“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.