(But why, why such thoughts? lying sleepless night after night. She had fixed upon college, upon the possibility of failure there; but if that subject—so vaporous, so speculative—ceased to hold her interest, she simply worried about other things. Her increasingly strained relations with Wilma, her odd lack of feeling, or, at any rate, much feeling, for either of her brothers; the fact that her mother might be living, might be actually accessible. . . . On really bad nights she found herself thinking of that November morning so many years ago when she’d been awakened by her mother and taken over to the Kureliks’ and then to town and then to. . . . She drifted off to sleep frequently, thinking of that trip to town, the airless cab of the truck, the baby’s smell, Kurelik’s voice and her mother’s silence and something rattling in the rear of the truck, bottles? milk cans? She drifted off to sleep still safe in the truck, she never got as far as Shaheen Falls and the courthouse square.)

In any case she had Emmett. She loved him and she would probably marry him after a year or two at Port Oriskany. Her cousin Alice was going to be married in a few months and several of her classmates were already married and a number were engaged and . . . and so, why should Marya behave differently? It was a coup to have attracted Emmett Schroeder’s attention, let alone his love; she would be an idiot to throw it away.

But she did want to leave Innisfail, at least for a year. She wanted to see what it was like, living away from home. At college. Where no one knew she was Marya Knauer, and no one could feel pity for her, or jealousy. Where she could begin again, give birth to herself (so Marya’s lyricism soared, at such times) at the age of eighteen.