Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“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.

In bed in his childhood home, Dennis would tell Molly the things he was privy to as a kind of civic figure in Ulster. He told her that the woman who had taught her kindergarten class was having an affair with the man who ran the hardware store, and who was just about to declare bankruptcy. He told her that the kid who used to work at the Mobil station had not joined the Marines at all — he had left town with money stolen from his parents, who made up the story to cover their shame. He told her how many times in the last month the town sheriff had been called out to Annika’s house, to try to settle down her parents. He wasn’t being insensitive; he had no idea Molly and Annika were friends, because she never mentioned her life at school, except for scheduling purposes, and he never asked about it, not wanting to have his sense of his own perversion stirred up by any reminder of how young Molly really was.

“You know what I wonder?” Molly said. She lay on her stomach, and Dennis sat beside her tracing with his fingertips the unflawed skin from her shoulder blades to the backs of her knees. “Has there ever been a day when you’ve come here, fucked me, and then gone home that same night and fucked your wife?”

The tracing stopped. “What would you want to know a thing like that for?”

“It wouldn’t bother me, really. I was just curious about it. Don’t you think it’s an interesting question?”

“No.”

“What, too intimate?”

He sighed. “‘Fuck’ seems like such an angry word to me. Anyway, no. That’s never happened. It’s a pretty easy situation to avoid. She has a very exhausting life just now. I know it must be hard for you to imagine a life like that, but just wait.”

That was the last time she ever saw him.

The golf course closed shortly after someone drove a car on to it at night and did doughnuts on the fairways. One of the officers of the charity organized by the IBM spouses was caught stealing from it to make her own mortgage payment; not long afterward the charity voted to dissolve itself.

On a Friday afternoon in March, misty and warm, Molly got off the bus at the stop nearest the Vincents’ and walked up to the front door with her jacket tied around her waist. She knocked, and a few seconds later Joyce Vincent opened the door. She was not dressed in one of the smart, boxy suits that generally indicated she was going back to the office. Nor, Molly saw, was she wearing any makeup. In fact she had been crying, which made her silence now all the more unsettling. The children were not in sight behind her. She stood in the doorway staring up at Molly — who was now taller than she was — with a look of utter disbelief, as if the girl were someone she had been told was dead.

“I’m here,” Molly said, confused.

Joyce’s head pulled back slightly at the sound of Molly’s voice. There seemed to be something she wanted to say but a few seconds went by and she couldn’t get it out. The corners of her mouth turned down. Then she slammed the door in Molly’s face.

Molly waited on the porch. There was no sound within the house. In a minute or two she turned to face the street, and the meaning of what had just happened began to bear down toward her as if on wings. She tried to figure out what had to happen now. For one thing, she had no way to get home. She knew a few shortcuts through the woods but it was still four miles at least. Lightheaded, she descended the porch steps.

As she grew more and more tired she really only wished that the trip were longer — that it would take her days of solitary hiking, sleeping under the moon, to get back home. She didn’t have any idea what a woman in Joyce Vincent’s position might do. All she knew was that she liked Joyce and was sorry she had been hurt. That hadn’t been the intention. If there were two worlds to live in, then everyone’s feelings could be spared, which is how Molly would have wanted it; but now the two worlds had fused back into one.

It was twilight when she finally walked through her own front door. At first she thought no one else was home because she heard no sounds from the television or the kitchen, no voices, no hiss from the dishwasher. But when she turned the corner into the living room, her mother and father were sitting there, Kay with her face turned away, Roger with his fist held up to his mouth. They sat in their chairs like two characters from the last act of Our Town .