Read Online MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin - Free Book Online Page A

and on the other, behind a wall of thick Plexiglas, a demonstration area, where a man and a woman are working. Miriam sheds her coat and joins the small group of people who have gathered to watch. At either end of the space are two stone kilns, like bank safes, their interiors glowing with a churning heat; between, laid across long work tables, rest half-a-dozen long metal tubes. The process is a blur of detail. In the tiny work area the man and the woman move with a graceful and liquid surety, like a couple dancing, though they are dressed cumbersomely, for hard labor: heavy aprons and thick safety glasses, rubber gloves that reach to their elbows, denim jeans and shirts despite the heat that Miriam knows must be searing. Somehow they manage to maneuver their long poles in and out of the heat, from table to kiln and back again, never colliding with anything or with each other, but never speaking either. They are young, in their thirties; Miriam imagines—then is certain—that they are married. (No, she decides, not dancing;
cooking
. It is as if she is watching a couple cooking in a kitchen.) The woman wears her dark hair in a long, swinging braid, wonderfully thick, and has a strong, narrow face. Behind her goggles her eyes are calm, and shine with the reflected light of the kilns. In and out of the fire she guides her rods, a half dozen at her command, spinning them with quick intensity as they cool. As Miriam studies her, she holds one to her lips, puffs out her cheeks, and expels a steady exhalation of breath. At the other end of the tube a bubble appears; Miriam finds herself exhaling, too, a breath that she realizes she has been holding in anticipation. The bubble expands to the size of a Ping-Pong ball, then a tennis ball; its surface gleams with the wet translucence of a baby’s fingernails. It seems perfect to Miriam, and yet the woman is not satisfied. Examining it, she frowns, then worries it quickly with a knife before reinserting it into the fire.
    It is then that Miriam notices the small display table in front of the Plexiglas wall, and on it a solitary glass pitcher, no more than four inches tall, with a wide curling lip. The walls of the pitcher are voluptuously thick, like the cream that the pitcher itself is intended to hold. A tented slip of paper beside it bears the price:
$50.00.
Fifty dollars for a cream pitcher. She knows why she has come; she will buy the pitcher, as a present for Kay.
    But in the gift shop the saleswoman tells her that they’re sold out; the last cream pitcher is the one on the table, and not for sale. She offers to take an order for her—she can have the pitcher in just a week or two, the woman explains, certainly in time for the holidays—but Miriam shakes her head, no. The point is to have it now, to feel the pure pleasure of coveting something and receiving it immediately, in one smooth transaction of discovery; waiting even a week or two, she knows, would break the chain. She has resigned herself to leaving the shop empty handed—she has put on her coat and scarf—when something else catches her eye. On a shelf above the sales counter she sees a display of glass musical instruments, the size of Christmas ornaments. A guitar, a saxophone, a tiny, jeweled flute: each is miraculously detailed, made of a brittle, paper-thin glass like the skin of ice on a puddle just frozen. In all her life Miriam has never seen anything like them. She dares herself to peek at one of the dangling tags:
$140.00.
Astounding, she thinks. But it could be a thousand. In her heart she has already bought one. Who is it for? For O’Neil? For Kay? For herself? Miriam finds the one she wants and lifts it gingerly from the shelf. She is surprised, and not surprised, to find that it weighs nearly nothing. The saleswoman stands silently beside her, wearing an expression of pleasurable expectancy that Miriam knows must be a mirror of her own. In her open palm she holds out the glass trombone for the woman