Like Life Read Free Page A

blazing new paths.” When she was little her mother had said, “Would you jump off a cliff just because everybody else did?”
    “Yes,” Mary had said.
    “
Would
you?” said her mother.
    Mary had tried again. “No,” she said. There were only two answers. Which could it be?
    “Let me take you out to dinner,” said Number One.
    Mary was staring past him out the window. There were women who leaped through such glass. Just got a running start and did it.
    “I have to go to Canada for a while,” she murmured.
    “Canada.” One smiled. “You’ve always been such an adventuress. Did you get your shots?” This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
    She handed him his fliers. He put them in a pile near a rhinoceros paperweight, and he slid his hand down his face like a boy with a squeegee. She stood and kissed his ear, which was a delicate thing, a sea creature with the wind of her kiss trapped inside.
    TO BOY NUMBER TWO she said, “I must take a trip.”
    He held her around the waist, afraid and tight. “Marry me,” he said, “or else.”
    “Else,” she said. She always wanted the thing not proposed. The other thing.
    “Maybe in two years,” she mumbled, trying to step back.They might buy a car, a house at the edge of the Heights. They would grow overweight and rear sullen and lazy children. Two boys.
    And a girl.
    Number One would send her postcards with jokes on the back.
You hog.
    She touched Number Two’s arm. He was sweet to her, in his way, though his hair split into greasy V’s and the strange, occasional panic in him poured worrisomely through the veins of his arms.
    “I need a break,” said Mary. “I’m going to go to Canada.”
    He let go of her and went to the window, his knuckles hard little men on the sill.
    SHE WENT to Ottawa for two weeks. It was British and empty and there were no sidewalk cafés as it was already October and who knew when the canals might freeze. She went to the National Gallery and stood before the Paul Peels and Tom Thompsons, their Mother Goose names, their naked children and fiery leaves. She took a tour of Parliament, which was richly wooden and crimson velvet and just that month scandalized by the personal lives of several of its members. “So to speak”—the guide winked, and the jaws in the group went slack.
    Mary went to a restaurant that had once been a mill, and she smiled at the waiters and stared at the stone walls. At night, alone in her hotel room, she imagined the cool bridal bleach of the sheets healing her, holding her like a shroud, working their white temporarily through her skin and into the thinking blood of her. Every morning at seven someone phoned her from the desk downstairs to wake her up.
    “What is there to do today?” Mary inquired.
    “You want Montreal, miss. This is Ottawa.”
    French. She hadn’t wanted anything French.
    “Breakfast until ten in the Union Jack Room, miss.”
    She sent postcards to Boy Number One and to Boy Number Two. She wrote on them,
I will be home next Tuesday on the two o’clock bus.
She put Number One’s in an envelope and mailed it to his post office box. She took another tour of Parliament, then went to a church and tried to pray for a very long time. “O father who is the father,” she began, “who is the father of us all …” As a child she had liked to pray and had always improvised. She had closed her eyes tight as stitches and in the midst of all the colors, she was sure she saw God swimming toward her with messages and advice, a large fortune cookie in a beard and a robe, flowing, flowing. Now the chant of it made her dizzy. She opened her eyes. The church was hushed and modern, lit like a library, and full of women on their knees, as if they might never get up.
    She slept fitfully on the way home, the bus rumbling beneath her, urging her to dreams and occasionally to wonder, half in and half out of them, whether anyone would be there at the