Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “You had own bathroom?” Eva’s eyes widened. “Everyone own bathroom?”

  “Oh, well … I had my own, yeah. My parents. My brother. Then, one downstairs.” This wasn’t the point she’d wanted to make. “What I mean is, it seems cruel of Nikolai to make such a song and dance out of your period.”

  “Song? Dance?”

  “To act disgusted by it. You know?”

  “Except for”—and she touched her healing face—“only he slap me. Is okay.”

  “Only!”

  “In families, people hit each other, is so normal. For me, and …” Again, she indicated the room, the television, Ivan, the three women. “Not for you. For people like you, is different.”

  Kate shook her head. She took a second cookie and, instead of eating it, began to pick it apart over a napkin. “Eva, these things happen to … happen with all kinds of people.”

  “If he and girl have family, I cannot stand it.” Eva took a third cookie. “Tomorrow, diet.”

  LATER, Kate bathed the girls and washed their hair. Colin returned from the office and dried them off and got them into pajamas and in front of their show. Kate opened the fridge and looked inside. Colin came up behind her and closed the door from under her hand.

  “Family dinner,” she said.

  “I’m beat. We can’t scratch it this week?”

  “I went to the store.”

  “Thank you.”

  She showered and dressed in her softest jeans, one of Colin’s old shirts, and beaded mesh slippers from the Chinese dollar store. Back downstairs, she put water on to boil. Colin, finding her, raised and knotted his eyebrows.

  “I set the table,” she said. “I’m making spaghetti. And we won’t throw it at each other. Okay?”

  17

  ATE RAN into Jack Auerbach at a gallery opening, a group show in which Mave had a piece. Colin stayed home with the girls and Kate drove up to New Haven alone. She avoided 95 with its menacing trucks and took the Merritt Parkway, lovely this time of year, edged by oaks and maples, their leaves flinging color at the cars. How predictably enchanting it was, but still, she passed through enchanted. She got off the Merritt and drove toward downtown.

  She parked and entered the gallery. Guests milled in appreciative stances—necks angled, plastic cups of wine at the ready. A blond girl in a bikini top worked her way through the crowd, handing out nude Barbie dolls to the men. Kate looked around for Mave and Dan. No trace, or of anyone else Kate knew. She took the everlasting plastic cup of white wine from the card-table bar and began her viewing. There was a life-size dress with a slim bodice made of bubble wrap and a giant flowing skirt made of Target bags. There was a tinfoil bull hanging piñata-style from the ceiling. There was a man in a glass case, kneeling and drenched in honey—another man stood behind him and stuck tiny mirrored tiles to the first man and took them off and stuck them back on again. There was a Barbie doll dressed in a skirt made of a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin and a tube top made of an empty Sweet’N Low packet. She held a purse constructed from an empty white real sugar packet and a red stirring straw, bent to form a handle, and she held a parasol made from a cup sleeve and another red straw. There was a bank of metal drawers. On top sat a yellow legal pad and a pen. A printed sign instructed the viewer to read a secret and write a secret.

  Kate opened one drawer, then another, then another:

  Once I stole money from my grandmother.

  When I was fourteen I dumped my best friend. We used to play with dolls together. I told her she wasn’t cool and I didn’t want to be friends with her anymore.

  I have herpes.

  Bulimia has ruined my life. Tomorrow I’m buying a gun.

  There was a painting of a couple making love on a pink bedspread, the man looking at the woman, the woman looking at herself in the mirror. Not at the man, not at them together, but at herself—one could tell—the man was just context for her, his rough textures accentuating her soft ones. There was a papier-mâché-and-cardboard tunnel that some of the younger guests were crawling through. There was a diorama of what seemed to be a gang bang. A tiny blond celluloid girl-doll lay on her back on the floor of a miniature replica of a boy’s room, her skirt up, smiling. A boy-doll lay on top of her. Other boy-dolls clustered around, some thrusting their pale bent arms in the air. Some of the boy-dolls had originally been girl-dolls—Kate could tell by their bodies and faces—but the artist had cropped their hair and dressed them accordingly.

  She registered a man next to her, also scrutinizing the gang bang. Somewhat older—familiar. Dark hair graying a bit. Crooked teeth.

  Jack Auerbach. Her father’s grad student from years ago.

  She tapped him on the shoulder. “Jack. Hi. Hi, there.” She pointed to her chest. “Kate. Dennis’s daughter.”

  “Kate! Right. Of course!”

  “Funny!”

  “You visiting your mom?”

  “Sort of. Yes. How are you? Still at Yale?”

  “Yep. Still there. We miss your dad.”

  “I do too.” Sometimes she actually did.

  “You were married, as I recall.”

  “I was. Am. Still am.”

  “And what does your husband do? Remind me.”

  “Finance. And I’m home with the kids,” she added quickly. “Kids. How many?”

  “Two. Two girls.”

  “Hard to believe.” He looked at her.

  She folded her arms to her chest, her index finger inside the plastic cup. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. When we met, when I met your dad, you were a little girl.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have been all that much older.” A fruit fly sauntered by and fell into her wine. She fished it out with her pinkie finger. “Anyway. You?”

  “No kids. Not married. I was but it didn’t work out.”

  She nodded sympathetically.

  “Or rather, it was what it was. Now it’s over. I kind of hate the whole vocabulary of breakups, don’t you? ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ et cetera—as if it never was at all unless you end up dying together, and only then if death ends the marriage is the relationship viable.”

  He’d hung onto most of his dark brown hair. The skin of his face had the geological look that men got after a certain point, that Colin was getting—as if the road from his chin to his hairline would be rough, as if a tiny earthbound insect might need a walking stick and a bottle of water to make its way.

  “I don’t think I ever met your wife.”

  “We weren’t married all that long. She’s at Harvard now. Married again, kids, et cetera. Well,” he said, “that’s great, that you’re still married. That it’s, ah, working out.”

  She laughed. She rolled her eyes. “We’ll see!” She looked down into her empty plastic cup. Boldly, he took it from her.

  “Refill?”

  “Sure. Yes, thanks.”

  “You seen everything?”

  “I was going to go over there.” She pointed.

  He went to the bar, she to the other side of the gallery, where guests wrote secrets on slips of paper and dropped them into a box and a girl in a tunic and tight jeans tacked the slips to the wall.

  I had a nose job, one read.

  I fake orgasms.

  I cheat on my taxes.

  I ate six thousand calories today. I feel like shit.

  I am a happily married man with a son and daughter but my wife no longer sleeps with me and sometimes I have this daydream that my best friend and I go on a fishing trip and we end up watching some porn on his laptop and then we suck each other off. I don’t think I’m gay but the dream still makes me horny.

  I have been in the closet for twenty years.

  I hate my life so much sometimes.

  I have a gambling addiction. I have lost over twenty-five thousand dollars. If I tell my wife she’ll leave me.

  I want to bring home a young beautiful girl with big breasts and watch her have sex with my husband.

  I pick my nose
when I’m alone in my car.

  I am a successful businessman and I own property and a truck but I have been addicted to crack for fourteen years.

  Once I ordered a Mac. They sent me two and charged me for one. I called but got disconnected. So I kept them both.

  I don’t recycle.

  Once my dog licked my leg under my skirt and got an erection and I took him into the bathroom and jerked him off.

  And so on.

  “Which is yours?” Jack held out the wine. She took it.

  “Nope. I mean, I haven’t done one. Have you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not telling you which it is.”

  “Oh, my. That bad, huh?”

  “It is bad.”

  “Not the one about the dog.”

  “No, not that.” The tunic girl swung by them and reached up with her paper and tacks. “So you get up here often?”

  “Time to time.”

  “How is your mother? And your brother?”

  “She’s good. Still in the old house. And Miles—he’s in New York. Working for the mayor. Running the city!” She laughed.

  Fruit flies hung about Jack’s head—something about him in particular, or his red wine maybe, seemed to be attracting them. He brushed them off and they scattered, then reattached themselves. She recalled his shaggy hair at the Q Club, the butter in the shape of a star. Now here he was, standing in front of her, flicking flies from his face.

  One settled on his temple and she reached forward instinctively and brushed it away. Then, immediately embarrassed by the intimacy of the gesture, she looked down into her wine. “I really shouldn’t drink this, actually,” she said. “I’m driving. I should probably actually take off.”

  He filched a slip of paper from the secret girl. “Well, if you’re up here again,” he said, “or if I’m down there for some reason, we could have coffee or a drink or something.” He wrote on the paper and handed it to Kate. “Get in touch.”

  She dropped the paper into her bag. There was something about his voice. A hoarse, craggy quality that matched his face. She wanted to stay. But she’d already announced her departure.

  “Great to see you,” he said.

  “Yes! Likewise! You too!”

  18

  ALLOWEEN HIJACKED the neighborhood. Pumpkins adorned front steps and artificial cobwebs draped bushes. Witches and skeletons hung from trees, their limbs shaking in the wind. After sundown, cauldrons glowed with demonic red lights, withered arms hanging over the sides. Kate and Lila and Robin attended a Halloween party at the club. Robin went as a princess, Lila as a witch. The face painter gave Robin red cheeks and a pink bow mouth and painted Lila’s face green. Kate took them out back to the club playground and pushed them on the swings. Lila asked repeatedly, “Is it still green?” as if afraid the paint might fly off midswing.

  The last weekend in October the family drove to Litchfield County to pick pumpkins. Kate had planned the trip for the previous weekend but the car had acted up and Robin had run a fever. The sun had shone all Saturday and Sunday as happy families frolicked in hay, stuffed scarecrows, and photographed themselves against blue sky and orange leaves. But on Tuesday a high wind swept through the state and snatched the leaves from the trees. The temperature dropped. Now Kate and Colin and the girls stood shivering under a curved gray drum in a dirt parking lot beside farmland.

  “We could have just gone to Bishop’s,” Colin said. He had waited in the car, reading the paper, while the females struggled with bathroom, shoes, coats, snacks, books, toys, hair. “Maybe I just shouldn’t go,” he’d said, when they finally materialized in the station wagon. “Maybe I should stay home, get some work done.”

  “This is an adventure,” Kate said. She took Robin’s hand and started toward an open barn. Other families greeted them there, other stragglers lining up for doughnuts and cider. “Look,” Kate said. “Doughnuts!” Conceiving of appealing activities, then generating enthusiasm for said activities, in spite of whiners (Robin) and naysayers (Colin), seemed an implicit component of her job as mother and wife. A horse stamped and switched its tail. Pigs rutted behind a fence. Goats looked anxiously over boards, their funny ears at attention, their funny faces so human.

  Lila went right up to the fence. “Those pigs don’t smell,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s too cold.” Kate took out her wallet. “Do you guys want doughnuts?”

  Then they stood by the goat pen with their cider and coffee and doughnuts, not quite knowing what came next. They stood close together, as if enclosed in a gray capsule. On Route 44 a lone car passed. Kate felt responsible for their near isolation in this dull landscape. She looked about, hoping to reassure herself with the sight of other people. A mom and a dad, two girls, and a boy knocked shoulders by the bonfire. The comfort of their company quickly gave way to pain as she felt herself to be separate from them, that most enviable of entities, a happy family. The mother she envied most, of course—neat bobbed hair, a gray coat, and pink gloves. Enthusiasm would come naturally to this woman, as would calm, as would peace of mind. Kate wanted to walk into the woman’s reality, taking her own family along, to own it or be owned by it.

  An assemblage of ducks and geese quacked by. Robin ran after them. They sped up and raised their voices, then escaped under a fence.

  “They’re talking about Robin,” Lila said.

  “Should we get going?” Colin swigged his coffee. “Or maybe we should just buy a couple pumpkins and call it a day.”

  Kate said, “I’ll find out.” She walked toward the barn and inquired after the pumpkins. They must journey to the field, by foot or wagon. She returned. “There’s a wagon,” she said. “Or we can walk.”

  Colin groaned.

  “Oh, fie on you, naysayer!” she cried.

  Lila sidled back to the pigs. “They smell, Mommy,” she said. “Now they smell.”

  “They must have heard us,” Kate said. “They must have forgotten to put their smell on this morning. They heard us and they put it on.”

  Kate’s family and the happy family waited for the wagon. Lila’s and Robin’s hands flushed red around their cider—their bare little hands—it hurt Kate to see it.

  Colin noticed too. “Doesn’t anyone have gloves?” he asked.

  Kate set down her coffee and searched her own pockets, then, getting to her knees, theirs, for a stray pair. Robin wailed, “Tissue!” and Kate provided her with one.

  Colin himself wore gloves—thick wool ones, with leather at the palms.

  “We forgot their gloves,” Kate said. “We’re terrible parents.”

  His face moved with all he wanted to say—his protest at the inclusive pronoun, the shared condemnation.

  “Terrible.” Kate rubbed both of Robin’s hands between hers.

  “I didn’t forget their gloves.”

  “Well, somebody did.”

  “Yeah.” He laughed over his coffee cup. His face appeared both menacing and vulnerable, his rough cheeks red with chill. “You did.”

  “We’re both responsible.”

  “Not me. You know why? Because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to remember the gloves. I didn’t get that memo.”

  “I didn’t either,” she said. “Get the memo. That’s my point.”

  “What is?”

  “We’ll be outdoors; it’s thirty degrees; they need gloves, right? So you just as easily as I could have thought, Yes, let me get the gloves; the girls will need gloves. You could have sent out the memo, or better yet, just done it on your own. Why do I have to delegate?”

  “But you were getting them ready.”

  “But only because you weren’t. Yes, I was getting them ready. And myself ready. And them ready again, after they took their coats and shoes off while I was putting mine on. All I’m saying is, is it impossible for you to do one small thing, the gloves?”

  “But you didn’t ask me to get the gloves,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you were counting on me to get the gloves.”

&
nbsp; She sighed extravagantly.

  “This was your idea,” he said.

  “If I’d asked you,” she said, “you’d think I was controlling.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “You would. You would. I don’t want to have to manage everything; I didn’t remember about the gloves either. Gloves were not even on my radar at that moment when I could have asked you to get the gloves.”

  “Gloves weren’t on my radar either.”

  “You remembered your gloves.”

  Everyone looked at his hands. The gray wool and leather gloves hugged them warmly. She waited for him to offer the girls his gloves. But he frowned and sipped his cider. The other family looked over at them and gathered more closely together. The wagon appeared over a small rise in the land, bearing pumpkins and their abductors.

  “This whole day was your idea,” he said.

  “Okay, okay,” she said softly. “Never mind. I should have remembered the gloves.”

  “Here.” Colin removed his gloves. He pulled one onto both of Robin’s hands and did the same with Lila.

  The wagon settled at the makeshift stop, three haystacks tied with twine. The horses stamped and shook their heads. The driver grinned from his perch—felt-hatted, gap-toothed.

  “All aboard!” he shouted.

  They climbed up, Colin lifting Robin. They seated themselves on two long wooden planks, one on each side. The girls’ faces and hands tensed in the wind. Kate leaned over and kissed Robin’s cold little cheek. She felt the usual urge to bite into it—so winsome, delightful, and luscious it was.

  The wagon bucked forward and bumped over the landscape that in spite of its fall harvest seemed depleted and torn. Trees hung to the edges of the fields, dark against the dull sky. Cornstalks rose fiercely from the uneven ground. Rocks kicked and clattered at the wagon’s wheels. The motion threw Kate and Lila, beside her, up, and gravity let them down, so that they jolted again and again off the wooden bench, their slender legs and tailbones punished. “Ouch,” Lila cried, “ouch, ouch!” But she laughed anyway, her straight thin hair still upwardly waving as her behind hit the bench, hanging on with both gloved hands. Across from them, Colin and Robin defied the motion—he so solid and large in his maleness, Robin in his lap.