His arms were still folded, but the look on his face was now more like fright. He couldn’t believe, quite apart from the truth of anything she was saying, that she would have the disregard for him to say them at all.
“I’m very sorry that you and Mom are in such pain because of me, but I can’t help it, I don’t know why you care so much what everyone else thinks.”
“All I care about,” he said softly, “is you.”
She winced at the onset of tears. He still can’t say what he means, Molly thought. All I care about is you. He could have picked that up in any of a hundred places. She stood up and put her arms around him, carefully, as if he were much older than he was.
“I’m fine,” Molly said earnestly. “I’m perfectly okay. Nothing bad has happened to me. So why can’t that please be the end of it?”
The best reason to go to school, really, was to get away from this conversation, and from the problem of how far to go, out of pity for her family, in apologizing for things she didn’t really feel sorry for. But school was breaking her down as well. She wasn’t as impervious to their rejection of her as she had thought; not that she minded being an outsider, but why return day after day to a place just to show that you didn’t belong there? To make matters worse, she was now constantly propositioned, in all sincerity, by the same boys who taunted her in public. There was little difference between the taunts and the come-ons: she was viewed as a source, as a locus of dreamily unfettered sex, and they were never going to leave her alone now, never going to stop trying to stumble on to the secret of something they had no hope of understanding. Finally one Monday just a month before exams she stayed home; she had her father call the principal’s office to say she had mononucleosis and would like her homework assignments sent to her at home until further notice. They knew he was lying. They sounded grateful about it.
She had a fantasy that Annika would be the one to deliver the assignments to her: but it was only a freshman boy who lived at Bull’s Head, drafted into this extra duty by the principal himself. The boy smiled nervously, involuntarily, whenever the Howes’ door was opened to him, as if he were visiting the home of a celebrity.
When she couldn’t take it any longer she went and presented herself to her mother, sitting patiently on the end of Kay’s bed, staring searchingly at her, waiting to be spoken to. Her parents were more alike than she had ever understood. Barely speaking to each other, they had nonetheless between them frothed up this scandalous incident until it grew large enough to contain the explanations for all the damage life had done to them. The fundamental difference between them — which held their marriage together as effectively as a similarity might have done — was that Roger felt he must be responsible in some way for every bad thing that happened, while Kay felt that the whirlwind of bad things around her was responsible for the wreck of her own early promise.
Kay lay on the bedcovers in a blue sweatsuit. Molly had never seen her dressed this way before: she must have decided that this was the garment of the woman who had been brought too low to care how she looked anymore.
“How could you do this to me?” Kay said wearily.
“I didn’t mean to do anything to you, Mom. You can’t take it all so personally. It’s something I did, not something I did to you. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”
“We’re ruined in this town! Our reputation is destroyed!”
“But why do you care? I’ve never heard you say a good word about this town or the people in it my whole life. Why does their opinion mean anything?”
“Don’t get smart with me! This is my home, that’s why!”
“All my life all you’ve told me—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ve told you!” she said, raising herself on her elbows. “All the hard work I put into raising you right, just so I could be the mother of the town slut?”
“Mom,” Molly said, trying not to cry, “can’t we forget everyone else just for a few minutes? If this is the last time you and I ever talk, can’t we at least find a way to say what we mean?”
But Kay went on talking about how she had been victimized until Molly realized her mother wasn’t even speaking to her anymore — she was speaking more to posterity. She never got it all talked out. She did not understand her judges.
On 17 April the mail brought Molly’s acceptances to Bennington, Reed, and Tulane; she was rejected by Columbia and Stanford. A few more rejections came in over the next few days. Molly had no one to share the news with; she no longer knew what connection these letters had to her future anyway.
She passed all her exams, taking them unproctored on her dining-room table. No one cared if she cheated or not. She skipped graduation, getting her diploma in the mail. All they had taken from her was something she had never really valued anyway; still, it wore on her, and she didn’t like the feeling of having nowhere to go.
In the middle of the night, in the darkened house, Molly came downstairs to the kitchen with a blanket around her shoulders and called Richard in Berkeley. He was home for once; it was after midnight there as well. Some sort of Indian music droned quietly in the background. She told him the whole story.
“I’m sorry to dump this on you,” Molly said quietly, afraid of waking her parents, “but I don’t have anyone else I can talk to. I’m stuck in my room in the middle of nowhere with these two lunatics who keep telling me I’ve brought a plague on our house. Okay, yes, I had an affair with a married man and maybe I shouldn’t have done it, maybe I should have foreseen all this somehow, but still, I don’t understand what they want from me. I don’t know what to do. I know they want me out of here. I’m supposed to go to college in four months. Dad’s out of work in another eight and they haven’t even bothered to put the house on the market yet. I can just imagine going up to him right now anyway and asking him for twenty grand so I can go to Bennington or wherever.”
“Do you want to go to Bennington?” Richard’s voice was a lot slower and more soothing than she remembered it, like a voice on the radio. He didn’t sound high, though. She knew she should take the opportunity to ask him more about how he’d been doing; but it was just such a relief to find someone who could talk calmly with her about the whole thing.
“No. I mean, no more there than anywhere else. I don’t know. The most appealing thing about it is getting the hell out of here.”
“So don’t go. Take a year off. Take five years off. What’s the law that says you have to finish learning things when you’re twenty-two?”
“And do what in the meantime?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Come out here and live with me for a while. Something different. Til you get everything else figured out.”
At that, Molly started sobbing. One act of kindness was all it took now. Richard said nothing to try to quiet or comfort her; he waited patiently for her to get control of herself.
“Oh, right, that’ll go over real big,” she said, when she had settled down a bit. “I’d have to ask Dad for the money for that, too. A little vacation for me, I’m sure that’s just what he’s thinking about, a little gift he can give me.”
“Ask him. I think I know him better than you do. Ask him.”
When she asked him, his expression never changed. He waited until he was sure she had finished talking, and then he said, “How much do you need?”