by Jonathan Dee
“So,” Kay said unexpectedly, “there’s nobody you’re dating, no regular boyfriend?” It was a Thursday night, and Molly, who had come straight home from school that day, was emptying the dishwasher.
“No,” she said. “Nobody regular.”
Kay had stopped dyeing her hair recently; Molly thought it looked much better now, both more natural and more severe, but she never brought it up because the effects of time and age, even good ones, were understood to be an unpleasant subject. “Well, I have to say I can understand it,” her mother said in a confiding, playful voice, “sorry as I might feel for you. A beautiful, smart girl like you, with so much on the ball, the boys around here must seem like real losers. I mean, not seem – they are losers. I see them too, you know. I notice things. Let’s face it, they’re hayseeds. I haven’t met one who’s good enough for you.”
Some girls Molly knew spoke of being horrified by their mothers’ attempts to gain their confidence by intimating that they were girls once themselves; Molly, though, found the idea of her mother’s youth engrossing. “I mean, you’ve grown up here, too,” Kay went on, “same as them, but let’s face it, you’re different. And that has to come from me. You don’t belong here, any more than I do.” She smiled. “One more year and you’ll be out of here, in the wide world somewhere. You’re smart to save yourself.”
“I was talking to Mike Cavanaugh at work yesterday,” Roger said. They were at breakfast together, more or less by chance, he in a gray suit and tie, his daughter in jeans and one of his own old tennis shirts with a bleach stain on it, a shirt he could have sworn he’d thrown out. “His son is a year behind you. And he said, Roger, I have to tell you, my son Stephen is just gone on your daughter. Talks about her all the time. Thinks she’s a goddess on earth. I doubt she even knows who he is.”
“I don’t, actually,” Molly said.
Roger laughed at this as if it were a joke. “See? And Bev whatshername, you know, who runs the market? She was telling me last time I was in there, your daughter Molly has grown up to be such a fine young woman. So mature, so polite. Never mouthing off like those others her age.”
He reached out as if he was going to touch her shoulder but then pulled his hand back. He hardly ever touched her now.
“That’s what I’m proudest of,” he said. “Not that you’re so pretty, because that’s just your mother’s genes really, I can’t take any credit there. Or even that your grades are good, though I am very proud of that. But you know how to conduct yourself. The Vincents, I’m worried they’re going to steal you away from us, they adore you so much. Every time I see them they tell me how great you are. No one has a bad word to say about you. That’s what I’m proudest of.”
What unnerved her about these hagiographic speeches was not the mention of the Vincents but their strangely valedictory, summing-up quality, as if her father were preparing to die.
They hadn’t been caught, but still, something so elaborate and time-consuming as a trip to Oneonta couldn’t be attempted very often – eight or ten times in all. Sometimes a week went by when the only place they could safely be alone together was in Dennis’s car itself. Molly still kept to the same babysitting schedule at the Vincents’, so there were two or three nights a week when Dennis would take her home through the empty streets, driving too fast, pulling in behind the supermarket or down the dirt road where the train tracks had been torn up fifteen years before, turning off his lights. Undoing his safety belt but staying in his seat. His passivity, his desire for her to make the first move, was less a sexual instinct than a moral one: it let him feel that he was being acted upon. Molly leaned across to blow him if she felt for some reason they were in a hurry. There wasn’t a lot you could do in a car but once in a while she liked it with her back to him, her hands on the steering wheel, listening for his gasps, looking through the windshield into the darkness and the noisy woods. For a few minutes everything was wrenched out of its usual context.
When she was alone in the Vincents’ house with Kevin and Bethany, Molly could put it all out of her mind with a surprising ease, though sometimes the sight of a framed photograph or a glance into the darkened master bedroom would remind her of the position she was in. The Vincent children, partnered by shyness, happiest in their own home, reminded Molly more and more of herself and her brother; and they were just reaching the age at which Molly and Richard had begun to grow apart. Kevin was big for his age, and the other kids had made sport of his oversensitivity, teasing, enraging, and then running from him in well-founded fear. Molly stroked his head and told him that what other people thought or said didn’t matter, but to him this was just one more adult maxim, the logic of which fell apart when you walked out your own front door.
With one or both parents at home, though, the atmosphere became a little more dense. Dennis was usually the first one home now. In part this was because the thought of Molly and his wife talking together outside the range of his hearing was torture to him: but it also had to do with Joyce Vincent’s job. Half the people in Ulster and the neighboring towns were trying to sell their homes, and to sell them right away; for those in the real estate business it was like watching the stock market crash. No one wanted to move to the area now. The only potential buyers were longtime residents who were interested in trading up to a nicer, newer place, and those people would wait for prices to hit rock bottom – for foreclosure, ideally. Joyce was out of the house evenings, weekends, driving walkins thirty miles to look at places just so they could wrinkle their noses and say it felt too remote. Some of the people who were looking to her to save them from default were friends of hers, parents of her children’s classmates, couples whose mortgages Dennis had approved. She had never worked harder in her life. It didn’t do much good. Bull’s Head, for instance, was now thirty percent empty.
The worse things got – and the guiltier she felt for working so much – the more Joyce needed to flank herself with the two children when she came home. She’d sit on the floor without even taking her coat off and join in a game of Chinese checkers; or she’d try to pull both kids on to her lap and get them to recount their day to her in exhausting detail. Kevin, who was ten, was beginning to shy away from his mother’s affections a bit. Bethany, on the other hand, was drawing ever closer to her, even as they began to look more and more alike; the girl doted on these evenings in the circle of her mother’s protective, guilt-driven attention, a mother who always seemed to be trying to make something up to her. Molly, meanwhile, would look at the waxy mask of normalcy on her lover’s face. If his wife and children were in another room, she might fix him with a long look, or even touch his hand or his stomach. He hated it – he had not the least affection for risk. She didn’t torment Dennis for fun, but she did find his torment interesting. Though she sometimes mused that a man who, in Dennis’s situation, felt no remorse at all, who deceived and charmed and led two intersecting lives with perfect equanimity, might be interesting in his own way.
When, for example, the family that was renting Dennis’s childhood home broke their lease and left town after the father was laid off by IBM, Molly thought the hardship of finding a place to meet was finally over for the two of them; after all, the heat and electricity were still on, and the house was furnished, nearby, empty, and not for sale. Dennis said that it was simply out of the question. He said he felt it would be tempting fate, and when she was impatient with that answer, he said that the idea of cheating on his wife with his babysitter in his parents’ bed was such a psychic minefield that he doubted he would be able to perform at all. Molly thought that this was a little sentimental of him; she pointed out that the logistical difficulties of seeing him – walking through the woods, waiting behind trees, being dropped off by the side of the road – were very hard on her, hard enough that they might well outweigh some neurosis that he didn’t even have yet but was only worried about developing. In the end, he was too afraid of her displeasure. When he finally consented, on the condition that they use only the
guest bedroom, Molly felt simply that common sense had triumphed; though his distress – and her power to make him do something so rich in significance for him, so discomfiting – was not lost on her.
In the new, narrow bed, his obsession with variety continued; often he would want to change positions three or four times in the course of one encounter. At first Molly had thought this was a courtesy to her, an assumption that she would want to try new things (which she did) that she’d never had the opportunity to try before. But it went on like that, like he was trying to pose her for a deck of dirty playing cards or something; and it dawned on her that he was searching for a particular reaction from her. Not just trying to make her come – she did come, sometimes – but to find something that would make her lose control of herself, make her feel she needed him. He was a submissive man more by nature than by desire, because he still dreamed, apparently, of dominating her, of seeing her beholden to him, a dream that he couldn’t make come true.
Of course it wasn’t as cathartic now as it had been the first time – or the first time with Ty Crawford, when she couldn’t imagine such a thing as a sexual routine and thought it would be that self-consuming, that final, every time. But a long sexual relationship introduced its own dynamics, the unromantic awakening of the senses, the grind of repetition, the powerful reduction of everything that attempted to make sex stand for something greater than itself. Passion as a kind of drug, in the sense that it granted you an absence from yourself. Besides, even to the extent that it did become boring, what was there in Molly’s life to take its place? Sometimes she became depressed, but the remarkable thing, she found, was that the sex itself could also be used as an instrument of her depression, a way in which to negate herself, to lose faith in everything.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked Dennis once, in the first few minutes on the bed when there was still room for talking, “like just a body?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just, like a body. Like all your thoughts or your feelings, everything you normally think of as being part of you, has just, I don’t know, flaked off; but your senses are still there, and the truth is you’re just this body that needs to be fed or that’s food for somebody else.”
He lifted his head. “Is that how I make you feel?”
“No. That’s not what I meant. Never mind, it was stupid.”
She wanted to say to him sometimes: You’re screwing your seventeen-year-old babysitter; you’d be the envy of every male friend of yours, if they knew. Is this the real meaning of fantasies, that if they ever came true you couldn’t enjoy them? But he wasn’t the type to be able to enjoy it thoroughly – he worried too much. He even worried that if he ever took her too much for granted she might turn on him, expose him even if it meant shaming herself – everyone would think it was his fault anyway. But that was a fear based on nothing. Once Molly had waited for him by Route 2 for an hour and he never showed: she had had to walk three miles home. The next day at the Vincents’ he came home early, in a panic to get her aside and apologize almost tearfully, imagining her furious and vengeful. But she knew what sort of thing must have gone wrong the day before. She would never let him get to her like that.
It was fall, then winter, of her senior year. College catalogues arrived in the mail for her, from all over the country, some by request, most not. The type was large, the words were vague, the pictures were a kind of gentle censorship: they looked like advertisements. It wasn’t possible to learn anything from them. Molly thought optimistically about living in a big city, Boston or New York or San Francisco, but beyond that she had no idea where she wanted to go, when it was time for going.
“What about Michigan? I hear Michigan is great,” Dennis said. He had traveled very little in his life and wasn’t able to be helpful; but then he didn’t really want to be helpful anyway.
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I think I’d rather be in a city, but I’m really not sure about anything at this point.”
“Of course, there are good schools right around here. Union is an excellent school. Bard’s not too far, maybe that would be a good place for you, Bard. You could still come home a lot.”
She looked at him.
“What?” he said. “Okay, maybe I would have a little stake in that.”
“Really? But this will be over with before then, don’t you think?”
Dennis agreed with her, but he winced anyway to hear her say it. Whether or not they were still lovers next fall, it would be hard for him to see her leave town. As ever, he treated it as something that would happen to him rather than something he might conceivably try to influence or prevent. He had imagined at the beginning that the whole affair would somehow run its course, end as inevitably as he believed it to have started; but lately the whole thing had taken on a different imagery for him, which was that when it ended, he would be old. Though he never said so, he was waiting for her to end it.
Molly spent a little less time with her friends now, but not that much; actually, the greater difference in the amount of time she now spent hanging out with Annika – giving her some pretext for putting off the return to her parents, though it was true that the longer she waited, the drunker they were – was due to the fact that Annika was going out with a boy in their class named Mike Lloyd, a short, strong, soft-spoken boy. Mike was on the wrestling team, and on every winter Friday he had to make weight for that weekend’s competition, which sometimes meant spending Thursday night jogging in a rubber suit or spitting for hours into a can. He seemed so much less intelligent than Annika. But he was awestruck by her, given to writing poems about her which his friends would steal and shout aloud in the cafeteria; and Annika’s own emotional longing for at least the appearance of constancy was not to be underestimated. Molly took a pleasure in their happiness which, though genuine, was nevertheless tinged with condescension toward the ordinariness of it.
The girls sat drinking in the TV room at Justine’s house, on a Friday afternoon. “You should have seen this place,” Tia said. “It’s near the Albany airport. My brother said just giving me the name and address would cost me a bottle of one-fifty-one.”
“Speaking of which,” Lucy said, standing up unsteadily and heading for the kitchen.
“I don’t know how it stays open – there must be some serious bribery going on there somewhere. Because it’s all totally out in the open. They didn’t even ask me for an ID. And then in the parking lot this kid, this boy who was like twelve maybe, came up and offered me five bucks to buy him a bottle of Bacardi. I should have told him I was a cop! Hey Moll, where were you yesterday?”
“Home,” Molly said. “We had this thing where my father was bringing people home from work for dinner, and I promised my mother I’d help her clean up.”
Her intimacy with a man her friends all knew, and addressed as Mr Vincent, was never a secret which she wished she could have told somebody. That would have tainted it. If you told someone, then thereafter, if, say, you were getting Dennis off with your hand while he drove, you might as well have been doing it for an audience, doing it for someone else’s amazement.
As for the boys in school, they were a considerable nuisance. It seemed that the lesson Ty Crawford had drawn from his encounter with Molly (which was never repeated) was that he was more of an ordinary guy, more a part of the world, than he had allowed himself to think; ordinariness, in that sense, was what he had dreamed of since his accident. The only way to ratify this knowledge, though, was to make sure everyone else knew about it. And within a few weeks, they did: every boy had Molly Howe on his mental list of girls who would do it, girls about whom their fantasies had some small purchase on the real. The fact that she had let herself be deflowered by a sort of freak just hinted at a broad streak of perversion which they didn’t understand but also didn’t mind in the least. They asked her out constantly. They tried the three or four things they knew, things they had picked up from TV or the movies, mostly: one sent her flowers and a poem; one gave her a
speech about how different she was from the other girls, how he had picked that up right away, how he would protect her from those who didn’t understand her; one went up to her when she was at her locker and whispered in her ear that his cock was ten inches long. He didn’t do it on a dare or for the benefit of any buddies snickering nearby – he actually thought this was what a girl like Molly wanted to hear. She turned them all down. It wasn’t that she imagined she was too good for them now, or that she thought of herself as faithful to her older lover; but she knew what was going on, and she had no desire to put herself in a position where she was going to have to fight somebody off.
Frustrated, the boys began to make fun of Ty, saying that he must have been so bad in bed that he’d turned Molly into a lesbian. Ty didn’t mind; it wasn’t so long ago that nobody would have dared to make fun of someone as unfortunate as him, over anything.
In the evenings she sat in her room and read The Stranger or Sister Carrie or whatever they were doing in Honors English that week; sometimes she read ahead. Her father was concerned that her grades in the subjects she cared about were so much higher than those in the subjects that bored her, like trigonometry; he thought this was going to prevent her from getting into a good college. And her extracurricular activities (at least as he would define them) were nonexistent. The school was putting on Our Town in April; why didn’t she try out for it? Molly said no right away, so as not to get his hopes up, then went to her room and thought it over. The high school mounted two productions a year, three shows of each, and she had been to every single one since freshman year – The Fantasticks, The Glass Menagerie, Godspell. She admired people who could act, but that didn’t mean she wanted to try it herself. She was a little afraid of it, actually – not of doing it badly but of doing it well. She wondered if she had that capacity to forget, even for a couple of hours, who and where she was.
