Jonathan Dee - Palladio

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 returned 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.