“So will you come?” John said.
“I don’t think so.” She shut the fridge and began opening the cupboards; she seemed not to want to look at him, and John, still in his chair, wondered if she was crying.
“Can you tell me,” she said, “why it is we never have anything to eat in this fucking place?”
THE PERPETUAL PRESENT tense of a college town. Always in the foreground, lively and faceless, the student body remains forever between eighteen and twenty-two; only those who accrue around their needs — the shopkeepers, the landlords, the tenured professors — are allowed to watch each other grow old. On the South Side, on Telegraph Avenue, the Bubble Man was out again, in his purple suit, playing the kazoo and banging cymbals strapped to the insides of his knees; Molly saw him through the window of the Soup Kitchen, a self-consciously down-and-out diner where she went most mornings for her coffee and toast with apple butter, a simple pleasure which, strictly speaking, she could no longer afford. Signs on the lampposts for a rally to protest the Gulf War, noon under the Campanile, three days ago. The UC campus lay in a sort of natural bowl; around it, the terraced streets, the eclectic homes set close together, the enervated brown of the hillsides.
Fall in California. The money from her father had lasted a long time, but now it had run out, though Richard and his seven roommates in the house on Vine Street had recently told Molly she was welcome to stay on there rent-free until she found a job. They told her this collectively, the way they did everything, all eight of them in the living room, facing her and smiling. Their earnestness, their cheerful uniformity, was disquieting and easily mocked (or would have been, had she any friends outside the house to talk to about it): but over the weeks and months their genuine kindnesses to her had accumulated into a charity that was not so readily dismissed.
Molly had tried diligently to find some work; she had never held any sort of job before, other than babysitting, but her lack of experience wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she hadn’t started looking until the end of September, after ten thousand students in need of beer-and-pizza money had flocked back to Berkeley. Everywhere she tried — bookstores, restaurants, thrift shops, laundromats — the spots were all filled. Her only income at the moment came from an odd job in a fancy North Side home, reading the San Francisco Chronicle for an hour or so every weekday morning to an old man who wasn’t blind by any means but who claimed that small-print reading gave him migraines. Mr Whalen was eighty and rich and that meant he could be unembarrassed about self-indulgences. He paid her ten dollars an hour, which was generous, but it still came to only seventy or eighty dollars a week. Nor did he reimburse her for bus fare; he was a kind enough man, but his scattered thoughts never for a moment came to rest on the question of just how Molly arrived in his living room on a given morning, or where she went to afterwards. She was too embarrassed to ask for it.
Inadequate as it was, the job had come her way only through subterfuge. She had gone into the UC Student Employment Center on campus, where they posted jobs on a bulletin board. You were supposed to make an interview appointment through the center, but that was out of the question for Molly, since the first thing they would have asked her for was a student ID number. Instead, she memorized the information from the sheet on the bulletin board, walked across Sproul Plaza to the student lounge, and called from a pay phone. Mr Whalen didn’t seem to notice or care that she hadn’t been referred by anyone from the university. In fact, he hired her over the phone; he liked her voice, he said, not too loud, so many young people were so loud these days. She hung up, chanting the address to herself, and ran to borrow a pen from one of the students playing Donkey Kong in the din of the lounge.
Molly haunted the university in much this way throughout the fall, living on the margin of student life, taking what she needed, unnoticed in the crowd. Her age made her inconspicuous; it was reason enough for her presence anywhere. There were always rallies in the plaza to protest something or other, huge effigy Bushes, signs condemning the Livermore Lab, which operated in contemptuous silence just a few hundred yards away, “the people united will never be defeated,” and Molly liked to attend now and then, not at all insensible to the rightness of the cause, but more immediately energized by her bogus affiliation with the crowd, by the simultaneous thrill of belonging and not belonging. Boredom was a danger because it was so easy to get used to it, to forget to want to escape it. She would flip through her brother’s course catalogue — he lent it to her the first week of classes and never asked for it back — and sometimes when a class looked good to her she found out where it was meeting (lists were posted in the student lounge) and dropped in just to listen.
It was only possible in the lecture halls, of course; once or twice she got to the door of a classroom, saw that there were only fifteen or twenty desks there ranged in a homey circle, and had to leave the building.
She saw the Bubble Man on Telegraph again and thought about the contradiction at work in him: life had pushed him to the margin, to the very lip of invisibility; he did not appear interested in escaping that region, and yet he had literally made it his life’s work just to be noticed, to be seen.
A sense of an interval in her life, a suspension. It might have been possible to enjoy these months of secret aimlessness on those terms, but for the fact that there was nothing on the other side of them. No prospect, no plan, no eventuality: she supposed that if Richard ever managed to graduate (he was only eight credits short, but lately he seemed to have stopped going to classes at all), he might move out of the house, and then something would have to happen. But he might not. So the most she could hope for, in the way of peace of mind, was to forget the future for a while.
Occasionally, into her life as a ghost with all a ghost’s privileges, came a kind of vestigial awareness of the fame, the cautionary status, Molly’s very name must have back in Ulster: the obverse of her existence now. She found the lives of the people there hard to imagine, even though she had never lived anywhere else until five months ago.
As for her parents, Molly hadn’t spoken with them since the hour the cab arrived to take her to the airport in Albany. They called from time to time and spoke to Richard, who reported that Molly was doing wonderfully, had a job, went to classes in her spare time. He said she had even put on some weight. (In fact she had grown thinner, without meaning to, and had lost some of her color as well; Richard wasn’t directly covering this up, since he hadn’t really noticed it.) Their father — it was always their father who made the call — spontaneously invented and then stuck to the implicit fiction that Molly was out, or asleep, or working, every time he called, and thus could never come to the phone.
“Well, give your sister our love,” Roger would say fondly, “and tell her we’re glad she’s doing well.”
“I sure will,” Richard said. Molly sat at the kitchen counter five feet away, blank-faced, as if trying not to be heard. “Bye now.”
From the day of her arrival, Richard had seemed untroubled, cheerful in an introverted sort of way — almost placid; it wasn’t that Molly was unfamiliar with this face of his so much as that she was conditioned to read it as a danger sign, as highs like this generally presaged an angry sulk of some sort. But his calm remained unbroken, and after the first few months she began genuinely to believe in it. Through July she had slept on the living-room couch; once it was clear to everyone that she would be around for a while, the group decided she could share a bedroom with a graduate student in cultural anthropology named Sally. Sally had had her own room in the house for two years, and this new arrangement came with no reduction in her rent. She took it all quite cheerfully, even enthusiastically. She went with Richard and Molly in the van — the house had a van, to which everyone had keys; it must have belonged to one of them, but Molly never learned to whom — to a used-furniture store in Oakland and came back with a foldaway bed. Sally was twenty-four, petite, hipless; she wore cat’s-eye glasses and 1950s thrift-shop fashions — Capri pants, pillbox hats. On some days she looked unnervingly like old snapshots of Molly’s mother.