Mary And The Giant

"What can I do?" he asked.

"You don't have to do anything."

"I want to do something."

"Well, you could find the coffee."

"Can't I do more than that?"

She pondered, her head against his, one hand resting against her cheek, the other in her lap. He could feel her breath rushing and see the slight motion of her lips. Like a child, she was breathing through her mouth. She was so close to him that, even in the dim light, he could make out the tiny, perfectly formed strands that grew from the nape of her neck and were lost in the general darkness of her hair. Along the edge of her jaw, beneath her left ear, was an almost invisible scar, a thin line of white that disappeared into the faint fuzz of her cheek.

"What was that?" he asked, touching the scar.

"Oh." She smiled up at him, lifting her chin. "When I was eleven I bumped into a glass cupboard door and the glass broke." Her eyes roamed mischievously. "It didn't hurt, but it bled a lot, all down my neck in big red drops. I had a cat who used to sneak into the dish cupboard and go to sleep in the big mixing bowl, the one my mother mixed her cakes in. I was trying to get him out, but he wouldn't come. I was pulling on his paw, and all of a sudden he scratched me. I backed away and broke the glass door."

She was still meditating over her childhood injury when he turned her face upward and kissed her, this time directly on her dry lips. Nowhere on her was there any excess flesh; her bones were close to the surface, just beneath the skin: first came the silk of her clothing and then the immediate hardness of her ribs and shoulder blades and collarbone. Her hair, as it swept close to him, smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. Close to her ears lingered the remnant of some perfume, long since evaporated. She was tired, and there was a presence of tiredness about her, a drooping passivity and silence.

At first he held her lightly because he thought she might want to get away, and it was important that she be able to get away. But, after a time, he realized that she was falling quietly asleep, or, at least, into a kind of unwinding stupor. Her eyes were still open-she was gazing at the cardboard cartons of adding machine tape above his head-but there was no particular focus of consciousness in them. She was aware of him, aware of herself too, but only in a nebulous way. Her mind was turned inward, still revolving around thoughts, and around memories of thoughts, meditating over experiences that had long ago existed.

"I feel safe," she said at last.

"Yes," he agreed. "You are."

"Because of you?"

"I hope so. Because of the store, too. It feeds us."

"But mostly because of you. I didn't always feel this way. Not at all, before. Remember?"

"I frightened you."

"You scared hell out of me. And you were so-stern. You lectured me; you were like-" She searched her memory, brightness dancing in her eyes. "When I was very little ... the picture of God in Sunday school. Only you don't have a long beard."

"I'm not God," he said. He was an ordinary man; he was not God or even like God, in spite of the picture she had seen in Sunday school. An unhappy anger grew inside him. Her odd, warm, totally childish ideal ... and there was really so little he could do to help her. "Disappointed?" he asked.

"I guess not."

"You wouldn't like God. He sends people to hell. God's an old-fashioned reactionary."

She pulled back and wrinkled her nose at him. Again he kissed her. This time she stirred; moving her face away, she smiled and blew a mouthful of warm breath up at him. Then her smile, without warning, vanished. Ducking her head she trembled and sat with her back stiff, hands clenched together, and, moaning, rose up until her bare throat was against his eyes.

Joseph Schilling knew that she was frightened now, that the old image had come back. But he did not stir. Motion would have been a mistake. He kept that fixed in his mind.

"Joseph," she said. "I-" The spoken sound faded into a stammer of confusion; shaking her head, she tugged fretfully upward, as if her body were caught.

"What is it?" he asked, rising with her as she slid from the table and caught at him. Her nails dug into his sleeves; she struggled with herself, swallowing rapidly, eyes shut.

Schilling saw his own hands tearing at the clasps that held her shirt together. How strange, he thought. So that was it. What an eerie sight it was, his large, reddish hands plucking so industriously. The girl, opening her eyes, looked down and saw. Together they watched the hands twitch aside her shirt and spread out across the hollow of her shoulders, until they had pushed her clothes down to her elbows.

"Oh, dear," the girl whispered. Schilling, unable to comprehend, drew back and sat rubbing his hands together.

Mary Anne took a deep breath and began to gather her shirt back around her. A wondering expression appeared on her face; turning to him, she asked: "Did you do that? You did do it, didn't you?"