Now Molly Knows by Merrill Joan Gerber

Author:Merrill Joan Gerber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Now Molly Knows
ISBN: 9781938103254
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1971-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Molly’s employer is apologetic that he was unable to keep her job open. The work was piling up, and he simply could not wait any longer to fill her position.

Molly says she understands. She really doesn’t care. She takes a few things out of her desk, gets her last pay envelope, and goes outside to catch the bus uptown. Instead of getting off at her house, she goes to 77th Street, where Joshua works in his office.

Now it is her turn to look in a window at him. He seems to be standing on some kind of wooden platform, where he walks about writing numbers in white chalk in little boxes on a huge blackboard. From time to time he erases numbers and writes in new ones.

The office is like a little theater with chairs in it; old men and women sit there, watching the blackboard, watching Joshua change what must be the stock quotations.

If this is what happens to people when they get rich, if this is how they spend their time, Molly never wants to get rich. Joshua never gets bored by things that seem boring to Molly; numbers are not so different from music to him. Music is not so different from art, from literature, from history. He only cares about learning things. Sometimes he cares about learning more than he cares about Molly. He often says he is unhappy that he won’t be able to afford to go to a really good college, that his parents can barely manage to send him to the University of Florida in Gainesville, which he will have to settle for. But it isn’t like Harvard.

The fact that he is going away to college in the fall means he is going away from Molly, but he never regards it that way. He is excited about going away. He is tired of high school.

Molly tries to take his enthusiasm about going away to mean that he is tired of living with his family. That she can convince herself of. It is no wonder that when he is trapped at home with them in their small apartment he plays the piano so long and so loud. It is his way of getting on a magic carpet and going elsewhere, where he is not witness to his sister shuffling around half-dressed and blowing smoke rings in his face, and to his mother shouting orders at the top of her lungs.

Molly gives him every benefit of the doubt; if he is too quiet, too unaware, too distant, she tries to understand the reasons. But what she cannot understand is that he was with another girl. How could he? After what he has said to her, after what he has done to her, how could he?

Molly pushes open the door of the stockbroker’s office and takes a seat toward the back of the room. For two hours she sits there silently, hoping no one will question her presence, and she watches Joshua write numbers on the blackboard.

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