Chapter VIII. 1953
CHAPTER VIII
Mary traced the very tips of her fingers over Sharon’s skin. She imagined patterns swirling beneath. Patterns only she could root out. Notes only she could play. A series of strings to be plucked, the sound echoing through her before nesting in her heart.
She did so well those initial months after the kiss.
She threw herself into cooking dinners with ingredients that required trips to multiple stores and sharpened knives.
Slabs of meat, all deep red and sinewy, laid out and ready to carve.
Vegetables and gelatin and carved radishes.
Her table expertly set. The china, the crystal, the silver all glimmering and perfect as she served her husband in the Jacques Fath dresses she bought for their plunging necklines, his eyes traveling the length of her body as she bent to offer him more pork roast and mushroom gravy.
The baby tucked away in her crib, full of formula and happy as Robert cupped a hand at the curve behind her knee and slid it up and up, her thigh burning and throat tightening as she forced her body to respond to this touch that wasn’t the one she wanted.
She knew she had loved him. In her way. She had forced her body to give in because it was what was expected of her. But Sharon had usurped everything.
She let him fuck her. It was a word she never used, but that’s what it was.
Fucking. His animal need destroyed again and again with the small movements of her body.
Her hands touching the quilt, her hair, anything if it meant she wouldn’t have to touch the male coarseness that was his back and shoulders.
None of it worked. Sharon was a wound she couldn’t stop touching. Her dreams burst with Sharon’s scent and the burn that was their mouths coming together. The memory of that night was a ghost she couldn’t shed no matter how she tried to bury it beneath the dinners and the sex.
Eventually, she found herself outside Rich’s, the pale pink polish chipped off her middle and index finger as she stared at the watery outline of her reflection in the shop window.
It was possible Sharon wasn’t inside, that it was her day off, and maybe she hadn’t thought of Mary once since that night.
It could be that Sharon discounted her as just another housewife and moved on. A cord so easily broken.
Before she could remember she had told Sharon they could never be, she pushed herself through the revolving doors and toward the women’s department.
There were a handful of other shoppers milling about the hats, and Mary slowed, her heart surging as she scanned the counter.
But there were no golden-haired shopgirls.
Disappointment threatened to topple her, and she turned, blinking away tears she could not allow.
It was idiotic to have come here. What had she intended?
What would she have said? Even if Sharon was there, what Mary was hoping for was still an impossibility.
Something other people would see and want to rip apart.
Either with condemnation or with violence.
She’d taken three steps when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Mary?”
Mary felt herself there, suspended in that moment. Shame and want and fear held her in place and tied her, forever, to this moment. This was a precipice that would certainly rise up to swallow her the moment she turned to face Sharon.
But there had never been any choice for her. This was who she was. No matter how she might try to run from it. How she might try to bury herself in homemaking. In being a wife. In being a mother. And so, she let herself turn and look at Sharon.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be here, and when I didn’t see you…” Mary dropped her hands to her sides, the words she wanted to say a chaos of unspoken need.
“I was just leaving. Quentin had too many of us on the floor, and I have the least seniority, so off I go.” Her face was bright. Open. As if there had never been any difficulty between them. As if hope and possibility might still exist in their world.
She took a step, closing the distance between them so Mary could smell her perfume. Rose. Bergamot. A woody touch of cedar. “I was headed home, but if you’re free…”
Mary could have laughed at the mimicry. How Sharon let her sentence drift toward an implied ending that neither was able to speak. She was not free. Neither of them truly was.
“I’m free,” she said, and it was like taking a final breath before drowning. She knew the danger, knew what there was to lose, but with Sharon standing there, the sun on her hair as she smiled, none of it mattered.
The hours would be stolen, but if she didn’t take them, she would go to her death knowing she lived a lie. It was like Vera told her. This wasn’t sin. This was her. The truth of who she was. Her nature. How could anything about that be bad?
“I make a martini that’ll knock your socks off,” Sharon said, her voice dropping into a shyness Mary hadn’t heard before.
Mary’s cheeks heated. They both knew this wasn’t going to be a simple lunch at a café or a cocktail at a dimly lit restaurant.
“I would love that.”
The walk was quick, both women aware of how limited their time was.
Neither spoke, but Sharon gripped Mary’s hand as they crossed the street.
Lost in the throng, they were invisible, but Mary could not keep herself from trembling.
Anxiety and anticipation both flooding her senses so that by the time they reached Sharon’s building, she was panting.
“There’s no elevator. I’m on the third floor,” Sharon said. In the stairwell, she again took Mary’s hand, but this was not the protective touch Mary had felt on the street. This was soft. The stroke of her thumb across the back of Mary’s hand spoke of something greater.
But as they came out of the stairwell, Sharon dropped her hand. Even though Mary understood, had, in fact, been readying herself to do exactly the same, disappointment flashed through her.
“I’m number three-three-three. They’re called angel numbers when they repeat like that. Feels fortuitous somehow,” Sharon said, and withdrew a set of keys from her purse. “But this is it. Home sweet home.”
She held the door open, and Mary stepped inside, struck by the heady scent of rosemary and some darker, more earthy scent she couldn’t place.
Suddenly, she felt as if she couldn’t move.
As if she were a child in a museum, afraid to touch anything, her body clumsy and stupid and capable only of destruction.
Something furred brushed past her ankles, and she yelped and sprang forward.
“Radish, you naughty thing.” Sharon bent and scooped up a longhaired tabby cat and nuzzled her face in its fur. “Don’t frighten our guest. She might not come back, and I wouldn’t like that at all.”
“I didn’t mean to scream. She startled me, that’s all,” Mary said, reaching to stroke the cat’s head.
“How did you know Radish was a she?”
“I didn’t. It just seemed that she was.”
Sharon dropped a kiss on Radish’s cheek and placed her back on the floor. “There may be some magic in you yet,” she said, winking. “Come in, come in. Make yourself comfortable.”
Sharon made her way to the window and threw open the curtains, afternoon sunlight painting the room in amber, and Mary gasped. Outside of a library, she had never seen so many books.
Several bookcases lined the back wall of the small living room, each one crammed with row after row of hardcovers and paperbacks alike. A small tan leather couch sat facing the window, and to the left, a record player cabinet complete with a towering stack of records.
Another set of bookcases dominated the opposite wall, and several vibrant houseplants sat along the top, their vines trailing over the shelves in a show of good health and obvious care. A pastel watercolor hung on the wall—abstract imitations of flowers blooming over the canvas.
“My sister painted that,” Sharon said from the kitchen, her focus on pouring gin into a shaker. “She could have gone to art school, but she met a boy, and well, you know the rest.”
Mary nodded. She knew all too well. How the expectation and want of marriage could swallow everything that once defined you.
You were told your entire life to want it.
Finding the man. The romance. The storybook wedding.
It was only after, in the quiet of your new domestic life, that the cracks started to show, and the voice you muzzled suddenly learned how to scream.
Mary stepped farther into the living room, her fingers trailing over the book spines as she absorbed the titles.
The collected poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Thoreau. Emerson. Whitman. Camus’ The Stranger.
Richard Wright’s Native Son. Carson McCullers and Betty Smith.
Two books by someone named Gerald Gardner.
At the end of the shelves, tucked into the corner beside the window, a tiny table hid in the shadows.
On it, a spread of butter-colored cloth with a scattering of dried flower petals.
Two heavy silver candlesticks with half-melted yellow candles stood on each side of a chalice placed at the center.
On the right side, a knife, the heavy handle carved with leaves.
A large roseate crystal lay at the bottom.
Mary had the urge to pick it up and feel the weight of it in her palm.
“You found my altar,” Sharon said, and stepped beside her. She handed one of the martinis she held to Mary and took a sip of her own.
With her free hand, Mary traced the rough surface of the crystal. “I’m surprised I haven’t burst into flames.”
Sharon threw her head back and laughed. “Wait until you see my bedroom. That’s where I keep the good stuff.”
Desire coiled in Mary’s stomach. She took a deep swallow of her drink, the olive brine the perfect counter to the gin’s bite. The delicious burn of it drew a path down her throat and bloomed across her chest. Her shoulders relaxed a little.