by Jonathan Dee
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.
It hadn’t taken more than a week for Molly to figure out that everyone in the house was a Christian. She wasn’t sure if they could all be classified under the term “born again” (though certainly Richard would have to be); some of them might have lived this way their whole lives for all she knew. But they never talked about it, at least not in front of her. It didn’t exactly fit her stereotype of young college Christians; she would have expected them to be all over her. Whatever they did was done in secret, with the exception of Sunday dinner, when they put the leaf in the dining-room table and matter-of-factly held hands to say a long grace before eating. It was the one time during the week when they were all together. Otherwise, what with part-time jobs (they pooled their salaries, along with whatever money some of them still received from their parents), classes, volunteer work, they were all on different schedules; if Molly returned for a nap in the afternoon, when she knew Sally would be in the library – Molly slept a lot now, often for two or three hours in the middle of the day – she never knew who else would be at home. There were few visitors.
She sat in a European History lecture and learned about the assault on the Bastille. Afterwards she went to a coffee shop and sat at an outdoor table, without money to order anything, and watched the scenes of student life at the too-small tables, the uneven stacks of books, the couples stroking each other’s arms, the students with their heads in their hands stubbornly reading Lacan or Derrida, not imagining themselves a part of the general pageant of unburdened youth.
Sally came from Massachusetts. Her parents disapproved of Berkeley and wouldn’t pay any of her tuition or living expenses there; she had a TA job and some financial aid. She talked to Molly about all this when they were in their beds with the lights out, like twelve-year-olds at a sleepover.
The student film societies, screening old movies in lecture halls and auditoriums, were one of Molly’s few affordable pleasures. She spent two or three evenings a week there. Admission for students was a dollar, and of course no one there ever questioned Molly’s status as a student; still, mindful of her finances, she snuck in without paying when she was able. She saw The Sweet Smell of Success for the first time that way, and as the credits rolled she still felt so exhilarated by all that hyperverbal moral viciousness that she decided to stay in her seat for the second show. The guy at the door saw her trying to hide, but he smiled discreetly and didn’t make her pay a second time, or perhaps he knew she hadn’t paid the first time either. Watching a movie straight through just minutes after seeing it before, with everything so fresh in your mind it lost its capacity for surprise, produced, Molly discovered, a new sort of awareness of the people who made a movie: an awareness of the actors on screen as actors, of the technicians and assistants who must have been standing disinterestedly just outside the frame as the stars emoted, an awareness of everything they said as words on a page coming out of someone’s typewriter in a room somewhere. It only made the emotions themselves seem more remarkable to her. People right there at Berkeley, she considered, studied the art and the science of making movies. Of course those were small, intensive, hands-on classes, not the sort of classes you could sneak into undetected. Molly felt a little sorry for herself and her outsider status.
After the lights went up again, she saw someone moving against the tide of departing film buffs, deeper into the auditorium, toward her. It was the guy who took the tickets.
Panicked, her face became still. He sat down beside her and smiled. He wore black jeans and a bowling shirt with the name Dave stitched over the pocket.
“Great flick,” he said. “My name’
s Eric. I’ve seen it like ten times. Have you seen that Barry Levinson movie, Diner? There’s a character in it who does nothing but quote lines from Sweet Smell. Plays a character who never breaks character.” Molly listened carefully through all this banter for any concealed irony which would end with his busting her for sneaking in without paying. But when he finally asked her if she wanted to go get a cup of coffee at Geppetto’s, she realized he was on the level; she let her guard down and said yes.
Eric talked a lot about himself, about movies she hadn’t seen and theoretical journals she’d never heard of, and even though this might reflect badly on him, Molly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Any effort to draw her out, to get her to fill in her own history, would have spoiled the evening for her. He had long black hair but even though he was no older than twenty his hairline was receding. Molly found this satisfying; she liked to see as much as possible about a man when she looked at one, and in that respect at least you could see fifteen years into his future. His glasses were tinted yellow.
“So you’re not in the film-studies major,” Eric said. “I would have recognized you. Are you a freshman?”
Molly nodded – not because she had thought out this lie beforehand, but because it was the response which least obstructed the flow of his talk.
“Live in the dorms?”
“No,” she said, “in a house on the South Side. My older brother is there.”
Eric lived in the dorms, even though he was a junior. Couldn’t stand those roommate situations, he said – eight people, one refrigerator, no one ever cleaning the bathroom.
He started talking about his efforts to get the film society to arrange a guerrilla screening of Titicut Follies. Molly kept her eyes on him while listening discreetly to the conversations at the tables around them, intimate and vehement, couples and circles of friends. Eric’s presence was what made her a part of all that, for the moment. It didn’t feel so bad, though she was puzzled as always by the general practice of going out at midnight in order to have private conversations in public places. Maybe it was a California thing.
“So what I’d like to do now, Molly,” Eric said, “is take you back to my room and make love to you.”
Molly, her attention divided, smiled for a moment before she thought to be startled. Men. Usually you could learn everything there was to learn about them in around five minutes; she knew instantly, for example, that Eric had never used this particular line before, that he’d been waiting, his whole uneventful sexual career, to meet some stranger so he’d have a risk-free opportunity to try it. And whence the idea that this was what women wanted – a frank, take-charge, no-time-for-games man, a man too evolved for pretensions? Was it grounded in anything that had ever happened to him, or in too many evenings in his single dorm room reading Penthouse Forum? She wondered about all those things so sincerely that she very nearly said yes just to see if he would fall over dead with surprise; but she collected herself and said, demurely but unambiguously, no.
“That’s too bad,” Eric said without missing a beat, as if following a script. “Can I have your phone number, then?”
She gave him a false one. But it got her thinking. Not about Eric, but in a more general way about how her invisibility wasn’t as complete as she thought. You didn’t move through the world without being watched. She liked the idea that boys like Eric, boys who just happened to see her on the sidewalk or in a classroom or a store, wanted to take her home and fuck her, conceived fantasies, instant fantasies in which maybe she would melt at a line like “I’d really like to take you to my room and make love to you,” or fantasies involving bringing Molly home to meet their parents for all she knew. The randomness, the variety of these projections was what she liked. They thought they knew her, but they didn’t. She might surprise one of them one day.
Some days she took BART into San Francisco and hiked the windy streets there, panting at the top of each steep block and tasting the salt in the air. There wasn’t much to see. It was more the bracing sense of hurry she liked to feel, the wealth and coldness, knowing she would only be feeling it for a little while. Street life in the big city was much less ironic than in Berkeley. Once near the Haight she came face to face with a group of girls, her age or younger, runaways with a hard, self-reliant glint. Their experience was not that far removed from hers, she realized; but the notion that she had anything in common with them, not an altogether welcome notion to begin with, was killed by the glare they gave her when they decided she had been looking at them too long.
Thanksgiving came; two of the housemates went home for the five-day school break, but that left seven of them, with a faded thrift-shop tablecloth thrown over the same table they ate at every night. None of them really knew how to cook but they threw themselves into it with a slightly hysterical glee, cooking a turkey in the oven whose thermometer was always broken, trying to re-create from a kind of sense memory various side dishes they remembered from their childhoods – creamed onions, candied yams, Roquefort string beans – with no access to any recipe and no reasonable prospect of calling their former homes for the secret. Molly made a Yorkshire pudding which failed to rise in the temperamental oven but tasted all right anyway with enough gravy. They screamed like children as they cooked, and even with a few dishes which turned out so badly they had to go straight into the garbage uneaten, there was still twice as much food as they needed. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to demonstrate for each other the reality of their own constitution as a family. Richard said grace, and it went on for almost three minutes, with plenty of murmured “amens” from the others; Molly, head down, eyes closed, holding Sally’s hand on one side and her brother’s on the other, didn’t mind it at all this time.
Christmas was going to be harder to manage. The house and the city would empty out to a much greater degree, and her sense of her own marginality would be heightened.
Molly had lost fifteen pounds in her months there, without intending to. It wasn’t a matter of poverty. Living away from home simply meant a different relationship to food; meals came not according to relentless schedule but only when you felt hungry enough to get up and do something about it.
She stood up from her table at the Soup Kitchen, late one morning in December, and fainted on to the floor. She came to after a few seconds with a cook wearing a filthy apron and a hairnet gingerly lifting her arms over her head. The waitress put a paper napkin to Molly’s brow and when she pulled it back Molly saw it was saturated with blood.
“You need to get this looked at,” the waitress said. “What happened to you? Did you just stand up too fast or something?” She was probably a student herself, Molly thought, working her way through college, toward whatever was on the other side of college, her hair in a clean ponytail. Molly wanted to go home with her.
“I guess that’s it,” Molly said, though that wasn’t it; she didn’t want to let on that she was at the point of tears herself.
“Do you think you can get to UHS?”
University Health Services.
“I’m not a student,” Molly said, taking the handful of balled-up napkins the cook held out to her, apologetically handing him the old, blood-soaked ones. Her head was throbbing.
She started to feel dizzy again. The cook and the waitress exchanged a look.
The cook, who was almost off his shift anyway, wound up driving her to the free clinic in Oakland, about twenty minutes away. She did her best to keep her blood off the upholstery of his battered car. This was her first impulse, to gather up any evidence that anything had happened to her at all. He offered halfheartedly to wait with her; she thanked him profusely for the ride and he drove away.
Inside the waiting room, where she would spend the next two hours, Molly got a clear picture of her situation, a picture made clearer – the ways dreams are sometimes startlingly clear – by the feverish wooziness that came over her in waves even after she was certain the bleeding had stopped. Twenty-one people waited ahead of her, or appr
oximately one for each of the turquoise molded-plastic chairs ranged in immovable rows before the receptionist’s empty window. They were people for whom waiting was obviously a condition of life; apart from two children who noisily passed a Cabbage Patch doll back and forth across their mother’s motionless lap, the place was deathly silent. Even the two men who were clearly deranged did little to disturb the atmosphere of timelessness, mumbling quietly, directing their animated gestures to the air. And the smell: alcohol and disinfectant and some other familiar smell like wet wool weaving in and out through the frank human stench. Each person’s complaint was invisible to the disinterested; Molly was the only one there actually bleeding. No one took any special notice of her, though, and she waited for her turn.
The doctor was Malaysian, and he was the unfriendliest medical professional Molly had ever encountered: not simply brusque or overtired but outright hostile, seemingly adrenalized by sarcasm. He sewed five stitches into her head and told her that she was seriously anemic. She needed to eat more, he said, and on top of that to take some sort of iron supplement, at least for a month. He said these things in a spirit of self-justification; it was clear he didn’t expect his instructions to be followed, nor did he care if they were. The stitches were the dissolving kind, he said; no need for him to see her again.
Molly was all the way out to the parking lot before it occurred to her that she had no way to get back to Berkeley. She wasn’t even really sure where she was. She didn’t have enough money for a cab; the only thing to do was to call the house and have someone come over in the van, but even if someone was home, and the van happened to be there, how could she provide directions so that she could be found? In her pocket she found change for a phone call; the coins, somehow, had blood on them. She caught sight of a phone booth on the sidewalk a few hundred yards away, but when she reached it she saw it had been stripped, down to the colored wires. No other phones in sight. Molly walked back to the clinic, stuck her head through the window and asked if she could use their phone to call for a ride. The receptionist banged the phone down in front of her without a word.