“Do you ever feel,” she asked Dennis once, in the first few minutes on the bed when there was still room for talking, “like just a body?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just, like a body. Like all your thoughts or your feelings, everything you normally think of as being part of you, has just, I don’t know, flaked off; but your senses are still there, and the truth is you’re just this body that needs to be fed or that’s food for somebody else.”
He lifted his head. “Is that how I make you feel?”
“No. That’s not what I meant. Never mind, it was stupid.”
She wanted to say to him sometimes: You’re screwing your seventeen-year-old babysitter; you’d be the envy of every male friend of yours, if they knew. Is this the real meaning of fantasies, that if they ever came true you couldn’t enjoy them? But he wasn’t the type to be able to enjoy it thoroughly — he worried too much. He even worried that if he ever took her too much for granted she might turn on him, expose him even if it meant shaming herself — everyone would think it was his fault anyway. But that was a fear based on nothing. Once Molly had waited for him by Route 2 for an hour and he never showed: she had had to walk three miles home. The next day at the Vincents’ he came home early, in a panic to get her aside and apologize almost tearfully, imagining her furious and vengeful. But she knew what sort of thing must have gone wrong the day before. She would never let him get to her like that.
It was fall, then winter, of her senior year. College catalogues arrived in the mail for her, from all over the country, some by request, most not. The type was large, the words were vague, the pictures were a kind of gentle censorship: they looked like advertisements. It wasn’t possible to learn anything from them. Molly thought optimistically about living in a big city, Boston or New York or San Francisco, but beyond that she had no idea where she wanted to go, when it was time for going.
“What about Michigan? I hear Michigan is great,” Dennis said. He had traveled very little in his life and wasn’t able to be helpful; but then he didn’t really want to be helpful anyway.
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I think I’d rather be in a city, but I’m really not sure about anything at this point.”
“Of course, there are good schools right around here. Union is an excellent school. Bard’s not too far, maybe that would be a good place for you, Bard. You could still come home a lot.”
She looked at him.
“What?” he said. “Okay, maybe I would have a little stake in that.”
“Really? But this will be over with before then, don’t you think?”
Dennis agreed with her, but he winced anyway to hear her say it. Whether or not they were still lovers next fall, it would be hard for him to see her leave town. As ever, he treated it as something that would happen to him rather than something he might conceivably try to influence or prevent. He had imagined at the beginning that the whole affair would somehow run its course, end as inevitably as he believed it to have started; but lately the whole thing had taken on a different imagery for him, which was that when it ended, he would be old. Though he never said so, he was waiting for her to end it.
Molly spent a little less time with her friends now, but not that much; actually, the greater difference in the amount of time she now spent hanging out with Annika — giving her some pretext for putting off the return to her parents, though it was true that the longer she waited, the drunker they were — was due to the fact that Annika was going out with a boy in their class named Mike Lloyd, a short, strong, soft-spoken boy. Mike was on the wrestling team, and on every winter Friday he had to make weight for that weekend’s competition, which sometimes meant spending Thursday night jogging in a rubber suit or spitting for hours into a can. He seemed so much less intelligent than Annika. But he was awestruck by her, given to writing poems about her which his friends would steal and shout aloud in the cafeteria; and Annika’s own emotional longing for at least the appearance of constancy was not to be underestimated. Molly took a pleasure in their happiness which, though genuine, was nevertheless tinged with condescension toward the ordinariness of it.
The girls sat drinking in the TV room at Justine’s house, on a Friday afternoon. “You should have seen this place,” Tia said. “It’s near the Albany airport. My brother said just giving me the name and address would cost me a bottle of one-fifty-one.”
“Speaking of which,” Lucy said, standing up unsteadily and heading for the kitchen.
“I don’t know how it stays open — there must be some serious bribery going on there somewhere. Because it’s all totally out in the open. They didn’t even ask me for an ID. And then in the parking lot this kid, this boy who was like twelve maybe, came up and offered me five bucks to buy him a bottle of Bacardi. I should have told him I was a cop! Hey Moll, where were you yesterday?”
“Home,” Molly said. “We had this thing where my father was bringing people home from work for dinner, and I promised my mother I’d help her clean up.”
Her intimacy with a man her friends all knew, and addressed as Mr Vincent, was never a secret which she wished she could have told somebody. That would have tainted it. If you told someone, then thereafter, if, say, you were getting Dennis off with your hand while he drove, you might as well have been doing it for an audience, doing it for someone else’s amazement.
As for the boys in school, they were a considerable nuisance. It seemed that the lesson Ty Crawford had drawn from his encounter with Molly (which was never repeated) was that he was more of an ordinary guy, more a part of the world, than he had allowed himself to think; ordinariness, in that sense, was what he had dreamed of since his accident. The only way to ratify this knowledge, though, was to make sure everyone else knew about it. And within a few weeks, they did: every boy had Molly Howe on his mental list of girls who would do it, girls about whom their fantasies had some small purchase on the real. The fact that she had let herself be deflowered by a sort of freak just hinted at a broad streak of perversion which they didn’t understand but also didn’t mind in the least. They asked her out constantly. They tried the three or four things they knew, things they had picked up from TV or the movies, mostly: one sent her flowers and a poem; one gave her a speech about how different she was from the other girls, how he had picked that up right away, how he would protect her from those who didn’t understand her; one went up to her when she was at her locker and whispered in her ear that his cock was ten inches long. He didn’t do it on a dare or for the benefit of any buddies snickering nearby — he actually thought this was what a girl like Molly wanted to hear. She turned them all down. It wasn’t that she imagined she was too good for them now, or that she thought of herself as faithful to her older lover; but she knew what was going on, and she had no desire to put herself in a position where she was going to have to fight somebody off.
Frustrated, the boys began to make fun of Ty, saying that he must have been so bad in bed that he’d turned Molly into a lesbian. Ty didn’t mind; it wasn’t so long ago that nobody would have dared to make fun of someone as unfortunate as him, over anything.
In the evenings she sat in her room and read The Stranger or Sister Carrie or whatever they were doing in Honors English that week; sometimes she read ahead. Her father was concerned that her grades in the subjects she cared about were so much higher than those in the subjects that bored her, like trigonometry; he thought this was going to prevent her from getting into a good college. And her extracurricular activities (at least as he would define them) were nonexistent. The school was putting on Our Town in April; why didn’t she try out for it? Molly said no right away, so as not to get his hopes up, then went to her room and thought it over. The high school mounted two productions a year, three shows of each, and she had been to every single one since freshman year — The Fantasticks, The Glass Menagerie, Godspell. She admired people who could act, but that didn’t mean she wanted to try it herself. She was a little afraid of it, actually — not of doing it badly but of doing it well. She wondered if she had that capacity to forget, even for a couple of hours, who and where she was.