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.
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.”