“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. If anyone sees us, I’ll be destroyed. How did I let this happen? Where will it all end?”
“It’ll end when we end it,” Molly said frankly, soothingly. “What, are you afraid I’m going to ask you to marry me or something?”
He seemed hurt by this; he wanted everything both ways. He would sit on the bed, looking lost, until Molly started to take her shirt off, or his. Then he would forget everything.
That October in Ulster the thing that had seemed to be happening so slowly happened all at once: the official announcement made its way from somewhere within the most rarefied precincts of IBM that the central New York regional sales office would be closed down entirely in twelve months’ time. As it was, nearly half of all those who had moved to Ulster in the last twenty years to work for IBM were already unemployed; and most of those people were stuck in the town until they could find a buyer for their house or at least until their children’s school year was over. There was no comparable work for them anywhere nearby. Much of what had been the town’s new professional class now found themselves virtual deadbeats, late with the mortgage, having their credit cards rejected at the IGA. First the dry cleaner and then the Baskin-Robbins went out of business. Twelve months was considered a merciful notice, but nevertheless, life in Ulster had begun to take on a mournful, irritable, last-days quality.
The Howes, at least, were exempt from the harshest effects. Roger had achieved a position of such seniority within the doomed enterprise that he was promised that he could stay on at work until the very last day — he would be turning the lights off behind him, he joked. And he had also been offered a transfer to the office in Armonk, though there was at least a temporary hitch in that plan: Kay was refusing to go. She said she liked it here, Ulster was her home, the thought of organizing a move to another strange place was too stressful for her. It was the purest perversity — she would go to her grave in that town to punish him for bringing her there. No one in the family took her refusal seriously.
Sometimes Dennis was passive, sometimes he was forcefuclass="underline" he was trying to figure out what Molly liked, but what she liked, really, was to see him trying everything. The passive role certainly seemed most true to himself. He lay on his back, with his head to one side, while she straddled him with her knees up, her feet flat on the bed, so that she sometimes had to grab his shoulders for balance.
He had things that he liked. He liked her on her stomach, the wrong way across the bed, so that her arms hung down. He loved blowjobs, and Molly found them a lot less complicated than she had expected; but she discovered that she didn’t really like it when he went down on her — it felt wrong, too intimate somehow, though she wouldn’t say that aloud — and he was reluctant to let her do it to him if he couldn’t reciprocate.
His body was small with just a few hairs on his calves and a sprouting right around his nipples that she found comically unattractive. He always took a shower afterward. While she waited for him, Molly peeked out behind the moldy curtain into the parking lot, or looked through the drawers to see if anyone else had left anything behind. Sometimes there were condoms, or pennies; once, a pair of black lace underwear.
He dropped her off a half mile from Bull’s Head, on a stretch of road across from a cow pasture; before they parted they would schedule their next meeting, because it was not always possible to speak to each other on the phone. Like a child he looked both ways before kissing her goodbye, something she only let him do because he insisted on it — such were the ways in which he worked off, through a sporadic and self-devised romantic etiquette, the guilt he felt over treating Molly like a mistress. The car moved off, and Molly walked back home in the twilight, happy deep within herself like a spy, feeling the weakness in her legs. Her mother, in the chair by the TV, smiled with frail disapproval and got up to fix Molly a plate. With Richard away at college, and Molly keeping such unpredictable hours, the family had stopped dining together; Roger and Kay ate early, in front of the television, which did away with the silence between them. So Molly sat alone at the table, eating slowly, listening to the faint music and occasional laughter coming from the TV in the next room. And it was those moments — not the moments in bed with Dennis inside her, not the walks through the woods or the lies themselves — which were happiest for her, because she had escaped the world, it had lost her scent, she knew that she was not who anyone thought she was. The only way to stay pure in the world was to live inside a lie.
Richard didn’t call much from Berkeley; he had moved off campus into a house with eight other people, none of whom, evidently, owned an answering machine. But he sent a letter with a copy of his grades in it, and from that it was possible to infer that he was doing fine. Molly now had a taste of what it might have been like to be an only child; her parents wanted to give her all the benefit of their attentions, but she made that difficult without really trying. She wasn’t rebellious or unkind — merely self-sufficient. When she was thirteen, this independence, this casual unconcern with their opinion, had been worrisome to the point where Roger and Kay argued with each other about who was more to blame for it; four years later, Molly was in that respect basically unchanged, yet her mother and father now congratulated themselves, seeing in her comradely disregard of them evidence that they had succeeded as parents.
“So,” Kay said unexpectedly, “there’s nobody you’re dating, no regular boyfriend?” It was a Thursday night, and Molly, who had come straight home from school that day, was emptying the dishwasher.
“No,” she said. “Nobody regular.”
Kay had stopped dyeing her hair recently; Molly thought it looked much better now, both more natural and more severe, but she never brought it up because the effects of time and age, even good ones, were understood to be an unpleasant subject. “Well, I have to say I can understand it,” her mother said in a confiding, playful voice, “sorry as I might feel for you. A beautiful, smart girl like you, with so much on the ball, the boys around here must seem like real losers. I mean, not seem — they are losers. I see them too, you know. I notice things. Let’s face it, they’re hayseeds. I haven’t met one who’s good enough for you.”
Some girls Molly knew spoke of being horrified by their mothers’ attempts to gain their confidence by intimating that they were girls once themselves; Molly, though, found the idea of her mother’s youth engrossing. “I mean, you’ve grown up here, too,” Kay went on, “same as them, but let’s face it, you’re different. And that has to come from me. You don’t belong here, any more than I do.” She smiled. “One more year and you’ll be out of here, in the wide world somewhere. You’re smart to save yourself.”
“I was talking to Mike Cavanaugh at work yesterday,” Roger said. They were at breakfast together, more or less by chance, he in a gray suit and tie, his daughter in jeans and one of his own old tennis shirts with a bleach stain on it, a shirt he could have sworn he’d thrown out. “His son is a year behind you. And he said, Roger, I have to tell you, my son Stephen is just gone on your daughter. Talks about her all the time. Thinks she’s a goddess on earth. I doubt she even knows who he is.”
“I don’t, actually,” Molly said.
Roger laughed at this as if it were a joke. “See? And Bev whatshername, you know, who runs the market? She was telling me last time I was in there, your daughter Molly has grown up to be such a fine young woman. So mature, so polite. Never mouthing off like those others her age.”