where they’d graduated a year before. They did not seem to like one another very much, though Mary had come to understand this was common with men who lived together and were also friends. Curtis sometimes tended bar at the Norway and spent his afternoons before a small easel in the corner of the apartment, smoking and painting. He was small, with dark hair, pale skin, and a sharp chin, and his paintings, Mary thought, were like him-still lifes of fruit or fish, rendered with painful, photographic exactness, on canvases precisely one foot square. Russell had red hair, which he wore in a thick ponytail, and a beard; he was a large man, with a broad chest and powerful arms, and he reminded Mary of a portrait she had seen of the Viking warrior Leif Eriksson, though the similarity stopped there. Russell’s girlfriend, Laurie, lived in Des Moines, and in the evenings he wrote her long letters in his bedroom, listening to records or the radio, and then at 4:00 A.M. he went to his job at the bakery, making rolls and cakes. He was applying to Ph.D. programs in Renaissance literature, and the plan was that he would go to school somewhere that Laurie, who was a librarian, could also find a job. Unless Russell had just showered, flour could usually be found somewhere on his person-his beard, his shoes-and sometimes he would return from work so caked that he looked like an actor from a Kabuki play.

Mary liked Russell more, and Mary believed he liked her too. But there was Laurie to think of-his devotion to her, and the almost stately happiness this gave him, were the same qualities that both attracted Mary and made anything between them impossible-so it was Curtis she ended up with. This began one warm night at the end of fall, and on Thanksgiving weekend they drove north in Mary’s old Citation to Curtis’s parents’ house in Duluth, a gloomy Tudor on a bluff above the sullen bulk of Lake Superior. Curtis’s father was a judge who liked to hunt, and at Thanksgiving dinner his mother served a goose that he had shot in the wetlands behind the house, while his younger brothers kicked at one another under the table and the wind off the lake rattled the windows of the dining room. Mary and Curtis had been seeing one another just two weeks, and yet they seemed to regard her as a permanent and promising addition to his life. What did she think of Curtis’s paintings? they wanted to know. They were beautiful, yes, but wouldn’t it make more sense for him to pursue something more grounded, such as law or business, while painting as a hobby? And Mary: did she plan to go on working at that bar? What else was in store for a bright young lady like herself? Mary’s family was very quiet-her memories of childhood were like a movie without sound-and by the time the goose was cleared away, she was exhausted and had barely eaten anything. Curtis’s younger brothers fought over who would get to bring her dessert-an enormous tart topped with sail-like wedges of chocolate-and when dinner was over they left the table to play basketball in the driveway while Mary and Curtis took a walk along the bluff in the dwindling light.

“I’m sorry about that,” Curtis said. “I think my parents really like you, though.”

Beneath the pines they stopped to kiss, listening to the thunk of the basketball. Curtis’s face was soft-he had no beard at all-and when he kissed her, Mary often thought of things that seemed arbitrary: the gray undersides of spring rain clouds, a cat licking its paws, sheet music with notations penciled in the margins. This time she thought of a raisin, squashed on the steps of her grandmother’s porch by the weight of a tiny tennis shoe. At just that moment it began to snow.

“Well, here comes the winter,” Mary said. “You know, you should probably tell them not to like me too much.”

On the drive south to Twig they decided to stop at Mary’s parents’ house in a suburb northwest of Minneapolis. In the five years since she had left home for college, her parents had prospered-her father sold advertising for a Christian country-and-western radio station that had gone national, while her mother owned a card and gift shop called Thinking of You-and each time she returned home, Mary was met by the sight of some new major purchase: a pool table, wrought-iron patio furniture, a big-screen television. This unlikely bounty in her parents’ lives was painful to Mary; she was glad they finally had the things they wanted, but it was also true that she had borrowed most of the money to pay for college, and was now facing student loan payments the size of a house mortgage.

No one was home, but a new pop-up camper sat in the driveway, and Mary and Curtis used the crank to open the camper’s compartment and fiddled with the miniature appliances before driving on to Mary’s mother’s store. The store, in a downtrodden shopping center surrounded by aging subdivisions, should not have succeeded, but in fact Mary’s mother, Gretchen, did quite nicely. Early on she had latched on to a new line of china figurines called Cu-tee-pies-dewy-eyed children in occasional costumes, some holding puppies or rabbits or other small animals-and had wangled an exclusive from the distributor, gambling on the chance that they would become collector’s items, which was exactly what had happened. In the window of her shop hung a banner that read YOUR CU-TEE-PIE HEADQUARTERS, and behind the register Gretchen kept a locked case of retired Cu-tee-pies, some selling for as much as a hundred dollars. For graduation she had given Mary a figurine wearing a cap and gown with the words Congratulations Princess! engraved in gold letters on its china base. She suggested that Mary might want to put it somewhere safe, such as a deposit box at the bank, in anticipation of the day when it would be worth a great deal of money: “a great deal,” she said knowingly. But Mary had no place like that, and now it sat on her kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers.

It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the small store bustled with holiday shoppers. Mary’s father, Lars, had taken the day off to help and was wrapping Cu-tee-pies in tissue paper at a table set up in the back. Mary and Curtis sat down to help him.

“Mary says you’re a painter,” Lars said to Curtis.

“He’s had a show,” Mary offered.

Lars waved a piece of tape from his fingers. “Is there money in a thing like that?” he asked Curtis.

“There can be,” Curtis said. “But not usually, no.”

Mary’s father shook his head sadly and held up a Cu-tee-pie waiting to be wrapped, a little girl in an elf costume clutching a daisy.

“Guess how much my wife makes on this thing,” Lars said. “Don’t guess, I’ll tell you. Thirty bucks retail, and fifteen of it goes right into the till.”

“Those are excellent margins,” Curtis observed.

“It’s a racket, if you ask me. Listen,” Lars said, and lowered his voice, “I’d like to help out. Let me buy one of your paintings.”

“You really don’t need to do that, Dad,” Mary protested. “You haven’t even seen them. They might not be the sort of thing you like.”

Lars shrugged amiably. “Just pick the one that you think I’d like best.”

“We saw the camper,” Mary said neutrally.

“Oh, that,” Lars said, and cleared his throat. “We got it out of the Pennysaver. Your mother has ideas about going out West. When we’ll have the time I just don’t know.”

Mary’s mother returned with Chinese food from the restaurant next door. Like her husband, Gretchen was very tall, and looked much younger than she actually was. She wore her hair in a long loose ponytail that fell down her back, and this afternoon was dressed in a denim skirt and a sweatshirt embroidered with teddy bears. Mary adored her mother with a hopeless affection, like an unrequited crush. She understood this feeling was common in middle children, as Mary was, but there was also a story. Mary’s mother had spent her first ten years of life in an orphanage in Grand Forks, North Dakota, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Though Gretchen was the first to say that it hadn’t been a bad place at all, the experience of growing up in an institution-of eating, bathing, and sleeping in large groups presided over by kindly old women who meant well but did not always remember her name-had left her with a view of childhood that was sentimental and general. She seemed to draw little distinction between Mary and her older brother and younger sister-often she mistook one for the other, and once had driven Mary to a guitar lesson that was, in fact, her brother Mark’s-and nothing could dissuade her from the opinion that her children, who had clothes to wear, food to eat, and a house to live in, were perfectly contented at all times. As she grew, Mary came to see that her mother was merely replicating the impersonal, well-intentioned affections of the nuns who had raised her. But still she longed for more; she longed to be known.

Gretchen served them noodles in brown sauce on paper plates. “So,” she began cheerfully, “am I to understand you two are no longer roommates?”

“We are roommates,” Mary said.

“A mechanical question,” Gretchen went on. “How do you date someone you live with? I’ve tried to imagine how this works.”

“I just bought one of Curtis’s paintings,” Lars said, changing the subject.

Gretchen looked up, as if the painting were there to see. “Really? Which one?”

“I don’t know yet,” Lars said, and waved his chopsticks around. “It’s a surprise.”

They ate their lunch, then opened their fortune cookies and read them aloud. Mary’s read, simply, “You will come into money,” and in the parking lot, Gretchen gave her a fifty she had taken from the register.

The bill was soft in Mary’s hand. “Doesn’t it confuse the books, just pulling money from the register like that?”

“The books, the books,” Gretchen said wearily. “I am the books.” She hugged Mary close, then Mary and Curtis together. “Be happy together, children.”

By the time they returned to Twig, darkness had fallen, and the sky over the alleyway behind the shoe store was thick with stars. Mary dressed for work in black pants and one of Curtis’s white dress shirts, and put on her heavy coat to walk the three chilly blocks to the Norway. The insides were dim and smoky, and the tables were crowded with students from the college, back from their Thanksgiving holiday and now optimistically drunk. Mary’s favorite customer was a man named Phil, a rail-thin alcoholic with a walrus moustache yellowed from smoking, who got by on small checks from the state. Phil lived in a tiny clapboard house by the grain elevator, and his only companions were his cats, whom he had named after different places in Vietnam: Saigon, Da Nang, Haiphong. Each night, Phil came in and put seven dollars on the bar, and drank till the money was gone: a total of six beers at a dollar a can-Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Grain Belt-and a dollar tip for Mary. This was very little, considering how much time he spent at the bar, but Mary didn’t mind, and if Phil was still sober he sometimes helped her clean up, telling her stories about his cats, or about the war in Southeast Asia, in which he had not fought.

Mary said hello to Phil, took an apron and serving tray from behind the bar, and went to a table of four boys who had just come in.

“Anybody here even close to twenty-one?”

Grumbling, the boys produced a variety of documents. Most had been falsified in one way or another, but the unwritten rule of the Norway was that an honest try got you one drink. Then Mary looked at the last card.

“What’s this?” said Mary. “It’s a library card.”

“The age is right there,” the boy explained.

Some dates had been typed, poorly, on the bottom of the card.

“So it is,” Mary said.

“I’ll have my usual,” the boy said. “A whiskey sour.”

Mary flipped the card onto the table. “Au revoir, mon enfant,” she said. “Begone, junior.”

The boy returned his library card to his wallet. “Fine. Give me a Coke if that’s how you’re going to be.”

“I will if you ask me nicely,” Mary said.

The boy rolled his eyes, and his friends snickered. “Mother, may I have a Coke?”

Mary paused and cocked her hip. “You may,” she said.

Later in the evening, Mary took her coffee break at the bar with Phil, who was just finishing up his fourth Blue Ribbon.

“How’s Curtis?” Phil said. It was Curtis, in fact, who had banned Phil’s cats from the bar. Whenever Phil asked this question, the bitterness of the experience was in his voice.

“Not so bad. He just sold a painting,” Mary said.

Phil shook his head and smoked. “Truthfully, I sometimes wonder if that boy’s good enough for you.”

Mary helped herself to one of his cigarettes. “It’s not like we’re getting married, Phil.”

“I’ll tell you something I heard.” Phil glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper. “You know that college? On the hill? Kids there are so rich they’ll throw away the keys of a brand-new Mercedes. Just pitch them in the trash.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Mary said.

Phil frowned into the broad mirror above the bar. “I watched my buddies die, and for what?”

“I went there, Phil,” she said.

Phil nodded gravely. “So you know,” he said.

In January the temperature fell, as it always did, and the snow piled up in enormous mounds around the town of Twig. Distances seemed to grow longer in the cold, and at night the stars shone hard and pure, like chips of ice, as Mary made her way through the silent streets between her apartment and the Norway. At the end of the month Mary came down with something that felt like the flu; she was tired all the time, and when she wasn’t sick to her stomach, her mouth was filled with the taste of metal. Curtis and Russell took care of her, bringing her glasses of ginger ale in bed, or bowls of heated broth. Mary joked that it was nice to see the two of them getting along, though they did not seem to get, or enjoy, this joke.

Her stomach began to feel better, but the feeling of lassitude did not depart-it seemed to have settled in her bones-and when her period did not come, Mary knew what had happened. The directions on the package said that she should wait until morning to take the test, that the concentration of hormones in her urine would be highest at first waking. But the hours that she kept, working late at the bar and seeing just a few hours of sunlight each day, made this seem like advice for some other woman. She took the test alone in the apartment at two in the afternoon, neither expecting nor receiving a different result than the one she got, then dressed and went to work at the Norway.

She wondered what she would do. She could not say that she loved Curtis, but even if she had, this love would be nothing to trust. In any event, she could not see Curtis as a father. She was afraid, but also felt, strangely, that this fear would guide her, that it would help her choose. In college she had known girls to whom the same thing had happened, and the ones who paid the highest price were those who seemed not to care. They went away for a day or two, an interruption no greater than a trip to the dentist to have wisdom teeth removed-many, in fact, claimed this very alibi-then returned to their lives as if nothing had happened; but a month or so later, just when the crisis seemed over, they would find themselves barricaded in their dorm rooms, unable to sleep or eat or even dress, weeping uncontrollably or else feeling nothing at all. Mary would see one of the resident advisors knocking quietly on the door, and then asking questions-is everything all right with so-and-so?-and the next thing anyone knew, the room would be empty, the mattress turned over and propped against the wall, and that would be the end of it.

On the day after the test Mary awoke in an empty bed, and knew that the worst of the sickness had passed. Curtis had taken the Citation to Minneapolis to show some of his paintings to a dealer who bought artwork for model homes in housing developments, and Mary spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment before visiting Russell at the bakery. The air of the bakery was moist and sweet, and under the long banks of fluorescent lights Russell was moving trays of bread dough, molded into loaves, in and out of the oven. Mary watched him, still in her heavy coat.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“What does anyone do?”

They took pint cartons of milk from the refrigerator and sat at a stainless-steel table in the back, eating heart-shaped Valentine cookies sprinkled with purple sugar that stuck to their fingers.

“I can speak to Curtis.” Russell took a long drink of milk to wash down a cookie and brushed crumbs from his red beard. “The word I’m thinking of is ‘responsibilities.’”

Mary found this hard to envision. “You two don’t even like each other,” she said.

Russell thought about this and tossed his empty carton in a trash pail full of tiny snippets of dough. “That could work in my favor.” He paused and looked at Mary. “Either way, you know, you should probably be talking to him.”

Russell was waiting to hear from graduate schools, and they discussed his prospects. His first choice was the University of Iowa, but Laurie opposed this plan, having had enough of Iowa.

“The thing is,” Russell said, shaking his head, “I can’t even really explain why I want to get a Ph.D. anymore. What’s so important about Elizabethan courtesy manuals? Why do I love the things that no one cares about?”

“That’s always the question,” Mary agreed.

Russell’s grandfather was also a baker, in a small town in the Iron Range. “I once asked him, ‘How did you know-really know-that you wanted to do this with your life?’”

“What did he say?”

Russell climbed off his stool and wiped his hands on his apron. “‘The old baker died.’”

Twig was famous for very little, but in 1874, in the dead of winter, the Jesse James gang had held up the town bank. Unlike his well-known defeat at the town of Northfield in the summer of 1876, the James gang had strolled into Twig Savings and Loan and made off with the money easily, plunging the town into a financial abyss that had nearly erased it from the map of time. It was an odd event to celebrate, but every year on the anniversary of the robbery the Lions Club staged a reenactment on Main Street, and in the evening there were fireworks over the baseball diamond.

That night Mary and Russell went to the fireworks together, and when the last ashes had scattered over the snowy baseball field, Mary left him to begin her shift at the Norway. She finished at midnight and sat down with Phil, who was wearing a lopsided cowboy hat, as he always did for “Jesse Fest.” It was one of Phil’s greatest disappointments that the Lions Club had never asked him to play the role of the great bandit himself. On the bartop in front of him was a single bullet, and he picked it up and pointed it at Mary, who raised her arms in mock alarm.

“Don’t shoot, Jesse,” Mary said.

Phil returned the bullet to the bartop and thoughtfully smoothed out his moustache with thumb and forefinger. “It’s the wrong caliber, anyway. Have a look at this.” He searched his shirt pockets and produced a photocopied wanted poster of Jesse James, which he held beside his face.

“Now, what am I seeing?”

“I got it at the library,” Phil explained. “When I saw it, I, too, was surprised at the degree of likeness.”

Mary studied the picture another moment. “There’s always next year,” she said.

“Not the way I hear it.” Phil dejectedly folded the poster back up. “You think they haven’t seen this already? I am persona non grata in this town.”

Mary got Phil his last beer and got one for herself.

“You shouldn’t drink,” Phil said to her.

Mary poured her beer down the sink and got a Coke instead. “God. Who told you?”

“You shouldn’t, you know. Or smoke.” Phil lit one himself and crumpled the empty pack.

Mary sat down beside him again and waved the thick air away. “It’s the same, just being in here. I’m serious. Did you talk to Russell?”

Phil frowned. “Who’s Russell?”

“So you didn’t talk to him.”

“I always wanted a son.” Phil sighed, his eyes pooling with tears. “Now it’s too late.”

Mary pointed at his beer. “I’ve lost track. How many is that?”

“It’s all right,” Phil said, and rose stiffly to go. “I’m done for tonight.”

She helped him with his coat, a denim jacket so filthy it seemed weighed down by dirt. He had the cowboy hat but no scarf, and she took her own and wrapped it around his lanky neck, tucking the ends into the jacket. “Straight home, all right? It’s cold. Call when you get there.”

Mary left the bar and returned under a full moon to the apartment over the shoe store. Curtis was working at his easel in her old bedroom, and Russell was asleep. She couldn’t explain how Phil had known-although, in hindsight, she recognized that this might not have been so; his words were ambiguous. Mary made cocoa for herself and Curtis and told him her news.

Curtis sat beside her on the sofa and put his arms around her. “A baby,” he said happily; and yet he did not look at her as he said this. “How did it happen?”

“I think in the usual way,” Mary said.

“We were careful, were we not?”

“There’s careful and there’s careful,” Mary said.

They agreed that they would wait a week to see how they felt. That night, in bed with Curtis, Mary thought about Phil. He hadn’t called, but she had not really expected him to. She saw him walking home through moonlight to the run-down house he shared with his cats, across a field of snow as blue as radioactive milk. She saw him lying down in the snow, and then the wind began to push snow over his body, until only the tips of his shoes were showing, but they were her mother’s shoes, and it was her mother under the snow. Then she woke up and realized she had dreamt this.

Curtis said that he wanted to marry. His desire did not seem completely sincere, but under the circumstances Mary wondered how it could have been. In any event, it seemed to Mary that they should at least try. It surprised them both how easy this was to do-no blood tests, just a few papers to sign. Curtis made the necessary phone calls, and on a Tuesday they drove to city hall in Minneapolis and got in line. After, Mary planned to call her parents, and then the two of them would drive back to Twig; she would work in the bar that night, and Curtis would get back to painting.

Curtis dressed in a dark suit-coat and jeans, and Mary wore the blue wool dress she had worn beneath her choir robe in college. She had no flowers, though many of the other women in the waiting room were clutching small bouquets at their waists. Each couple had a number, and every few minutes a clerk with a clipboard would appear through a door behind the desk to call the next couple in to take their vows.

“This is crazy,” Curtis said.

“It isn’t exactly what I planned for my life either,” Mary said. She was holding their number, thirty-six. The couple they had just called was number thirty-two. “On the other hand, it seems I’ve planned very little.”

Curtis looked like he was about to cry.

“I can’t,” he said helplessly. “Not to either one of us.”

Mary took his hand, threading their fingers together. “I know,” she said.

They left the building and returned to the car. “Don’t do it,” Curtis said, his knuckles white on the wheel.

“Don’t?”

Curtis took a deep breath. “I don’t… believe in it,” he said.

“No one does,” Mary said.

They drove out of the city and stopped at an Ember’s for lunch. Her circumstances made it difficult for Mary to know what to order; already the hunger had begun, a force like possession, and yet she now knew this would come to nothing.

“I’ll go with you,” Curtis said finally.

“Who’s asking?” Mary said.

The clinic was in St. Paul -a small white house on a residential street with baby strollers left on the porches and brightly colored plastic toys strewn in the yards. Mary parked her car and walked around the block twice before stepping onto the porch. Inside, a dozen women sat on plastic chairs. Some were very young, and had brought their mothers with them. Seeing these women, Mary wished she could have, too, but of course this was impossible-her mother was, after all, adopted, and under different circumstances, might not have been born at all. Mary gave her name at the desk.

“Where are the demonstrators?” she asked. On a stool by the front door Mary had seen a pile of leaflets, weighted down with a stone.

The woman looked at the clock on the wall, then back at Mary. She was spooning yogurt from a cup and had tucked a pencil behind one ear. “I think he usually goes to lunch at one o’clock.”

Someone, a nurse or doctor, examined Mary and told her to come back in two weeks. This seemed like a long time, but Mary didn’t see how she was in a position to argue. Outside, a single demonstrator patrolled the sidewalk, a bald man wearing a sandwich board and mittens. One eye looked at her, while the other did not; the second one was glass.

“This isn’t the answer,” he pleaded.

“Fuck you,” Mary said.

Spring came early to Twig, and the next two weeks brought storm after storm to the little town. Mary moved back into her old bedroom, with its window looking out over the street above the shoe store and its sign, a single boot with an upswept toe, creaking in the spring wind. It was clear that things were over with Curtis-that, when the time came, they would not emerge together on the far side-but in these two weeks of wind and rain, they became a couple again, in a way they had never been before. They were tender and affectionate with one another, and when she came home each night from the Norway, Curtis made her something to eat and then said good-night to her at the door of her bedroom, as if they lived in different towns.

On the eleventh day, a Saturday, Mary returned from the Laundromat and found Curtis sitting on the sofa, clutching his eye. She thought he might be crying, but when he pulled his hand away she saw the green-and-purple bruise, and the cut along the ridge of his cheekbone, a line of blood dried black. The eye itself was uninjured.

She sat beside him and touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “What happened?”

“Russell did it,” Curtis said.

Mary tried to imagine this but couldn’t. She wrapped some ice cubes in a warm dish towel from the laundry basket and held it to his eye. “I didn’t know he knew how to hit. Where was this? Outside somewhere? Or here in the apartment?”

Russell had hit him with his radio. Mary folded the laundry while Curtis iced his eye. Their things were still mixed together, and she sorted them into separate piles of neatly folded clothes on the old trunk they used as a coffee table. She had always done it this way, but as these piles accumulated, they became something more.

“I thought I’d go back home,” Curtis said.

“That’s probably best,” Mary heard herself say. “I’m sorry, but could you please do it now?”

In the morning he was gone, and two days later Mary drove herself to the clinic. How terrible, she thought, to be twenty-two, and already have the worst thing of her life to remember. Then she imagined a strongbox, like a small safe, and she took this idea and placed it in the box. Afterward, she rested an hour on a cot, drank the juice and nibbled the cookies they gave her, and then got back into the Citation. They had told her not to drive after the abortion, but no one actually checked on this, and she drove halfway to Twig before she stopped to vomit in a field of broken corn.

She managed to drive the rest of the way home, climb the stairs to the apartment, and collapse on the couch. They had told her not to take aspirin-it thinned the blood-but that was all she had, so she took two and wrapped herself in a blanket. She drifted in and out of an unhappy sleep. Late in the afternoon Russell came home from the bakery, his hair and hands dusted with flour. She hadn’t told him that today was the day, and now she saw she should have. He brought her a tray of tea and cinnamon toast, and sat on the couch near her feet.

“I’m sorry, that’s all I know how to make.”

“It’s perfect,” Mary said, chewing her toast. “I didn’t know how hungry I was.”

Russell looked at the floor with desolate eyes. “Oh, he’s an asshole.”

“I don’t know if he is.”

That evening a gusty wind tossed the bare branches about. Mary lay on the sofa and listened to the storm approach. It seemed at first to be very far away, and then was suddenly upon them. At the same moment that the sky turned yellow, they heard the tornado sirens; the heavens opened, and hail began to pelt the windows, a sound like pennies falling.

“Check the TV,” Mary said from the couch.

“There’s no time.” Russell lifted her off the sofa and carried her in his arms down the stairs. A green haze had descended over the street, and the wind had ceased, freezing the scene in its abandonment-a bad sign, as Mary knew. Hailstones were scattered over the sidewalk, some as large as marbles, mixed with old leaves and twigs that the wind had torn from the trees. Cars were parked at haphazard angles; their drivers had dashed inside.

“What now, my hero?” said Mary.

He carried her around the building to the gravel alleyway, down a flight of concrete steps, and into the dim basement. There Russell placed her, still wrapped in her blanket, on the floor by the water heater. The wind resumed, the lights went out, the heavens shook with thunder. Russell lay beside her on the damp floor and kissed her.

“Your beard tickles,” Mary said.

The tornado touched down a mile away, near a highway overpass. It skimmed along an empty oat field, fingering a deep rut in the damp soil, searching here and there, then found a farmhouse, and blew it to pieces.

She had lied to Phil; she had a little money, after all. Years before, an uncle had left her ten thousand dollars in his will. She had met him just a few times, and Mary remembered him only vaguely-a pale, perspiring man, who smelled like peppermint and sat on her parents’ patio in the sunshine drinking glasses of iced tea. He was a butcher in California, but did not seem like one. Her parents had put the money in a savings account, earning a dribble of interest, but even so, it had grown to a little over fourteen thousand dollars in the six years since Uncle George had died.

She left Twig in the summer. Curtis had come back to get the rest of his things; Russell had moved back to his parents’ in Bloomington and, in the fall, was starting graduate school at the University of Illinois. The day before her departure she held a yard sale on the sidewalk outside the shoe store, and by evening all that remained were some stained kitchen pots, an asparagus fern, Russell’s broken radio, the Cu-tee-pie her mother had given her for graduation, and a card table of paperback books. In waning light Phil helped her carry the pots and the asparagus fern and the radio to the Dumpster behind the Norway, and with a fat Magic Marker she wrote a sign for the table of books: FREE, TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE. THE TABLE TOO. She left it where it was and awoke that night in her empty room to the sound of rain, fanning over the pages of her books.

She drove north the next morning, a hot, wet Sunday in July, beneath a sky the color of milk. The air conditioner in the Citation was broken, and she drove with a damp kerchief around her head, listening as the Minneapolis stations came in clearer with each passing mile. She had thought about leaving the Cu-tee-pie behind, but she had had enough of that, and it sat on the seat beside her. In Bloomington she stopped at Russell’s parents’ house and signed the title of the car over to him.

“I should pay you something,” he said, opening his wallet. They were standing in the driveway in front of the house. He had been mowing the lawn, and wet grass clippings clung to the weave of his shirt.

She brushed some grass away. “You already have,” she said.

She accepted a dollar, and the next afternoon Russell drove her from her parents’ house to the airport in the Citation. He had not kissed her since the evening of the storm. She knew that he would want to, but also that he wouldn’t know if this was the right thing to do or not. It was. In the busy loading zone, her suitcases piled at their feet, they kissed each other, taking their time. Then she carried her things inside and boarded her plane and flew away, through the summer night to Rome.

In the fall she wrote him a letter. She was in Florence, where she had been since September. She lived near Santa Croce, sharing an apartment with her cousin, who was a student at the same school where Mary was taking courses: a seminar on Dante, Italian language and culture, figure drawing. From her apartment, in the old servants’ quarters of a great palazzo, she could see through the buildings the dirty Arno, and below her the small piazza where sunlight pooled on the cobblestones and old men gathered to listen to soccer games on the radio. She had a boyfriend, an American she’d met walking in the gardens behind Pitti Palace, where she had gone with a sketchbook to draw. He’d approached her where she stood, looking at a sign displaying a map of the gardens and park, and asked in a halting Italian that made her laugh: “Dove siamo?” Dove siamo: Where are we? He was blond and tanned, and had a broad, happy smile, and didn’t look at all like Curtis, nor remind her of him. He loved to talk, to tell stories about himself and the places he’d been. He had been out of college a year, worked in San Francisco as a carpenter, and was now traveling with friends. She never got to meet them. The two of them talked on a shady bench in the park, and when it grew dark he caught a bus back to the hostel to retrieve his backpack, and stayed; and though she did not make love to him then, she soon did, and knew that she was cured. She was twenty-three years old, an American girl in Europe making love to a boy from Ohio who was funny and kind and had no plans for her at all; he would find an apartment, a job teaching English, they would travel together to Rome, to Venice for carnivale, to Greece when the weather grew warm; she was cured, her heart was cured. Dear Russell, she wrote,

Thank you for your letter, and congratulations to you and Laurie. Your news makes me happy, and if I am back in the summer, I will come to your wedding.

It is just a few months later, but already those days in Twig seem like a distant memory. Is it the same for you? The mail is slow here, and the phone is impossible, so I have heard almost nothing from home; so perhaps that’s the reason. But I also know that our year there was like no other-it was like a year outside of time-and I’m glad we were together, to know that it happened.

She wrote this in a coffee bar, late on an October afternoon. She told him about her roommate, and about her classes and friends, and the way the trains were always on strike and it was always warm; she wrote him of her life. When she was done she sealed it without reading it, bought a brightly colored stamp from the young woman behind the counter, and slid it into the postbox by the phone. On the busy street the sun fell over her, and for a moment she stood still, tasting autumn sunshine. She closed her eyes, hiked her bag up high on her shoulder, and that was when she felt it, one last time: the lightness. It blossomed inside her and widened, like the rings on a pond, suffusing every thought, and she knew what it was, that it was a child. Then it was a second, and then a third, so that she knew that in her life she would have three, two girls and a boy. Motorbikes sped past, laughing students, tiny weaving cars; but their voices, their eyes-all seemed far, far away. She knew that people had stopped and gathered around her; someone had taken her by the elbow, in case she might fall. She stood on the street, on the old stones of Florence, her eyes closed, one hand touching her chest where her heart was, and felt the spirits of each one of her children, not rising but falling; they came from above. Then a fourth passed through her-different than the others, for it was a presence of great hesitancy, both there and not there-and she knew who this was, too. Good-bye, she thought, good-bye, and she turned from everyone and hurried down the street of the ancient city so they would not see her weeping.