Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  Kate put the D’Aulaires book away. She brushed her own teeth. Colin returned, girl-free. She said, “I hate when you wander away like that.” She recalled Dr. Levy. “No. When you wander away like that, it makes me feel … shitty.” She searched for a better word. “Abandoned.”

  SHE SAT UP against the European pillow, reading Martha Stewart Living. She read about how to make candy critters from marshmallows, licorice, and gumdrops. She read about how to make spiderweb eggs and swamp sangria and witch cupcakes with sugar-cone hats. Colin went to check on the girls. Upon his return she asked, “What are they doing?”

  “They’re line dancing to ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ ” He got into bed and scooted up close to her. “I’ll rub your back if you want,” he said.

  “I have my period.”

  “I’m sorry about before. You’re right. I shouldn’t disappear like that.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry I lost my shit.”

  He put his hand up her nightshirt and held her breast. He played with her nipple, rolled it between his index finger and thumb. Her nipple hardened—so promiscuous it was.

  “No, no, no. I’m bleeding. And I’ve got to go to sleep.”

  “I just want to feel close to you.”

  “You can spoon me while I read Martha.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” He wrapped his arms around her. A compelling odor rose from his armpits.

  “You know what’s amazing? That smells are made up of molecules. Just like things. Um, right?”

  “Huh.” He squeezed her. “It’s been a while,” he said.

  She felt his erection against her hip. She closed her eyes. She listened to the highway—still a constant sound, though less intense than in Bridgeport. She thought of the train, a mnemonic for intimacy. The blue-and-maroon seats, the crushed paper cups, the wrecked buildings and stations and waterfront towns jolting by outside the filthy windows. Her mind strayed to actual mnemonics and her old kitchen, Livingston Street, the refrigerator and the lists: Virgins Are Rare, Eli the Ice Man, When You Catch German Measles Remain Between Blankets.

  She reached down and put her hand on him. He rolled on his back and pulled her on top of him and nudged at her shoulders, lightly enough for her to ignore if she wanted to. But unexpectedly inspired, she wriggled down his torso. When had she last spent time down here? Not since the spring. She recalled a night of debauchery: a party at the club to celebrate the renovated squash courts, a torrent of dirty martinis and her subsequent generosity later in bed, and, the following morning, mascara on her pillow and a horrific taste on her tongue.

  She hesitated, her nose in his crotch, her hair mingling with his slightly larger-than-average penis. “Please,” he said. “Just for a minute.”

  “Okay. A minute. Five minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I don’t want you to come in my mouth, okay? I really don’t feel like it.”

  “Okay, baby. Deal.”

  She put her left hand around his scrotum and her right at the base of his shaft and ran her tongue around the tip. She worked on him with the right hand while she sucked: less demanding than using her throat, and he never knew the difference. His testicles contracted under her hand.

  He grabbed her hair. “I’m going to come.”

  She pulled off. His ejaculate hit her in the face and neck.

  “Oh, Colin!” She sat up on her knees. “Goddamn it.”

  “Sorry!” He threw her his T-shirt. She swiped at herself.

  “What the fuck?”

  “You said not your mouth.”

  “That doesn’t mean my face.”

  “Well, what did you want me to do with it?”

  “Just, I don’t know, catch it or something.”

  “Hey. Free goop for your frown lines.”

  “Don’t laugh, Colin; this isn’t funny. I’m taking a shower. And you’re not invited.”

  She washed her hair and let the hot water run over her body for an environmentally negligent length of time. Back in bed, clean nightshirt and hair in a towel, she prodded Colin, whose face was obscured by Men’s Journal.

  “That made me feel … disrespected.”

  “I’m sorry.” His arm shot out and found her shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Do you respect me?”

  “Of course!”

  “Really?”

  “Well.” He contemplated. “Actually, I assume I do, but I guess … I don’t know.”

  Could he respect her and do that at the same time? Was that possible; was that ever possible?

  “Do you respect me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if I do. I don’t know either. Not like I used to.”

  He put the Men’s Journal aside and lay back and closed his eyes. “I think … I think I actually respect you more than I used to.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “You’re a great mother. You have an irrepressible spirit.”

  “But that doesn’t make you feel the way I used to make you feel.”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “So we should go back to that then,” she said. “When I respected you and you didn’t respect me. That was better.”

  “What?” Amazingly, he’d nodded off since his last utterance.

  “Never mind. Sleep. Go to sleep.”

  15

  T IS A WINTER AFTERNOON, a Saturday. The day that things change between Kate and her father. The day things happen between Kate and the boy next door. A day that will last, to some incalculable degree, for the rest of her life.

  Dennis has announced a driving lesson. “She’s too young,” Edie Allison says as her husband grabs the keys. She stands at the counter, kneading bread dough.

  He says, “Not in Texas she’s not.”

  “We live in Connecticut. Remember, Professor?”

  But she says this to their backs. Kate follows the professor out the kitchen door. She sits in the driver’s seat and he turns the key in the ignition. As the car warms up he reviews: accelerator, brake, blinker, side- and rearview mirrors, hands at ten and two o’clock.

  “Now,” he says. “Signal.” She tries to put the car into drive. “Foot on the brake,” he says. She pulls out from the curb. A passing station wagon honks. “Blind spot,” he says.

  She slams on the brake. The car juts into the empty road.

  “Okay. Let’s try this again. Check your mirrors. Then glance over your shoulder—”

  “Which one?”

  “Well, depends. On where you want to go. Now, for instance. We’re pulling out to the right, so check your mirrors, then look over your right shoulder. See? That spot right alongside the car.”

  They drive slowly around and around the block. Winter has trashed the whimsically colored houses: salt and dirt and water deposits dull the paint; a storm door hangs loose; a porch railing has lost integral parts. A squirrel runs the length of a telephone cable. A dog chases a ball in the park. A crow flies, cawing, across the opaque white sky.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” Kate’s father says. “If you look at the scenery, you’ll end up in the scenery.”

  They turn into the Wilbur Cross High School parking lot and he has her back into a space. He has her make a three-point turn. She performs quite respectably until they call it a day and she pulls up to the curb and directly into the blue government-issue mailbox. Her father gets out and looks. In the front yard, Miles is climbing the copper beech, pudge hanging out from under his down jacket. Kate sees the dent in the blue box. In her father’s expression, she sees that the fender is dented too. She puts on the emergency brake and takes the key from the ignition and leans her head against the steering wheel, accidentally honking the horn. Her father gets back into the passenger seat and checks around and takes the key. “No big deal,” he says. But he feels sorry, she can tell, sorry for her. The sorry feeling is icky and heavy in the car, cagey and creepy like slime under a rock, unpleasant and interfering as a dental exam. Both want to rid themselves and each other of
it. They can’t move on until they do.

  She picks at her nails. “I saw it; I was just worrying about that squirrel.”

  “What squirrel?” He watches her fingers.

  “The squirrel in the road.”

  “Squirrels will get out of the way,” he says. “So will birds.”

  “The mailbox is too close to the street.”

  “Please don’t do that.” He pulls her hands apart.

  “I can do it if I want.” She resumes the picking.

  “Look,” Dennis says. “At Miles. Climbing that tree. Isn’t that nice, Kate?”

  She turns to look, hooking her elbow over the back of the seat.

  It is nice. Miles jams a foot against the trunk and pulls himself to a higher branch, struggling a little with his excess weight. Still, he strikes Kate as unencumbered somehow.

  “He’s leaned out a lot, hasn’t he?” her father says.

  “I don’t know.”

  He has. And Kate has developed further, as if Miles’s extra pounds have fallen off and landed on her in all the right places.

  “He’s really growing up. You’ll be giving him driving lessons before we know it.”

  “Yeah, if he can fit behind the wheel.”

  “Don’t be like that. He’s your brother.”

  Miles is three-quarters of the way up the tree.

  “Look at him go,” Dennis says.

  “I hope he falls,” Kate says. She turns back to the wheel. “And breaks his neck.”

  Dennis grabs Kate’s arm and stares at her. Then smacks her flat-handed across the face.

  DURING THE DRIVING LESSON, Kate’s mother has been baking bread. Oatmeal, buttermilk, anadama. She has brought out the old loaf pans, kneaded dough in the big yellow bowl. The kitchen is warm and fragrant. Kate runs through it on her way from the car and up to the bathroom. She splashes cold water on her face. She hears the car pull away from the curb. Back downstairs, she smears the fresh bread with butter and crams it into her mouth. She has slice after slice of bread. The butter, which has been sitting out anyway, melts into the spongy nooks and crevices.

  She calls Topher. They have homework in common, a science assignment. Also, they’ve become an item. They stop after school at Clark’s for milk shakes and pizza. They nuzzle in the reading room between classes. He sits on the couch—she stretches out and recites her Latin and lodges her head in his lap. He sighs and fidgets. She encourages his excitement by flipping up her skirt and pulling at her tights and twisting her head this way and that. They’ve graduated from kissing games to real makeout sessions. They make out in the climber in the playground and on the swings, her straddling him. They fool around in basements and rec rooms: his hand under her shirt, her hand at his crotch, rubbing at the cloth. His friends look at her knowingly, lewdly. Her friends call her names and she insults them back—they do this the way girls do, as if challenging the future name-calling their indiscretions will bring, as if beating the guys to the punch:

  Easy Access.

  Loose Lips.

  Jizface.

  Sometimes she feels as though she loves Topher. But still she suspects that her real affection concerns the house and the Anderson-slash-D’Amato family, the whole rambunctious swept-away feeling of all of them together, the televised sports, the sitcoms, the wrestling, the whacking off. She has tender and intense feelings for Topher. But she has them also for Nick and Bobby (both away at college now), for Sebastian and for Rudy, certainly for Rudy.

  AFTER DINNER, which Kate and Miles and Edie eat at the kitchen table and Dennis eats alone in his study, Kate walks next door with her backpack and books and a loaf of bread for Ella Anderson. The Andersons have finished dinner and are moving on to dessert. Kate pulls up a chair and partakes. She flirts with Sebastian, with Rudy, with Mr. Anderson. She describes the day’s lesson, including the mailbox but leaving out the bad feelings and the slap. She’s surprised that the Andersons can’t tell anyway, can’t see fingers like a brand across her face.

  “And then, bam!” she says.

  Everyone laughs, even Ella Anderson. Rudy leans back in his chair. He crumples his napkin and throws it onto his plate. His hair, almost black, several shades darker than Topher’s, sticks up in cowlicks all over his scalp, and reminds Kate of his swarthy testicles. Ella Anderson gathers up his plate and the others.

  Then, with their books, Kate and Topher go up to Topher’s room. They take out the assignment they’ve been charged with: blowing up a balloon with a banana. Supposedly, the decomposition of the banana will inflate the balloon. Bacteria will flock to the rotting fruit, multiply by eating the banana, and, while processing the food, release gas that fills the balloon with sweetly rancid air.

  “This is charming,” Kate says, mashing the banana in a small bowl.

  Topher clears debris off the radiator. They must place the banana mush and balloon in a warm sunny spot and note the balloon’s progress over the course of a week. Kate scoops the mashed banana into a glass juice bottle and Topher fits the neck of the balloon over the bottle top and moves both to the radiator, adjacent to a window.

  That done, they begin to make out. There are the usual maneuvers: his hand up her shirt, hers against his zipper. His bed sits under the window, a plain melamine rectangle—there is something military about his room, the sparseness and squareness of it, as there is about his brothers’ rooms: the empty bureau tops, the neat corners and swept floors and frugal lighting, the plain colors and overall lack of adornment. A draft comes in through the window. They find their way under the covers. The sheets are worn and soft with a Peanuts motif. Her tights come off, her short corduroy skirt.

  “Wait,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Don’t.” She pulls the skirt back on.

  Topher gets out of bed. He goes to his closet and returns with a magazine. She untangles herself from the sheets and sits up also, crossing her legs.

  He hands her the magazine: this month’s Cosmopolitan. “You wanna try something?”

  “Oh, God.” She holds the magazine at arm’s length, between thumb and index finger. “Did you …”

  “Nope. Today’s mail.”

  “You stole it out of the mail? Your poor mom.”

  “Check out page thirty-four.”

  She muddles her way through makeup and perfume ads to the page. “ ‘Fellatio 101.’ Oh, please.”

  “Come on, read it.”

  “ ‘Step One. Hydrate! A lubricated mouth interior will get things off to a steamy start. Swig from a glass of water before going down on your guy.’ ” She looks at Topher. “Oh, man.”

  “Keep going.”

  “ ‘Step Two. Position.’ Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Hey!”

  “ ‘Step Three: Execution. Run your tongue around the tip of his penis for a minute or so. Lick up and down the sides. Tease him by licking his inner thighs and his testicles. Put one hand on him and make a ring with your thumb and forefinger. Attach the ring to your lips—’ ” She breaks off. She waves the magazine in Topher’s direction, also, surreptitiously, fanning herself—she is blushing. “Attach it? Like with duct tape? Masking tape? Elmer’s? Staples?”

  Topher pantomimes a full-body shudder. He grabs his crotch and rolls off the bed and lies on the floor.

  “Not you, me!” she cries. “It’s me they’re saying should staple my fingers to my lips! For your enjoyment!”

  “Oh, well, okay then …” He raises himself on his elbows. “Go on.”

  “ ‘With your palm and remaining fingers, grip the skin of the penis as you might while pleasuring him manually. Move your hand up and down in tandem with your mouth.’ ”

  “SAT word. Tandem.”

  Rudy is deep into prepping for the SATs. Vocabulary lists flap under refrigerator magnets, drift off counters and tables, wilt on bathroom and mudroom walls. Unlike his brothers and unlike Kate, Rudy struggles in school, and therefore all this effort is unlikely to yield meaningful results. When he has
a paper he sits at the kitchen table, slowly typing under the basket-shaped overhead light. Sometimes tutors sit with him there. They bend their sleek ponytailed heads toward him with tender concentration, their soft voices speaking of precalculus, the Civil War, the atria and ventricles of the heart.

  “Poor Rudy,” Kate says.

  “Just keep reading.”

  She wiggles her behind on the mattress. She uncrosses her legs and recrosses them the opposite way. “ ‘The ring will mean greater friction for him and less work for you. Don’t be shy about putting a little spit and slobber into it. Move your tongue constantly in a back-and-forth or circular motion around the tip of the penis.’ Wow.” She looks up. “This is like one of those patting-your-head-and-rubbing-your-stomach-at-the-same-time kind of things.”

  “I can do that,” Topher says. He does it.

  “ ‘Conclusion: To Swallow or Not to Swallow?’ Oh, yuck.” She closes the magazine and tosses it onto the floor.

  “What music should we listen to?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. No way.”

  “Rudy and Karen Baker did it. I mean she did it. To him.”

  “They’re juniors!”

  “Yeah, well. It sounds complicated.”

  “I’m just not interested.”

  “You’d be stumped the second you got down there.”

  He knows—and he knows she knows he knows—that she likes a challenge. “I don’t want my number on the boys’ bathroom walls.” But she retrieves the magazine and opens it to page thirty-four and reads the remaining paragraphs to herself. Then, standing: “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Really? Stay here.” He looks at her meaningfully, delighted and alarmed. “I’ll get the water.”

  “Don’t get all excited. I’m actually thirsty. And. I have to pee. Right back.”

  She walks down the hall to the second-floor bathroom. At this point, she might as well. Her father’s slap has woken her up—or something—brought her to her senses, or maybe the opposite. Everything feels different. She has no idea what she’ll do back in Topher’s room but one variable is leading to another, faster and faster, and extreme measures seem suddenly available.