Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [42]
Mary had sworn that it wouldn’t happen to her, but she hadn’t known it would be so hard. She always wanted to leave the office and she always wanted to stay. She wanted all of the partners to like her, to praise her. She lived for one of them to say, “Nice job” or “Thanks for the help.” It didn’t come often, but when it did, it felt like getting an A. Or at least a B. And there was nothing that Mary loved more than getting good grades. Maybe that made her pitiful, but she couldn’t help it. And so she stayed, and she sat in her chair for fifteen hours at a time, eating Chinese food, popping dumplings into her mouth, slurping up sesame noodles, and hoping for someone to notice her work. And then she would go home and look at herself in the full-length mirror, studying the bulge that was threatening to explode, wondering how long it would be before she erupted into a truly giant person.
Each time she bought a pack of cigarettes, she said, “Last pack,” as she unwrapped the plastic at the top. She was basically done smoking, she told herself. It was really just a formality until she was an official nonsmoker. And so when Isabella came over to her apartment, sniffed the air, and said, “Were you smoking in here?” Mary said, “No, I quit.”
She knew she’d gone too far. Once she started lying about it, there was no going back. “I don’t care if you smoke,” Isabella said. She gave Mary a strange look. “I was just asking.” But still, Mary denied it. She hid her cigarettes in her bedside table, tucked in the back of the drawer, wrapped in an old bandanna. Each time after she smoked, she wrapped up the pack of cigarettes with the lighter, folding them in the cloth, and carefully placing them back where nobody could find them.
Brian Sullivan was made a junior partner at thirty-three. He was the one all of the first years wanted to be, the one they all talked about. He was handsome in a prep school way and looked like every cute boy that Mary had a crush on in high school. He was the first person to ask Mary to write a memo, and she was flattered. “Really,” she asked. “A memo?” She sounded like a parrot.
He laughed and leaned on her desk. “Look,” he said. “I know it feels impossible now, but it’ll get better. I promise.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and Mary almost turned her head and leaned down to kiss it. It was the first time in a week anyone had touched her, not counting the toothless woman who’d pulled on her leg as she was going down to the subway. Her face got hot, as though she had actually leaned over and placed her lips there. Brian removed his hand before she could think much more, and she was left in her office with her embarrassing thoughts.
Mary had always been scared of her imagination. When she was younger, she used to think, “What if I stood up in the middle of class and told Mrs. Sugar to go to hell?” Then her cheeks would flush at the thought and her heart would start pounding, as if she was really going to stand up and scream. “I’m not going to do it,” she would tell herself. She would try to calm down, but then she would think of it again, how she could have just screamed, how no one would have stopped her, and she would get nervous again. It was the potential of what could happen, the possibility that she could do something so reckless. That’s what scared her.
Brian Sullivan brought all of that back. Every time he came into her office and stood next to her desk, Mary imagined what would happen if she put her hands on his belt buckle and started to take off his pants. Her blood pounded in her ears, and she tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t going to do any such thing. But then she’d pass him in the hall, and she’d think, “What would happen if I just went up to him and said, ‘Let’s have sex right now’?” She tried to tell herself that she was in charge of her actions, that her brain couldn’t take over. And then she thought, “This is what happens to people right before they go insane.”
Brian found Mary on the roof one night,