Often it had to do with what they watched on television. “Don’t you think you’re a little young for this, mister?” she would chide Richard, who sat Indian-style on the floor in front of the big TV, five minutes into a boring National Geographic special about life on the Nile.
“Aren’t you sleepy?” she would say to Molly, right before Dallas came on. “You must be sleepy. I think it’s time for bed.”
Molly was almost eight by now, old enough that she didn’t really need to be put to bed; all the same, it was different when the last face she saw was Patty’s, and she often lay awake until she heard her parents come in, her father starting the car again to drive Patty home, her mother’s stockinged feet on the stairs.
Outside the house were other houses in the development that looked just like theirs, divided in Molly’s mind into those with children in them and those without; the yards were separated by identical brown split-rail fences. And in the town center, which was reachable by bike, the stores were all interesting in their way — the revolving shelves of wristwatches in the glass case at the drugstore, the velvet ropes at the bank — mysterious at least until you got a little older and the mysteries weren’t explained so much as they just dissolved into intelligence. It was enough for her, at that age; but her mother seemed forever to be bringing Molly her jacket and telling her to get in the car, sometimes for a doctor’s appointment or a haircut, more often for something that had nothing to do with Molly at all. The car itself was like an absence, the way sleep is an absence, the embodiment of in-between, the blank time and space that connected the events and routines in her life. Wherever they went, the same bare landscape through the cloudy window: pine trees, power lines, roadside gullies filtered by sodden leaves. Molly spent a lot of time in the car with her mother; in that rural setting you soon thought little, even with small children, of driving an hour each way just to visit a friend or to shop somewhere.
One summer Monday, Roger surprised them all by walking through the door, pale and secretive, at three in the afternoon; the whole office had been sent home early because Roger’s boss, a man in his fifties, had had a heart attack while introducing the staff to a special guest speaker from Research and Development in Armonk. By the next morning he was dead. From scraps of conversation and tensely veiled references over the next few days, Richard and Molly picked up that their parents were fighting over the question of whether they, the children, should be forced to attend this man’s funeral. In the end, Roger’s concern for appearances (would his colleagues think him insufficiently respectful? Would they think of him as a man whose children could do as they pleased?) won out, and the kids were dressed up and driven to the funeral home in Oneonta. On the way their mother leaned her coiffed head over the seat and explained that what they were going to was not a funeral, strictly speaking, but a wake, and that they should try their hardest not to act shocked or to say anything at all when they saw their father’s boss’s casket at the front of the reception room with the lid open and Mr Murphy in it.
They both did as they were told. At a whispered signal from their mother, Richard and Molly walked slowly up to the casket and knelt on the little upholstered bench, as they had seen those ahead of them do, even though they then had to crane their necks to see inside. Molly was told she had met Mr Murphy before, but she did not remember it; in any case, the face before her, wearing makeup, smelling of perfume, lying in a frame of satin, with its strange concavity around the mouth, was not one she had ever seen before. She was aware of Richard next to her, his head down and his hands folded, looking very solemn, even close to tears. “Goodbye, Mr Murphy,” he whispered. He was older than she and might well remember meeting this man, Molly thought, maybe even more than once; still, she was puzzled by this evidence of a feeling stronger than muted curiosity. He did not seem to be faking. She folded her own hands and lowered her eyes to the polished side of the casket, watching Richard as well to see when he would stop or what he would do next. She knew that their posture was that of prayer. But she wasn’t thinking about anything but the posture itself, and she was still waiting for something to happen when her brother stood up and whispered sternly, “That’s enough.”
She was smart, and passively respectful, but she was also the kind of child who notices everything, who takes everything in and doesn’t ask questions, and while that made some adults fond of her, others were discomfited even to the point of suspicion. Her teachers at school fell into these two camps as well. All of them were women; the only men she ever saw in her school building were the principal and the janitor. Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs Park (who, like every teacher of Molly’s, was wary of her at first, remembering the more temperamental Richard from three years ago), was the only one who said to herself that there was clearly something more inside the girl than was getting out: she tried to befriend her, to find out what that something was, but Molly only felt the maternal heat of this interest as something contrived, something to be tolerated rather than understood, and nothing more than kindness ever came of it.
What did the other children see? Molly was not the kind of shy girl who took pains to keep from being noticed, but rather one who seemed not to notice herself, not to assert or even bear in mind her own presence in a group. Thus she was not offended when others did not recognize it either. Unlike her brother, though her pleasures were unshared ones, it didn’t follow that she could find pleasure only in solitude. She could often be found in the band of children — children of all ages hanging out together, as happens in small neighborhoods — on their bikes on the aesthetically crooked roads of Bull’s Head, on the expanse of tended grass just before the boundary line where the slope of the valley began. She was considered by adults a child who loved to read, and relative to others perhaps she was; still, in those years she spent no more time reading each day than she did in front of the television, usually sitting on the floor, occasionally scooting forward to turn the dial on the box which controlled the rooftop antenna, knowing it oriented toward New York City or Albany or Vermont but preferring to imagine an element of magic to it, watching happily as the rotor hummed and the lives of the families on the screen were retrieved from a purgatory of the unobserved, brought into focus through a kind of electronic snowfall, their voices growing clearer, along with the bodiless, ratifying laughter that enclosed them wherever they went.
Holidays were spent all the way up in Syracuse, where Kay’s mother lived; Molly’s other grandparents were in Illinois. Kay was from a large family, none of whom seemed to have gotten very far away from Syracuse: they were all there, along with Molly’s cousins, at Christmas and Thanksgiving.
The snow drifted all the way up to the windowsills. The children ate at a card table set up for the purpose in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room; an hour after dinner, the whole house still smelled like food. The heat was always up too high. Kay sat on the stairs, talking quietly and intensely with her sister. The six cousins still sat at the cleared table in a kind of limbo of parental circumscription: they couldn’t play outside, and they couldn’t watch TV, because Roger Howe and his brother-in-law had the football game on.