Mary and O'Neil Page 0,45
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