Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

  Larry looked up in pained surprise. He lifted a small bag of ice away from his left eye, which was pretty much swollen shut. The Auditors had made him their primary target during the game-ending fisticuffs.

  “You shouldn’t thank me. You should spit in my face.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I couldn’t block that guy. He was killing me all night.” Larry hung his head like a little boy caught misbehaving. “I let you down. I let the whole team down.”

  “Bullshit. You played your heart out.”

  “I’m slow and I’m fat and I let that dirtbag piss all over me.”

  “It’s over,” said Todd. “Just forget about it.”

  Larry pressed the ice bag against his eye and glared at Todd for a few uncomfortable seconds.

  “Don’t fucking tell me to forget it, okay?”

  Todd glanced at his wrist, where his watch would have been if he’d been wearing it.

  “You know what?” he said. “I think I better get going.”

  Todd didn’t think Larry was in any condition to operate a motor vehicle, but he didn’t want to upset him by raising the issue. It was just a short drive home, and the streets were pretty clear at this time of night.

  “I let you down,” Larry repeated morosely, jabbing his key in the general direction of the ignition switch. “That’s what I do. I let people down.”

  Larry handed Todd the ice pack. Without thinking, Todd pressed it to his own injured cheek. It felt good, better than he expected.

  “My family, my teammates, the guys I worked with.” Larry successfully inserted the key and started the van. “Don’t count on me, ’cause I’m gonna let you down.”

  “You’re overreacting,” Todd told him. “Anyone can have a bad game.”

  Larry hesitated before leaving the parking lot. He looked both ways several times, then inched out into the empty street as if merging with rush-hour traffic.

  “Joanie left me,” he announced. “Took the kids and went to her mother’s.”

  “Jesus, Larry. That’s a tough break.”

  “I deserved it. Me and my big mouth.” Todd didn’t ask for elaboration, but Larry provided it anyway. “I called her a fucking whore. Right in front of the kids.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was in a bad mood or something.”

  Larry punched the gas for no apparent reason, accelerating down Pleasant Street as if drag-racing an invisible opponent. His minivan had surprisingly good pickup; the speedometer shot up to fifty in what felt like a couple of seconds. Todd was both startled and relieved when he jammed on the brakes at the intersection with South Street, belatedly obeying a red light. Both men lurched forward and back along with the van.

  “So now I’m fucked,” Larry said. “It’s gonna be lawyers, and custody rights, and child support. Then she’s gonna marry someone else, and some stranger’s gonna raise my kids. That’s what happens to assholes like me.”

  “Maybe you can still work it out. Get counseling or something.”

  “We been down that road. There’s nothing left to talk about.”

  The light turned green. Larry was driving slowly again, as if unfamiliar with the area. Todd felt tired and a little buzzed; he searched his cloudy mind for conversational gambits unrelated to the game or his friend’s domestic troubles. What he really wanted was to talk about Sarah, and the beautiful strangeness of their affair, the way it seemed to fit so perfectly with the contours of his life—the morning and night belong to my family, the afternoon belongs to her—but something told him that Larry wasn’t the right audience for his confession. Then something else popped into his mind, something he’d been meaning to mention anyway.

  “You hear about the pervert? He went swimming at the Town Pool.”

  “What?” Larry whipped his head in Todd’s direction, turning his attention completely away from the road. “Who told you that?”

  “I saw him myself. During the heat wave.”

  “The Town Pool? That place is crawling with kids. Sometimes my boys go there.”

  “It was just that one time. I don’t think he came back.”

  Larry just kept shaking his head and muttering to himself, as if something were very, very wrong. Even before he stepped on the gas and spun the wheel hard to the left, pulling a cop show U-turn in front of the Pet Palace, Todd had already come to the conclusion that he would have been better off keeping his big mouth shut.

  Lately, Kathy had found herself thinking a lot about a particular incident in her past, the moment when she had the first vague inkling that her future and Todd’s might somehow intersect. It happened during the spring semester of their junior year in college, in a class called Sociology of the American Family.

  It wasn’t like they were total strangers. They’d attended the same small school for two and a half years at that point, and shared a handful of mutual acquaintances. They bumped into each other every so often on the compact, bucolic campus, and exchanged the obligatory smiles and slightly labored small talk of people who lived in the same world but had made a tacit decision not to become friends.

  At least Kathy had made that decision, very early in their freshman year. She’d been hearing about this gorgeous football player ever since her first night in the dorm, when she and her three roommates stayed up late, comparing notes about the people they’d met. When Todd’s name came up, it inspired a chorus of ecstatic recognition.

  “Oh my God, did you see him?”

  “He is sooo hot.”

  “Doesn’t he look like that J. Crew model?” the friendly one named Amy asked, glancing at Kathy for support. “The blond guy?”

  Kathy shrugged, unable to offer an opinion. She was the only member of the group who hadn’t caught a glimpse of the magnificent, apparently ubiquitous Todd. Amy’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  “You know what?” she told Kathy. “You should go out with him. You’re like the two best-looking people in the whole class. You’d be, like, the perfect couple. Wouldn’t they?”

  The other roommates agreed, and Todd was immediately designated Kathy’s boyfriend-in-absentia. I saw your boyfriend today, one of them would invariably say. Your boyfriend’s in my bio lab.

  But all it took was a single conversation at a party a few weeks later to convince Kathy that her “boyfriend” would never be her boyfriend. He was handsome, all right, but he seemed less like a person than a type, the epitome of the dashing scholar/athlete, a category whose charms Kathy felt like she’d exhausted in high school. She hadn’t come to college to waste her time with another guy like that, the square-jawed captain of the team, the boy most likely to succeed.

  No, Kathy was through with jocks, weary of the preening and self-congratulation, the minutely detailed recaps of yesterday’s game. She was on the lookout for scruffier, less conventional lovers, artists and intellectuals, unshaven guys in thrift-store paisley shirts who could help her to transform herself into the serious person she meant to become, someone her airheaded high school pals wouldn’t even recognize.

  By the end of her sophomore year, she’d worked her way through a blues guitarist, an abstract expressionist painter, a pothead photographer, and an anthropology major who’d hitchhiked his way across Australia. Each of them was exciting for a while, but once the novelty wore off, she had to admit that the bohemians had just as little interest in actually getting to know her as the football players did. They didn’t want to spend hours discussing the finer points of art history or aboriginal culture; they just wanted to get her stoned and take her clothes off.

  Then, in the beginning of junior year, she met Jason, a short, curly-haired guy whose parents were both history professors at a state college in Wisconsin. He was a fiery, unrepentant Marxist, one of the few on campus, with a passion for social justice and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for conversation. All through the fall, he and Kathy stayed up late into the night, drinking black coffee and talking about politics. They disa
greed about almost everything—Jason believed that the East Germans were justified in building the Berlin Wall, for example, and that a dictatorship of the proletariat couldn’t, by definition, be considered a repressive form of government—but that wasn’t the point. He was the first smart guy she’d ever been with who treated her as an intellectual equal, who listened to her opinions and tried to respond to them with reasoned arguments of his own. He didn’t act like these discussions were mere foreplay, a preliminary to the main event. For Jason, the talking was the main event. He never flirted, never tried to kiss her, and ignored her increasingly unsubtle hints that he no longer needed to be so respectful of her physical boundaries.

  Needless to say, she fell madly in love with him. Once a source of pleasure and excitement, their chaste, endlessly unspooling conversations about Maoism and the Sandinista Revolution became a form of erotic torment. Finally, Kathy couldn’t take it anymore. She got him drunk on vodka one Friday night and took him to bed. The sex was everything she’d hoped for—intense and tender at the same time, full of sustained eye contact and whispered commentary, a physical and emotional dialogue. When it was over, she poked him in the chest and demanded to know what in the world had taken him so long. Jason looked away, scowling with embarrassment.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s stupid.”

  “What? You can tell me.”

  He forced himself to meet her eyes.

  “You’re too tall,” he said.

  She laughed out loud. Was that all?

  “Jay,” she said, “I’m like three inches taller than you.”

  “Closer to four.”

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  Kathy waited for him to echo her sentiment, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “Say what you want,” he said. “It just doesn’t look right when the girl is taller.”

  “Look right to who?”

  “To people. Everybody.”

  “My God,” she said. “You’re a revolutionary socialist. You hand out copies of The Daily Worker. Since when do you care what people think?”

  “It just bothers me, Kathy. People are gonna laugh. And they won’t be laughing at you.”

  “Let them,” Kathy whispered, leaning forward and kissing him. “Let the idiots laugh.”

  They tried to make a go of it, but they didn’t last a month. Jason wouldn’t take her on dates, wouldn’t be caught dead holding hands with her in public or stepping onto a dance floor. Instead of arguing about dialectical materialism, they ended up wasting their time fighting about whether she was trying to “undermine” him by wearing a pair of cowboy boots to Sunday brunch. He finally dumped her on her first day back from Christmas vacation, apologizing profusely as he did so.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said. “I’m probably gonna regret this for the rest of my life.”

  “Then don’t do it,” she said, her eyes welling with hot, humiliating tears. “I’ll throw out the boots. I won’t ask you to dance anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just not gonna work.”

  She was still smarting from the break-up two months later, on that afternoon in sociology when her life veered suddenly in a whole different direction. The professor, a bearish ex-radical with an immense potbelly and a salt-and-pepper-beard, was pacing back and forth in front of the blackboard, on which he’d scribbled the enigmatic phrase, “Gender Expectations/Conflict. Insoluble Problem?”

  “At this particular point in time,” he said, “I think it’s fair to say that we are experiencing an era of definitional instability. The whole concept of a quote unquote just and equitable marriage is pretty much up for grabs. Your generation has no choice but to reinvent the wheel and discover workable new ways for men and women to live together in a long-term domestic relationship.”

  To illustrate his point, he took an impromptu poll of the students, asking how many of them expected to marry and have children. About half the class raised their hands. The professor waited patiently, an amused look on his face. After a brief hesitation, Kathy joined the second wave of future procreators.

  “About three-quarters of you. That sounds about right.”

  Next the professor asked how many women in the room expected to pursue a full-time career during their childbearing years. About half of the prospective mothers raised their hands, Kathy among them.

  “Okay, then,” continued the professor. “That’s a pretty substantial number of women who expect to follow a traditionally male career path. I ask this next question simply out of curiosity. How many of you men would be willing to stay home and raise the kids while your wives go off to work? Change the diapers, take care of the cooking and the laundry?”

  The guys glanced around—many of them were football players, a tribute to the professor’s well-deserved reputation for generous grading and a shockingly light reading load—trading Yeah, right smirks, leading the women to shake their heads and roll their eyes in mock exasperation.

  “Any takers?” the professor asked.

  By that point, though, the whole class was already in the process of turning to face Todd, who was sitting in the back row, between two other football players, all three of them dwarfing their little wooden chair-desks. Unlike his teammates, however, Todd’s hand was raised high over his head, his long arm stretching toward the ceiling.

  Kathy thought at first that he must be joking, pulling a little prank for the amusement of his buddies. Her indifference to Todd had remained constant over the past couple of years, as he fulfilled his early promise to the letter, developing into an old-fashioned B.M.O.C., the object of much swooning speculation and feverish pursuit from the sorority girls and sports groupies who made up the least imaginative sector of the undergraduate female population.

  Oh, grow up, would you? she thought.

  As if responding to this request, Todd looked right at her and smiled. Not the smug, mocking smile she expected, but something sweeter and more complicated, as if he were apologizing for not being the person she thought he was, for failing to embody her low expectations.

  I’m not kidding, his face replied.

  Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occurred. This was certainly the case with the silent communion that passed between Todd and Kathy in sociology class on that dreary March afternoon. The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds, during which Kathy was aware of nothing more than a pleasant sense of possibility, the beginning of an unexpected flirtation. Ten years later, however, as she lay in bed beside her sleeping son, it seemed to her that everything that had happened afterward—the whole course of their lives—had been contained in that single charged moment, Todd’s hand in the air, his eyes on Kathy, almost as if he were volunteering to be her husband.

  “There he is, ladies,” the professor had announced, in a tone of mild but genuine surprise. “There’s the man you’re looking for.”

  The old woman answered the door after the third ring. She didn’t seem unduly surprised to find two men—one of them with a bruised and puffy eye, the other with a bag of ice pressed against his cheek—standing on her front stoop at two-thirty in the morning.

  “What now?” she demanded. Her gaze was sharp and alert; she must not have been sleeping.

  “Good evening, Mrs. McGorvey.” Larry sounded like a polite drunk, the kind of guy who wasn’t fooling anyone but himself. “We were wondering if Ronnie was home.”

  “You leave him alone,” the woman snapped.

  “We just want a moment of his time.” Larry smiled, as if to underscore the modesty of this request. “Just a little chat.”

  Mrs. McGorvey turned to Todd as if he were the one who had spoken. He shrugged, but what he really wanted to do was apologize—for bothering her so late, for the eggs, the posters, the burning bag of shit. The poor woman just looked so sad and ravaged sta
nding there in the doorway, breathing raggedly through her nose, all the indignities of her advancing age nakedly on display—the hamhock arms, the thinning, badly colored hair, the Ace bandages wrapped around her swollen ankles. If she had dentures, they were floating in a glass somewhere. With a certain amount of amazement, it occurred to him that she probably wasn’t much older than his stepmother, who played tennis three times a week and kept standing appointments with a masseuse, an acupuncturist, and a personal trainer. Helena’s dental work alone could have put a couple of kids through college.

  “This is my house.” The old woman spoke firmly, her head held high. “I paid the mortgage, and I say who is and isn’t welcome.”

  Larry cupped his hands around his mouth. His voice sounded playful and commanding at the same time.

  “Yoo hoo, Ronnie! Get your sick, perverted ass down here!”

  Mrs. McGorvey tried to slam the door in his face, but Larry caught it with his foot and kicked it open even wider. A musty odor of hard-boiled eggs and stale ashtrays—the warm, rancid breath of the house—came surging out, mingling unpleasantly with the leafy coolness of the summer night.

  “I’m calling the police,” she said.

  Larry laughed. “I hear they’re well disposed to child molesters.”

  All the air went out of the old woman.

  “Ronnie didn’t hurt anyone. Why can’t you just leave him in peace?”

  “Ronnie didn’t leave that Girl Scout in peace. Do you think he deserves any more consideration than he gave her? And what about little Holly?”

  Before Mrs. McGorvey could reply, Ronnie himself appeared in the hallway behind her, blinking and bewildered, wearing a short-sleeved pajama top over blue work pants. He looked like a loser in the sickly yellow light, a middle-aged dork with a hopeless combover and a slouching, cringing demeanor, as if he expected to be beaten at any moment. It was hard for Todd to connect him with the otherworldly creature he’d seen at the pool, the masked and flippered invader who’d struck fear into the hearts of grown-ups and children alike.