Jonathan Dee - Palladio

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 another’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—”

“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.