On a Sunday in late June, Mr. and Mrs. Zemlinsky are in London. A light rain falls, and Roderick, Molly and Natasha are hanging out in Natasha's studio.
Roderick sits on a red cushion on the hardwood floor, reading The Native American Canoe. He figures the book will help him in his summer work at the boathouse. When he's finished reading about canoes, he plans to read The Handbook of Bond Market Analysis and Strategy.
Natasha is wearing a plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, top two buttons unbuttoned, shirt tails out over baggy pants rolled up at the cuffs. Her feet are bare. She stands before her easel, observing, pausing, brushing, brushing, brushing, observing. She works quickly. The canvas is large, taller than it is wide.
Molly wears nothing. She stands posed, weight slightly on her right leg. Her blonde hair is long enough that if she were so inclined, with appropriate arrangement, she could hide certain parts of her body that most girls her age prefer to keep private.
But Molly is not so inclined.
If you wander into the studio, you would note that she is small-breasted, sufficiently so that the casual observer cannot tell when she wears nothing under her shirt (as is her habit). You would also notice that she is tall, with long arms and long fingers; that her hips swell with a graceful curve, and that she is completely blond.
Molly moves with remarkable grace. When she was a child, the Blooms sent her to dance lessons with Miss Duncan, together with almost every other child her age in Beauneville. The dance lessons didn't stick; Molly was much more interested in karate. She won her black belt last year, which Donny Clapper discovered to his chagrin a couple of weeks ago at the Friday night bowling party in Stapleton. Donny, who is Freddy Clapper's older brother, is about nineteen; he decided -- without any encouragement from Molly -- that she was hot for him, and that "no" means "yes". Molly floored him with a left-right combination and a kick to the groin that left Donny writhing on the foul line of lane three.
Roderick was impressed.
Molly is a Cancer, and she will be sixteen in a soon, on Bastille Day. She is the youngest of the three: Natasha, a Capricorn, turned sixteen just before the Zemlinskys moved to Beauneville; Roderick who will be sixteen next week on the first of July, is a a couple of weeks older than Molly. As long as Roderick can remember, he and Molly have done everything together: as toddlers, they toddled together in Beauneville Park; they studied piano together with Mrs. Gabrieli; in every grade at Beauneville Grammar and Beauneville Academy, they were in the same classes, sat next to one another, studied together and walked home together.
Roderick looked up from reading about canoes and looked at Molly. He'd seen Molly in the buff many times, but today, for some reason, she looked..different. Radiant, perhaps, or...Roderick couldn't quite put his finger on it.
"She's like my sister", he thought. "But she isn't my sister." Roderick is really comfortable around Molly, but today, he wondered to himself how she feels about him.
Molly likes Roderick, because he's kind, and thoughtful, and a good conversationalist, and because Molly doesn't feel like she has to say anything at all when she's with him, and because he seems to sense how she's feeling.
Natasha wanted to take a break from painting. There is an upright piano in the studio, and without pausing to dress Molly sat and played the fugue from Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, from memory.
Roderick stood in an alcove on the other side of the studio, by the window, looking out at the light rain falling on the little cottage garden. Natasha exited the bathroom and joined him in the alcove just as Molly began to play the second idyllic section of the fugue. Out of sight from Molly, she snuggled up against him.
Natasha is shorter than Roderick, by several inches. As Molly banged out the cantus firmus just before the final coda, he pulled away slightly and looked at her azure eyes. She didn't look away.
