by Jonathan Dee
She came to know the DJs from that college station in Albany by name. They mumbled, they forgot when their microphones were off, they made private jokes to their friends, because they couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t a friend of theirs would be listening. Their absence of a talent for what they were doing only impressed her further, because it seemed like the purity of the amateur. No news, no commercials, seldom even a mention of what time it was. They loved the music they played, and they hated the music they didn’t play. Molly too conceived a scorn for whatever too many others liked. She thought that this was what college would be like – a place of tacit understanding, a little republic of sensibility.
Though she herself was often silent, silence was less and less a part of her waking life; anytime she found herself alone was by definition an opportunity to hear music, loud, without others to spoil it by rousing her anesthetized self-consciousness. She never once had the ambition to learn to play an instrument or to form a band herself. Music was not something you made but something you listened to; listening well was the act. The nearest she came to this creative boundary was to copy especially pithy song lyrics into her school notebook, during biology class or in the minutes before tests were collected, so that they might seem to her more like original thoughts of her own.
Home is where the heart is
Home is so remote
Home is just emotion
Sticking in my throat
Let’s go to your place
Records weren’t the same. It was a moot issue because any record Molly might consider worth owning was not likely to be found at the Rexall in Ulster or anywhere near it; but even so, a record, which you could hear whenever you wanted, as many times as you wanted, skipping the bad songs and hearing your favorites as many times in a row as you liked, could never produce the same satisfaction because it lacked that element of providence. When a song you loved – a song you felt protective of, because you were hearing things in it that no one else seemed able to hear – came on the radio, it was an event, a small blessing conferred by randomness, a reason to believe in waiting at all, when the rest of your life brought you nothing with any power to surprise, no reason to expect much from the passage of time.
It didn’t cost her anything, this type of modest self-estrangement from whatever was most popular; if others took it the wrong way, she didn’t notice. The word most often applied to her, in discussions among her peers which did not include her, was “intense,” which in the way of teenage vocabulary meant nothing specific but stood for a great deal: a sincere demeanor, a reputation for intelligence, an abstention from any of the self-mockery or regressive foolishness which insulated most kids her age from the things that really bothered them, a quietness which was not exactly shyness but more like patience, a face that did not smile much but did not turn away or look down either, that held your eyes until you forgot that you were the one doing the observing. And she was looked at more and more. All the children in Ulster knew one another too well, and yet as they passed through the onset of adolescence they watched each other more or less reborn, at least in some cases – visually and socially reestablished. Molly emerged as one of the prettier girls, certainly, if not one of the three or four prettiest, but she had a kind of physical charisma that made her seem older than she was, an ease within herself expressed in the slowness with which she moved and spoke – an indolence that was easy to make fun of but that also seemed construable into sensuality. Her languor, her inattention to the stare of others, introduced many of the boys her age in that town to the agonizing interplay between desire and sexual fear. Among themselves they included Molly in all their contemptuous fantasies of conquest, but this was partly an effort to talk away their private images of her, which were less definite; they drifted more toward those girls who they felt might be more naturally dominated.
There were forty-seven students in Molly’s freshman class – the graduating class of 89 – at Ulster High School. Three or four would drop out before graduation, if the past was any guide; they would go to work for their fathers, or join the military, or, once every few years, disappear into some other eventuality which children couldn’t get their parents to discuss. Such a small circle was of course more oppressive than a larger one would have been, for there is no question of finding a place to hide, socially speaking, in a class of forty-seven. Still, like teenagers anywhere, they found themselves quickly stratified by the ruthlessness of fortune; and Molly was welcomed into the circle of the fortunate just by virtue of her looks and the relative wealth of her family, and in spite of the renowned weirdness of her older brother. She made no effort to be attractive, but that didn’t mean she was unmindful of her appearance or embarrassed by it: in fact she was greatly interested in the idea of changing her looks, and the consequences of that. She even flirted with the idea of a tattoo, but Richard refused – on the basis of a simple risk/reward calculation, he told her – to drive her anywhere to get it.
One afternoon at school, by arrangement, Molly cut math class and waited in the girls’ bathroom for her friend Annika to get out of social studies by complaining to her teacher of menstrual cramps. These words tended to produce a kind of magical effect upon adults who worked at the school, particularly the men: Annika claimed her older sister had gotten the school doctor to send her home early complaining of cramps three different times in the space of six weeks. In the girls’ room, undisturbed, in the muddy light from the one opaque, sealed window, Annika helped Molly to dye her auburn hair jet black in the sink. One of the reasons the two girls were becoming so close was that it never took more than thirty seconds to talk Annika into anything. She came home with Molly after school; they walked in the front door just as Kay Howe was emerging from the downstairs bathroom. She stopped in her tracks. They all stood there wordlessly for a few moments, before Kay, to both girls’ amazement, actually burst into tears. She turned and hurried upstairs, and they heard the sound of her bedroom door closing.
“I guess you saw that one coming,” Annika said, trying to recover her customary apathy.
But Molly hadn’t done it to get this reaction, or to rebel in any way; and though she knew that if she had spared a thought for it she could have easily guessed what her mother’s reaction might be, the truth, which she wasn’t proud of, was that she hadn’t considered it at all. Her mother was capable of attaching a crazy significance to Molly’s most prosaic decisions – what to eat, whom to befriend, which shoes to wear with which pants – and her feelings could be hurt by the smallest manifestations of Molly’s autonomy. But like the town itself, Molly’s home, though intimately familiar to her and in some particulars even quite dear, lately seemed to her not so much where she belonged as simply where she found herself. She loved her family but not in the sense that their problems seemed in any way like her problems. A year ago, her father had been promoted to supervisor at IBM, and eight months after that he was ordered to lay off more than a third of the managers who had formerly been his colleagues, some of whom were still his friends. Molly watched her father react to this trial at work by becoming, at home, even more congenial than usual, more gratingly optimistic not only about his own prospects but about hers, everyone’s, as if constant expressions of enthusiasm could call some reason for enthusiasm into being; at the same time she saw the expression of injured dignity on his face at the end of the evening when he was watching TV and thought no one was looking. He did his best not to talk at all about his own guilt and fear, in part because he didn’t want to be reminded that his wife had long ago stopped caring about his problems outside the home. Molly was interested in all this, genuinely sympathetic to him, and yet at the same time it all seemed to take place on a sort of stage. It all managed to seem less like something that was happening now than like something she knew she would want to remember someday.
In the summer after her ninth-grade year, her brother Richard enrolled in an intensive course at the community college in Herkimer in conversational Jap
anese. Roger and Kay gladly paid for it, trying to take in stride the idea that a child of theirs would volunteer to go to school in the summer; but before long they had reason to debate whether Richard’s growing fascination with the East ought to be encouraged or treated as a symptom of some sort. It was the ascetic, ancient, somewhat brutal side of Japanese culture which interested him. He bought a complete set of the works of Mishima and beginner’s tracts on various martial arts. He moved all the furniture out of his room into the attic and brought in a tatami mat. At dinner, if Kay mentioned that he didn’t look well, he might reply gamely that he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. The thing Molly couldn’t figure out was how all this Eastern self-denial squared with the fact that Richard was still smoking prodigious amounts of dope and even dealing it to friends out of the closet in his otherwise purified bedroom. At the tail end of childhood, he was still trying to forge a personality for himself – to find an identity that felt true to him, that might harden him against the world – but it seemed to be made up, at this early stage anyway, of an unstable compound.
A few months later he surprised his father at dinner by asking if he was a member of the local Rotary Club. Roger smiled somewhat condescendingly and said he was not. “Would you consider joining?” Richard asked him. The Rotarians, it came out, ran a worldwide student exchange program; a friend at school whose father was treasurer had mentioned that they were having trouble finding a local teenager willing to take a year off and see another part of the world, which, in turn, was holding up the application to spend a year in Ulster of a high school student from Sapporo, Japan. Roger and Kay argued for a month about whether to send their only son abroad for a year. Neither of them felt sure what was best, really – they just took turns being goaded into different positions by each other’s unreasonableness. By the time they went to Mr Darwin, the Rotary Club treasurer, to ask formally if Roger could join their organization, the spots in Japan were all filled (though the boy from Sapporo, whose name was Tsuney, still planned to come to Ulster). The only place left open was with a family in West Germany, in the countryside near Bonn. Right there in the office, without waiting to be asked, Richard surprised them all by saying he would take it. He left Labor Day weekend from the Albany airport, where Tsuney, who was to live with the Darwins, arrived three days later. All year long Molly would pass him in the hallways at the high school, looking polite, genially confused, and above all cold. She admired his mask of good cheer in the face of all this strangeness, but she also couldn’t help feeling like he was in some way the ghost of her displaced brother, and for that reason she found it too hard to talk to him.
Patty, their old babysitter, was married now but still lived in town. Molly ran into her once a month or so, usually at the IGA. She was old enough herself now to recognize that Patty was usually stoned. She would lean over her cart full of soda and frozen food, until her small breasts were mashed against the handle and her hair fell around her face – as if Molly were still four feet tall. “Hey, gorgeous,” she would say lazily. “Are you staying out of trouble?”
It stayed in Molly’s mind because she herself was babysitting now, on Friday or Saturday nights, sometimes for families she knew well, sometimes for other families to whom she had been referred, people who had up to then been strangers to her because they had no children nearer her age. She was good with kids, but what interested her more was the sudden access to the insides of other people’s homes. A sinkful of dishes, a profusion of flowers, an unmade bed seemed to her so deeply revealing (especially within Bull’s Head, where the housefronts were all nearly identical), so intimate; and the little quarrels, the odd customs, the pasts hinted at within her hearing were so compellingly unlike her own home that it was hard for her to be discreet about it. She sometimes had a strong impulse to steal things she found – nothing of any real value, just small personal items, especially photographs – but she was afraid to follow through on it.
She helped out a few families but soon became the regular sitter for a family called the Vincents, who lived in one of the converted farmhouses on the other, older side of Ulster, five miles from Bull’s Head. Mr Vincent was the president of the bank; Mrs Vincent also worked full-time, in one of the town’s three real estate offices. They had two children, Kevin and Bethany, he in the third grade and she in the first. Once or twice a week after school Molly got off at the bus stop nearest the Vincents’ house, knocked on their door, and waited to be let in by Mrs Vincent, who then drove back to her office for a few hours. Molly stayed with the kids, usually just doing her homework while they sat in front of the TV, until both parents had returned from work, and Mr Vincent could drive her home.
The Vincents were in their thirties, though she looked older than he did. Molly’s own parents often tried to leave each other alone but just couldn’t seem to do it; whereas in the Vincents’ house, everything seemed, for better or worse, to have been worked out a long time ago, and the daily life of the house ran as if in accordance with some amicable contractual arrangement. Molly was sometimes invited at the last minute to stay for dinner. The little girl, Bethany, had a cute round face and you could already see how someday, with luck not until full adulthood, she was going to grow right into her mother’s stout physique. Though Molly was not the type to invent new activities or otherwise take it upon herself to stimulate the children, her compliant good will toward them was so reliable – she would get up to do them any favor they asked, play any game they brought to her – that they came to accept her unguardedly as a part of the home, though Kevin’s face, she noticed, did darken just a bit on those afternoons when he watched his mother in the front hall putting on her coat again as Molly took hers off.
Mr Vincent was a trim, youthful-looking man with fair skin and small, sharp features; he was neighborly enough but the most extroverted thing about him, whether he was aware of it or not, was his surprisingly expressive taste in clothing, at least for work: double vents, broad Jermyn Street stripes, neckties much more modishly colorful than one might expect from a small-town bank president. His voice was softer than his wife’s and he was obviously the pushover of the two parents where the children were concerned. The house he had grown up in was just four miles away; his parents had moved to Florida in 1981 but couldn’t bring themselves to sell the place, so he still forwarded them the monthly rent checks from their IBM-employed tenants, and he paid the local plumber when the tenants called up and complained in their unfriendly New York City way that the pilot on the hot water heater was out again. He still kept the longish sideburns he had had in high school, not out of fashion or nostalgia but because to change his own appearance in the mirror in any way would have struck him as a worrisome vanity in a man like himself, a sign of creeping pathos in a husband and father approaching middle age. He thought more about such questions than was useful or even healthy, for the truth was he felt like a much younger man than his years but he was too young yet for this feeling to be a source of pleasure or pride to him; on the contrary, it was more like a source of shame, even if no one else knew anything about it. Eight years after the birth of his son he still thought of himself much more readily as a child than as a father, and he was worried that the death of his own parents, whenever it came, was going to find him unprepared. Every night he stood at the far edge of his lawn, just beyond the reach of the house’s light across the grass, and smoked a cigar. He pretended this was because his wife had prohibited cigars in the house, when the truth was she disliked them but didn’t really care if he smoked them as long as the children were upstairs. He asked Molly to please call him Dennis. Molly knew what Mrs Vincent’s first name was too, but she was never invited to use it.
It would be six or eight months yet before anyone in Molly’s class was old enough for a driver’s license; and since the owners of the few stores within walking distance of the high school were experts in a kind of saccharine harassment of loitering teenagers, most often they would all just take turns going to one anothe
r’s homes, preferably a home where the mother held a job so that they could have the place completely to themselves for a few hours. It was a tough experience for the girl whose house it was, for she knew the gimlet eye with which her friends regarded the fripperies of adults, whether they happened to be your parents or not. The girls lounged or paced around the strange living rooms, absentmindedly opening cabinets and drawers, trying the father’s brand of cigarettes, talking ironically about the world as they found it, defining themselves through the instrument of their contempt.
Annika liked this way of marking time more than Molly did, maybe only because she had more to fear from going straight home. When she could she prevailed on Molly to hang out with them. They were sophomores by then, and they understood that they were living in the clumsy intensity of the male gaze.
“I had lab yesterday,” a girl named Tia said, flipping through a stack of mail addressed to her friend Lucy’s parents, “and Mr Hinkson comes over to show me how to work the titration tube. Like it’s that complicated. And he puts his hand on my arm and he leaves it there for like nine hours.”
“He wants you to work his titration tube,” Lucy said.
“You are so fucking disgusting,” Tia said. Even in disgust, her boredom was imperial. She ran a hand through her hair, which Molly thought of as perfect – long and shaggy and almost two-toned.
Molly spoke up. “Imagine being Mrs Hinkson,” she said. She had a soft voice, the kind you had to lean closer to hear, which some people found annoying or assumed had to be some kind of careful affectation. They turned to look at her. “I mean have you ever noticed how much he sweats? In the middle of winter? Just imagine what he—”
