Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [40]
Mary cried and was sent to sit on the bench in the vestibule to wait. She sniffled as she sat, wondering what Mrs. Sugar was going to do to her. But while she was back there, James Lemon farted loudly, making the rest of the class laugh and scream, and Mrs. Sugar got distracted as she ran around trying to calm everyone down. For the rest of the day, Mary waited for her punishment, but it seemed Mrs. Sugar had forgotten all about the candle and the stolen prayer.
Mary, on the other hand, never forgot. Anytime she lit a candle, she felt guilty. She kept thinking that this feeling would go away, that eventually something bigger and more important would come and take the place of this memory. But it didn’t. For years, anytime that she went to church, she put a dollar in the box to light a candle. “For the one that I stole,” she would whisper, and then she would light it. She lit a candle in Rome her junior year, and another in Ireland. When she moved to New York, she lit one in St. Patrick’s, and that was her last one. She stopped partly because she was rarely in church anymore, but also because she figured that however big the prayer was that had been attached to that candle, she’d more than made up for it by now.
Mary was quitting. That’s all there was to it. She’d always said that as soon as she passed the bar, she was done. No more cigarettes. She’d never been a real smoker anyway. It was just something she did when she studied late at night. And when she drank. But that was all over now, she told herself. She was a lawyer now. A lawyer who didn’t smoke.
Mary was hired at Slater, a big law firm right in the middle of Times Square. Its real name was Slater, McKinsey, Brown, and Baggot, but no one ever got past the Slater. She was hired along with nine other brand-new eager lawyers, and all of them were taken out on a boat cruise, where they were served piña coladas and reminded that they were incredibly lucky, that this was the job of a lifetime, that they better live up to their promise, and that they must pass the bar.
She spent the summer studying for the bar, holed up in her apartment drinking Red Bull and eating bananas, because she’d heard that they were good for concentration. Her friends sometimes dropped in to check on her, and while she knew they were being nice, she wished they would just ignore her until it was over. “It’s not normal how long you can stay in one place,” Isabella told her one night. She’d stopped by and found Mary sitting at her desk, where she admitted she’d been since that morning. “I think you should at least get out of the apartment once a day. Maybe we should go for a walk?”
But Mary refused. She didn’t have time to leave her apartment. She went to the store once a week for supplies, jumped rope for exercise, and treated herself by leaning out her window and smoking out into the darkness. “Just until I finish the bar,” she would sometimes say out loud, and then stub out her cigarette with purpose and force, so that it bent in half, as if to say, See, cigarette, I won’t need you for long.
After she took the test, Mary thought she would feel relief. But all the weeks of studying had taken their toll and all Mary felt was strange. She could feel all the caffeine she’d drunk still throbbing through her system, and her hand seemed unfamiliar now that it was no longer holding a pencil all the time. Sometimes Mary was sure she could still feel the pencil in her hand, the way she imagined people with missing limbs would feel.
It was because of all of this that Mary decided that she would not throw away her half-finished pack of cigarettes right after the bar, as she had originally planned. She would finish this pack she had, and then she would quit when she started at the firm. No sense in making too many changes at once.