Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“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 Japanese. 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.