The Last Worthless Evening (23 page)

“I wish you were happy,” her mother said. “Not that you should be. Today.”

“I will be.”

“You're not just saying that?”

“No. I will be.”

The crow was restless, watching for something.

“I wouldn't want you on the pill. Or an
IUD
. I've read too much about them; heard too much.”

Molly nodded, and the crow spread its wings and climbed, large and glistening black against the blue sky.

“There used to be a rubber generation. I mean boys carried them. Before the pill. But a diaphragm's better. With the cream. It's—”

“Mom.” The crow had risen out of her vision, above the window.

“What?”

She watched the pine tree.

“What's going to happen?”

“I don't know.”

“I mean what's going to happen to me?”

“It looks like—I guess you're going to have your first affair.”

“My first affair.”

“I guess, sweetie.”

“Then what?”

“Maybe you'll learn something.”

“And then I'll get married.”

“Of course you will.”

“So did you.”

“It'll be different for you.”

“Why?”

“You'll know more than I did.”

“About sex?”

“About men. About yourself, most of all.”

“I'm not off to a good start.”

“You don't have to be. You're young. And Molly: this is a shitty time to say it, but I have to. I've let you drink at home. Wine at dinner. A beer sometimes. We even smoked a joint once.”

“Twice.”

“Twice. I wasn't very good at it.”

“Neither am I. I don't smoke it anymore.”

“Really? Not since then?”

“No.”

“
That
makes me feel good. Since they were yours.” Her mother's hand was on Molly's shoulder now, kneading it, and Molly knew from that touch that her mother's voice, when she spoke again, would be friendly, teasing, and it was: “Since you had these
joints
with you.”

“That was last year. I smoked for a while. Then I thought it would be fun to turn you on.” She looked at her mother, and blinked away the distant light and color of the pine against the sky. “To turn on with you.”

“We got awfully hungry.”

“It's dumb. A lot of stuff is dumb.”

“I hope you mean that.”

“Why else would I say it?”

“Sorry. I just want to ask you not to get drunk again. Or stoned, or whatever cocaine does.”

“I told you I won't.”

“I just have to say it. I know you and your friends drink a few beers.”

“That's all. For me. From now on.”

Her mother's arm was around her again, hugging, their temples and cheekbones touching, then pressing too.

“You'll be all right, Molly. You're strong. And you're wise. God, I was a silly, shallow little thing at fifteen.”

Her mother's face moved back, then she stood and, holding Molly's hands, drew her up from the couch, and kissed her forehead, her eyes, her nose, and then her lips, and with that kiss Molly was inside her mother's mind—or was it only her own?—seeing her lips encircling Bruce's cock, and moving down and up, and sucking.

“And you'll be happy too.”

“Yes,” Molly said. “I will.”

THREE

Molly sat at her dressing table, and when the polish on her fingernails had dried dark pink, she licked a finger and moistened an eyelid, chose the green eyeshadow, and colored her skin. When she finished her other eyelid, she lit a cigarette, then leaned forward and brushed mascara up onto her eyelashes. She squinted and with a finger pushed her lashes upward. She spread dark pink lipstick on her lips, then brushed the skin beneath her cheekbones with blush. She took the cigarette from the ashtray and drew on it, watching in the mirror, and as she returned the cigarette to its notch she looked at the lipstick on its filter. That stain of pink on the fawn tip, and the smoke rising between her face and the mirror that showed her brightened lashes and colored eyelids and, on her dark skin, the diagonal brushstrokes of pink rising to her cheekbones, and her lips like rose petals, made her sit erectly, and take a calm deep breath; and she felt that with the inhaled air, and its scents of cosmetics, and the aroma of cigarette smoke, she breathed an affirmation of her womanhood.

Her straightened back and shoulders pushed her breasts against her tight black shirt, so the button pulled against its hole at her cleavage. She did not wear a brassiere, and her nipples shaped the soft cotton of the shirt. They were small breasts, but certainly enough; certainly not flat; their proportion to her chest and shoulders and waist was good.
You're beautiful, you're wonderful
. She held the cigarette angling from her closed lips, and placed her hands on the table, tilted her head to the right, and lowered her face, so her black hair moved to her cheek and the corner of her left eye. Slightly she raised her eyes, watching Molly Cousteau in the glass. She withdrew the cigarette a moment before its lengthening ash changed her image from alluring to slovenly. She upturned a bottle of perfume onto her finger, and dabbed it behind her ears and on the arteries on either side of her neck and on the veins of her wrists. For a while longer she looked at herself, and turned her head from left to right to see fully the turquoise-on-silver earrings at her lobes. She was putting her make-up into her leather purse when she heard Bruce's car turning from the road and climbing the gravel driveway. She stood, in long soft leather boots under the tight legs of her jeans. The boots were dark brown, with high heels and toes that were sharply rounded, but not quite western. She went down the hall and stopped at her mother's door. Her mother sat at her dressing table, her back to Molly; she wore a beige dress and high heels and was applying lipstick. She stood and looked at Molly and said: “I'm glad I'm not one of those jealous mothers.”

“Are there any?”

“So I've heard. ”

“Pretty shitty.”

“I might not think so if you were a few years older.”

“How many?”

The doorbell chimed.

“Ten?” her mother said. “Six? Face it: probably two. The way some of these men are. Is that Bruce?”

“In shining armor. If it's two, why not one?”

“What.”

“Years.”

“Oh.”

“Or none.”

“Because,” her mother said, crossing the room now, pointing the tube of lipstick at Molly, a smile in her mother's eyes, and her lips mimicking scorn. “Because,” she said, stopping, looking down, but with less angle of her neck now; soon, in a year, or two, they would look into each other's eyes. “You are an empty-headed girl. You could not talk to a grown man. You just want to eat junk, and listen to rock music—” But when she said eat junk the smile darted from her eyes, driven out by shame and guilt, and Molly felt them in her own eyes, and quickly said: “And get
stoned
, man; get wasted just all day long. And pop pimples.”

Her mother's eyes, and her own, she knew, showed nothing now; but they would, in a second, and here it was and she felt it in her eyes too: the light of jest and merriment. Her mother said, “You're going to the beach? Don't you want to take a sweater? Or your shawl?”

“Maybe the shawl.”

“Molly? Speaking of shining armor. Make him stop at a drugstore.”

“He already has them.”

“He has them.” It was not a statement; it seemed to want to be a question, but her mother had controlled it, and was thinking now. Molly could see the images in her mind, hear the questions her mother would not allow to have sound:
If you know that, then he showed you or told you, so why fellatio? Or was it afterward? Did he say next time be would have rubbers? Because you— What did you do afterward? Spit it out? Cry? Get sick?

“But he won't need them,” Molly said.

“Molly.”

“I'll be all right.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Should I go and tell Bruce hello?”

“No need.”

“Give me a kiss, then.”

Molly lifted her face and puckered her lips and they kissed, and Molly felt she was kissing from behind glass, not separating their lips but glass between her own heart and breasts.

“Bye-bye,” she said.

“Twelve o'clock, sweetie.”

As she went down the hall and stairs, she wondered how much she had lost or given away last night, or whether she had given or lost anything at all, and most of all she wondered how long she would feel like scattered pieces that were only contained in one body and soul when she was oblivious: asleep or lying in the sun on the hammock with Maria and Robert in Spain, among the smell of pines and the cool breath of dying in the sunlit air. It was her, not her mother; in her mother's eyes and mouth, in her voice and touch, there was nothing of accusation, or shame, or sorrow. Nothing but love, friendship—and yes: alliance, encouragement—in the face that had nearly wept two years ago when, after the birthday dinner, Molly had taken one of her mother's Winstons, and slowly, calmly, had tapped it and lit it: a performance that had concealed her fear of anger or, worse, ridicule, embarrassment; and Molly did not know that night when she gave in to her impulse, allowed it to become a choice that directed her fingers and lips, and still she did not know whether she was testing their friendship, or showing her trust in it.

Bruce stood looking out at the road, not at the screen, not into the kitchen, and tenderly she knew it was a pose, tenderly because at once she knew that he was not certain she would come to the door, and go with him. She stepped out and they stood on the concrete slab, close yet not touching, though her hands, her arms, started to rise and reach out to embrace him, but they stayed tensely at her sides. Then they spoke, the hello and how are you so tentative that quickly they laughed, with reddening cheeks, and they walked to the car, with between them a space, a foot or two of late-afternoon summer air and light that asserted itself, so Molly wanted to penetrate it, thrust her hand through it. But at the front of the blue Subaru they separated.

The interior of the car began to restore her, to draw back into her what had been dispersed. For here there was the ritual of pulling the seat belt over her shoulder and across her hips, watching their four juxtaposed hands pulling straps, pushing them into buckles; and lighting a cigarette and looking out her window and to the rear as he backed down the long driveway and paused, then backed into the road and shifted gears and drove away from the sun; past trees and the dairy farm, to the river, and east on the road where old trees grew on the bank, and across the road mowed hills rose to large houses. She had last seen him in this car, and sitting here in the passenger seat, with Dotty and Wanda in back, Wanda drinking a can of ginger ale and saying oh God it was good she puked, at least she wasn't sick anymore, and if she'd thrown up like that at home her mother might have heard her, and come to see if she had the flu or something, and one smell of her breath and it'd be all over, grounded, probably till she went to college. And she would never drink that much beer again. Never. It wasn't worth it. Bruce took her home first, then Dotty, quietly smoking a joint in the back seat, offering it again and again to Molly and Bruce, holding it between their shoulders, but they said no. At Dotty's house he waited at the curb, as he had at Wanda's, and watched Dotty standing under the lit porch light and unlocking the door and going inside. Then he drove to Molly's. But her house should have been first, it was between his and Dotty's and Wanda's. She was the one, though, who had taken the front seat. He had not arranged that, had only said he would drive the three of them home; he had brought them to the party, so there was nothing there either.

Nothing for any of her friends to see (yet she had chosen the front seat, and had not spoken when he drove toward Wanda's); and she thought and hoped there had been nothing they could see after she and Bruce dressed in the dark and, in a half-bathroom near the foot of the stairs leading to the bedrooms, she combed her hair and lipsticked her new mouth. Or perhaps old. For it felt older than she was, older than her time on earth, as if it had joined the mouths of women long dead, centuries dead, beyond electric lights and houses, all the way back to the dark of tents on deserts, beneath skies whose only light was the stars and moon. Bruce waited outside the bathroom door. When she came out, the light from above the mirror struck his face, and she saw her beauty in his humble eyes, his solemn lips. She switched off the light and moved a hand outward from her side in the dark and it met his moving toward her, and tightly their hands joined as they went through the dark and large dining room and through the kitchen, the bass of the music downstairs pulsing in the floor and the soles of her feet. At the door to the stairs they withdrew their hands, and he opened the door and went ahead of her down the stairs, into the light and music and smoke. As she descended, Molly looked over and beyond his shoulders scanning the people below, but she saw only dancers watching each other, and Belinda, with her back to Molly, standing at the couch across the room, talking to a seated girl, probably Wanda, though Molly could see only the girl's arms spread on top of the couch's back, one bare arm on either side of Belinda. She wondered how long she and Bruce had been upstairs. The first face to turn and look at her was a girl's, straightening up from the ice chest on the floor, twisting the cap from a Miller Lite. She was a senior, and Molly did not know her.

“I like your blouse,” the girl said. “Your singing too.”

“Thank you. I can't really sing. It was the coke.”

“I don't do that anymore. It's dangerous shit. I've got a brother-in-law who's married to it. He's married to my sister too. But it's all shit now. You shouldn't do it anymore. You think these are addictive?” She held up her cigarette. “They're nothing. They'll maybe kill you. But my brother-in-law is soup. Babbling soup. My sister does everything: a job, the house, takes care of the kid. One day she'll walk out. When she sees it's all over. No hope. The asshole will be robbing banks soon, to pay for his shit. Maybe they'll shoot him and she can start living again. Jesus. I made a promise. I'd never
think
about them when I'm drinking. I can't take it, you know?”