Mary and O'Neil by Justin Cronin
“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 brou
“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 t
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.