Mothers and daughters were called from the room, one pair at a time, and none of them returned. It had never been explained to Molly why exactly she had been brought there — that is, to do what. She grasped only that there was some sort of vague premium placed on looking pretty. Of course, her mother didn’t understand the task in much more specific terms herself.
The secretary who had greeted them an hour earlier stuck her head in through the open door.
“Mrs Howe?” she said, looking all around the room.
They were led down a long hallway and through a door which had taped to it a paper sign reading Maypo. Three men were seated around a small round table covered with papers and photographs; two of them stood to shake Kay’s hand. The third, whose left arm was in a sling, just sat and looked discouraged. At one end of the room was a white backdrop with all sorts of large lights pointed at it. The lights had fans blowing on them. Molly had expected to find in this room all the other girls whose names had been called; but she was the only girl there. She began to worry.
“Now, Molly,” one of the men said. He was much taller than her father; he squatted down and held her hand. “We’re going to take a picture of you. You’ve had your picture taken before, right?”
She stared at him. He had long sideburns, and his tie was loose. He straightened up, still holding her hand, and began leading her toward the white backdrop, in front of the lights.
“Well, this is a special kind of picture,” the man went on. He was kind, but he spoke quickly. “You have to stand here for it to work. Right here. See that bit of tape on the floor? That’s perfect, sweetie. Now,” he said, backing away from her, “in a few seconds I’m going to say some things, and I want you just to repeat what I say. But you know what? This is all just practice. Just practice. So do your best, but you don’t have to be scared. You can look at your mom if you want to.”
He was back in his seat by this time. The second man had gotten up and was on one knee in front of the table, holding a big Polaroid camera like the one Molly’s grandfather had. Molly was glad to be reminded to look at her mother instead of the strange men or the cameras. Kay stood near the back of the room, her arms folded, smiling weakly.
“You look gorgeous, Molly,” the tall man said. “Molly. Molly, look at me for a second. That’s it. Now, let’s pretend a little. Let’s pretend you’ve just eaten your favorite thing in the whole wide world. What’s that?”
After a few seconds went by, Kay said from behind him, “It’s pizza.”
“Good, thank you,” he said, without turning around. “Pizza. So you’ve just had some pizza, and it was delicious, the best pizza you ever had, but you didn’t quite have enough of it. You want some more.”
Molly found these difficult circumstances for pretending. She put her hand up to shield her eyes from the lights.
“Put your hand down, please, honey. We’ll be through soon, I promise. Now, this particular pizza has a special name, kind of a silly name. It’s called Maypo. It’s a funny name to say, isn’t it? Try saying it. Maypo.”
Molly said nothing. She stood still and didn’t cry, but for some reason she felt that even if she wanted to she couldn’t say anything at all.
“Say, ‘I want my Maypo.’ You can say it to your mom if you want.”
Ordinarily Molly found silence to be a preferred way of hiding, but this time silence itself was playing, quite inadvertently, as an act of disobedience, an accidental exercise of her will. She was only trying to do nothing; still, she saw in their faces and felt in the air of the room that she was doing something wrong. The man with the Polaroid took one more picture, then put the camera on the floor.
The man at the table with his arm in a sling sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and looked sullenly at the window, which was covered by a shade.
“Okay, just say your name then,” said the tall man, still very gentle. “Say—” he picked up a pile of papers — “Say, ‘Hello, my name is Molly Howe.’”
Her mother took her for ice cream near Radio City afterwards but didn’t say a word to her while she ate it. The train station was almost an hour from Ulster; Molly was hungry again in the car, but she had an intuition that it was not a good time to ask for something. Outside her window, the hard limbs faded into the brown of the hillsides, and before long the headlights in the opposite lanes were all there was to see. Kay checked to make sure the heat was turned up all the way.
When they got home, it was after dark, and Molly’s father and brother were watching television. Kay forgot to ask any of them about dinner; she left her coat on the chair in the vestibule and walked quickly upstairs. They all heard the bedroom door click shut. Roger massaged his temple for a moment and then stood up unhurriedly. He believed it was important not to express anger in front of the children; but whenever he was angry it was easy enough to see in his face the vague and upsetting outline of what was left unexpressed. Molly wandered into the living room and sat on the floor. Her parents’ muffled voices floated down. After a few minutes, Molly got up, climbed onto the couch, and laid her head on Richard’s lap.
“Where were you?” Richard said, still looking at the set.
Richard had his father’s black hair and a serious expression that he hadn’t inherited from anybody. Toward his younger sister he maintained a kind of benign detachment, responding to her questions with ostentatious patience, never cruel to her but never really emotionally engaged by anything she had to say. Like Molly, his main pleasures were solitary ones. He had, for instance, an electric football game he was given for Christmas; it developed that he would much rather play both sides of the game himself than invite a friend over to oppose him — or, indeed, to go outdoors after school and play football itself. He did well in school but not conspicuously so, was not unathletic, had no sort of stammer or blemish, and yet other children appeared to him principally as a source of hurt. His threshold for this sort of injury was so low that his classmates and neighbors would have been genuinely surprised to learn about the humiliation they caused him. Kay and Roger, when they had run out of other things to disagree about, would disagree about whether there was theoretically a time when a parent should take a book out of a ten-year-old boy’s hands and encourage him strongly to go socialize with other children.
The more the Howes argued, the more parties they went to. While Kay got dressed, Roger drove out of the valley to Sennett Hill Road and came back with the babysitter, whose name was Patty. Patty was a teenager whose mannerisms were an object of Molly’s fascination: the first thing she did, the moment the door had closed behind Mr and Mrs Howe, was to kick off her shoes, wherever she happened to be standing, and go to the kitchen drawer where she knew the cigarettes were kept. Patty had long, perfectly straight blond hair, wristbands made out of some kind of braided rope, and a wardrobe of secondhand jeans she bought at the Salvation Army in Coxsackie. When she was bored, which was most of the time, she liked to draw on her own jeans with a ballpoint pen — peace signs and monochromatic daisies — an undreamt-of bit of disobedience which Molly regarded with esteem. Time in the house with Patty alternated between long periods of equable silence and occasional flashes of an overcompensating harassment: out of nowhere, she could suddenly insist on making brownies, or playing some old board game that Richard had already outgrown. Once she had been their regular babysitter for six months or so, she began to act differently around them, talking to them in a false voice that staked out a zone somewhere between sister and mother — asserting her authority over them, but in such a way that she wanted them to think it was all for their benefit, that their interests really superseded her own.