Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  Molly tried her father, but no answer. She smoked half a cigarette and then went into the bookstore. It felt empty, but she knew it wasn’t. The clerk, a man with a lumpy, unshaven face, was reading at the counter. He didn’t notice her.

  Andrew was in nonfiction, evaluating who to option.

  “Did you get ahold of him?”

  “No luck.”

  “I was wondering,” Andrew said. “Who do you think he voted for?”

  “It’s not something we talk about.”

  “You don’t talk about politics?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not ever?” Andrew asked.

  “Not in years.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was a point of contention.”

  “So, who your father voted for in the presidential election is a total mystery to you?”

  “If you want to call it that,” she said.

  “What would you call it?”

  “I would call it something I don’t know,” Molly said. “Not a mystery.”

  When friends asked her about her father, she had a cute line stored up. “He’s like Jack Nicholson,” she’d say. “He doesn’t do TV interviews.” The line implied that John was distant and cool, but what Molly actually meant was that he didn’t talk very much and that he scared her. People enjoyed the Nicholson reference to the point where they didn’t notice she’d evaded the question. She wouldn’t have to say how one time when she was six her father took her to the grocery store and forgot her there. She wouldn’t need to explain how he used to drink, but sobered up, and blah, blah, blah, everything’s fine now.

  “Who did your parents vote for?” Molly asked.

  “Obama, of course,” Andrew said. “They were at the fundraising dinner we threw. They donated fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Well, there you go,” Molly said.

  “What does that mean?” Andrew asked, but she’d already moved on to the fiction aisle.

  She went to the W’s to see if Greg’s novel was there. As usual, it wasn’t. Because there was little demand, nobody bothered to stock The Last Century. It was only on Amazon, priced at a nickel. He’d done a terrible job promoting it. She’d told him via text he needed to get an op-ed in the Times. Didn’t he have an essay lying around he could get published? Couldn’t he show his ass a little? He’d written back a quote about silence, exile, and cunning. In reply, she’d lol’d for the first time in her life.

  Molly turned the corner at the end of the alphabet, and went to the other side of the bookcase. She started over again at A. From high school, she remembered To The Lighthouse, remembered the father who’d conceived of his intelligence as an alphabet, like a scale, or an odometer, but with letters instead of numbers. What had been the letter he was anguished to remain at? R? M? She’d thought it was the saddest part of the book, that someone should think of his life that way.

  The bell above the bookstore entrance announced someone. Molly browsed C, D, E. A tall woman with a giant forehead walked up to her. Molly stepped back. The woman was white with blue eyes. She was in her early forties. Her dirty blond hair fell to her shoulders. There were a lot of freckles going on.

  “You think all white people are racist, huh?” the woman bawled at Molly. Old spittle the size of tiny Quaker oats dislodged from the corners of her mouth. “You think people forgot you said that? You think you get to say some stupid shit like that, and then go back to your fancy life, you Hollywood whore slut?”

  Molly continued retreating as the woman shouted. She was two body lengths away. She jammed her shoulders, arms, hands, and the back of her head into the four shelves of the poetry section.

  The woman hopped toward a nearby shelf. First, she pulled, then she knocked, and finally she swept all the books off the shelf to the floor.

  “Yes, we can!” she mock-chanted. “Who are you callin’ racist? That’s on you! You’re the one who’s racist! Happy Father’s Day!”

  * * *

  Molly wanted to jump in the Land Rover and get the hell out of there, but they couldn’t.

  “Technically,” the bookstore guy said, “you’re also a witness. It would be a different matter if the perpetrator was still around. But she was so fast. Did you see her? She was like a cheetah. Some of these books are—I mean, look at these covers. I can’t sell these. They’re all bent. That’s property damage. I’m an employee. I represent the owners. I need to file a report. You can do what you want, but you have to stay here.”

  The bookstore guy’s face had changed. The entire situation had given him his zest for life back. He looked ten years younger. His skin was taut and brilliant. Waiting around for the police was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. Molly played second fiddle to heroism.

  “I saw your last movie,” he said, leaning across the counter. “It was pretty okay.”

  “Alright,” she said.

  The guy went to the door and flipped the sign to CLOSED: BE BACK IN 10 MINS.

  “Who are you?” he asked Andrew.

  The cop was young, white, and in possession of a firearm. It was right there on his hip. You couldn’t miss it. He also had a lightning bolt tattooed in black around his right bicep, a pair of gold aviator sunglasses on, and a scar that ran down the left side of his face seemingly from his eye to his chin like a wobbly line a child might have drawn. His face made Andrew’s face seem inert—like who was this husband? like what did he bring to the table?

  “What’s the story?” the cop asked. In Bono fashion, he kept his sunglasses on. They all did that. It was a neat little trick of the eye. Who could look in? Nobody. Meanwhile, he was a camera. What sort of psych training did police go through? Were they like hairdressers? Did they attend classes concerning the aura of their power? In her research, Molly had learned the answers to these questions.

  The bookstore guy explained the situation. The cop hated him. Everybody felt it. Every time he said anything remotely boring, the cop scanned around the store. He didn’t seem to be paying the slightest attention. Andrew kept his mouth shut.

  “And you’re not pressing charges?” the cop asked Molly.

  “No,” she said. “It’s—I don’t know. It’s—”

  “Complicated,” the cop said. He took off his sunglasses and looked right at her. From the scar, his left eye was slightly pinched in the outer corner. It was impossible that he didn’t know who she was. “I understand,” he said. “Why don’t you show me where it happened. Show me these books on the floor.”

  She led him across the hard bookstore carpet to the scene of the crime. They looked at the novels scattered everywhere. Who were these people? Where did they come from? What did they want? The cop crouched down on his haunches. He plucked a dark red novel up by its cover using his thumb and pointer finger. It dangled in the air in front of his face.

  “My sister’s a big reader,” he said.

  “What does she read?” Molly asked.

  “I don’t know,” the cop said. “She’s twelve.”

  “Is she smart?”

  “She’s average,” he said. “Maybe slightly above. What did this woman look like? Can you give me a description?”

  Molly did. She said the word forehead.

  “Big forehead?” he asked. “Lots of freckles?”

  “Tons.”

  “Like all over the place?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Nose? Cheeks? Chin?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I think I know who we’re dealing with.”

  They gathered at the discount table. To make an arrest, as the bookstore guy insisted, the cop said Molly would need to identify the woman.

  “Since you aren’t going to file a complaint for harassment,” he said, “all you are is a witness to the crime of her knocking books off a shelf.”

  “Several shelves,” the bookstore guy said.

  “Whatever,” the cop said. “I just need you to point her out to me. You won’t even have to leave the car.”
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  They put Andrew in the backseat of the SUV cruiser. It was a whole other world back there. He was like if luggage could talk. Nobody up front cared. The bookstore guy had wanted to come, but the cop gave him the face that said no fucking way. Molly loved the doo-hickeys all over the cruiser’s dash. She’d done twenty ride-alongs with various cops in East LA. You could push a button and light up like a disco ball. They drove east on a road coursing through a forest of black and dark green. The channels of your brain underwent a re-org in a cruiser. The world deadened somewhat. You were more alive. All objects were isolated and alone against the backdrop of reality. Cars. Houses. Road signs.

  “Lots of Confederate flags,” Andrew said. “And totem poles. I’m seeing both out here.”

  The static voice of dispatch announced a 417K.

  “Somebody has a knife,” Molly said.

  The cop turned his entire head to look at her. He kept it that way for a beat longer than was safe, and then he went back to the road.

  “How about a 211?” he asked.

  “Robbery.”

  “451?”

  “Arson.”

  “5150?”

  “A crazy person.”

  “602?”

  “Trespassing.”

  “Okay. Okay,” the cop said. “Here’s one. I’ve got one. What’s a 422?”

  “A terrorist threat.”

  “Holy moly,” he said.

  He asked her about the movie she was going to be in. She told him the plot.

  “Sounds good. I like mysteries. I’m always watching a detective show,” he said. “But you know what I got into over there? Classics. Black-and-white stuff. A guy in my unit went to film school. He was a godsend. You can’t just sit around watching Transformers over and over again.”

  Half the cops she’d been assigned to on her ride-alongs were vets. She’d had to quickly learn how to talk with them. It was a whole different language, much of it unsaid.

  “Where were you deployed?”

  “Two tours in Iraq. One in Afghanistan.”

  “Nice to see you.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Then you changed the subject.

  “What classics?” she asked him.

  “All sorts. But if you ask me who my favorite is, I’d have to say Bergman. That guy is super fucked up. Excuse me, ma’am.”

  He took the cruiser down what looked more like a horse path than a road. They rolled and dropped among the giant divots. The house was a very normal affair. It was one of those sea-green ranch styles a Mack truck had delivered. A blue minivan and a red Saab were parked at angles in the yard.

  “I’m not going to arrest this woman,” the cop said. “If you wanted to file charges, I would. But you don’t. Is that right? Am I understanding you?”

  “That’s right,” Molly said. “It would be a whole thing.”

  “Understood,” he said. “Bookstore guy is only an employee. He’s not the owner. If the owners want to press charges, I’ll come back out here. I’ll take five or six hours out of my day to arrest her, process her, and file the paperwork. I don’t have time for that today. It’s Father’s Day. My kids are making me pancakes for dinner. I’m just gonna get her out on the porch and nod to you. I need to let her know that we know. If people do this sort of thing and get away with it, it’s all they ever do.”

  He gathered his ledger and called in his position to dispatch.

  “One last thing,” he said, hand on the door. “Why was she so offended? Why was she so angry?”

  “Because of an interview I gave a million years ago.”

  “In which you said what?” he asked. “Specifically?”

  “In which I said seventy-five percent of white Americans are racist,” Molly said.

  “Sorry!” Andrew chirruped from the back.

  The cop turned around and looked at Andrew. Molly still liked the scar on his face. She didn’t know about his smile.

  “For what?” he asked.

  HOME 2011

  6

  HER MOTHER WAS IN THE kitchen. Molly listened to her from upstairs. Sarah was loading the dishwasher, arranging and rearranging the plates. She heard a series of beeps, a pause, and then her mother say “Oh, dear. Oh, no Wait… there we go.” The machine went to work, and her mother began to hum. These were the sounds Molly had been hearing all week, and they irritated her in the easy manner of a grown child’s judgment. She sometimes thought her mother had given up on complexity, had let go of a more demanding engagement with the world, and that this letting go had made her strange. Back home in Vermont, Sarah used an ancient Mr. Coffee every morning, even though Molly had sent her at least a dozen far superior machines, often two or three at a time, so that her mother could pick and choose from among them and send back those she didn’t like. Instead, Sarah gave them away to friends or donated them to local businesses. The fact that she’d explicitly asked for a new coffeemaker never seemed to register; once they were delivered, Sarah was afflicted with an historically New England guilt. “What do I need those fancy things for?” she’d ask. And yet, whenever Sarah came to Los Angeles, she absolutely loved using Molly’s “fancy things,” like the German-made dishwasher and the Italian dual-shot espresso machine, and raved about them as if only movie stars like her daughter owned such luxury items, marveling every time, “Would you look at that,” as the automatic window shades descended on the night.

  Molly guessed it was only age, but she couldn’t get used to her mother’s gee-whiz behavior during these visits. Her behavior, and the fact that whenever Sarah came to California she liked to get drunk, but only once per trip, and only on red wine. That night, on the eve of the awards, she’d gone ahead and done that, invoked, as Molly had come think of it, her privilege. Sarah was in rare vacation form, and had developed, after a second glass of Malbec, a competitive, even mean streak. With a wave of her hand, Molly flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and went back downstairs to see what the hell her mother was doing.

  “The Twelve-Year-Old shouldn’t even be nominated,” Sarah said. She was sitting on the couch, glass of wine in one hand, remote in the other. The TV was off because she couldn’t figure it out. “Something like that shouldn’t even be allowed. Doesn’t the Academy have rules? They should. It should be eighteen and over. Or twenty-one. You shouldn’t be able to get a nomination unless you can drink.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Molly said. “Who would play those parts?”

  “What parts?”

  “The kid parts.”

  “The kids would,” Sarah said.

  “But they can’t get nominated?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Not even if they’re good?” Molly asked. “Like great? Like this kid?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “Not even.”

  They were sitting on opposite ends of a couch in the second largest living room. Below them was the canyon. Below that was Hollywood, and in the distance downtown LA. The skyscrapers glowed blue and dark green at their edges. This living room and the kitchen were the only two downstairs spaces Molly Bit occupied. There was another, larger living area, and the smaller one, and the two dining rooms, and five spare bedrooms with their own separate baths. There was a room that had nothing in it but old promotional items like posters and T-shirts and a large cardboard cutout of Molly in a red leather trench coat. There was also a special twelve-seat screening theater with a digital projector. The fact was, Molly only ever used those rooms when she had company, which wasn’t often. One of these days she would move, she told friends. She was working on it. But who had the time?

  At the end of the year—in between the divorce being finalized and the publicity swing before the nomination—Molly experienced a month off, the first of her adult life. Initially, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She kept busy with meetings at the agency, or at one of the studios, and every day there seemed to be five or six new places to eat lunch. This involved driving out to Malibu or down i
nto Beverly Hills, arriving at enormous fortresses. Molly realized these social outings were unified by the theme of driving around by herself for hours. When she thought of her private life, when she imagined its true parameters, this was what she saw, and maybe what she preferred.

  Because it was expected of her, she went on a few dates. One had been with a late-night television host, the other with a young, ridiculously attractive actor she’d played opposite in a poorly received thriller. Both evenings felt weirdly official, as if they’d been staged for any number of cameras that weren’t there. Molly was thirty-seven. Both men were younger than her. They didn’t make her feel old so much as profoundly uninterested in youth. Although she looked twenty-nine, she felt eighty. She’d gone ahead and slept with the actor, and everything but for her orgasm seemed ridiculous. She kept waiting for him to say his mom was a big fan.

  “It doesn’t matter,” her mother said. “The Twelve-Year-Old doesn’t have a chance. All she did was die for two hours.”

  “People love that,” Molly said. “They love dying kids.”

  “But she didn’t even die!” Sarah said. “She got better! What’s that about? She dies in the book.”

  “They always die in the book,” Molly said. “Death’s different in books. Who cracks a novel and thinks, ‘Oh, yeah, this’ll work out’? Name one great book where a major character doesn’t die? You can’t. They all die.”

  “She’s not going to win, is what I’m trying to say,” Sarah said. She topped off her wine and took a long sip. “That just leaves the other three. The Legend. The Nun. And The Prostitute.”

  “Who am I?” Molly asked.

  “You’re The Mother,” Sarah said. “You’re The Wife. What did The Nun say?”