Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  Sometimes just for something to do they drove out to the shoreline, looked at the water and in the windows of houses, stood in bookstores and flipped through the bestsellers and told each other, “Listen, listen to this,” shopped for cider and taffy and pumpkins, and sometimes these things surprised them by substituting well for what they actually wanted. The oil heater broke and for a week they spent the evenings in bed, under the down comforter and the matelassé bedspread. Kate read a novel and Colin read the Wall Street Journal and magazines with George Clooney on the cover. They listened to NPR on the radio and played pillow tag. They had interesting, peaceful conversations about topics that had nothing to do with them. They had ordinary, affectionate sex that week, which was nice but only reminded them of the other kind.

  “WHAT IF I LOST ALL of my hair,” Colin said one weekend morning—abruptly, from behind his paper. “I mean, all of it. Would you still want me?”

  Kate thought about it. She got up from the kitchen table and loaded her coffee cup into the dishwasher. “Maybe not. I mean, I would still love you but I might not want you. Not the same way.”

  “That’s not right,” he said. “That’s not how you’re supposed to feel.”

  “What if I gained two hundred pounds? Would you still want me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would not!”

  “I’d worry about your health.”

  “Total crap. You know it.”

  “I guess we see things differently.”

  After all these months together, differences in their individual perceptions seemed out of the question. “I will then,” she said. “I’ll gain the weight.”

  She opened the cabinet and reached for a package of Mallomars, Colin’s childhood favorite. She crammed one in her mouth. Then another. He watched her, curious: How many Mallomars could she actually manage? He wouldn’t stop her—he wanted to know.

  She threw the cookies back into the cabinet. “You get the idea.”

  · · ·

  WES FOUGHT LESS FREQUENTLY with the woman who used to be Lucy’s mother. He found a girlfriend, a ravishing Indian woman who taught foreign policy at Georgetown and came to stay with Wes on the weekends. She smoked outside on the porch at night, because of Lucy’s asthma, and she smiled at Kate and Colin when they came home from their movies out and Saturday-night dinners. At night, they heard sounds of love above them, which compelled them to amp up their own routine—Wes was, after all, almost forty.

  THE BASEMENT FLOODED and the paint peeled off in scabs. The landlady didn’t bother to send her teenagers over anymore. The block association put together a petition against the house and all the tenants signed it, even Lucy. Darcy finished art school and Kate and Colin went into the city for her thesis exhibition. Her thesis was a six-foot black-and-white photograph of her vagina, printed on poster board.

  “It’s amazing,” Kate said, looking at it.

  She could see the labia’s every wrinkle and fold, the clitoris swelling above, the hairs twisting exuberantly about one another.

  “I totally agree with you on this one,” Colin said.

  Darcy sashayed up behind them and put her arms around Kate’s waist. “It’s Freudian,” she said. “The child looking up the mother’s skirt.”

  “I guess the mother doesn’t wear underwear,” Colin said. In the face of culture he tended to become silly.

  “Oh, shush,” Darcy said. “It’s art.”

  “It looks so powerful,” Kate said.

  “Not what I’d want to run into at the Bridgeport train station on a Tuesday night,” Colin said.

  Darcy pinched him. “You wish.”

  They stayed at Darcy’s that night and drove home the following morning. It was spring again. They got coffees from the deli and cruised north on the FDR. The East River shimmered alongside. They merged onto I-95. They were sick of all their music so they listened to the radio.

  “I feel melancholy,” Colin said. “I don’t know why.”

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. I do too, she could have said, because she did. She rubbed his leg. Then his crotch. Then, to cheer them both up, she unzipped his pants and loosened her seat belt and blew him en route.

  Later they went out to dinner at their favorite of the downtown Bridgeport Italian restaurants, the kind of place with wall-to-wall carpeting and a drop ceiling and salad included with the meal and more pasta in one serving than a person could reasonably eat. They parked and detoured around the block because it was still light out and, in Connecticut, the week for cherry blossoms, and cherry trees bordered these few particular streets. A light wind moved about, blowing the blossoms off. The trees bloomed, then lost their delicate crop immediately, the petals spinning and circling all week, the air in constant motion. Kate and Colin held hands. White blossoms caught on their hair and arms and shoes. Colin twisted Kate’s fingers around his own.

  “I had this friend when I was little,” he said. “A girl. She lived on our street for two years. We were four and five. Or maybe five and six. Our mothers were friends so we played together. They used to take us to this park with trees just like this, maybe apple or something, I don’t know. And we used to run through them, through the blossoms, in the spring. I remember her running ahead of me and wearing a dress. She had the strongest little legs. She took gymnastics.”

  “Cute,” Kate said—bored by the story but attentive.

  “Then she caught some sort of freak virus, the flu or meningitis or something. And she died. I remember my mom telling me. She came into my bedroom where I was playing and told me. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it until we went to her funeral.”

  “Oh, Colin!” Kate stopped walking and pulled at him.

  “I know.”

  “You never told me about her before.”

  “I haven’t thought about her since I met you. Seriously.”

  She hugged him around the waist and pressed her face into his chest. He’d taken a shower at the apartment but still smelled of booze from the night before. They went to dinner. He got spaghetti carbonara and she got zuppa di pesce. They traded bites. They couldn’t finish and took the rest home but forgot it in the car overnight.

  IN SPITE OF their isolation and the ordinary quality of their days, something beautiful and mystical would persist for Kate about those years. She would recall, predominantly, a sense of having run away—to a bed and home shared with her wedded husband, but a place hanging about the fringes of life and civilization. Together, weekday mornings, they would drive to Stamford in the Jeep, Colin driving, Kate watching out the window at the sunlight striking patches of snow. They’d stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee, and Kate remembered so distinctly the rows of frosted pastries, the Indian woman who served them, Colin in his big coat ordering coffee black with two sugars for himself, light and sweet for Kate, snow melting on his collar. Then the timed illuminated window, the pink light in the dark as Colin and she returned from Stamford in the Jeep, when the weather got cold and night came early, or on vaporous fall evenings, driving through a witches’ brew of mist. She remembered the movies and the waitress with the bouffant. She recalled the train, those Fridays going into the city. She remembered standing with Colin by the doors and the rails, swaying and bumping into him, how sometimes they’d stand there for the whole trip, how she’d catch herself reflected in the dark glass. She remembered how he’d touched her and how much she’d wanted him to, how she’d run her hands over his face. How he’d rubbed her shoulders and hugged her, how she’d leaned against him. She remembered the way his glasses would steam and flash and his smile, which still possessed the roguish quality she’d loved. She remembered the slush and dirt of the train in winter, the houses built into the bay, the crowded stink of a bar in summer, the East Village waitresses with their hair done up in pencils. Then the last, late train home—the cars nearly empty and the windows giving back the overhead lights, Colin and she slumped against the ripped maroon seats—knees sprawling, hands linked, los
ing track of each other as they slept, separately dreaming.

  5

  ATE’S FATHER GETS TENURE and they paint the house dark red. The Andersons buy a VCR. Miles gains weight and loses teeth. Sebastian goes off to college. Kate’s fifth-grade class begins a unit on Norway, and Kate stays up late in the living room reading the D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants. She reads her book and her father reads his.

  “What are you doing still up?” he asks. Knowing perfectly well. That she craves his attention, that she lives for him.

  She rolls over on the hearth. “Not much.”

  “You like the book, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  On his way to the kitchen to refresh his drink, he stops and examines the book. He points to the sepia illustration of Freya clasping her wonderful necklace to her bosom as she sleeps. “She looks like you.”

  Embarrassed, Kate says, “No, she doesn’t. She’s blond.”

  Miles has inherited their mother’s freckles and dull, ashen hair. He’s gotten their father’s broad build and will eventually achieve his height. At six-three, Dennis has to duck through the side door, though the rest of the house with its high ceilings suits him. He does push-ups on the bedroom floor and chin-ups on a bar he’s installed in the narrow back hallway. Like a troll’s, his footsteps disrupt the walls and floorboards.

  Kate has her mother’s delicate, slanted features: her brief forehead, oval face, and soft chin; her mother’s slender shoulders and small waist; her father’s eyes and pale skin and coarse dark hair. “Beautiful,” her father says, looking at her. He enjoys her appearance but, she senses, does not want her to grow into it. There seems to be something shameful, something basically desperate and humiliating and pleading about femininity in general and Kate’s in particular. Her inferiority manifests itself in her mother’s slavery to the household. As his eldest, for her to have been born a girl at all has hurt him in some way—has harmed him, weakened him. She’s compromised him with her female body, her own general vulnerability and specific susceptibility to the elements of sex. Her disadvantage becomes his. His chaste love attached to her female body steals away some of his virility. She reads the Norse myths and the Greek myths, she reads Little Women, some Judy Blume, and she understands that her body will be hurt, damaged, and discarded. She understands that a boy maintains a certain strength and physical integrity but that when girls come into their reproductive capacities, everything changes; they and anyone who loves them—really loves them, for their minds and spirits—are liable. And that to maintain a certain dignity those people will need to love their girls less.

  He asks Kate about her day; he does not ask Kate’s mother about her day. He frames Kate’s artwork and hangs it in his office. He praises her attention to detail, her good grades, her studious ways.

  He takes her into the city. They leave the car for Edie and catch the eight fifty-two from Union Station. They shop on Fifth Avenue and he buys her a blue dress. He takes her iceskating at Wollman Rink and to lunch at a café in Central Park. They eat shrimp cocktail and hamburgers and coffee ice cream in small glass bowls.

  “I want to live in New York someday,” Kate says. “When I’m grown-up. When I’m married.”

  “Oh, don’t get married, Kate.”

  “Why not?” She picks at her nails. He hates this.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “Fine.” She returns to her ice cream. “Why not get married?”

  “Well, get married if you really want to. Just don’t have children. Parenthood is a terrible arrangement for women.”

  Sex is the only department in which he doesn’t prefer Kate to her mother.

  A screen breaks and a troop of moths invades Kate’s room. She dances about, shrieking, sure one has found its way into her underpants before realizing the faint tickle is a stray bit of Scotch tape.

  But still. She appears at her parents’ door with a sleeping bag and her pillow.

  “Your mother and I have a special relationship,” her father says, sternly.

  Her mother reclines on the bed with her drink and her biography. Uncommunicative, passive, remote. Shut off, suddenly, from Kate, from Miles and the chores and the once-lavender-now-red house.

  He does not want Kate to become this sort of woman: a wife. He anticipates better things for her. She understands that he hopes she’ll somehow evade her sexuality, that she’ll dodge the domestic, jealous, and promiscuous and remain purposeful and chaste. Anything less will hurt him, expose him, and generate shame: his and hers. Anything else will betray them both.

  THE D’AULAIRES’ ILLUSTRATIONS, while grotesque in their extremity of detail, achieve a splendid and peculiar gorgeousness, one that makes Kate want to dig her fingers into the pages, into the fantastic little creatures marking ends and beginnings of chapters (guarding, taunting, wrapped around capital letters), into Odin’s eight-legged horse, into Sif’s golden hair. Kate reads about Loki (prankster, entertainer, thief, liar); Freya, the sorrowful goddess of love, with her cats and crown of flowers; wise, one-eyed Odin; gentle Balder; short-tempered Thor; the many-headed trolls; the grouchy gnomes, hammering precious metals into valuable objects; the Norns, who spin the threads of life; the ice cow, who licks the first god into being from the salty brim of a pit; Odin’s heroes, who fight every day for the fun of fighting, then pick up their severed limbs and put themselves back together; the Valkyries, warrior maidens.

  Kate reads Valkyrie as Valerie, of which she knows three: in her class, Valerie Hamilton, Valerie (“Val”) McCleary, and Valerie Mentz. Confusingly for the teachers, the Valeries form a trio of best friends. They hold hands in the hallway and giggle in the reading room. They give each other backrubs and play jacks and trade stickers. They crow when a teacher trips over a book bag, they stick pencils in their ears during math class, and, later, they unbutton their shirts to just below the bra in Mr. Mack’s science section. Valerie Hamilton with her smooth blond ballerina bun; Val McCleary, a nail-biter, with blue eyes and a dark bob; Valerie Mentz with a carrot top and freckles and a crooked, broken nose (word is, her older brother punched her in the face for snapping the head off his Darth Vader figure). When Kate opens the book she sees the Valeries in helmets and braids. She internalizes the Valkyrie Valeries and they become her imaginary attendants, wayward spirits tracking her through her days, cheering and jeering at crucial moments.

  Kate lies reading on her belly on the hearth, crossing her ankles in the air. Alone with her father, she feels herself to be as precious as Freya’s necklace. She understands herself to be, for him, for now at least, generative and transforming: an invisible cloak, true love, a second, unanticipated chance.

  He reads books by Richard Feynman: books on physical theory or autobiographies with cheeky titles. Sometimes he reads poetry. Sometimes novels and stories. He reads Leaves of Grass. He reads Madame Bovary. He reads Joyce and Tolstoy and Gogol.

  “What’s that about?” Kate asks, of the latter.

  “The story I’m reading right now is about a man who gets separated from his nose.”

  “Weird.”

  “He sees his nose getting on a bus in a soldier’s uniform. Or …” He skims back through the pages. “Never mind. Some sort of military attire. The idea is that he’s become so estranged from his own life that his body parts move around Saint Petersburg without him. The modern world alienates him from his choices and actions.”

  “How … does it work?”

  “Does what work?”

  “Is the nose a big person-size nose wearing a regular-size uniform? Or is it a normal-size nose wearing a tiny uniform? Or a normal nose floating around on top of a regular-size uniform?”

  “That last one, I’d say. How about you?”

  “Me too. The nose floating around.”

  “Tell me about that.” He points to the Norse myths.

  “It’s a lot like Greek mythology.”

  “How so?”

  She looks through the table of contents. “
There’s a ruler god. Odin. Like Zeus. And eleven others. Thor is the god of war, like Ares. Freya is like Aphrodite, the goddess of love. But married to other people. The Norns are like the Fates. They spin the threads of life.” She makes quote marks with her fingers. “The sun and the moon go on chariots around the earth. Balder is like Dionysus. Except Balder dies. He really dies; he doesn’t come back to life. They all die, actually.”

  “The best stories always repeat themselves.”

  Eventually Kate finishes the book and her class finishes their unit. The school year ends. She gets her period and goes around untended to for nearly a week, hoping it will go away. The furtive smears recall 123 Livingston’s fresh dark-red paint. Her mother finds her underpants in the laundry and confronts her and supplies her with feminine products and a book. Kate starts the sixth grade. She moves on to certain paperbacks, stealthily checked out from the school library, books with worn and yellow pages and dense, small type, the covers rubbed away at the corners, as if from much investigation, much handling. Forever; Then Again, Maybe I Won’t; My Darling, My Hamburger; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Ode to Billy Joe. The pages give off a faint odor: a musty, private smell. Kate and Topher and other friends gather on weekends in built-out basements. Here they play strip poker and kissing games: I Never; In the Dark; Stop Signs; Rock, Paper, Kiss; Kiss Around Town; Kiss or Dare; Kiss or Slap; Kiss and Push; Kissing Tag; Hide and Go Get It; Sixty Seconds in Heaven. Bras become necessary. Edie takes Kate to Filene’s Basement in the Milford Mall. They hide her other developments from her father.

  DENNIS HAS A FRIEND with property in northwestern Connecticut. One Saturday morning in the fall he wakes Kate up early and tells her to pack a bag. He hands her a cup of coffee (half milk, three sugars), leaves a note for Edie, and stashes Kate’s bag and his own and a rifle in the trunk. They take Route 8 north toward Waterbury.

  The friend is a retired professor with family money. They pull into the driveway of a big white house with balconies. They eat pancakes and bacon with the friend and his wife, who is several decades younger.