by Jonathan Dee
“You imagine it,” Tia said. “You are both so disgusting I can’t even deal.” She tossed the stack of mail down, not where she had found it. “Does anybody have a Chap Stick or something?”
None of it was real. Or rather, something was hardening around whatever was real, taking the place of it, strangling it. It would be very hard to call what had happened to her peers since grade school unnatural, for Molly felt sure that neither Tia nor Annika nor any of them had even the remotest worry that the way they acted now in all their waking hours was in any way at odds with something within them that was more true, more personal. What was personal in them simply seemed to have given way. The social was what was real. And while any group – whether you were speaking of the whole of the town or the whole of the school or merely the five or six ascendant girls who made up the set which sometimes incorporated Molly – had its hierarchies and its leaders, the organizing principle of life as a teenager was that all your beliefs, your tastes and standards, were now a communal matter. You had to agree on which were the cute boys, you had to agree on how to act around the cute boys, you had to agree on what constituted an acceptable item of apparel, what the good movies were, what the simple transgressions were, like smoking or shoplifting cheap cosmetics from the Rexall. Conformity was not a limitation but a stage of development.
But Molly did feel that, just by virtue of being aware of it, she was protecting something private, though she couldn’t have said what that something was – perhaps just protecting that space where something private might theoretically exist. Something that was more authentic than the sarcasm of the fortunate teenager, something less accessible, less easily defined.
Their culture was no longer local, as a child’s culture was; its reference points were celebrities and brand names: Dynasty, Levi’s, Elvis Costello, Paulina, Richard Gere, Nicole Miller, Duran Duran. Yet alongside this worldliness was a premonition that they were living in a place so remote that they might never be found. The high school building from the 1950s with its flagpole scratched by thousands of keys; the half-light of the closed stores at night; the farms which looked abandoned but were not; the evenings spent in front of the television or on the phone or looking out the bedroom window at the one or two visible lights; the damp, deadly quiet in the moldering woods across the road as you waited at the end of your driveway for the bus. Withering judgment of all these things, even if expressed only to yourself, was one way to make certain you were still alive.
Mr and Mrs Vincent didn’t go out much on their own initiative, not even to the movies, but between their two careers and their positions as Rotarians they were kept busy with functions they felt it was prudent to attend: whenever they called the Howes and asked for Molly, it seemed to her, it was because there was somewhere they had to be, never somewhere they wanted to be. What with their evening calendar and the fact that they both felt better about working late knowing Molly was with the children, they began asking for her services two or three times a week. Though Kay constantly objected – she couldn’t stop herself from taking as personal attacks things which really had nothing to do with her – Molly didn’t mind it at all; she could do her homework as easily in one place as in the other, and there was something liberating, something anonymous, about feeling so at home in a place that wasn’t your home at all, where the stakes for you were just about nonexistent. Sometimes he would be the first one home from work, sometimes she would be: in either case Molly had to wait for both parents to return so that Mrs Vincent could be present with the kids while Dennis drove her home.
One spring Saturday they went to a nephew’s wedding all the way up in Loudonville and didn’t return home until past midnight. While his wife slipped her heels off and tiptoed into the children’s bedrooms, Dennis went straight to the living room and found Molly sound asleep on the couch. He stood in the doorway, just on the edge of the rug. She lay on her side, with a textbook open on the floor near her head. In the last moments before sleep she had pushed off her sneakers, and they rested, the heels still flattened, against the arm of the couch by her feet. It was April, and the evenings were still cool. She had on a pair of thick wool socks that might have belonged to her father or brother, green fatigue pants – she always wore pants – and a gray V-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed up. Everything was too big for her, twisted in her sleep – it was almost as if she were trying to hide; but she could not be hidden. One of her knees was drawn up near her stomach. Molly had a delicate face, round without being full, small-lipped, and her eyelashes were so long, so much darker than the auburn hair which was cast around her in her sleep as if she were floating on water, that you might even take them for false if you didn’t know that she never wore makeup of any sort. Of course he had noticed all of these things before. Her left arm was folded against her chest, and her right was straight out beneath her head, fingers bent: the impossibly taut, impossibly reposed long arm of a teenage girl.
He heard his wife coming into the room behind him. “Molly, we’re home,” he said.
Molly’s eyelids fluttered, and then she started upright, embarrassed to have been discovered asleep. Dennis too felt embarrassed all of a sudden, thinking she must have known she was being stared at; but really she was only worried they would be angry at her for sleeping on the job when one of the children might have been whimpering quietly in bed or calling to her. He smiled and held out his hand to try to settle her. She rubbed her face slowly with both hands.
Dennis looked from the girl to his wife and back again; Molly could see that he wanted to ask his wife something but couldn’t work out how to do it discreetly. Finally he went ahead and said, “You know, Molly, it’s so late, you were sound asleep, if you want it’s perfectly okay to stay over here and I can drive you back in the morning. Right, Joyce?”
Joyce Vincent nodded immediately, briskly almost, as if to say that the iron reputation of her hospitality was not open to dispute.
Molly saw her sneakers still lying on the couch cushion and quickly swept them on to the floor. Dennis didn’t come any closer; he stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, on his face an expression of care that wasn’t at all exaggerated, just outsized for the situation. It was a face her father sometimes made.
“No, thank you,” she said hoarsely. “My parents would freak if I wasn’t there in the morning, and I wouldn’t want to call them now and wake everyone up. If it’s okay, Mr Vincent, maybe you could just drive me home, if you’re not too tired yourself.”
“Dennis,” he said.
He watched protectively to see if she would fall asleep again in the car, but she did not. The moonlight seeped through heavy clouds as they drove through the center of Ulster, past the closed gas station, the closed supermarket; the rooftops glinted in the valley. Richard was still up, watching an old movie on TV with the lights out. Just from the way he rolled his head on the back of the chair to see her, Molly could tell that he was stoned.
Nowhere was the chasm of understanding between parents and children greater than when it came to the subject of drugs. Roger and Kay had no idea that their son had ever tried marijuana, much less that he smoked it habitually. He sometimes wore sunglasses inside the house, and all they did was roll their eyes at each other as if it were some amusing teenage affectation. You had to wonder how they could look so hard and see so little. The word drugs didn’t even mean anything very specific to them; it was more like a way of not looking at other, less material sorts of damage that might be done within the controllable climate of home. And yet if they had ever figured it out, they would have overreacted, screaming at him, grounding him, cutting him off from his friends, wringing their hands about college. His grades were fine – he had it all under control in that sense.
Richard had only received half-credit for the time spent studying in West Germany, though, so he and Molly were still in the same high school. At some point during his months in Europe, it seemed, his samurai phase had passed without fanfare, and on the day he ret
urned home he brought all the furniture and wall hangings from the attic back into his room, without a word to anyone about it. His old friends, many of whom had graduated by now, came over in the afternoons and joined him in his room. Molly knew some of these friends were checking her out, though others, more single-minded about getting high, just smiled absently at her on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen. One or two would urge her, with a great pretense of subtlety, to come smoke with them. Molly could well imagine how these boys talked about her behind the closed door of Richard’s room, beneath the boombox accompaniment of Eat a Peach or Europe 72, but she knew Richard was the type who would just change the subject rather than get offended. He had some friends who, as long as they had to put minimal effort into it, would like to fuck his sister: it would never happen anyway, so why waste energy getting all macho about it? Was his sister supposed to be different somehow from every other good-looking girl in the school, or in the world?
There were periods, though, when the Howes’ place was unavailable after school, because Kay had stopped working again and was back to roaming through the rooms of the house with a sweater on, insisting that the place wasn’t properly insulated. She went through stints as a bookkeeper at the clothing store, assistant to the principal at the elementary school, secretary to the town’s one lawyer, who worked out of his house and handled mostly wills and real estate sales – Kay had no professional secretarial skills, but neither did anyone else in town. She took tennis lessons, and joined some of the other IBM wives in establishing a charity for the children of some of the poorer families in the county. Roger praised this sort of activity so indiscriminately that even his children could see the element of condescension in it. Occasionally, when she seemed most depressed, he would raise the possibility of Kay’s going back to school part-time for a graduate degree, in some indeterminate discipline. But she could have done this years earlier if she wanted, certainly since the time Molly entered junior high. She felt it was too late, though she wouldn’t explain what she meant by that. She was not yet forty-five. She wanted to believe that there was something in her life besides fear and maybe vanity that made her regret the passing of the days, and for long spells she did believe it: but always some small frustration or thoughtless remark would tear down the curtain that separated her from this vista of pointlessness and waste, and when that happened, she would quit what she was doing, quit doing anything really, preferring to martyr herself to the decision that first brought her here.
Dennis Vincent came home one Thursday at quarter past four, to find Molly doing homework in the dining room while Kevin and Bethany played Trouble on the floor beneath the table, next to her feet. Molly looked at him quizzically, wondering if anything was wrong, if she had gotten the dates mixed up somehow. “Easy day at work,” he said simply. “I thought I could knock off a little early.” He went to the kitchen, got himself a beer, and sat wearily at the table, at the end perpendicular to Molly. His thin yellow tie was loosened, and when he crossed his legs there was a small pale strip of skin between his pant leg and his red argyle sock. She waited to see if he would say anything more – or if he would suggest putting the kids in the car and taking Molly home now, since his wife wouldn’t be back for another two or three hours – but he just seemed to be unwinding, glad to be there at his ease, staring into space and drinking, far too at home to give a thought to being sociable. Molly picked up her highlighter and went back to reading her history textbook, Our Living Heritage. She could feel his eyes stray on to her when her head was over the book. He didn’t say another word. It was a domestic little scene, even, it seemed, to the children, who went on with their game, popping the little bubble where the die was contained, counting out loud, sociably taunting each other, comfortably fenced in by the adult feet and the table legs.
Whenever Molly’s friends got together the subject might stray in a few worldly directions but it always came around to boys. Since their opinion of the boys they actually knew was so quickly recapitulated (and when opinions did change, they changed at a glacial pace), the girls tended to discuss good-looking celebrities, especially musicians – their best qualities, their sexual virtuosity, the downsides of relationships with them – with just as much of a sense of reality as they picked over the faults of the boys with whom they had gone to school since age five. In a larger, suburban school, it would have been possible to move from set to set, it would have been possible for a girl to start dating someone about whom her friends could tell her virtually nothing. But at Ulster High there was nowhere to disappear to after a bad breakup; and the boys were simply recycled from girl to girl because there was no other way to do it. If you started dating a guy your friend had dated briefly six months ago, you knew all his bad points, you knew everything intimate about him, and he knew that you knew it; you had no choice but to take a chance that your friend might be lying to cover her own shortcomings or that maybe the boy had somehow rehabilitated himself.
One of the few, though, about whom no one could offer much in the way of personal detail was a tenth-grade boy named Ty Crawford. He was in Molly’s math and English classes; everyone knew who he was. When Ty was six his older brother had accidentally set their bunk beds on fire with his mother’s Bic lighter. A neighbor saw the flames through the window and called the fire department. The burns had left scars all across Ty’s upper body, which his clothing, if his sleeves were rolled down (as they always were), nearly covered up; some of the grafted skin, though, was noticeable advancing up his neck just above the collar of his shirt. In spite of this anomaly he was unguarded in his friendships, and no one had a bad word to say about him. His classmates were certainly past the age where anyone would dare to tease him about his physical difference, or refer to it at all; but given the renewed primacy of the physical in their lives, it was still hard to pretend to forget it.
“No one’s gone out with him?” Molly asked. Today everyone was at her house; her brother was alone in his room with music on.
“No, as it happens,” Tia said defensively.
“I mean, it’s so sad,” Lucy said. “It’s sad and everything, because it’s not his fault, but wouldn’t you – I mean wouldn’t it just, when the time came, make you—”
“Why?” Annika said. “What, do you like him or something?”
The true answer about Ty, who had a nice, fine-boned face and wore flannel shirts and tan work boots every day, was “I don’t know”; the most attractive thing about him, after all, was that element of the concealed, and she was mindful of the possibility that he might turn out not to be that interesting after all, except to the extent that such an obvious form of damage made anyone interesting. But Molly knew well enough that whatever she said here – despite her friends’ demeanor, which suggested that it was an act of great forbearance for them even to stay on the subject – might, if it was unusual enough, get back to Ty within a day. She liked the suddenly available role of the aggressor, even if it was an abstract sort of aggression; already she had had enough of guys putting their hands on the wall beside her head at parties, which was how these things usually started. And she wasn’t unaware of the looks Tia and Lucy and even Annika were exchanging, which suggested that Molly might have stumbled on a way to shock them, a way of demonstrating that she wasn’t really one of them.
“I never really thought about it before,” Molly said. “It’s … intriguing.”
She was fluent in the language of the group she was in. Similarly, there was a language of home, a kind of anti-language in which the sentiments expressed were not true ones, and the facts were really encoded sentiments.
On the weekends, for instance: everyone’s goal was either to get out of the house or, what was sometimes better, to wait for the others to get out and then have the house to yourself for a while. Play music through the speakers rather than the headphones, use the kitchen phone and not be overheard, just breathe easier for a while, open up the windows and let the air of sensitivity and cross-purposes bl
ow out of the place.
“I thought I might go over to the courts,” Roger would say, as if it had just occurred to him. Tennis courts and a nine-hole golf course had sprung up in an old cow pasture shortly after the IBM branch office came to town twenty years ago; the place billed itself as the Ulster Hills Country Club but Roger for some reason was prudish about referring to it by its name, whether out of some sort of high-class modesty or simple embarrassment at such pretension, Molly was never sure. “Want to come, Molly? There’ll be other kids there.”
“No thanks, Dad,” Molly would say, as if this conversation were improvisatory. “I have a test.”
“Richard?”
“Gee, I’d love to, Dad” – edging perilously close to sarcasm, but never all the way there – “but I should work on my college essay some more.”
“And Kay, you have things to do today too, probably.”
“Things to do,” Kay said.
“Which car do you need? Do you need the Ford?”
“Either one. Take the Ford if you want it.”
“Well, looks like I’m on my own, doesn’t it?” Roger said, laughing.
Or at the dinner table – on a weekday, when they had to see much less of each other as it was: heavy silence, then Roger would say with a strained sort of joviality, “‘How was work today, Dad?’ Well, thanks for asking, gang. The quarterly report comes out in two weeks, and if it’s as bad as it’s supposed to be, the rumor is they’re going to start shutting down some of the Northeast offices entirely.”
“Can I be excused?” Richard would say. “I have a test.”
“Well, now, not so fast. Didn’t you have a meeting with your college adviser today? See, you think Dad’s not paying attention, but he is.”
“Would anyone like anything more?” Kay said, departing for the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
