Once there was a girl, Mara—it meant bitter water, but she did not know that. She knew she was named for a long-dead great-aunt she never knew. Mara was neither young nor old but caught in that strange in-between that is twenty-four: old enough to be called an adult but young enough to believe that all her questions had answers. In this, she was still an innocent.
She believed that stories had happy endings if one just got the recipe right. Like a cookbook. Recipes for her mother’s sponge cake or recipes for the meaning of life. When her first love left her for her best friend, yes, for a while she had pondered the mysteries of true love while wandering around her parents’ house for weeks in a chocolate-fed daze. But in the end, she concluded that she had been missing a key ingredient: the right color eye shadow or the right man—she could not make up her mind which. Among others of her age, in this, she was unremarkable.
Unremarkably, too, she hated her hair. Is thirteen when it begins, the obsession with hair, standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to make it go in a way other than its wont? Mara never saw it as others did who envied it: the long, crazed curls, a Pre-Raphaelite frizz, that leapt all rose-gold when she moved. She saw her hair as an unlucky draw from her genes, a constant rebellion that she never completely subdued with pins or strategically placed black bows. The insult at times felt like a cosmic betrayal, like her complexion, pale as wet tissue paper, she thought, revealing to the world her ungovernable blush. And yet, despite these solitary tragedies of blood, she was no more vain than others of her age.
Mara moved to the city after college, as many do, to find a job and, perhaps, a husband. She took an apartment near the number 15 bus line in an old house owned by a old woman who lived on the first floor, Mrs. Minnegarode. Once, within her first month in the apartment, Mara locked herself out while taking out the trash. While she waited in her landlady’s living room for her to find the spare key, she glanced at a card standing upright on a table. “Dear Carmen” ran the handwriting above the printed script. The girl was startled. Her eyes searched the room for traces of a Carmen—a slash of scarlet, an echo of flirtation—but the leather recliner, squat as a brown cow, and starched doilies held no Carmen that the girl could find. A feeling not unlike shame overwhelmed Mara at the discovery, as if she had pried open a dresser drawer and found love letters smelling of sour nylon and lavender sachet, as if knowing the old woman’s secret name was somehow a violation. She banned it from her thoughts.
For Mara this was her greatest weakness: the discipline of her mind, a losing battle, always. In her closet hung three new suits, blue, green, and grey, as ordained by the article on Elle about dressing to be taken seriously at work that she had printed out and taped to her refrigerator door. On her bookshelves crowding against volumes of poetry were instruction manuals for job interviews that outlined sample answers for any question that might be posed. She was as prepared for this as for any test she had ever faced; still, she was afraid. There were in any challenge dragons, and her dragon was a mind with the unfortunate tendency to chase irrelevancies or wander into blank deserts at the worst moments, like a puppy unused to a leash. Yet she was determined. A puppy is a minor dragon, after all, in the scheme of things. Messy, yes, but minor.
Soon, when the money she had saved began to run out, Mara took a job with a temporary agency until her one-true job came along, and her life in the city fell into a predictable routine. She would come home, cook herself dinner, and if the intellectual demands of keeping her mind tied to her temp filing job had not completely exhausted her, write To-Whom-It-May-Concern cover letters into the night. One such evening, while waiting out the fifteen-minute simmering in a recipe for ground turkey royale, she absent-mindedly opened a book of poems that was slanted on her shelf. She found herself crying. At first she thought it was the poem she had been reading that had struck some deep unconscious sorrow, but then the high-pitched screech of the smoke alarm jolted her attention to the burning pan on the stove. In one adrenaline-driven motion, she threw a lid on the pan and picked up her now ringing phone.
“Hello?…No, Mrs. Minnegarode, it’s fine….I understand….Please don’t worry, Mrs. Minnegaride….It won’t happen again, Mrs. Minnegarode.”
After opening all the windows, Mara looked through the haze at the charred mess on the stove spread in front of her like a war-devastated countryside. In the bathroom to wash her face, she sat on the toilet seat and, this time with now conscious sorrow, began to cry anew. “You dumb jerk,” she muttered. “When will you ever grow up?”
From the bathroom window, she saw Mr. Mitchell in his garden next door. Every day she had watched the retired gentleman play warden to his yard, mowing, clipping, raking, seeding. He handled the hedge-trimmers with effective delicacy until all shrubs—azaleas, yews, boxwoods—were carved into cones and mock mushrooms. That evening he was trimming the pyracantha espaliered against the cement retaining wall. To Mara, it began to look like a Hindu god with arms outstretched symmetrically, palms raised upward, a god dancing motionlessly against the wall. She wished someone had trained her to grow in such balance. But she was more like the sprawling pyracantha her father had planted in their front yard back home where its splay of thorns caught all the trash from the highway. Each fall it became an indiscriminate heap of Coke cans, McDonald’s wrappers, and lewd orange berries.
The next day she went to Sparwassers Department Store on her lunch break to buy a new frying pan. Housewares—her green eyes fixed on the sign on the ceiling at the far end of the store, and she walked resolutely to it past the perfume counter—there was no time to pursue her sideline quest for a signature scent among the lined-up testers. As she threaded her way through racks of sportwear, a weaving flash of yellow caught her attention. It was a rainhat, one straight out of a Winslow Homer painting of New England fishermen, the kind with the flap sliding down the back of the neck. The rainhat itself was peculiar in Sparwassers Department Store, but the man in the three-piece suit wearing it was even stranger. He looked as if he were lost, yet his half-witted grin made him seem delighted to be so. Drawing nearer, she noticed that he was an old man of about seventy, rather ordinary-looking in a skinny, wiry way. If he had been weird—an Albert Einstein meandering through Princeton streets or a bald and paunchy Picasso type—she probably would have been too intimidated to give him a second glance. But he was just so ordinary looking he seemed out of place. The kind of ordinary that movie directors seek as extras to stock town scenes. Ordinary, yes, if he would only take off that hat….
“Hey there, girl,” he called out.
She looked around nervously, then realized that the half-witted grin was directly in her face.
“What do you get folks for a fiftieth anniversary present?”
She looked away quickly, hoping he would bother somebody else.
“The poor old think I’m married to sent me down here to get something for her ancient sister and her husband, and I can’t for the life of me figure it.”
Mara thought ancient should know ancient, and he’d be better off asking a salesperson if his own befuddlement couldn’t clue him in.
“I’m no good at this stuff. Hell, it’s HER sister. I don’t have the slightest idea. What would YOU get?”
She should have said, something gold. That would have been the correct answer—twenty-five silver, fifty gold. Instead, glancing at the display to her immediate right, she said, “One of those. Get a music box with something romantic.” She didn’t know why she said that. To get rid of him maybe, or maybe to answer his looniness with a close-at-hand looniness. She tried to walk past him, but he cut off her escape route.
“Great! You can’t get something serious for anybody who’s been married that long. If they haven’t learned to take a joke by now, it’s all over. But it’s gotta be something stupid. Something silly. Lots of geegaws. Playing the sappiest trash we can find. Come on.” He steered her toward the counter, picking up a porcelain butterfly, and shoved it in her hand. “Start winding, girl!”
They wound music boxes one after another until a tutu clad ballet dancer en pointe, a couple in minuet, a rocking horse, a butterfly, a rose, an a heart-holding Jesus turned rigidly in a row in a tinkling stew of “Feelings,” “The Anniversary Waltz,” “Edelweiss,” “Memories,” and “Jesus Loves Me.”`
“No, this won’t work. None of them is dumb enough.” He gripped her elbow and pushed her toward the escalator.
Mara was irritated. Her lunch break ticked away inside her head. She should have said, “I’m sorry, mister,” pulled away, and run on to frying pans, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “Where are we going?”
He said nothing. They reached the down escalator.
“Where are we going?” This time louder. Maybe the old guy was hard of hearing. She shifted her weight impatiently from one foot to another on the moving tread. Finally she turned around to give him a piece of her mind, to tell him that she didn’t have time for this nonsense, but his loony grin, spread manic across his face, stopped her.
“Hush, girl. You’ll see.”
The toy department was before them. Like a grey-muzzled hunting dog waiting for a quivering in the underbrush, the old man froze, his nostrils flared, his blue eyes scanning the rows of toys. His quarry sighted, he sprang forward, dragging Mara after him. They stopped before a shelf of wind-up toys.
“But these are toys, mister—”
“Sully.”
“Mister Sully, I don’t think—”
“Mister NOTHING, Red. It’s Sullivan Austin Dumler, but if you call me that, I’ll stop talking to you. Saddled me with the last names of everyone in the family they were afraid to offend. Always thought it was a cruel thing to do to a kid. Sort of like throwing virgins in volcanos to make it right with the ancestors. It’s Sully. Just Sully.” He picked up a monkey with a tin drum. “Would you look at this one? Sort of looks like me, don’t you think?” He started to turn the key as she stared numbly at him. “Well, come on, girl, get started! We don’t have all day!”
Reluctantly, Mara wound up a pink poodle and placed it on the floor where it barked and back-flipped around the monkey. Soon a robot rolled by, its arms pumping like a cross-country skier, its red eyes blinking toward the finish line; a blue bus popped its top to regurgitate a Smurf; a kangaroo boxed its way into an elephant hoisting a trumpet with its trunk while a blue-hatted bear spun out in a jalopy through it all. Through the chaos, Sully’s laughter was a high, whistling wind that stopped only long enough for him to bend and wind a toy that had begun to slow its frenzy. An unwilling giggle escaped Mara. Then as the pink poodle collided with the careening bus, her laughter swung wide open in a contralto rush, and she too began to bend and wind, tending the pandemonium in the aisle.
“Can I help you?” Above them a ponderous voice jiggled. They looked up from their playing at the Brunhilda toy-keeper whose fingers, stiff as clothespins, nervously flew before her bosom. “Can I help you?” she trilled louder.
Sully stood up and was silent for a moment, his eyes fixed—rather rudely Mara thought—on the wide shelf of the lady’s chest. “I’ll take them all!” Sully declared as the monkey drummed its final roll.
Mara and Sully scrambled out of her way as the saleslady maneuvered sideways between them and picked her way through the toys giving out their good-bye twitches. She began to pull boxes from the stock shelves. Sully continued to stare at the woman’s chest as if mesmerized.
Sully withdrew his charge card and handed it to the woman who busied herself at the end of the aisle preparing his purchases for travel.
Sully turned to Mara and whispered, “She must have at least three of them.”
“What?”
“My mother had three of them—I knew that for a fact—except it felt like my head was one of ‘em.” When I was a boy, she would grab me up in a hug and smash me against ‘em til it felt like my head was completely surrounded by bazoombers. It felt like she had a million of them, maybe more….It was lovely.” His eyes closed and his mouth curved blissfully. He opened one eye as if to check her reaction. “My mother used to bring me here a lot when I was a kid. She used to dress me up in shorts and knee socks and drag me along so she could have lunch with her friends next door. I hated it. She was always telling me to pull up my socks, and she’d always be scrubbing imaginary dirt off my face with the corner of a napkin she wet with her spit—she had a finger like a chisel. Then there was the time on the elevator when there was this lady’s rear end like a balloon at eye level and I reached out my finger to see it I could pop it and—
The saleslady loomed large at his side, handing him his shopping bag, her face the practiced mask of Sparwassers training.” “I hope the children like them,” she offered solemnly.
“Children? Hell, no. These are for some senile old relatives.” He turned and once again gave Mara his loony grin and winked. “It’s their reward for fifty years of trying to act like adults.” He took up his packages. “So long, girl. Thanks!” And Sully sailed off, his perfectly ordinary head in the perfectly unordinary fisherman’s hat held high as a spinnaker through the waves of shoppers at Sparwassers Department Store.
Mara did not buy her frying pan that day. She rushed back to her temp job and found them angry with her: being hijacked by a crazy old man was not the act-of-god excuse the temp agency had promised in its reputation for efficiency. She had been replaced. That day, she walked to the bus stop, head down, consciously avoiding the cracks in the pavement. Her forehead was creased with a grim line, her hair, a fly-away fire in the sun.
Three weeks later she was again downtown, sitting on a bench in Liberty Plaza, mentally rehashing the interview she had just had in one of the many blue-glass buildings that reflect the clouds and confuse the birds. She remembered how her nails had penetrated the thick twill of her chair. Looking down, she had realized that her legs were crossed high at the knees. They had seen her error, she was sure, before she had corrected her position, crossing her legs modestly at the ankles, knees together but relaxed. The voice to her left had said, “Mara, give us a description of what you think would be your ideal position here.”
Oh God, they had seen, she thought; then realizing that they weren’t talking about her legs, she went blank. The light swirled across the grain of the rosewood table. She had not rehearsed an answer to this one. She didn’t know what they wanted to hear. A lock of hair had sprung free from its anchoring comb and fell across her forehead. She had stammered something, her blush, she knew, announcing to the world her confusion. Her legs, unobserved, had reverted to their former high cross. She repositioned them again, planting her feet firmly to the floor in a self-directed restraining order. She had watched their eyes turning to the window, heard through the pounding in her head the muffled tapping of fingers against a pin-striped sleeve.
Outside on her bench, disappointment and the July heat had wilted her. Her hair, coiled into ringlets, stuck to her forehead and neck; perspiration crawled in itches down her thighs; her feet had swelled and blistered like sausages in their new high-heeled casings. Stuffing kleenex in the heel of one shoe, she tried to muster the courage for a long, painful walk to the bus stop. The voices in her head alternated: one calling her a jerk with a thousand different adjectives; another sternly quoting: “Use rejection as a catalyst.”
Then Mara saw the old man gliding toward her through the plaza wiggling with heat. She grabbed her purse. Her eyes darted around the open plaza for something big and close enough to hide behind.
“Hey, Red!” Too late. He had steered a course directly to the seat beside her.
“Hi, Sully,” she answered feebly. “Destroyed any department stores lately?”
“Nah, been with my accountants all morning. I swear, when it comes time for me to die, some damn accountant’ll have me filling out a permission form in triplicate. It’s inhuman. They suck you in, those finance people. They fool you into thinking that what you are doing is some kind of hunt, which you take to right away like a dog or a lion. Then, when you’re furiously running along, chasing what you think is your dinner, you find out that they’ve tied a piece of meat to your own tail—You hungry, girl? My treat.” Sully ignored her silence. He took her arm and started walking them both to the street. “Anyway, I thought all this was over when I turned the factory over to my son. I should have known better. Where do you want to eat? Never mind. I know where we are going. Come on.”
On the street before them was an old cherry-red corvette convertible—probably one of the first ones made—top down, a parking ticket on the windshield. Sully tossed the ticket onto a pile of them on the floor. “Come on, girl. Get in!”
It’s happening again, Mara thought. She was hungry, but maybe a hot dog from a street vendor was a safer compromise. The car’s well-aged flashiness wedged a space of doubt in her mind between “harmless” and “old man.”
“Sully, I don’t think—”
“That’s good, girl, don’t think. Thinking just gets you into trouble.”
Through the downtown streets, Mara gazed motionlessly ahead, uncomfortably aware of the gawking pedestrians who daunted Sully not at all. On the expressway north, Sully changed lanes whenever he pleased, oblivious to traffic, all the while ranting about his son and the accountants who would not let him enjoy his retirement in peace. The corvette exited into a community of stone houses, sedate in their decay, that used to quarter hands who worked the mills that lined the now polluted stream. Sully parked the car in front of one old house that stood off to itself in a grove of oaks canopied high in a wide vault above them.
“Is this where you live?”
“No, this is where I come when accountants or my crazy wife get too much for me. Sort of like a foxhole in a battlefield. Everyone need one, I think, a place, some corner, even a quiet space in your mind will do in a pinch, someplace you can dive into to be alone to remember who you are.” Sully’s constant grin faded, his blue eyes softening. “What’s wrong, Red? They getting to you out there?”
She nodded and said nothing. The oaks became to her a green, stained-glass blur.
“Yeah. They make it rough for us—worse, because sometimes it’s hard to tell who they are. Sully’s voice lowered; Mara could barely hear him. “Then you wake up in the morning one day and look in the mirror and they are staring back at you. But they’re the ones’ll kill you.”
Sully’s finger traced the lock of hair that had again fallen like an inverted question mark across her forehead. His touch was slow, almost reverent. Suddenly, he withdrew his hand. “Good God, lunch! That’ll fix everything. Let’s get some food!”
Sully unlocked the door. On the table just inside stood the toy monkey with the tin drum.
“You kept it, Sully!”
“Didn’t have much choice. I got home and caught hell from my wife. She thought her sister would be insulted.”
The living room of the house was small. Mara waited there while Sully rooted around in the refrigerator and banged cupboards in the kitchen. The sofa spanning the outside wall faced a winter portrait of an old oak tree. Its crown of leafless limbs formed an image of a brain-like hemisphere, branches twisting into a cortex, its gnarled trunk, a spinal column sunk into the shoulders of the earth. A fireplace was flanked by bookcases crammed with volumes in no order she could tell: Menken, Jung, The Tao of Pooh, Henry Miller, St. Theresa of Avila, Descartes.
“You read a lot, Sully? She called over the clamor in the other room.
“What?” He turned the corner with a tray of cheeses, pepperoni, and crackers. She pointed to the books.
“Oh. No. Used to. But not much anymore. I’m just to gullible to get anywhere. Get myself into real mind-scrapes. I’ll pick up some book and the author’ll say something right off the bat in the first chapter that sounds like it may be true, like it was something I knew all along that I had to be reminded of. I get so damned grateful to be reminded that it’s like I fall in love. Follow the author anywhere, even to the end of the book in one night. Then I’ll wake up the next morning still fondling the writer’s ideas, convinced that I’ve found the key to the universe. I take another look and get this half-sick feeling because, in the light of day, the idea that the night before was going to lead me to paradise has warts all over its nose. I’m getting too old for one-night stands—want to go to bed with me, girl?”
Mara was caught mid-swallow. She choked and started to cough. She recovered enough to aim a lethal glare at the old man but, instead, found a boy who had just said, “Wanna play checkers?” Startled, she began to laugh.
His grin grew incorrigibly. His blue eyes were trading baseball cards. “I’ll pay you five-hundred dollars.”
“Sully!!!”
His lower lip trembled in mock deflation. “Well, it never hurts to ask.”
This July lunch in the oak tree house became the first of many. The rest of the afternoon set a pattern that was to grow between them. If she received another rejection and came to him full of complaints and itemized self-recriminations, he’d listen quietly, staring so intently at the oak tree portrait that she wondered if he had heard her at all. If she brought him her latest self-improvement campaign, he’d laugh, saying, “So you’re going to ditch the works and start from scratch, are you?” Then he’d wind up the monkey on the table and let it play, or he’d jump up, run to the kitchen to bring back a block of cheddar with a candle stuck in it and sing happy birthday.
He never made sense. If she came asking advice as she did when she was offered a job—an entry-level marketing position in one of the downtown glass towers—he never answered her. He just talked…and talked…and talked. About matters that were so irrelevant that they infuriated her. About how nobody ever taught monarch butterflies how to catch just the right air currents to get to Mexico to make whole trees undulate with orange. About the mating habits of certain species of apes. About how a lioness waits for the right window to open in her cub’s consciousness to teach it the killing blow. About when he was eight and stalked the wild horse mint in the field next to his home because its sharp taste let him breathe ice in summer.
He seemed to repeat himself obliviously. One Saturday in February, he snuck once again behind the enemy lines in Normandy to capture a truckload of French brandy, only to have it blown up by the Germans before he could get it back to his friends. But she had heard the story in January, with less brandy and far fewer Germans.
She didn’t know why she put up with his endless monologues that never seemed to have anything to do with anything. At times he drove her crazy; at times she felt that he had trivialized her dreams. But she always left the stone house laughing, first at him, and gradually later, when safe in the aloneness of her apartment, at herself. If during that year of Saturdays, she never quite broke the stranglehold of her own innocence, if she still believed that all questions were only asked for their answers, if she still believed that faults were always faults and that determination would fix them, well, at least there were times when her head rested against Sully’s shoulder, her hair fleeing like a forest fire across his chest, as she listened to him drone on and on, and the anxious lines in her face softened, and the wintering branches of old oak’s portrait blurred to a fine grey mist, at least there were times that she forgot.
But one day she showed up at the door of the oak tree house, her green eyes wide, her face washed with excitement—or that’s what it seemed. Her cheeks glowed with unfading pink. Her mouth curved in a carefully drawn red. Her hair clung to her head like matchstick sulfur. Mara spun in a circle like a mechanical ballerina.
“Look, Sully, I’ve been made over!”
Sully stood in the middle of the room, his face still.
“I finally got sick of it and decided to put myself in the hands of people who knew what they were doing. They worked on me all morning—nails, makeup, hair. It cost a fortune! What do you think?”
He did not answer.
“At first I was scared when I saw my hair in pieces on the floor—some a foot long. But then I figured that a drastic change was what I needed. Everyone says how important it is to project the right image and—”
“Why?”
“So they can take me seriously, Sully. Don’t you get it? Seriously. The way I was made me look like a kid. Someday I’m going to get my own line of products to market, but they’re not going to give the account to someone who looks as if she cannot even control her own hair.”
“Sit down, girl.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I take you seriously, girl. Sit down. Please.”
Sully went into the kitchen. Mara was bewildered. She had never heard this jaggedness in his voice. She didn’t understand what was wrong. After a while he returned with two cups of coffee, handed one to her, and sat next to her on the sofa. The Sully as she knew him had returned.
“It’s all a game, girl, that’s what you think, isn’t it? If you just know the right moves, you’ll win. Right? Well, I think you’re on to something.”
Mara was pleased. “I knew you’d—”
“But there’s a hitch to it. You learn the game, but that’s all. Then one day you find yourself in a football field trying to hit the ball over the goalpost with a tennis racket. We’re a ridiculous species. Insane, really. I remember once in the war—”
“Sully, not that truckload of brandy again.”
“My buddy Jack and I had gotten cut off from the rest of our unit by a sniper attack. The Germans had withdrawn from that area but had left pockets of stragglers that were dangerous as wolves. We were walking through the countryside, mile after mile of deserted farms and houses—kind of spooky, really. Nobody was around, not even a stray dog rummaging through a bombed-out kitchen. We eventually came onto a chateau that could have been a movie set for The Three Musketeers. Huge place. It looked like the enemy had taken it over for a headquarters or something, but we saw no signs of them anywhere. Still, we weren’t going to take any chances.
“We went through the chateau room by room. Before going into a new one, we’d flatten ourselves against the walls next to the doorway the way cops do on TV except this was real. By the time we had done this through fifty rooms or so, Jack and I were getting kind of bold. We got to the door of a tower room, and Jack put his arm out to keep me from just bulldozing in. On the far wall, a panel was open, revealing a secret passage of some sort. There in front of it was, slumped over the table, was a German officer, his hand wrapped around a bottle of wine, looking like he had just passed out drunk…except for the smell. Jack started to turn the body over, and I said, ‘Jack, don’t,’ but he did it anyway. You would have thought he was still breathing the way his belly moved. He was alive, all right, with maggots crawling around this big hole in his gut. I got sick right there on the floor.
“But that was the only person we had seen…for days…in the time we were exploring this part of the country. So, I went alone up through the passageway that led to the top of the tower. Jack must have gone in the other direction. I saw something move in the courtyard below. It was Jack. He didn’t see me. I snuck open the casement window, cocked my finger like a kid playing guns, and fired. ‘Bang, you dirty bastard, you’re dead.’ Jack didn’t miss a beat. He made a big show of being wounded—like an opera singer taking forever to die—then, in his last breath, he aimed imaginary machine-gun fire at me. ‘tatatatatatatatata—gotcha, you piece of shit.’ I fell back on the floor of the tower room. Dead.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, what happened in real life? To you. To Jack. How did it end?”
Sully seemed confused by her question. “We died, girl. Can’t you recognize a dead man when you see him? Anyway, when I fell back on the that floor, all I could see was a window that opened the blue sky. I could hear Jack laughing in the courtyard below, but that wasn’t real anymore. It was like I had dropped into that deep hole in the sky, and I was all alone, with the sky pressed in close all around me. I didn’t understand, but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to understand. It was beside the point. Beside the point. That must have been the way my mother felt.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah, my mother died when I was still a kid. She went to the hospital, and I didn’t see her for a long time until towards the end when my dad brought me to see her. She was in a room at the end of a mile-long hall. I remember her in that bed. Nothing moved except the light in her eyes and that seemed far away, deep inside her, like it was trapped inside her all alone. I kept asking her when she was coming home, but she couldn’t answer me. She just peered out at me as if she were stuck in a cave. When it was time for me to go, Dad said for me to kiss her, and I went up close, and her skin was cool and hard as if it had already happened, but it hadn’t. To her, I think, everything, including me, had become beside the point. Dad told me over and over that she had loved me more than anything, and I believe that was true, but she just had set that light that was trapped free. She knew that she just had to do that.”
Sully stopped talking. A long silence, a quiet trance, charged the room. Mara leaned toward Sully and gently kissed him. She felt no need to break away. Their breaths, matched and quickening, kept time in a new world that was being made between them. Lightly, Sully touched her face, then her neck, and warmth rushed through her like a spring current, insistent, softly pulling her downward into instinct.
But then the image of Sully, the old, old man, rose behind her closed eyelids. This was not right. This was Sully. And in her, revulsion moved against this unexpected attraction, and her face went red with shame for her body’s betrayal. She pulled away.
“No, Sully. No. This is impossible.”
He laughed gently. “Impossible? But it’s happening. Doesn’t that make it possible?
She was confused. This was not supposed to happen. He was too old for her, too old by a century or more, with skin as thin and wrinkled as her grandfather’s. What they had between them was just that, not that kind of…love. “Sully,” she began slowly, “this is all wrong. I don’t think—”
“That’s right, girl, don’t think. Thinking gets you—”
“Damn you, I’m NOT a little girl,” she yelled. “My name is Mara. MARA! Do you hear me? Or are you so old that you are losing that along with your sanity. I’m sick of your telling me what I should or shouldn’t do. I’m sick of being treated like a child. You’re the one stuck in your childhood trying to get back what you don’t have anymore. I’m sick of you. Sick of your stupid stories. Sick of your pretending that you know more than anybody else!”
Still shaking with rage, she searched by the side of the couch for her purse. At the door she looked back at Sully and a conscious sorrow invaded her anger. His head leaning against the back of the couch was almost the image of the tin-drum monkey on the table beside him, its arm raised, drumstick in hand, fixed in the motion of the beat that didn’t come.
“You’re an old fool, Sullivan Austin Dumler, a dumb old fool.”
Mara never saw Sully after that. She ignored his phone calls and texts and didn’t answer the door the one time he showed up to see her. And for a long time, she would not allow him into her head. It was as if she had walked him down a long corridor in her mind, found an empty closet, and shoved him into it. If she ever came close to thinking of him, it would have been to hang a brass plate engraved with his name on the door. True, she might occasionally stop to polish the plate, but she never opened the door.
Time passed. She dated men from work or men she met at Sheila’s Pub, the local happy-hour stop for the downtown legal community, but none seemed quite right for her. But then again, she had little time for socializing; success at work was the only goal that absorbed her. She worked hard, did everything that was expected of her and more, and waited for the reward to come—her own product, her chance to prove herself all alone. But once,
twice, three times, she was passed by. She just tried harder, sinking all her spare time into the endeavor. She was sure she would be next.
But she wasn’t. The day she found out that the account had gone to another, she went to the ladies room where she stood leaning against a sink, wondering what she had done wrong. But then she wondered why, when all the bathroom stalls were perfectly clean and working, everyone chose the third stall on the left. And the sky outside the window above the sink consumed her with its blue.
A sudden thud made her jump. A bird, mistaking the glass for more sky, had smashed against the window leaving a thin, round smudge of red. Mara stared at it. Tears, with the guttural taste of bitterness, snuck one by one down her cheeks. Co-workers came in with their coats over their arms. It was close to five. “Are you all right, Mara?” they asked.
“Fine,” she told them. “Just fine.”
When she was finally alone, she glanced at the red smudge on the window and, on impulse, scrambled in her purse for her red lipstick, rolled it out from its gold tube, and drew a line on the window beside the smudge, then another, then two more crossing. The round smudge now centered a tic-tac-toe grid. She marked an empty box with a red X and leaned back against the sink and waited for the sky’s next move. Outside it grew dark. She wondered if it was a computer or an unseen human hand that waited for the moment when all the colors faded into grey to flick the switch that made the streetlights into a progressive dawn. She wondered why the cars seemed to flow upstream like spawning salmon in a red tide. She wondered if she should stay or go home. She wondered if she were hungry. She wondered if they would ever stop, the questions that throbbed inside her, making her feel pried open and raw. And the doors in her head swung wide, and she wondered where Sully was and if he were even still alive. She wondered what happened that day in the oak tree house. She wondered when she would weep for him.
She reached out one finger and lightly smeared the window’s crimson X and wondered why the sky had not yet made its next move. She wondered if this is what children felt at their coloring books, when they were still young enough for trees to be orange and dogs really blue, when the crayons transgressed the black lines, past the limits of the page, onto tables, walls, and floors. And she wondered if, when playing games with the sky, it always moved in blood.
And she knew that she was dead, and Mara laughed.
-Kitty Yanson
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 