— What’s it like working for the Fosters?
— Beg pardon?
— Working here. For the Fosters.
— What are you talking about?
— Just asking.
— You should mind your own business. Her voice diminished to a whisper. — Don’t you worry about what goes on in somebody’s house. You wouldn’t understand anyhow.
— No, I would understand.
The black woman waved him off.
— I don’t have time for nonsense.
He would have pursued his convictions, but beyond Gina the cook’s fiefdom of particulars, he could see someone in the laundry room. A girl. A beguiling and comely someone. Girls, from a distance, and the heartbreaking recognition of their superiority to boys, their fleeting perfection, the curve of them in jeans, the strap of a bra peeking out of a V-neck sweater, smudged eyeliner; there was nothing more perfect than that smudge of eyeliner; a sobbing girl (perhaps disconsolate over some brutality of the world, the starvation of distant children, the local athlete with his neck broken); weeping girls; disheveled girls; girls at dusk; girls in autumn; girls running; girls laughing; girls growing up. Here was a girl, mostly concealed in a luffing of white sheets, bleached and dried, sheets in the process of being folded. What a relief from the tense atmosphere of the kitchen, from the Victorian stiffness of the parlor. This girl was trying to fold king-sized sheets, twice again as wide as she was, longer than she was. She was dressed in white corduroys, and a white velour turtleneck sweater, and so she was a vision of simulated virginity and piety. Polly Firestone. The mere syllables of her name summoned nobility. She could purchase multiple sets of new sheets if she wanted. And yet where on another day he might have resented it, the way in which the name Firestone summoned nobility, the way in which the name Abramowitz sounded like a name for a manufacturer of carpets. Nevertheless, there was a pathos to Polly’s travails in the laundry room. Despite her inability to manage the king-sized sheets, she didn’t seem at all resentful. In fact, she was radiant, and lit in profile, across planes of cheekbones, by candlelight, by a pair of hatless jack-o’-lanterns on a shelf with the powdered detergents. Polly Firestone, in a flattery of candlelight, resembled the heavenly servant girls of Flemish painting, and her every movement summoned the music of zithers from a heavenly bank of cumulonimbus clouds. There was a stack of a dozen sheets already piled on the dryer, folded in a number of oblong and imperfect ways. Now, as Gerry watched, Polly turned her attention to that most vexatious of folding responsibilities, the fitted sheet. Would the young heiress, of the Philadelphia Firestones, know the proper way to fold a fitted sheet? Would she at least be able to argue for the proper strategy in folding this sheet, having been informed through some matri-lineal ritual that Gerry’s mother would eventually write about for the Cultural Anthropology Quarterly, in a monograph that would include a note saying, Jane is not the subject’s real name. It has been changed at the insistence of her family. Would Polly jam the fitted sheet up into a ball, as the vast majority of Americans had been doing for almost fifty years now, proving that class difference was not as rigid as it had once been? No, Gerry Abramowitz divined: Polly had known the theory of folding since birth.
— Hi there. Polly Firestone said, without looking up. — Aren’t you a little late?
He manufactured the appropriate ennui. Boys of Darien avoided caring perceptibly about anything, the trajectory of that revolving plastic disk that was about to float into their hands, chased by a golden retriever. It was routine. Everything was routine. Boys could walk across a festooned gymnasium into the arms of a girl at a dance as though it were like getting the mail. Without evident feeling. He would attempt these skills, though they were foreign to him.
— Everyone keeps saying that.
He felt a powerful urge to reach for a laundry marker on the shelf above her, so that he might connect her freckles.
— Where is everyone?
— If you got here earlier, you wouldn’t be asking.
The exchange might have been considered flirtatious, at least according to his mother’s theory, Disregard as Complex Coital Strategy, but he decided that the tone was actually intended to be callous. No festivity without cruelty. Gatherings of kids always had their body counts. He thought of Peltz, and of the dwindling of his own opportunities at the party. Time was passing. He didn’t even have any candy to show for himself.
— Will you kiss me? he asked.
— No. Why would I want to kiss you? What’s your name, anyway?
— Gerry.
— Oh, yeah. Are you going to help me carry all this bedding?
— Must be a lot of beds.
— Have any gum?
He did have gum, of course. Sugarless, according to recommendations of four out of five doctors. She handed him the stack of flat sheets as she worked to finish up the fitted counterparts. And it was true, she had a perfect intention, a complete knowledge of tactics, if not the total command of muscular adjustments required for fitted sheets. Later in life she would be as good at folding sheets as the German army was at lockstep, but she would pay someone else to do it. The transfer of sheets into his arms, an important symbolic exchange, and the exchange of gum, these required the abandonment of his beer, unfinished, on a rattling Maytag dryer. Polly demurely snapped the gum as she led him down the corridor at the rear of the house. Through the pantry. There was an empty gallon crate of ice cream sweating off its remains that he hadn’t noticed earlier. And in a door jamb, at the rear of the pantry, was the Fosters’ genealogical measuring station. Nick Foster had once been little Nicky, who smiled recklessly and admired the action of waves on lifeless Long Island Sound. A wobbly line, made with Old Man Foster’s golf pencil, indicated Nicky, Age 6yrs, 6mos, another, Nicky, 8th birthday, and so on, likewise for his little sisters, whom Nicky had terrorized into submission, and who were nowhere to be seen this night, Annabelle and Grace. With his mother, they had relocated, probably to the Fosters’ pied à terre in the East Fifties. Next right was the servants’ staircase to the second floor, half in shadow. He bolted up these back stairs, and Polly, who waited behind, likely understood the implications of these researches. Every kid who came to the Fosters’ house had to know its complete architectural layout, as if this were to understand all American power, its implied antagonism of classes, its scant beachhead against wilderness, its scantly concealed totalitarianism. Polly was impatient, though. She sighed. Nevertheless, he embarked on his frolic, without leaving aside the fitted sheets, no, carrying them upon his person. There weren’t enough lights at the top of the servants’ staircase. There were low doorways, irregular construction, pneumatic tubes, messages from below. Spiders everywhere, their astounding constructions brushing against his brow, spiders of finality, existing beyond the great net of causality. The servants’ rooms were closed, storage vaults, now, in which boxes of neglected dolls’ dresses and cadets’ uniforms moldered. An aunt had climbed these stairs in search of Christmas ornaments, several years past, never to return. But Gerry survived these adventures. But soon he passed into the larger corridor of bedchambers on the second floor. These were constructed on a plan of increasing size and ornament. The bed in each was more floral than the last. Simple double beds gave way to fabulous poster beds with too many pillows. (A subject on which subject his father had recently expatiated, Interior designers make their margin on the pillows. It’s a percentage of whatever fabric you use, so they buy these pillows, different kinds of fabric, put the pillows all over the goddamned place. Any time you want to sit down, you dislodge pillows.) There were sheer window dressings, draperies as convoluted as the waterfall outdoors, there was wallpaper with velvet upon it. And a television in every room, a stunning luxury from Gerry’s point of view, since his mother’s regulations allowed him to watch two hours of television per week. No more. He was permitted to bank time from one week and use it toward the following week, but more frequently he squandered it spinning the dial.