But Molly did feel that, just by virtue of being aware of it, she was protecting something private, though she couldn’t have said what that something was — perhaps just protecting that space where something private might theoretically exist. Something that was more authentic than the sarcasm of the fortunate teenager, something less accessible, less easily defined.
Their culture was no longer local, as a child’s culture was; its reference points were celebrities and brand names: Dynasty, Levi’s, Elvis Costello, Paulina, Richard Gere, Nicole Miller, Duran Duran. Yet alongside this worldliness was a premonition that they were living in a place so remote that they might never be found. The high school building from the 1950s with its flagpole scratched by thousands of keys; the half-light of the closed stores at night; the farms which looked abandoned but were not; the evenings spent in front of the television or on the phone or looking out the bedroom window at the one or two visible lights; the damp, deadly quiet in the moldering woods across the road as you waited at the end of your driveway for the bus. Withering judgment of all these things, even if expressed only to yourself, was one way to make certain you were still alive.
Mr and Mrs Vincent didn’t go out much on their own initiative, not even to the movies, but between their two careers and their positions as Rotarians they were kept busy with functions they felt it was prudent to attend: whenever they called the Howes and asked for Molly, it seemed to her, it was because there was somewhere they had to be, never somewhere they wanted to be. What with their evening calendar and the fact that they both felt better about working late knowing Molly was with the children, they began asking for her services two or three times a week. Though Kay constantly objected — she couldn’t stop herself from taking as personal attacks things which really had nothing to do with her — Molly didn’t mind it at all; she could do her homework as easily in one place as in the other, and there was something liberating, something anonymous, about feeling so at home in a place that wasn’t your home at all, where the stakes for you were just about nonexistent. Sometimes he would be the first one home from work, sometimes she would be: in either case Molly had to wait for both parents to return so that Mrs Vincent could be present with the kids while Dennis drove her home.
One spring Saturday they went to a nephew’s wedding all the way up in Loudonville and didn’t return home until past midnight. While his wife slipped her heels off and tiptoed into the children’s bedrooms, Dennis went straight to the living room and found Molly sound asleep on the couch. He stood in the doorway, just on the edge of the rug. She lay on her side, with a textbook open on the floor near her head. In the last moments before sleep she had pushed off her sneakers, and they rested, the heels still flattened, against the arm of the couch by her feet. It was April, and the evenings were still cool. She had on a pair of thick wool socks that might have belonged to her father or brother, green fatigue pants — she always wore pants — and a gray V-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed up. Everything was too big for her, twisted in her sleep — it was almost as if she were trying to hide; but she could not be hidden. One of her knees was drawn up near her stomach. Molly had a delicate face, round without being full, small-lipped, and her eyelashes were so long, so much darker than the auburn hair which was cast around her in her sleep as if she were floating on water, that you might even take them for false if you didn’t know that she never wore makeup of any sort. Of course he had noticed all of these things before. Her left arm was folded against her chest, and her right was straight out beneath her head, fingers bent: the impossibly taut, impossibly reposed long arm of a teenage girl.
He heard his wife coming into the room behind him. “Molly, we’re home,” he said.
Molly’s eyelids fluttered, and then she started upright, embarrassed to have been discovered asleep. Dennis too felt embarrassed all of a sudden, thinking she must have known she was being stared at; but really she was only worried they would be angry at her for sleeping on the job when one of the children might have been whimpering quietly in bed or calling to her. He smiled and held out his hand to try to settle her. She rubbed her face slowly with both hands.
Dennis looked from the girl to his wife and back again; Molly could see that he wanted to ask his wife something but couldn’t work out how to do it discreetly. Finally he went ahead and said, “You know, Molly, it’s so late, you were sound asleep, if you want it’s perfectly okay to stay over here and I can drive you back in the morning. Right, Joyce?”
Joyce Vincent nodded immediately, briskly almost, as if to say that the iron reputation of her hospitality was not open to dispute.
Molly saw her sneakers still lying on the couch cushion and quickly swept them on to the floor. Dennis didn’t come any closer; he stood in the doorway, hands in his pockets, on his face an expression of care that wasn’t at all exaggerated, just outsized for the situation. It was a face her father sometimes made.
“No, thank you,” she said hoarsely. “My parents would freak if I wasn’t there in the morning, and I wouldn’t want to call them now and wake everyone up. If it’s okay, Mr Vincent, maybe you could just drive me home, if you’re not too tired yourself.”
“Dennis,” he said.
He watched protectively to see if she would fall asleep again in the car, but she did not. The moonlight seeped through heavy clouds as they drove through the center of Ulster, past the closed gas station, the closed supermarket; the rooftops glinted in the valley. Richard was still up, watching an old movie on TV with the lights out. Just from the way he rolled his head on the back of the chair to see her, Molly could tell that he was stoned.
Nowhere was the chasm of understanding between parents and children greater than when it came to the subject of drugs. Roger and Kay had no idea that their son had ever tried marijuana, much less that he smoked it habitually. He sometimes wore sunglasses inside the house, and all they did was roll their eyes at each other as if it were some amusing teenage affectation. You had to wonder how they could look so hard and see so little. The word drugs didn’t even mean anything very specific to them; it was more like a way of not looking at other, less material sorts of damage that might be done within the controllable climate of home. And yet if they had ever figured it out, they would have overreacted, screaming at him, grounding him, cutting him off from his friends, wringing their hands about college. His grades were fine — he had it all under control in that sense.
Richard had only received half-credit for the time spent studying in West Germany, though, so he and Molly were still in the same high school. At some point during his months in Europe, it seemed, his samurai phase had passed without fanfare, and on the day he returned home he brought all the furniture and wall hangings from the attic back into his room, without a word to anyone about it. His old friends, many of whom had graduated by now, came over in the afternoons and joined him in his room. Molly knew some of these friends were checking her out, though others, more single-minded about getting high, just smiled absently at her on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen. One or two would urge her, with a great pretense of subtlety, to come smoke with them. Molly could well imagine how these boys talked about her behind the closed door of Richard’s room, beneath the boombox accompaniment of Eat a Peach or Europe 72, but she knew Richard was the type who would just change the subject rather than get offended. He had some friends who, as long as they had to put minimal effort into it, would like to fuck his sister: it would never happen anyway, so why waste energy getting all macho about it? Was his sister supposed to be different somehow from every other good-looking girl in the school, or in the world?