Jonathan Dee - Palladio

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 blow 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.

“It went fine,” Richard said, not at all impatiently. “The list is still Berkeley, Amherst, Williams, Connecticut College, Reed, and Tulane, with SUNY New Paltz as my safety.” Again, the bright tone of his voice walked right on the edge of mockery; Molly knew that he thought this sham attitude effectively excused him from the conversation itself, but his strategy was less different from the others’ than he thought. His ironic manner was over the head of no one; but as long as nobody called attention to it, things went on just as before.

Kay stayed in the kitchen much longer than was necessary. When she returned, the children had already gone up to their rooms. She looked into her husband’s faltering smile. She found herself perilously close to expressing what she felt: that she was thrilled to imagine that Roger’s office might be shut down, that he and indeed most of the people they socialized with might suddenly be jobless, ruined, that they would lose the house and not be able to send their son to college, that existence would become the wreck she had long dreamed of and to which she felt temperamentally better suited than the infuriating haze of life as a middle-class wife and mother.

“Well, that was delicious, as always,” Roger said. “If you don’t mind excusing me, I think I’ll go catch the start of the news.”

Molly never felt any sort of teenage scorn for the outright bogusness of all this, nor any lament for the absence of the genuine in every look, every word exchanged within her family. Of course it was false, but there was no true language that she knew about in any case; every place had its idiom, and this was the idiom of home.