Spring break was approaching, just after exams; John would fly home to endure more questions about the ruin of his future prospects, a ritual which would end with his stepfather Buzz guiltily handing over a big wad of money as John waited for the cab to take him back to the airport. But it was the imminence of those two weeks, during which they wouldn’t see each other, that finally emboldened John to ask Molly on an actual date.
“You know the LaValle’s on the South Side?” he said, his nervousness showing. “Will you meet me there Thursday at about eight?”
Pizza and beer, jukeboxes and shouting; Molly didn’t love it, but she suspected that John didn’t, either, that he took her there because he didn’t want to demonstrate for her the fact that he could afford something nicer. He was waiting for her in a booth, and, unsurprisingly perhaps, for the first few minutes they couldn’t find much to say to each other.
Around them few of the tables were full; there were some solitary diners, people who had probably studied through the serving hours for dinner at the cafeteria, and one round table crowded with what looked like freshmen who evidently had no exams tomorrow and were celebrating by playing drinking games — Quarters, Thumper, Boom Schwartz. The waitress who avoided them wore a shirt and tie and one of those miniaprons.
“So what will you do,” John said, “over the break?”
Molly shrugged. “Not really a break for me,” she said, “strictly speaking.”
“Yeah, but no classes to go to during the day, no … Are your roommates going home?”
“A couple of them,” Molly said, but this was not true, not one of them was leaving the house.
“Your brother?”
“My brother hasn’t been back home since he came out here. It’s a long way to fly for just a couple of weeks,” she said, a little defensively.
The waitress stood on her toes to lean through the serving window. One of the girls at the table full of freshmen chugged a beer while the others chanted her name, the boys with particular vigor, a drunk female being a special kind of desideratum for them.
“Is it okay,” John said, leaning forward on the table, with his eyebrows low, his hair falling into his face, “if I say to you that I worry a little about you?”
Molly stared at him. The thought that rolled through her head — to her instant amazement — was that he was a guy and so she should just take him home and fuck him as a way of killing whatever it was that was growing here, a way of not being taken in by the seeming genuineness of it; and that thought was quickly supplanted by something even more surprising, which was an aching desire to be normal, to be a part of every stupid thing, a desire to play Thumper with a table full of idiots in a public place spending pocket money Daddy sent from home, a pain, in fact, at the idea of being worried about.
John sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve said the wrong thing. Please forgive me. Sometimes I don’t know what to keep to myself.”
Molly started to tell him it was all right, but at the same time she didn’t want their conversation to go any further along that particular path; so she said nothing. Politely, he began talking about himself again.
An hour later, they were done, and the place was becoming noisier. He asked if he could walk her home. But things had been getting strange at the house lately. It was irrational of her, she knew, since he would only be taking her as far as her front door; still, for whatever reason, she didn’t want him to see it. She asked him if she could walk him home instead.
He lived with a roommate in a three-story apartment complex on Bancroft. On his face, when they reached the door to the lobby, was a little amused smile, a look of comic dignity; Molly realized it was because the simple role reversal involved in being walked home after a first date made him as mirthfully self-conscious as if he were in drag. “I had a great time tonight,” he said. “Would you like to come up, have another beer or some coffee or something?” And right then she thought she saw, like a shaft of light coming from under a closed door, all the dates he had ever been on in high school, how conscious he was of what was expected of him, and how much, if she got him into bed, he would enjoy being controlled, being overwhelmed; she could do it, she could lose herself and what she was feeling for him in that clinical administering to him of what she knew he would want, even if he didn’t know it himself.
But she didn’t want to have sex with him. It was a bad and confusing sign. Of course, when she said, “I think I should just get home,” he took it for simple restraint. “I guess I won’t see you for a couple of weeks, then,” he said. And he reached out very gently to where she stood with her arms folded against the chill and touched her very lightly on both elbows as he kissed her.
Something about it, the tenderness of it, upset her; and she thought about what this might signify the whole way home, on the overlit side streets, past the parking garages roofed with artificial turf for soccer games. She was glad she hadn’t slept with him, and she was glad she wouldn’t see him for a while, but she didn’t know the reasons for these feelings. When she got back to the house there were six people, none of whom she had ever seen before, in sleeping bags on the living-room rug. She stepped over them, went to her room, and closed the door.
Some kind of seismic shift, the nature of which she was not made privy to, had taken place in the last few weeks in the house on Vine Street. It now resembled less a home than a sort of base of operations, though what sort of operation it was impossible to say. All day long there were meetings in the house, some involving all the housemates and some composed of just a few; they would stop talking when Molly passed through the room.
Two nights before her date with John Wheelwright, she had come home late from a film-society screening of Knife in the Water. No one seemed to be awake. She tiptoed into the bedroom she shared with Sally, carefully closed the door, and began undressing in the dark. Slowly, as her eyes started to pick out shapes in the dark room, Molly began to feel that something was wrong. Her anxiety spread until finally she reached out to the wall and felt around for the light switch. Sally’s bed was stripped to the mattress; the closet doors and dresser drawers were all open, and every one of Sally’s belongings was gone.
Next morning four of the strangers were at the breakfast table, eating as if late for some appointment; Richard sat at the head. Molly waited until the others had left before asking Richard, her voice scratchy, what was going on.
“Sally’s gone,” Richard said offhandedly.
“Yes I can see that, but—”
“We took a vote, which was unanimous, and asked her to leave.”
“Without any notice?”
Richard shrugged.
“Did she do something wrong?”
Her brother reacted as if this were not a simple question. After a long pause, he said, “It was … I guess you could say more on an ideological plane, but I don’t want to say any more, we all agreed not to discuss it. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make reference to it in front of the others.”
While Molly, who still lived there rent-free, could hardly afford to feel slighted by her brother’s continual use of the word “we,” she began to wonder how safe her own place there really was. As long as she didn’t start antagonizing them — bringing men home, doing drugs, things like that — she supposed they would continue to ignore her as she flew, so to speak, below the radar of their Christianity. Of course, her only real protection was afforded by her kinship with Richard, who seemed more and more, if also obscurely, in charge. If something should happen to cause the others to turn on him, or if he should turn on her himself, then she would have no place to go. She went back to her barren room and thought about it. Not quite twenty years old, she found herself without an attachment in the world she could rely upon, not even within her own family. Calmly she turned over the question of whether or not something was wrong with her.