Mary and O'Neil Page 0,21
Miriam feels the humiliation of the moment afresh, how her fury and need had been twisted in on themselves, and turned into silence. She remembers almost nothing of the picnic itself; she remembers only this moment in the kitchen, and the one that followed, when she stepped from the house into the sunshine and surrendered to it, its blinding light and promise. Fine. Fun. Read in the dreary kitchen if you must. On the bed Miriam lets one hand rise to where the lump is; at the end of her fingertips she feels its firm, insistent shape, and allows her touch to linger there. (It could still, of course, be nothing; though wouldn’t someone have said so, if it could be nothing? Whatever it is, it is not nothing.) Beside her, on the little bedside table, the telephone rests, unused.
She rises then, careful not to wake Arthur, pulls on a sweater and shoes and her coat, and leaves the hotel. Evening has fallen; the air is dry and very still, and lights are coming on. She walks alone to the center of town, toward the restaurant where she and Arthur had lunch, though that is not her destination. Horace Bullfinch, Glassworks: the sign hangs on iron hooks over the front door, its lettering crisply ornate, like the sign on an old-time apothecary shop. It is a large brick structure, half hanging over the dammed river, with a wheel that turns in the water beneath it. By the door, a wide glass window is fogged with steam.
She steps inside and finds herself in a large room with tables and chairs scattered about, and a counter for coffee and sweets. On the far side she sees a wall of windows, looking out over the millpond, and beyond it a patio, with tables and chairs covered for the season. The room is empty except for a lone woman standing at the pastry counter, reading in the heat. Her eyes rise as Miriam enters; she nods, smiling emptily, and then returns to her magazine.
Stairs lead down to the basement. Miriam finds herself once again in a large room, though the space has been divided in half: a gift shop on one side, and on the other, behind a wall of thick Plexiglas, a demonstration area, where a man and a woman are working. Miriam sheds her coat and joins the small group of people who have gathered to watch. At either end of the space are two stone kilns, like bank safes, their interiors glowing with a churning heat; between, laid across long work tables, rest half-a-dozen long metal tubes. The process is a blur of detail. In the tiny work area the man and the woman move with a graceful and liquid surety, like a couple dancing, though they are dressed cumbersomely, for hard labor: heavy aprons and thick safety glasses, rubber gloves that reach to their elbows, denim jeans and shirts despite the heat that Miriam knows must be searing. Somehow they manage to maneuver their long poles in and out of the heat, from table to kiln and back again, never colliding with anything or with each other, but never speaking either. They are young, in their thirties; Miriam imagines—then is certain—that they are married. (No, she decides, not dancing; cooking. It is as if she is watching a couple cooking in a kitchen.) The woman wears her dark hair in a long, swinging braid, wonderfully thick, and has a strong, narrow face. Behind her goggles her eyes are calm, and shine with the reflected light of the kilns. In and out of the fire she guides her rods, a half dozen at her command, spinning them with quick intensity as they cool. As Miriam studies her, she holds one to her lips, puffs out her cheeks, and expels a steady exhalation of breath. At the other end of the tube a bubble appears; Miriam finds herself exhaling, too, a breath that she realizes she has been holding in anticipation. The bubble expands to the size of a Ping-Pong ball, then a tennis ball; its surface gleams with the wet translucence of a baby’s fingernails. It seems perfect to Miriam, and yet the woman is not satisfied. Examining it, she frowns, then worries it quickly with a knife before reinserting it into the fire.
It is then that Miriam notices the small display table in front of the Plexiglas wall, and on it a solitary glass pitcher, no more than four inches