Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  Or the struggle might erupt after dinner, or on a Saturday between soccer and sundown: something Kate could avoid if she wanted to, really wanted to, but she doesn’t. She defies him; she challenges him; she makes a face; she shrugs or swears. She has a hunch that what he’s doing is changing her, inventing her, and that his slaps and pushes (never exorbitant, generating only a discreet bruise or two, an upset stomach) will make her into something valuable and durable and refined.

  Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, she and Rudy pack an Indian blanket and a joint and a six-pack and venture out to the park. They lie on the blanket and pass the joint back and forth and look up at the stars.

  Rudy says, “I saw on the Learning Channel the other day that in a billion years there won’t even be any human beings left.”

  He is living at home during his year off and working construction in a volunteer capacity on a housing project for the city. He has become political and civic-minded. This stance has given him a certain confidence, has counterbalanced his academic struggles. He unwinds at night with a joint or two and has consequently lost some of his exuberance in bed.

  “Oh, don’t talk about that,” Kate says.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s sad.”

  “There’s evidence that we’re bad for the planet.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should.”

  “We like it here. Maybe the Learning Channel is wrong.”

  “Everything changes eventually. It’s evolution.”

  “Huh.”

  “Let’s make out and then get you home.”

  He puts out the joint. Under cover of a second blanket, he goes down on her, then pushes into her. Somewhere nearby, years ago, Nelson Young raped the Hellerman girl. Kate closes her eyes. She imagines herself as Matilda, Rudy as Nelson. It’s exciting, but it wouldn’t be, she decides, if it were really happening. Kate and Rudy gather up their things and he walks her to her house and her front door. In the window of her father’s study, the light is on.

  “I’ll go in with you,” Rudy says.

  “No, don’t.”

  “I should.”

  “No. He’s working.” She can still feel Rudy inside of her; her vaginal canal buzzes with that particular sensation. Tears fill her nose. “It’s fine. I don’t want to argue about it.”

  Inside, she makes a racket—locking up, dropping her key in the china bowl, rummaging around the kitchen, procuring Oreos from the highest cabinet shelf. She stands and eats the cookies at the counter, taking them apart and licking the vanilla cream off the chocolate wafer. She leans her elbows on the counter and listens for her father. The typewriter clacks and Edith Piaf sings incomprehensibly of love as he labors, forges his ideas, excavating precious metals from his brilliant, cavernous mind. Eventually the study door opens and closes and his feet sound in the hallway and he enters the kitchen through the swinging door.

  He looks at the Oreos, then at her body. She’s gained some weight since Rudy became a pothead. He comes right up next to her to the sink for a glass of water. She hoists herself up onto the counter and sits there next to the open pack of Oreos. He sips the water and pauses. He leans toward her. He sniffs.

  “You’ve been smoking something,” he says.

  She breaks an Oreo apart and looks at the two halves.

  “Have you been smoking pot?”

  “What do you think?”

  She nibbles around the circumference of one Oreo half, the one with the vanilla cream stuck to it. She slouches on the counter. She waits to be pushed or pulled off.

  “Are you all right?”

  She shrugs and slouches. Her nose fills again.

  He puts his hand to her cheek. And then he does lift her off the counter, but instead of shaking or smacking her he hugs her. This is terrible, embarrassing, almost as uncomfortable as the other business. She can smell his armpits and the onions he ate for dinner. Feebly, she hugs him back.

  “Kate,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

  Lying in bed the next morning, registering the smell of coffee from downstairs and the birdsong from the copper beech, she understands what’s happened—she’s sixteen and to continue with their ritual would give it a character he doesn’t mean for it to have, would make it definitively brutal, and shameful. A certain distance, a certain respect must assert itself. She’s not a child. She has sex and her boyfriend is going to college. She can and will take her driver’s test, get her license, drink a glass of wine in a restaurant. Her father can no longer assume such a casual, such a familiar relationship with her body. His parental right—to punish, to handle—must be withdrawn.

  They adopt a disinterested, intellectual, almost philosophical stance toward each other, that of colleagues who have collaborated intensely on a groundbreaking project. They discuss books at dinner, books neither Miles nor Edie has read. They discuss physical equations. When she passes her driver’s test, he claps her on the back and gives her car privileges. He calls her from his office and asks for a ride. Kate loses the extra pounds. She breaks it off with Rudy. Like a soldier home from war, she spends her free time in unsatisfying ways, at a loss—in front of the television or in the kitchen, opening the fridge and closing it again. She hangs out in Eastwood Park at night on the weekends with her friends and they hurl discarded beer bottles at a decaying brick wall. Her father carries on with the graduate student and demands a divorce—he claims he’s in love, as if it’s not enough to jilt Kate’s mother; he must humiliate her too. He moves out and rents an apartment on the second floor of a three-family house. There’s something undignified about this but at least he’s given up the once-lavender-now-red house on Livingston Street without a struggle—as he should, as he should. Kate leaves for college. She doesn’t write or call. She majors in economics. She rides on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. The Valeries recline, inactive, at the edge of a lake. They lie on warm rocks and snuggle into sleeping bags. They read books or bite their toenails or braid one another’s hair or skip stones or masturbate. Kate spends her vacations at her mother’s house. She runs into Topher, also home on vacation, into Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Nick is a lawyer, she hears, and married; Sebastian is in med school in Chicago; Rudy is majoring in environmental studies. Kate’s father takes the journals from the attic and the gun from over the fireplace. Gnomes crop up in new abundance, audaciously, impishly, and pause on the slate path, the porch steps, their small white-bearded heads raised. The Hellerman girl is close to thirty. “She’ll pull through it,” people said, years ago, when it happened, but she never did. Kate spots her sometimes still at the market, her hair cropped short, filling her basket with sweets, dragging her feet and singing—an anecdote now, a heavy, burdensome creature with varicose veins and graying teeth and furrows across her sorry thumb-sucking face.

  27

  ATE AND COLIN took the girls shopping for a Christmas tree at the Bishop’s farm sale. They climbed into the car around noon, the girls’ hands protected this time by thick gloves—Kate had laid out all the parts and details of their dress the previous night, had searched the laundry for matching gloves and socks. They lunched in the beat-up grill room of a country restaurant where the waitress gave the girls crayons and paper. At the farm, the evergreens leaned together in splendid rows, sacrificially bound. The girls ran off immediately into them. “Stay where I can see you!” Kate cried.

  Colin rubbed her shoulder and smiled at her. “I have a good feeling about this Christmas,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yup.” Surprisingly, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. She endured. “Maybe we should have it at our place.”

  “Your mom would never be okay with that. Or Moira.”

  “Well … I could put it out there.”

  “I’m sure your mom and sister have everything totally set already. I mean, but maybe. Sure, you could ask.” She stepped back and called, “Lila! Robin!” Two raucous voices responded. “They’re get
ting so big,” she said.

  He pulled her close to him again. He said, “Maybe we should have another baby.”

  The Valeries stirred and snickered.

  Shush, she wanted to tell them. Sympathy and nostalgia coiled within her. She recalled Jack’s beautiful arms. She put her forehead against Colin’s chest. She didn’t think she could bear to look at him. “What’s all this about?”

  “I think I’m going to land that account.”

  How could he still want her after all these years, all the bitterness? But clearly he did. He was kissing her face, kissing her like he fancied more. She put up with it but how icky it felt, akin to kissing Miles. On the train, he had hugged her and kneaded her shoulders—he could not help but touch her, and she had leaned into him, both of them stirred below their work clothes and fatigue. She had thought this perpetual wanting each other would last them the rest of their lives—years, at least. It was a trick that nature played, wanting them to couple. It was given and quickly taken away. Now all the innocent and arbitrary particulars she’d loved about him seemed like bait in a trap.

  He went for her mouth and she withstood the urge to clench her lips closed. She allowed the tip of her tongue. But after a minute or so she turned her head.

  She said, “We can barely handle the kids we already have.”

  He released her and stepped back. “You’re right.”

  “Robin!” she called. “Lila!”

  “Over there.”

  They chose a tree and purchased it. Colin strapped the tree to the top of the car and at home he unloaded it and carried it through the hall into the living room while Kate carried in everything else, all the frustrating odds and ends of the excursion. The girls reacquainted themselves with their things—the Woodkins, the puzzles, the Ariel head, the Play-Doh—not playing exactly but touching and examining and moving from one place to another. While Colin clamped the trunk upright Kate swept away the trail of needles.

  “I’m hungry,” Lila said, looking up.

  “Family dinner,” Colin said.

  Kate knelt and brushed the needles into the dustpan. Was he mocking her?

  “On the other hand,” he said, “there’s tomorrow.”

  “School night.”

  He shook his head at her pessimism.

  “I’ll order pizza,” she said.

  She called Gennaro’s for two take-out pies. Then Colin (the man, the bringer of provisions) went out for them. Kate hosed down the girls and washed their hair. She put on the radio and hung a star in the front window—a white paper star with triangular cutouts and an electric bulb suspended inside. She switched it on. She went out front for a minute to admire it. How enchanting it looked.

  She poured herself a glass of Chianti and went out into the living room, where the girls played, building something out of pillows and the more portable furniture. Lila looked up. “Will you make cinnamon rolls for tomorrow, Mommy?”

  “Sure, baby girl. Why not.”

  She mixed the ingredients into a silky dough and set it on the counter to rise. Colin returned with the pizza and slid it onto the sideboard. Kate covered the dining room table with a cloth and lowered the lights. She set the table with the blue-and-yellow ceramic plates and cloth napkins. Colin watched disapprovingly (retreating from his earlier tenderness and subsequent rejection into censure), as if she were hurling the plates to the floor rather than lining them up in neat pairs across from one another. Standing, he took a piece of pizza from the box and began to eat it. She took the boxed pizzas off the sideboard—away from him—and took them into the kitchen and stuck them in the oven in their cardboard and set the temperature to two hundred.

  “Will you round up the girls?” she asked him.

  She made a salad. She set one box of pizza on the table. Her family joined her and took their places. She took her place too. Robin touched her arm. “Soft Mommy,” she said.

  “Did anyone dream last night?” Kate asked. “What did you guys dream? Do you remember?”

  Robin said, “I dreamed there was a … I had a dream about … a dangerous dungeon. When a person walked by, it grabbed their legs.” She demonstrated, clutching at the air.

  “Sounds scary.” Kate picked up her pizza. “You’re brave, Robin, to get through the night in your bed. Good job.”

  She looked at Colin. See? her look said. It’ll all work out. She’ll stop when she’s ready.

  “Let’s see if you can do it again, Robin,” Colin said. He folded his pizza and tore it with his teeth.

  “I don’t want to tell you my dream,” Lila said.

  “Was it a bad dream, Lila? Tell me, baby girl. Tell us.”

  “Only if you promise not to tell …” She thought. “My class.”

  “We won’t tell your class.”

  “My dream was, there was a desert. Three men pretending to be nice but they weren’t. They cut me up into little pieces.”

  “Jesus,” Colin said.

  “It’s too scary for my class. Don’t tell them. Don’t.”

  Kate had dreamed a dream she’d had before. In the dream she’d somehow forgotten all about Colin, lost track of him entirely. She waited alone while other people coupled off. Then she saw Colin, or remembered him. Sometimes when this happened they were on the train. Then excitement would spread through her like a colored tablet dissolving in the bath. And she would feel elated, relieved. Now her life could begin: T-shirts in the microwave and pumpkin-picking expeditions and Halloween costumes and school mornings. And a house lit up in the snow and a star in the window.

  “What did you dream?” she asked Colin.

  “I have no idea.”

  He poured more wine into his glass. She would have liked him to pour more into hers, but he didn’t. She would have liked for him to ask her what she’d dreamed, but he didn’t. She reached for the Chianti bottle and poured for herself. Though she’d lost her appetite to fatigue and no longer wanted the pizza, or the salad, or anything but the wine, she picked up her slice and took a bite.

  “Something about buying a tree with two little girls?” Colin said.

  “That was real, Daddy, that was real!” Lila shrieked, kicking her feet under the table. Robin laughed, her sweet rare belly laugh.

  Lila tapped out a song on the table with her spoon. “Guess what song this is,” she said.

  Kate guessed. “ ‘Wheels on the Bus’?”

  “No!”

  “ ‘Clementine’?”

  “Tell us.”

  “ ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ ”

  Robin banged one out too. Under her breath she hummed “Wheels on the Bus.” “Guess,” she said.

  “That’s not fair,” Lila said. “You were singing, Robin. You were singing.”

  “Lila,” Kate said. “Come on.”

  Lila’s pizza languished on her plate. Colin reached over and took the cheese from the top and crammed it into his mouth. Lila, turning her eyes back to her plate in time to witness the theft, began to cry.

  “Oh, Colin,” Kate said.

  “What?” He swallowed, a frog with a fly. “There’s plenty more pizza.”

  “I want that piece.” Lila wept.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I didn’t realize.” He looked at Kate. “I thought she was done. It was just sitting there.”

  “But, Colin, you don’t just take from her plate.”

  “We’re a family. That’s what families do. Families share.”

  Insufferable prick, she thought. Out loud she said, “By that you mean you take what you want when you feel like it. Even if it’s not yours. Even if you did nothing to get it.”

  “I paid for this pizza and I picked it up.”

  “She’s a person. She’s a kid but she’s a person too. Have some respect.”

  He slammed his fist onto the table. The plates jumped. “I know she’s a person, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Oh, damn you.”

  “Nice. Nice thing to say in front of your kids.”

&n
bsp; Kate put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. She pressed her fingers, smelling of tomato and garlic, into her face. She looked down between her spread fingers at the pizza on her plate. It seemed very far away: To eat another bite would be impossible.

  Robin next to her and Lila across from her vibrated with worry.

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I’m sorry. Let’s regroup, okay?”

  She took her hands from her face and looked up. Colin reached for a fourth slice of pizza. He folded it and began to eat it fast and furiously, the way he ate when angry.

  “Don’t shovel your food,” she said. She couldn’t help it.

  He banged the cardboard box closed and shoved his chair away from the table and stood up, shaking his head, still holding the folded pizza. He tramped into the kitchen.

  The girls looked at her.

  “You guys are the best,” she said. “Sorry. Mommy had a fit. Daddy had a fit. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” She got up and kissed their delicious full cheeks—Robin and Lila and Lila and Robin and Robin and Lila, one cheek then the other, again and again, until they covered their heads and complained.

  Colin appeared in the doorway and suggested bedtime.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Thank you and please.”

  She swept the crumbs off the tablecloth and shook the cloth out the back door. Beneath the cold and snow and the Hesselgroves’ dwindling fire she detected the scent of cannabis. The grad school sons, home for the break.

  She piled the dinner plates by the sink, still crowded with cereal bowls from the morning and a pan from Thursday, a frying pan in which she’d cooked lamb chops. She loaded the bowls and the dinner plates into the dishwasher. Behind her, Colin broke up the pizza box for the recycling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He didn’t answer, just shoved the cardboard into the bin.

  He sprayed and wiped the counters. She washed and dried the Sabatier knives, Chianti still at hand. She bent down to start the dishwasher. He poured the rest of her wine down the sink.

  “I was drinking that,” she said reflexively. Then, “That’s okay.”

  Again he didn’t answer, and it was then she realized he wasn’t speaking to her.