“I forgot to tell you,” Patrice said. “I like what you did with your hair.”
“My sister cut it for me.”
Patrice took a strand of it in her fingers, narrowing her dark eyes to examine it. “Well, she did a good job. I cut hair for a while, and this isn’t at all bad.”
He knew nothing about her: the jobs she’d had, the places she’d lived, why she was alone. Henry’s body was warm and damp, and his breath had the dry, pasty smell of papier-mâché. O’Neil wondered what the little boy might make of him, this man with them in the hammock. He understood then that Henry’s father was dead, or gone so far away that it was all the same. There was no knowing, or need to know.
“I think I like the house this way,” Patrice said. With one bare toe on the ground she moved the hammock to and fro. “I think I’ll leave it half painted to remember you by.”
“This is just the one time, then,” O’Neil said sadly.
Patrice took his hand in hers.
“For the record,” O’Neil said, “I wish it weren’t.”
Patrice nodded thoughtfully. “You will find her,” she declared.
“Her.”
“Her. Yes.” Her voice was pale; she seemed to have left him behind, in memory. And yet she was smiling at him. “The one you are meant for.”
O’Neil said nothing. There was no reason to think it; and yet it seemed so. A few minutes passed, and Patrice squeezed his hand again. “You will.”
O’Neil rose. “I believe you,” he said. Then he kissed each of them good-bye, and swung on his crutches toward home.
LIGHTNESS
March 1985
S
HE THOUGHT OF IT AS
the lightness;
that was the name she gave it. The first time it happened, Mary was a little girl, alone. This took place in her bedroom in the apartment on Naomi Street in North Minneapolis, in a time before her sister, Cheryl, was born. Mary remembered nothing else about this place, for they lived there less than a year; the building was owned by a relative, and her father managed it, collecting rents and maintaining the apartments and grounds, while going to college at night. This was a difficult period for her parents, a time of small children and no money, and, as Mary later learned, her parents had nearly divorced. Her father would tell her about this on a trip they would take together to San Francisco, the year before Mary herself was married. Though the tale was meant to be cautionary—marriage is a long haul, he told her, like carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs and trying to wedge it through a narrow doorway—Mary also understood that the story was a happy one: her parents had, after all, stayed together, and by the end of that year her mother was pregnant again. She told him then about the hummingbird, her only memory of that year. They were standing together on the fantail of a ferryboat, crossing the choppy bay. A hummingbird, her father said, laughing and shaking his head in the wind. All that arguing, and what you remember is a hummingbird. My God, we thought we’d scarred you for life.
This was how she remembered it: yellow sunlight and the high, purple smell of the lilacs; her own tiny body, and the feel of a hummingbird’s wings beating inside her. Their apartment was on the ground floor; beneath Mary’s bedroom window was a lilac bush. On a summer afternoon, Mary was kneeling on her bed to look out the window when the bird appeared, darting between the blossoms on a blur of wings. Never had she seen such a bird. It seemed not to fly but to float—its long beak and inexplicable aeronautics made her think it might be a kind of insect—and yet whenever it moved, it seemed to disappear, reemerging at some adjacent spot of air as if it had not traveled through space but around it. Pure pleasure filled her, watching this wonderful new thing at her window, when suddenly she wasn’t watching: they were one and the same, Mary and the hummingbird and the lilac bush, and all the dense bright heat of the summer afternoon. She felt herself suspended; she seemed, like the hummingbird, to be both in one place and also everywhere, her consciousness joined to another, far larger than her own. The sensation was new to her—she had no words for it—and yet it did not frighten her; she wanted to close her eyes to make it last. She did, and thought:
Who’s there? Who’s there?
But when she opened her eyes she found no one; even the bird was gone.
The second time she was at a friend’s birthday party; Mary was nine, or ten. Hats, balloons, games that seemed childish but were still fun: The girl whose party it was, Simone, had invited no boys, or else they simply had not come. It was February, a Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, and the house, a rambler in the same subdivision where Mary lived, was a modest variation of her own. The party was held in the basement, a low-ceilinged room with brown paneling and shag carpet the color of moss. Mary’s mother kept a bag of presents in the coat closet for birthday parties, and Mary had selected Spirograph, which now embarrassed her: all the other presents were better, more grown-up. Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker, a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft, a poster of David Cassidy, a neon-purple Hula Hoop—the last a child’s toy but also something older girls did, girls who had hips and waists and could keep the thing spinning for hours. What could she have been thinking with the Spirograph? Still Simone had thanked her, pausing dutifully to open the package and insert the pen into the gears, drawing a single fleur-de-lis before putting it to the side. Spirograph, Simone said, smiling. Cool. I haven’t used this for years.
They sang “Happy Birthday” and ate the pink-frosted cake, and when Simone’s mother had left them in the basement, one of the girls, Simone’s older cousin Rose, showed them how to practice kissing with a pillow. They taped the poster of David Cassidy on the wall, and took turns kissing this as well, tilting their faces as they knew they were supposed to; you had to be careful, Rose instructed, not to go straight in, or you would bump noses. When this was done Rose took one of the empty pop-bottles and placed it, on its side, on the coffee table. The girls all sat around the table while Rose explained the rules and gave the bottle a lazy spin.
Mary watched as the bottle turned on the wood—it seemed to go around forever—and then it came to rest, pointing at Mary like a finger. All the girls laughed, though Mary knew this wasn’t personal: they were simply relieved that the bottle had pointed at someone else.
Mary curled her hair behind her ears. “Sure,” she heard herself say, “I’ll kiss you.”
“Remember what I said about the noses,” Rose warned.
It happened so quickly it was nothing. Mary had never been kissed on the lips before—her parents did not do this—and she leaned across the table, letting her eyes fall closed and trying to think of David Cassidy, and kissed Rose.
So this is kissing,
she thought. A pause fell over the room—Mary felt this silence, as she was also aware of the taste of pink cake-frosting and watermelon Lip Smackers—and when their faces parted Mary realized that with this kiss the game had ended. The bottle was a dare, meant to be accepted only once; because Mary had done this, the others were absolved.
“When you kiss a boy,” Rose said confidently, “you’ll want to use your tongue.”
Mary said nothing; this did not seem true. Use it how? Around them the girls laughed again; they had no idea either.
“You’ll see,” Rose said.
It was later, on the car ride home, that she felt it. Darkness was falling; the snow, in great piles beside the roadway and the houses, had turned a pale and lifeless gray. At her waist Mary was holding the small party favor that each of the girls had gotten, a jewelry-making kit wrapped in cellophane, and her father was smoking, tapping the ashes from his cigarette through a slender crack in his window. How was the party? he wanted to know. Did she have fun with her friends? What was that there, honey, that little thing on her lap? Was it a prize that she had won? The moment was common, and yet everything about it had begun to feel strange to Mary. More than strange: The smell of her father’s cigarette and the close heat of the car, the slipperiness of cold vinyl beneath her jeans, the remembered taste of Rose’s kiss—all of it was both less than real and somehow more, as if she were dissolving into sensation itself, like a lozenge on the tongue. A warm weightlessness flooded her, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and she wondered if she had responded to her father’s questions, though it seemed so; her father was beside her, nodding and puffing away. Mary closed her eyes. In school they had been warned about drugs, and all the girls had read
Go Ask Alice,
both thrilled and frightened by this story of a girl so like them who had sailed away as easily as a balloon cut from its string.
Daddy,
she wanted to say,
Daddy, something is happening,
but these words did not come. A new awareness filled her, a sense that someone was very near, inside her even, a presence without form or substance yet somehow known to her; she felt her lips move to speak its name but as she did, it vanished altogether, and when she opened her eyes she found only the lights of her own house looking back at her, glowing to greet her in the winter twilight. Her house. Simone’s party. The car in the drive. Just like that she was back from wherever she had gone.
“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.