“You have to go home,” Cindy said, looking anxiously out the bay window.
“I thought you wanted me to try the dress on first,” Mary said.
“There isn’t time for that now,” Cindy told her.
THE PROM DRESS WAS PINK AND HAD A PRINCESS neckline and a full skirt composed of overlapping layers of taffeta and tulle. There was what looked like a small cigarette burn near the hem, practically invisible.
“Smoking must have been fun,” Mary said to Eddie.
In keeping with prom night tradition, he had reserved a booth for them at the Captain’s Table. The restaurant was filled with other prom goers and chaperones; it had a nautical theme, its walls covered with paintings of seascapes by local artists, not a one of whom had ever been anywhere near the sea.
While Eddie was busy studying the menu, Mary was studying the hem of her dress, trying to avoid having to look at the painting hanging above their booth. In it a sailboat sat directly atop the water in the light of the moon. The water had a curve to it like the meniscus on a glass of milk but other wise looked rock solid. You could almost feel the painter trying to get the water right and failing—“missing the boat,” Mary said — though maybe all she was feeling was Eddie’s wish for her to stop talking about the painting in such a loud voice.
“I’m going to have the combination plate,” Eddie said. “Only without shad. What about you?”
“I hate shad too,” Mary said. She thought Eddie looked especially good tonight in his black tuxedo and red baseball cap. Not only had he ended up handsomer than everyone expected, he’d also been elected captain of the baseball team. “Order me the same,” she said, holding Mrs. Andersen’s purse aloft suggestively. “You know where to find me.”
The waiter pointed her down a long hallway, unlit aside from a red bulb flickering at the end of it. Mary proceeded cautiously, the only other source of light the glow from around the door to the kitchen.
Her plan was to wait for Eddie in the bathroom the way she did at school, with her skirt hiked up around her waist and her underpants down around her ankles. At school there was barely enough room in the last stall for him to press her against the wall, and when she tilted her head to kiss him she would see the same spider web that had been there since they’d been in seventh grade. Now that they were seniors, usually he was the one who brought the whiskey, but tonight Mary had Mrs. Andersen’s flask.
A trickle of music entered the restaurant bathroom through speakers in the ceiling. The room was nicer than the one at school but not much; there were two stalls with dark wood doors and old-style toilets, a pedestal sink just for show, a photograph of a dog wearing sunglasses and a fur stole to hide the dactilo port. “Hi there,” Mary said to herself in the mirror. She smiled before she remembered that she couldn’t stand the sight of herself smiling. The French twist was a nice touch though, and pink was a good color on her; it made her look young even though she knew she had been endowed with the disposition of an old person long before she actually became one.
Mary went into the stall and pulled down her panties and waited. They were pink like her dress and embroidered with black flowers. Soon enough someone else entered the bathroom. But Eddie would never wear shoes like the ones Mary saw through the opening at the bottom of her stall door, their pointed tips pausing there in front of her for a moment before turning into the stall next to hers. She heard a zipper being unzipped, the protracted sound of a man urinating, like coins falling into a box on a bus.
“That’s better,” said the sorcerer.
The proximity of Mary filled him with excitement; he had to work to slow his breathing. A drop, another drop — he was flicking his penis dry. It grew long and thin, the corona pointed and cleft like a hoof. “Don’t worry,” the sorcerer said. “Your boyfriend’s preoccupied.” He shifted his feet. “Hello in there. Are you listening to me?”
When she didn’t answer he tapped the wall between them once, hard, with the sharp tip of his index fingernail. “You’re right — every idiot thinks he can paint water. It takes genius and even then — well, I don’t have to tell you.”
Mary still didn’t answer. A large black ant was walking along the ledge that held the toilet tissue and she made herself focus on it, the way its abdomen was gleaming like patent leather. She had never felt so naked in her life.
“If you were an ant, you wouldn’t be stuck in there that way,” the sorcerer said, and as he did the ant came to a halt. “Don’t cry,” he said.
“I’m not crying!” Mary replied, though she hadn’t realized she was until he said so.
Meanwhile the sorcerer had what he’d come for; he had taken what he needed to get erect. Now all he had to do was keep the result viable until he could ejaculate it later into a jar. From one receptacle into another — that was the system. He had many such jars that he screwed into lids attached to a ceiling panel in his basement workshop, a system popular among do-it-yourselfers for storing nails of various sizes. But this jar was different; this jar was part of a plan that had come to him in a dream. The sorcerer knew how to sow fear inside human bodies or in their places of habitation, among the folds of their brains or the leaves of their trees; in this way he always got what he wanted. The difference this time was that Mary was his fate. In the dream he saw her face, very close up, including the pores and the small colorless hairs. She was old in the dream and that was the most important part of all, for without the things living and dying on it, what was the world to him except a useless lump of rock?
“How did you know I was crying?” Mary asked, sniffling.
But it was too late; the sorcerer had left the stall.
The dactilo port filled the bathroom with its sudden infusion of brilliant blue-violet light. Mary folded herself over her knees and burst into tears; from her head came the soundless commotion of a port set on vibrate. “MARY! MARY!” said the robots. “MARY! MARY!” It sounded like $@&!!**$$#!!! Mary pulled herself together and returned to the restaurant.
Eddie was sitting exactly as she’d left him, only now there was food on the table in front of him getting cold.
“Why didn’t you start without me?” Mary asked. She felt the way she often did after crying, like there wasn’t as much of her as there’d been before.
When she took her seat she could feel the sorcerer’s body aligned perfectly with her own, back to back, on the other side of the booth, exuding heat through the leather upholstery. If she moved to get away from him he moved too. “Look,” she said. “They gave us the shad anyway.”
The fish was positioned in the exact middle of her plate next to the sac containing its roe. At three o’clock there was a mound of creamed corn, a corn muffin at six; Mary couldn’t recognize the items at nine and twelve. “This isn’t what we ordered,” she said, pushing the food around with her fork. She made a face. “I waited and waited,” she whispered. “It was awful. Did you forget?”
Eddie leaned toward Mary; there was a lewd curl to his lip. “It was her doing,” he mouthed, pointing. “She was acting really weird.”
“How do you mean?”
“Shh,” Eddie said. “I don’t want him to hear. She came over here while you were gone and when the waiter arrived she placed the order but she hadn’t even opened the menu. She told me not to worry and when I said, worry about what, she looked at me like I was kidding. She told me every thing would be OK in the end.”