Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “We have an appointment,” Darcy said, grandly.

  Kate wished she’d worn something besides the brown corduroys and hoodie that had been so comfortable this morning. Darcy wore a long droopy soft skirt with leggings underneath, sneakers, and a frayed sweater that smelled of mothballs, but her height and gorgeous hair allowed her elegance anyway.

  The woman showed them dresses in varying degrees of flounce. There were fairy-tale-princess skirts with layers of net below; there were lace bodices and beaded necklines and heavy ivory satin. (“For a redhead,” their fairy godmother intoned.) There were pristine Waspy white A-lines and dramatic overblown ball skirts and sexy satin sheaths with bows on the behind and mermaid fishtails about the knees.

  “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Darcy asked, flipping through dresses. “Wanna come to my parents’ house?”

  “Going to Colin’s. His mother’s.”

  “Wow. That’s serious.”

  “Darcy. We’re engaged.”

  “Oh, right.” Darcy pulled a dress off the rack and held it up in front of herself and looked in the mirror. She frowned and batted at her hair. “I forgot. Hey! Look at this one! And this!” She fingered the dresses boldly, running her palm possessively along the lengths of the waists. Kate picked up the dresses as Darcy let them go. There were so many, too many choices. Whatever she picked she’d get it wrong. On one dress she liked the bodice but not the neckline; on another she liked the neckline but not the waistline; on another she liked the skirt but not the sleeves. She pointed out four gowns and the fairy godmother brought them in her size. Two other fairy godmothers were tending to a Locust Valley type and a cropped, jockish type, both with matching mothers. Kate and Darcy went with the dresses into a softly lit room with a tumbler of water and two glasses on a small table. Kate stood on a pedestal in front of the mirror and Darcy did up dozens of pearl-shaped buttons. All the dresses were too long for Kate, so they fell over the pedestal all the way to the floor, making her look tall.

  “Why does this matter to me?” Kate said. “Why don’t I just give the wedding money to charity?”

  Darcy reached up to pull a loose piece of hair off Kate’s face. “How will you wear your hair? Up?” She piled the hair up on top of Kate’s head and held it. “You look like a goddess.”

  “Really? Do I?” Kate took over the hair. She turned her head and looked at herself in profile.

  “You should be very proud of yourself.”

  Outside, the jock and the lockjaw marveled over their own and each other’s daughters.

  “Just look at that!” the lockjaw exclaimed.

  “Exciting times,” the jock said. “Exciting times.”

  AT THANKSGIVING, Colin’s mother cornered Kate in the pantry and said, “Colin is a lovely person. I know I’m biased, but he is.”

  Kate nodded. She’d escaped to the pantry to refresh her drink, a martini. Fresh ice cracked in the shaker she guiltily held. A fleet of Cornish game hens (her future mother-in-law’s bird of choice) marinated on the counter.

  “He will never hurt you. He will never abandon you.” She looked at Kate as if anticipating thanks.

  Kate chose an off-the-shoulder A-line dress and white satin heels and a Cynthia Rowley purse to match. Her mother booked the church and the club. Kate shacked up in Colin’s Upper West Side apartment. Darcy cried, helping her pack her shoes and dresses and wine-bottle lamps. At a Turkish restaurant, over an awkwardly wide mosaic table, Kate and Colin conducted a discussion of their future. Kate had imagined they’d live in the city, downtown, of course, but Colin, who worked in private equities, had been offered a better setup at his company’s Stamford branch. Taxes, he said, family, quality of living. His sister was pregnant and this was giving him ideas. Kate saw them forming daily, energetically, like mold on fruit. She saw him looking into strollers on the street. The other night, another couple’s baby had woken up and started to cry as the adults sat down to dinner.

  Colin looked at Kate. “Don’t you want to just go in and pick up that baby?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Well, you should.”

  “Maybe I will. Don’t you want to?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not ready,” he’d said indulgently.

  She could see that doing what he wanted was compelling for both of them, and that to resist would interfere with the sexual chemistry that served as foundation for their bond. “Okay,” she said. “I don’t care where I am,” she said, “so long as we’re together.” But later that night, doubt moved in her. They’d gone to bed. He’d fallen asleep quickly but she stayed up and worried. Was he afraid—if so, of what? She did not want to admit any vulnerability in him. So she smothered the fear under thoughts of wedding plans, spooned him, and went to sleep.

  IN HER CHILDHOOD ROOM at 123 Livingston Street, a stylist from the Richard Penna Salon pinned Kate’s hair up and applied powders and creams to her face. Then Kate and Darcy waited together in the girlish room, listening to Shawn Colvin, sipping at glasses of champagne, Kate pacing delicately back and forth in front of the full-length mirror.

  “I have to pee,” Kate said. “Should I go now or later?”

  “Now. You don’t want to be thinking about it during the ceremony.”

  “Okay.”

  Darcy held up Kate’s skirt while she went. Then, sorting out crinolines, Darcy discovered a loose button.

  “I think it’ll hang on through the party.”

  “But …” Kate twisted, trying to look. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “Downstairs, I think …”

  “She has sewing stuff; she can do it. Will you get her?”

  “It’s no big deal, really; you have so many other buttons.”

  “But it’s right at the waist. Please just get her?”

  Darcy exited the room and returned a few minutes later.

  “Your mom left for the church already.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I think she has things to do there.”

  “I can’t believe this.” Kate groped at the loose button. She rustled over to the bed and despairingly sat on it.

  “I’ll do it! Where do I find the sewing stuff?”

  “Her bedroom, bureau, first drawer.”

  Darcy fetched needle and thread. “Oh, don’t cry,” she said. “You’ll mess up your makeup.”

  “I know.” Kate plucked a tissue from the box on the bedside table and poked at her eyes.

  “It’s fine. It’s totally fine. I can do this.”

  “I know. It’s just that I feel like I want my mother to do it. I know it doesn’t matter.”

  “Shush. Stop crying. Don’t be a hysterical bride.” Darcy pulled her gently off the bed. “Stand up; turn around.” She unbuttoned the gown all down the back, then knelt behind Kate and began to tend to the delinquent button. “Deep breath. Don’t cry.”

  “Okay. I’m not.” Kate closed her eyes and breathed through her nose.

  “Remember those peppercorns? Bouncing?”

  “That was ridiculous.”

  “I know it was.” Darcy’s manicured fingers probed and labored. “You know what I think? I think that Colin is going to have fun with these buttons.”

  An hour later, Kate’s father walked her down the aisle to Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” She had ignored her father throughout the engagement—she had avoided him at various dinners and parties; she had averted her eyes as Colin and he talked golf at the bar of the Fairfield Tennis and Swim Club, identical amber-colored drinks at hand. She sensed his amusement over the whole affair, and she did not let him catch her alone or look her in the eye. Evasion proved easy. She seldom saw him anyway. She could count on one hand her visits to the apartment he’d rented since divorcing her mother. Kate ignored him as he took her arm and gave her away. She would not let him mess this up. Her current sense of joy and victory wa
s a glass vessel she was carrying on her head down a long cluttered hallway. He would not distract her from this task. He would not! If she looked at him, talked to him, met his eye, she would trip and the glass would break.

  2

  E TEACHES HER to ride a bike, running along beside her and pushing her off into the grassy sections of the park until she can pedal on her own. He teaches her to drain the boiler and replace a fuse. At his brother’s place, in their hometown of Galveston, he teaches her to load and fire a rifle. He teaches her mnemonics: for the order of the planets, the color of resistors, the digits of pi. He writes them out on index cards and sticks them to the fridge:

  My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

  Bad Boys May Ruin Our Young Girls

  But Violet Goes Willingly.

  I Took A Quick Glimpse At Bright Stars Far North.

  They perform backyard experiments. They turn milk to stone (chemical reactions) and conduct a tennis-ball moon bounce (conservation of motion). They make lightning with aluminum, Styrofoam, and a sock. They build a volcano with clay, baking soda, vinegar, and an empty bottle.

  At the Payne Whitney Gym he teaches her how to throw a punch. He tells her: Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, one in front, knees bent. Keep your thumb outside your fist. Swivel your body. Use your weight.

  He teaches her how to drive: around the block, then up and down Whitney Avenue, then on the Merritt Parkway, then on I-95. Always drive defensively, he says. Pay attention. Don’t speed. Wear your seat belt. Yield anyway. Know your blind spots. Create space around your vehicle. Signal your intentions. Slow down in rain or snow. Watch the road. Don’t look at the tree you’re about to crash into—look where you want to go. Steer through a skid. When in doubt, both feet out.

  They inhabit a single-family house in a residential section of New Haven, Connecticut, birthplace of the hamburger and the cotton gin and the automatic revolver, home to Yale University and Pepe’s Pizzeria and acres of depreciating industrial real estate and scores of disaffected inner-city youth. Kate’s father, Dennis Allison, teaches physics at Yale, and her mother, Edie, works for human resources at United Illuminating—an occupation that seems to embarrass Kate’s father a bit—and manages all other aspects of life, aspects having to do with the household and two children, Kate and her brother, Miles. Kate’s mother shops and cooks, she makes phone calls and calculations and doctors’ appointments and lunches, and if necessary she sits up late in the kitchen sewing on buttons and paying bills. On other evenings, exhausted from holding the family together, she crawls into bed early with a mystery novel or a biography. She believes that books exist for entertainment or education, not psychological or spiritual enlightenment.

  The house, 123 Livingston, a three-story Victorian painted a whimsical lavender by the previous owners, occupies the edge of an extensive and overgrown park, which rises at its eastern reaches into a massive rock. The rock contains hiking and bike trails, a tower and a telescope, and, along with I-95, divides the academic side of town from what the academics think of as the slums. Eastwood Park surrounds a pond, basketball courts, a hill for sledding, and a playground. Beer and soda bottles litter the playground, as do cigarette butts and roaches and used condoms and the occasional syringe. As a preschooler, Kate frequents the park in the company of her mother or a sitter. As a grade-schooler, she bikes and hikes the trails in the company of her father.

  Occasionally muggings or rapes occur. Once: a young babysitter, a neighborhood girl with professor parents, out walking her charge. The attacker drags them off the trail and into the surrounding brush. He parks the stroller against a tree—the toddler shocked from sleep, crying—and throws his coat over the awning. The girl’s coat he arranges under his knees. Kate hears the story on the local news and around her school and at a faculty dinner party given by her parents. She likes to sit on the back stairs when her parents have company and listen to the conversations: forgettable, pleasant ones and horrible, valuable ones. The man, Nelson Young, is arrested at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Fair Haven and shuttled off to prison. The girl, Matilda Hellerman, does not go away to Princeton as planned. She stays home and crops her hair and keeps it that way, short as a boy’s. The word is she gorges daily on brownies, that she buys sanitary products in bulk and sucks her thumb. She develops acne. She becomes obese. Kate, as she waits for the bus, spies her walking the family dog down the block, singing wistfully under her breath. Kate spots her also at the Italian market, filling her basket with sweets, grotesque and troubling amid the young mothers pushing double strollers, the graduate students in plum-colored T-shirts and jeans choosing peaches and corn carefully from the wide wicker baskets, the professional women rushing in after work to get something for dinner before closing time, which is supposed to be seven but really happens at six forty-five because the Italian girls put the cardboard sign up early, impatient to leave.

  Kate’s father dislikes whimsical colors, so he and Kate’s mother are saving up the money to paint 123 Livingston a sober off-white or a sensible dark red. One year they tore off the porch, which was falling down, and rebuilt it. The following year they installed a slate walkway. Beside the walk rises a massive copper beech, which supports a swing and keeps the front rooms cool in the summer. Certain funds go toward the tree’s maintenance. Once a month a man is paid to mow the lawn, and his wife is paid to clean the house. Kate’s mother has decorated the latter in a typically shabby Waspy fashion, little purchased, much inherited: sconces, wrought iron and gilt, outfitted with electric bulbs; tiny silver bowls; swimming and riding trophies; paintings of horses and ducks and foxhunts; needlepoint pillows; trim, firm couches and chairs covered in tapestry prints. From Kate’s father’s family: a stag’s antlers mounted on a polished piece of wood; above the fireplace, an antique rifle. On the first floor, the kitchen, dining room, study, and living room lead one into another and surround the front hallway. The second floor holds four bedrooms and three bathrooms: the parental suite, a guest room, and separate bedrooms and bathrooms for Kate and Miles. Kate’s father stores his scholarly journals on the third floor, the attic. Industriously, he piles them away, great blockades of brilliance and intellect. Kate’s mother teases him, saying that he believes if he has journals left to read, he won’t be allowed to die like everybody else.

  Every now and then a mysterious local somebody makes rounds at night and leaves small gnome statuettes on certain porches and doorsteps. The condition of having received a gnome, as well as the action of planting the gnomes, is known on the street as “a gnoming.” “I was gnomed last night,” one neighbor will say to another. “And you?” Some people find the gnomings delightful. Kate’s father does not. He takes as dim a view of gnomes as of whimsical colors, and upon discovery of a doorstep gnome he curses and hurls the gnome to the sidewalk, where the little fellow rolls and cracks.

  In the other houses around the park, also three-story Victorians painted whimsical colors, live Yale faculty and the more affluent townies: doctors and lawyers and bankers and small-business owners. The neighbors on the left, two men who live together, teach respectively in the drama program and the medical school. When invited along to the Frankenstein house, as Miles calls it, Kate and Miles poke around the basement while the adults drink cocktails upstairs. A century ago, the basement functioned as a sort of laboratory. Glass jars fill the shelves and preserved liquids and substances, some labeled, fill the jars. A collection of tiny bones. An eyeball, too large to be human. A chicken foot, a hawk’s foot. Green sludge. A sheep’s phallus, a rat’s brain, a cat’s kidney, a deer’s heart. Fungi. Petals, stones, seashells. Hair, teeth, nails. More sludge, jars and jars of terrifying unidentified sludge.

  The non-Yale-affiliated neighbors on the right have allegedly changed their family name from D’Amato to Anderson for business purposes. Max and Ella D’Amato-slash-Anderson have five boys, all close in age, like brothers in a fairy tale or a British children’s novel circa 1900. Along with Miles and Kat
e, they attend Whitney Hall, the private K–12 school. Though Kate occupies herself mainly with Topher (at her age, the youngest), she adores all five of them and finds reasons to choose Topher’s house over hers for play. “My mom’s got a headache,” she tells him. Or, “My brother will bother us.” Or, most often, “My father’s working in his study.”

  While Max Anderson runs his contracting company, Ella Anderson stays home and supervises the rambunctious but cheerful household. Topher and his brothers wrestle and tussle, rolling over backs of couches, toppling lamps, disrupting cushions, and crashing down on coffee tables. Ella scolds from the next room, and Kate stands back, watching and wanting to jump in. Injuries abound, some from the roughhousing, others from various team sports. Back and forth from Yale–New Haven Hospital the boys go, ankles and wrists and shoulders bandaged, skin stitched. At dinner, which the Andersons sit down to every night as a family, tender expressions pass between Ella and Max over the roast chicken, the mashed potatoes, the beef bourguignon. Unlike Kate’s mother, Ella makes a production out of dinner: Billy Joel on the stereo, sauce splattering the stove, little rags of meat dropped underfoot. Kate and Topher might sit at the counter and watch, eating raw sliced carrots and chips, and if need be jump up to wave a broom in front of the smoke alarm. Topher’s father, instead of shutting himself in his study, watches the game, whatever it is. He follows the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Whalers, the Celtics. Like all the fathers, he stays away from the dishes. Topher and Kate set the table. Then Kate eats and eats. Ella and Max exclaim over her appetite.

  Skinny little thing!

  Watch you pack it away!

  Where do you put it!

  Tell us!

  Kate and Topher might watch a sitcom after dinner, or they might go up to Topher’s room and turn off the lights and tell creepy stories and count the fluorescent stars stuck to his ceiling. On a weekend, they might have a sleepover—then they might sneak back down to the kitchen in the witching hours and conduct a knockdown-drag-out food fight, which they wake early to clean up.