Susan Taylor Chehak

How about we skip the once upon a time, for now? That, and who she was and where she was born, how she grew up with her mom (accountant) and her dad (actuary) in a world of numbers and dates and formulas and facts with one living sister (Janet, seven years older) and one dead brother (Horace, the infamous unborn twin) in a smallish brick house in Nowhere, New York, with trees in the yard (maple and oak) and bushes by the windows (juniper) and flowers in the garden (roses, lilies, irises) and one of those quilted covers over the toaster that matched the oven mitts above the stove – just to give you a feeling for Mrs. Mifflin and her sense of style (toilet seat covers, refrigerator magnets, pastel sweater sets, sensible shoes). How about instead we go right to the point of where she found herself at the end of the story, all out of options with nowhere to turn, because she'd already done everything that she could think to do to put things right again when they had all gone so terribly, and to her mind tragically, wrong.

Which was: holed up in the student lounge of the creative writing program in the English Department on the third floor of the Bell Building at the Stanley Hall Women's College in Brevity, Minnesota – Veritas Odit Moras – with the triple loop of a ping-pong ball bomb collar hanging around her neck like a string of oversized pearls on a little girl playing at pretend, which is pretty much what she was. Except that this was not a game, it was real.

One flick of the Bic, and ka-boom.

What else do you want to know?

Her name was Mollie Miller Mifflin, and maybe you've already heard of her, because she did gain some notoriety after what happened, but it's important to understand that before that she was no one. She was seventeen years old at the time of her crime – if it was a crime, and that's still up for debate, whether Mollie is the hero of her story or its villain – and she had never been in any kind of trouble before. That's not to say she wasn't everything her mother always believed her to be, which was a liar and, now and then, a thief.
We can tell you this: she never meant for it to go as far as it did. She had always hoped that someday she'd be famous (doesn't everybody?), that she'd do something big, something important, something that would make people sit up and pay attention. That she'd be someone, somehow, and yet never in the wildest of her wild dreams did she ever imagine that it would have come to the crisis that it did and become the legend that it has. But there it is. The truth won't wait.


o0o


The facts as we know them are these: a certain Ms. Mollie Miller Mifflin was in the employ of Mr. and Mrs. Deacon Molene at the time of what everybody thought and said was their collapse. She'd been working for them for about three months by then, since the start of summer. Job title? Housekeeper. Caretaker. Companion. Job description? Do whatever there was that needed doing. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, mending, minding. You name it, and it was Mollie's to do for them.
The arrangement that they had was not exactly a formal one, because that's not how it happened. And it wasn't something that she was trained to do, either – she would be the first to admit that. Quite the opposite. If Mollie was trained to do anything it was to keep to herself and stay out of the way, not be the one whose responsibility it was to get everything done to make sure that somebody else was fed and warm and clean and dry.

She was nobody's mother (yet), and she was not a nurse, either. There is no evidence to suggest that she ever explicitly claimed that to be her profession, to the Molenes or to anybody else, although it's possible that some assumptions were made and then left to stand, without any denial or correction from her. She did wear a uniform sometimes – that's been documented – so maybe that made it seem like the position was more legitimate than it actually was? Or maybe it made it seem like she was pretending to be someone that she was not.

That uniform was all her own doing. She has admitted to that, too. Nobody asked her to wear it. Nobody told her to wear it. That was all her own personal choice, of her own personal devising.

At one point she found herself wishing she could show it to her mother, but that was clearly just wishful thinking, and even as much as she might have wanted to, Mollie was not about to spend the money to call and say, "Hey Mom! I have a job and I wear a uniform and I know what I'm doing and people trust me!" because she knew her mother would not get it, and even if she did she wouldn't have cared, not really. Or worse, she wouldn't have believed Mollie anyway.

Nevertheless the uniform did mean something to her, which maybe makes it sound more complicated than it was. Mollie just liked the phony white fabric. She liked how it was clean and slick and easy to take care of, too. Wash warm. Drip dry. Cool iron, if you must. It was important-looking. Serious-seeming. And if you want to know the truth, she liked how it looked on her, too. She had a classic figure. Very small waist. Long legs. Full hips. Nice breasts. Emily had been heard to say more than once that to her Mollie was the very picture of an angel.

She bought the whites at the Green Square Swap Meet that they have in downtown Brevity every Sunday in summer. On her days off Mollie prowled the church bazaars and tag sales around town and because Number One, she was a frugal person (thanks Mom) and Number Two, she knew a good bargain when she saw it (thanks Dad), she was able to outfit herself quite well while she was in Brevity and nobody was the wiser. Plus, Number Three, Mollie had no living expenses to speak of that time (thanks nobody but herself). She worked hard to pay her way. She did what she had to do, and she was very good at her job.

Mollie was not able to tell anyone where the woman who sold those uniforms to her got them for herself, because the fact is: she never asked her about it. For all Mollie knew, they weren't even hers in the first place. Or if they were, she had definitely grown out of them, and probably so some time ago. Maybe the woman used to be a nurse herself, when she was younger, or thinner. Or maybe she had a daughter who had been a nurse and then she died of something that she picked up from one of her patients and now the mom was trying to get rid of her daughter's old stuff, for which she had no use anymore, and make a little bit of money from it at the same time. To pay for the casket and the funeral and the flowers and whatnot.

That whole train of thought brings up some other questions, though, ones that may or may not be important. Such as: Are nurses allowed to sell their old uniforms? And: Is wearing a nurse's uniform some kind of an impersonation? And: Could a person get in trouble for impersonating a nurse? If so, it probably doesn't matter anyway, because that's definitely not the worst thing that Mollie had ever done.


o0o


The Molenes weren't looking for help when Mollie showed up to become just that. In fact they didn't even know they needed it until there she was, on their doorstep one night, an apparition that came to them out of what as far as they were concerned might as well have been the blue. Hungry and cold, because she'd been on the road for several days already by then, riding on a Greyhound bus from Erie to the St. Paul, with a hitchhike at either end and three stop-overs along the way.

Mollie's thought was that Emily would take one look and know how much she loved her, she'd be so happy to see her, she'd take her in without a moment's hesitation, and then they'd have this perfect little family, the family of Mollie's dreams. Maybe there would even be other kids, Emily's own children, a bunch of brothers and sisters for her to have to contend with. They'd be jealous at first, but then when they got to know Mollie better, they'd realize that she was no threat to anything and then they'd come to count her as one of their own. But by the time she actually got there, it was way too late for any of that. A lifetime too late. Too much time had passed already, and Mollie was too young and Emily was too old. Deek, too. Besides, there weren't any children anyway. Never had been.
Mollie tried. She did the best she knew how. But it was impossible, and before she knew it, the whole thing had just gone too far. That was not her fault.

It was early summer and a storm had rolled in over the plains on its way to the mountains far away, so it was raining – the kind of blind solid downpour that stops just as suddenly as it starts – and Mollie was soaked. In fact, she was a mess in all kinds of ways at that time. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair, as her grandmother had been heard to say. Of herself, of course, not of Mollie.

She had hitched from Nowhere to Erie, in the dark and all alone, just a girl, with nothing but her own wits to keep her safe from harm. A nice woman in a family van stopped and offered her a ride and then turned around and scolded her for accepting it, going on about how she used to bum rides when she was in college but that was then and this is now and you can't trust anybody anymore (though it seemed she was having no problem trusting Mollie), until finally she let Mollie out at the bus station, with another warning to be careful and pay attention and don't talk to anybody, especially not if he's a man. Either it was a while before this lady missed the two twenty dollar bills from the wallet in her purse or she didn't want to admit to her own vulnerability, because Mollie never saw her again, although she did spend four more hours at the station waiting for the bus to come in, and by the time she'd begun to feel the stab of remorse and think about somehow giving the money back, she was long gone and it was too late for any of that. By then it was the middle of the night and so far away from Nowhere that Mollie didn't even know where she was anymore. More no one and nowhere than she'd ever been before. She half expected that her family might be looking for her, that her mother would be sorry when she saw that Mollie had left not just her house, but the town altogether, but that didn't happen (more wishful thinking), so it looked like Mrs. Mifflin was as glad as she had always told her younger daughter she would be that the girl was gone and out of her hair.

Mostly it was uneventful, but the one good thing that occurred on that trip was that Mollie experienced her first real mindreading episode – after all those fruitless months of lessons and hard work and practice at it – and when it finally happened she realized that she'd been doing it all wrong, all along. She had been calling it mindreading, but that was a total misnomer, misleading in its implication that what she was supposed to do was use her intuition to read other people's minds and so that way she could come to know what they were thinking. You see, she thought if she could learn to do that, then she would know just what they wanted, and then maybe she could find a way to give it to them somehow, whatever it was – if it wasn't too expensive, that is, and if it wasn't something that would bring misery to someone else – and then they would be happy. This was how Mollie Mifflin was going to save the world. She figured the more people who were happy, the fewer people who would be unhappy, not only because their own minds had been changed but also because that made them nicer to everyone else around them. Like a virus, she thought, such happiness couldn't help but spread.

But what Mollie learned, there in the dark on that bus on a highway from Nowhere into nowhere, was that she wasn't the one who was supposed to read other people's thoughts, it was other people who were supposed to read hers. By her sending them out strong enough and in just the right way so that the other person would be able to hear it and pick it up. It wasn't clear what good that did them, whether it would make anybody any happier if only they could know what Mollie was thinking, unless what she was thinking was about how good and beautiful and perfect they were – which was, most of the time, a big enough challenge in itself, never mind sending such thoughts out loud and strong enough that they might have a chance of being overheard. No wonder it was so hard.

You know when you stare at the back of someone's head and then eventually they snap to and turn around and look at you? Like that. Or when you're thinking about someone you haven't thought about for a long time and then all of a sudden the phone rings and there they are, telling you they've been thinking about you, too. It wasn't mindreading that was Mollie's psychic talent. It was mindwriting. Or to put it another way, it was mind control.
This was a tremendous revelation to our girl. So huge it almost made her turn around and go back home to try again. Because once she had it figured out, well that changed everything. Once she knew what she was supposed to do, then she also knew what she was going to have to do to practice getting better at it.

The mind belonged to an endomorph. Female, maybe forty years old, black hair, blue eyes, medium height, 250 pounds and all that goes with that – shortness of breath, diabetes, high blood pressure, varicose veins inking the insides of her thighs. She had taken the aisle seat next to Mollie, who honestly had no prejudice against her for her size, per se. Mrs. Mifflin happened to be a fat woman, too, and Mollie's sister and her aunt Lucy – those three of the most important women in her life, all of them were overweight in their own way. No, it was that she was taking up more than her fair share of the seating area and her skin was deathly white and, where it touched Mollie's, clammy and cold. Soon she was sleeping. Mollie stared at her. She thought daggers: "Go away. Go away. Go away. You don't want to sit next to me. You don't want to be here." And then, two hundred miles later, at the next stop, the woman woke up and she got off, just like that. So maybe that proves something. Whether we think so or not, the point is, Mollie believed it did.