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It’s not even Madge that finally gets to Mary: it’s the restaurant. John has never taken Mary to a restaurant. Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find, and takes them and a half a bottle of sherry. You can see what kind of a woman she is by the fact that it’s not even whiskey. She leaves a note for John. She hopes he’ll discover her and get her to the hospital in time and repent and then they can get married. . . .
In story variation B, from which these lines come, Mary has the least agency and is the most desperate for some kind of happy ending. She is so desperate that she allows John to use, neglect, and cheat on her without ever confronting him about his behavior. Mary’s love for John is predicated on false hope: John will “get used to her,” or he’ll suddenly undergo a metamorphosis from a man who uses her to a man who cherishes her, or he’ll regret seeing how devastated she is when he takes another woman to dinner. By the time Mary stages her suicide attempt, she has already dismissed months of unkind behavior and ignored friends’ realistic assessment of John. Now she traps herself in a fantasy, thinking that John will rescue her from her sorrow. The narrator’s comment about Mary’s use of sherry, a sweet drink that’s easy to swallow, rather than whiskey, a stronger drink with some heat to it, encapsulates her weakness and her unwillingness to stand up to John. Even her solution to her despair puts her in the passive “damsel in distress” role and assigns John the role of hero, finding her and rushing her to help. The narrator says, laconically, “this fails to happen,” and Mary dies.
John has a steady, respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but Mary isn’t impressed by him, she's impressed by James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn’t the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.
In story variation C, from which these lines come, Mary has more agency in her relationship with John than she does in variation B because she is not in love with him and is not dependent on his love for her own self-image. The reverse is true, in fact. John, aging out of his youth and into self-doubt, needs Mary’s affection to shore up his self-image. Yet what he gets is not her love but her pity. Their sexual relationship is not abusive, as in variation B, but it isn’t honest, either, because Mary can’t give John what he really needs. Nor can she get what she wants because James, a man her age, isn’t ready to settle down into a relationship. In her longing for James, Mary surrenders agency and plays a waiting game while James rides off to live his life. Mary’s life is lived “in the meantime” until James finally wants sex with her. Rather than this moment beginning the relationship Mary wants, of course, it ends when John kills them all rather than face losing Mary to a younger man. Even in the story variation in which Mary seems to have a better chance at a “happy ending,” the actions and desires of men overwhelm so that she spends her time waiting, making do, and then, when she seems near her own desire’s fulfillment, dying anyway.
