THEY NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT MARY
The past is often hidden amid the skirts of time, but I do recall that the room was broken. Its ceiling was the only part that remained smooth, uncracked – although mottled with an archipelago of stains in the vicinity of the rose. So you see, they never told me about Mary. She could tempt anything, even fate.
The ledge of the room’s mantelpiece was sundered, part of it thickly crumbled upon the lower hearth area whilst the other part – with jagged edge – was still proud to the chimney breast. I merely described its bald state to Mary, as if to palm it off as customary. She was barely out of her teens, in those days.
“But,” she asked, “is the mantelpiece the only bit of the room that you quaintly call – what did you say? – broken?”
I had not been led to expect anything of Mary other than cold objective logic. Indeed, I cannot recall ever being warned about her at all. Despite her age, her maturity was unimpeachable. I didn’t know she had been listening.
“No, Mary … as you can see,” (and I tentatively circled my arm like a compass pointer) “the floorboards have given way in several places … and the mirror leans at more than 45 degrees from its wall … and the window is twice as big and far more disjointed than it was when originally built - if gaps such as windows *can* be built.”
Mary laughed or, rather, gave a slight snicker.
My shaky pointer made its way *through* the said window. She evidently found my jokes rather crude, although, that day, I felt myself nearly witty enough for her steadily growing maturity.
“There, Mary,” I persisted, “you will see even the washing-line is broken.”
“It’s not. The washing is still hanging on it and the rope is propped up by the wooden pole.”
Her words, to my ears, were rather gawky if words can be gawky. I shrugged off her response with my own: “The washing-line is broken because something is missing from it.”
“Do you mean there is a gap along it?” she piped, taking the wind from my conversational sails.
I gave a brief nod. There was certainly room enough for something small.
Donkey years later, middle-aged Mary reminded me of this broken circuit: yet another pointer to something missing from the aging thread of memory. Apparently, she had never been told about me, either. I briefly nodded again. And she slightly snickered.
