Mary

Mary appears chiefly in the Unnamed protagonist’s account of a Saturday built around the hope of seeing her. She goes to the movies with him and babysits; he asks whether she will be babysitting that night, tells her to look out the window after the household has gone out, and says he will wait in the courtyard below. These arrangements establish a repeated, practical setting for their meetings, but the narrative presents them almost entirely from his perspective. Mary’s own thoughts and motives remain largely outside the account.

Identity and Place in the Protagonist’s Routine

The passages identify Mary through ordinary activities rather than through background or independent biography. After walking with her, the Unnamed protagonist leaves her in front of her house and returns home. When his mother asks how he liked the movies, he answers quickly and vaguely before going to his room. The contrast is telling: the outing itself receives little explanation, while his private anticipation of seeing Mary again becomes the focus. The narrative establishes her importance less through what she says than through the time and attention he organizes around her.

Mary’s role as a babysitter shapes the logistics of those plans. The protagonist waits in his room for dinner and imagines going out afterward to spend time with his friends, then making an excuse so he can leave without telling them where he is going. He hopes to meet Mary once the people she is babysitting for have gone out. The courtyard window and his proposed wait downstairs make their expected meeting specific, but the arrangement is described as his plan; the text does not explain how Mary understands it or what she wants from it.

Saturday Plans and Their Disruptions

For the protagonist, Saturday is part of a recurring cycle of expectation. He describes looking forward to Saturdays from the previous Sunday onward, yet feeling that something is missing or not quite right even when the day goes well. On this particular day, the expected sequence has not yet been spoiled: the movie has happened, and he anticipates dinner, time with his friends, and another meeting with Mary. That apparent success does not settle his discontent. His relief is provisional, shadowed by the possibility that the evening may still go wrong.

Mary’s availability is one source of that uncertainty. The protagonist recalls that sometimes she cannot go to the movies or does not babysit, frustrating the plans he has made around her. On one occasion, she appeared unexpectedly and told him she would not be babysitting; he says this nearly prevented him from slipping away from his friends without revealing where he was going. The account emphasizes the disruption to his plans rather than the reason for hers. It therefore shows both that Mary can alter the routine and that the protagonist interprets her change of plans chiefly as an obstacle to his own arrangements.

Desire and Unequal Characterization

The protagonist’s anticipation of the evening is explicitly sexual, although Mary is not given a corresponding account of her feelings. He mentally rehearses intimate encounters at the house where she babysits, focusing on the possibility of being alone with her and on his own physical gratification. The passage depicts this as part of his private planning, not as a mutual description of their relationship. A neutral account must preserve that imbalance: the narrative records what he wants and remembers, while offering little basis for determining how Mary experiences their encounters.

This limited viewpoint makes the difference between Mary as a person and Mary as an element in his routine especially visible. He values the possibility of seeing her, but his attention repeatedly turns to access, timing, and anticipated pleasure. Even a change in her babysitting plans matters to him chiefly because it threatens his carefully arranged evening. The text does not supply enough information to define their relationship more precisely or to infer Mary’s motives; its emphasis is on the protagonist’s possessive and self-centered mode of imagining her.

The Uncertain Name

A later image makes that thin characterization more pointed. Sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped between his knees, the Unnamed protagonist wonders whether the woman’s name was Mary, then treats the name as unimportant and concludes that she had been better than nothing. The uncertainty complicates the earlier passages: the name attached to a figure around whom he has planned and fantasized is no longer secure in his recollection. Rather than recover her as a distinct person, he reduces her to a substitute for absence.

The closing posture—seated and looking—slows the scene after the earlier forward rush of plans for Saturday. Across these passages, Mary is first anticipated as the center of an evening, then recalled through the protagonist’s desire, and finally approached with uncertainty about even her name. That movement does not establish what happened to her or whether the recollection refers in every respect to the same person. It does show how little of her identity the narrative makes available beyond the role she occupies in his expectations. Her significance lies partly in this contrast: she matters intensely to the protagonist, while remaining largely inaccessible on her own terms.