Jonathan Dee - Palladio

She didn’t know why he couldn’t just leave them alone. She wanted them on continuously — that’s why she’d gotten all electric ones. They weren’t turned up loud. True, sometimes she craved a little silence, but when she did she just went into one of the kids’ rooms and shut the door. She didn’t see why he couldn’t just do the same thing.

He had his work to do, and she had hers.

The children were never coming back. She didn’t even know where they were. Maybe they were dead. She imagined them dead, imagined the depth of her own agony, so vividly that she started to wonder if maybe someone had told her they were dead, told her that on the phone, and she had just forgotten it.

If you changed around their bedrooms, refurnished them, gave them over to some other use, then they were no longer shrines to the children’s having been there: instead they became shrines to the children’s having left. Besides, change them into what? If they weren’t Molly’s and Richard’s rooms, then what was that extra space doing there at all?

In the upstairs hall, she put her ear to the closed door of her own bedroom and heard the sound of Roger weeping. She listened for a while; discreet, unmodulated, the sound eventually gave way to silence. She went downstairs. It was morning again.

Time for the pharmacy. She hated to go, actually. She hated leaving the house, even for a short while; the forces of decay made too much headway while she was gone, so that when she did return, it could be overwhelming. And she hated driving the car. Especially now that she had to go all the way to Canajoharie just to get her prescription filled. The Rexall in town was still open but that witch who worked there had too many questions, questions about money, questions about the prescription and whether it hadn’t expired. Last time, the woman had put on those glasses chained across her flat chest and held the bottle itself up to the light, trying to insinuate that the label had been altered somehow. That was the end of that relationship; Kay took her business elsewhere, to Troy, to Middletown. She had found a place in Canajoharie that would be fine for a while.

She put on her scarf, her fur hat with the earflaps, her gloves, her long down coat. She got into the car and turned the heater up all the way. Something was agitating her, as was always the case on these trips. She knew they were unavoidable, but still, an hour or two spent in the car just seemed like such a waste of time. She couldn’t bear to waste time anymore. When she sat on the bed to write in her diary, she didn’t want to look back on the time and wonder where it had all gone. There were the storm windows to put in, for one thing.

And that was just the beginning. There was so much left to do. She could remember, it seemed like years before, talk about selling the house and moving somewhere else. Fine: once everything was finished. But if you started something, and then just abandoned it before it was completed, then what had the point of the time been at all?

* MESSAGE *

Do you keep the promises you make to yourself?

Wash Out Your Mind

Once you put something out there, people can interpret it anyway they like — nothing contains a specific meaning; nothing is degrading for anybody.

Communication Without Boundaries

BOOKS ARE OVERRATED.

Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

Bring Us Your Content

generally avoids such trivial speculation, suggesting instead that business in the new age will be transformed, the salvationary spirit of the entrepreneur will soar and the roving ambitions of individuals will find resonance in an incandescent web of knowledge. Freedom will grow, wisdom thrive and wealth spread. What more could a prophet of a “redemptive technology” possibly desire? Forget the mundane

The Voice of the People Can Topple a Despot.

While We May Fall Short, We Will Not Give Up,

Nor Will We Remain Silent.

In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.

*

MOLLY, THOUGH SHE doubted anyone was looking for her anymore, traveled for a while in an indirect path, in the general direction of the center of the country. Mostly by bus; money was a problem, even after she’d sold the car. She stopped in a state she’d never been to before, in a city she had never heard of.

She’s been there a while now. She works for an insurance company, one of the larger ones, in their secretarial pool. She had no real secretarial skills when she went in to answer the ad for the job, apart from scoring 100 on their spelling test. But the woman who interviewed her, an overweight woman (but they were all overweight there) with a towering blond perm, kept looking hard at her.

“And you didn’t go to college,” she said, for the second time.

“No.”

“Where did you say you were from?”

“Virginia.”

The permed woman stared at her. Molly could see her weighing the possible effects of asking all the questions she wanted to ask.

“Okay, come here,” she said finally, standing up from her desk. Molly’s first thought was that the woman was going to hug her; but no, she was only waving Molly briskly into her own desk chair. When Molly was seated the woman spun her a quarter turn toward her computer terminal, and right then and there gave her her first typing lesson. QWERTYUIOP. After about five minutes they stopped.

“Okay, all right,” the woman said. “I can see you’re going to get it. I’ll give you a starting date of two weeks from now. That’ll give you time to practice at home, which you’d better do.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will, thank you,” Molly said, though she had no keyboard to practice on, and indeed, at that point, no home.

But that same day she found a place, a beautiful warped old clapboard house painted yellow whose two third-floor rooms had been converted to an apartment after the owner’s husband had run off, leaving her with two young children. The apartment had its own entrance, an outdoor wooden staircase which Molly was responsible for keeping free of snow and ice. When Caroline, the landlord, first saw Molly — an attractive single woman from out of town — she had her doubts, what with the kids sleeping right downstairs from her. But she’s proved to be an ideal tenant. Always pays right on time; hardly makes a sound.

Caroline’s children were a little shy with Molly at first — a little scared of her, in fact; a stranger, even a nice lady, creaking around upstairs as they lay in their beds in the dark was like a nightmare scenario come true for them — but nowadays, if they’re in the yard when she comes home from work, they’ll yell to her or even run up to tell her about some triumph at school. If Caroline is having a day where she’s particularly depressed, Molly will come downstairs and read to the kids before bed; then the two women sit on the porch glider and drink wine and talk in whispers until they’re sure the two children are asleep.

Molly’s little secretarial subdivision (“pod” is how they’re told to refer to it) contains five other employees, all women. Her supervisor is a woman too — Fern, the woman who hired her. In fact there are only five men in her entire department, only two who work on her floor. No one speaks to them. Molly lives in a virtual society of women, with the sole exception of her landlord’s son, Tucker, who is five. This wasn’t what she was after, in settling there, but in practice she feels it suits her fine.

There was one time, back in New York — around dawn, drunk, at home after a party at which some contemptibly suave TV actor whose name she didn’t even know had kissed her on the mouth in full view of everyone by way of saying goodbye — when Dex had hit her with his closed fist. It was in the chest, oddly, as if he’d changed his mind about it at the last instant. The next day she showed him the bruise and he apologized so long and hard that at one point he had started crying. He had always had a temper, and sometimes in the course of making a point he would grab her arm hard enough to leave a mark, but only that one time had it gone further over the line than that. The point was not to defend him but to remember how amazed, how genuinely compelled and shocked, she had been to learn that that was in him: the wild possessiveness, the terror of abandonment, the capacity to hurt. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she had no reason not to suppose that it was in all of them.