“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.
Word filtered quickly back to Ty that Molly had mentioned his name in conversation in a nondismissive way; he began turning up in places she knew he had no reason to be, never saying more than “Hey,” though he let his eyes stay on her longer now — nothing aggressive about it, just a loosening of his self-restraint. She did nothing different, and this, apparently, was all that was expected of her. Even though she had initiated whatever was going to happen, even though he had by all reports never been in this position before, he seemed to take it for granted that he would assume the role of the pursuer. A week went by. Then one evening Molly was in her room when Kay yelled upstairs to her that she had a phone call.
“Some boy,” she heard her mother saying as she came down the stairs.
“And so it begins,” said Roger.
Ty sounded dull, disaffected; with no preamble at all he asked if she wanted to go to the playground next Friday night. The elementary school playground after dark was always full of teenagers, smoking or surreptitiously drinking: it was a place Molly might well have gone on Friday anyway, alone or with Annika; there was nowhere else to go in town that you could make belong to you that way, unless you had a car. But Molly was not confused, because Ty, like any sixteen-year-old boy, was so easy to read: he wanted to make sure that if he was wrong about Molly or if the whole thing was some sort of mistake — the two of them had never really spoken for more than a few minutes — he would learn this in a place where he could easily pretend, in front of others, never to have thought otherwise at all. They would be in a group, and whatever might set it apart from any other Friday evening when they ran into each other there would be a matter only of an understanding between the two of them. She said she would do it.
“That’s excellent,” Ty said, with a little more animation.
The next afternoon Molly went to the Vincents’, and when she knocked it was Dennis who opened the door. He was not dressed in a way that suggested he was going back to the office. Her first sensation was annoyance. If she wasn’t needed, she couldn’t imagine being paid, and there were other things she could have been doing with her time.
“Have I made a mistake?” she said, though in fact Dennis was smiling at her as if he’d been expecting her.
“No, no,” he said softly, absently, “I’m sorry, I ought to have called you, to give you the choice, I didn’t know I’d be home so early. But I’d like you to stay. The kids are in the yard playing. I need you here. They’re so attached to you.”
Something was wrong with him. He seemed upset, though he was trying to hide it — the way a parent will try to act as if everything is normal in order to avoid transferring fear to the children. He was staring at her. It was strange that he was still standing in the doorway.
“So how are you?” he said, too loudly.
This was interesting, in the way that misfortune is interesting, to the point where it was hard to take her eyes off him; she wanted to stay in the room, to see what would happen next, but at the same time not to be in the room, not to be a part of whatever was taking shape. She remembered the two children, and that decided it for her, for the moment.
“I’ll just get a soda,” she said, stepping forward, “if that’s okay, and I’ll go make sure Kevin and Beth are all right.”
“Oh,” he said, finally backing out of her way. “Okay.”
A few hours later Mrs Vincent came home. Molly had dinner with the kids and then Dennis drove her back to Bull’s Head. His face was red. He didn’t say a single word to her on the way, not even when she opened the door and said goodbye to him. At home there was something of a celebration: Richard had been accepted to Berkeley, and though Kay and Roger made several plaintive jokes about his getting as far away from home as possible, mostly they seemed relieved to know that now the worst-case scenario still had him going to college somewhere. Roger even let Molly have a glass of wine. While they were all still downstairs, Molly went up to her parents’ bedroom and looked at herself for a minute in the big semicircular mirror above her mother’s dressing table.
Friday night she told her mother she was going to Annika’s house; she met Ty outside the Bull’s Head sign. He acted just like any other boy on a date, bluff and nervous, and she felt a little disappointed in the first few minutes. There were eight or ten other kids at the playground, mostly boys. The girls sat on the swings, pushing off gently with their feet; the boys hung on the jungle gym or walked up the slide. When the sun went down they all became shadows, and one or two pairs moved off into the darkness. Ty produced a joint, which he and Molly shared. The leaves shivered in the wind, and whenever a car slowed down on the road in front of the school, they all stopped what they were doing for a moment and turned their heads to listen like deer.