Mary and O'Neil Page 0,48
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