Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  The happy-family husband requested in polite tones that the driver slow down. The driver did, grudgingly.

  They passed a corn maze—at the entrance to indicate it as such, a decomposing wooden sign.

  “Look!” Lila cried. Robin looked. “Corn maze!” Lila had begun reading last year but Kate still found herself stunned by the fact of it—when she shouted out, “Stop!” or “No Parking!” or sat silently over a book. “We want to go to the corn maze.” Lila looked from one parent to the other. She functioned this way periodically, as a spokesperson for both girls. “We want to go. Can we? Can we go?”

  Robin said, “Remember when we went on another time? On another day? On Saturday?”

  “That was a hay maze,” Colin said. He kissed her hair. Robin sucked on her doughnut. She sang a song she’d learned in preschool—“I looked out my window and what did I find, pumpkins a-growin’ on my pumpkin vine, pumpkins, pumpkins are growing …” The happy-family mother smiled at Colin.

  “We want to go. Please. Please can we go, Mommy, please can we go?”

  “Not right this minute, baby girl. Maybe on the way back.”

  “You promise.”

  “Okay. Definitely we’ll go on the way back.” As always, they asked Mommy, not Daddy. He was not called upon to make the decisions, decisions that might inconvenience or incriminate him, might later be used against him, as proof of his poor judgment.

  The wagon turned a corner. They bumped over a rut. Kate bit her lip and tasted blood. The ethanol odor of corn rose about them, sharp and dry. The stalks bristled.

  She seized Lila and hugged her. “Ow,” Lila said.

  They parked at the foot of the field. The wagon wedged its wheels into the shallow rocky earth. The passengers climbed down off the back. Robin jumped from the third step. She held up her doughnut. She had mangled it and licked off the sugar. She pushed it into Kate’s hand. “Don’t want this,” Robin said.

  “Look,” Kate said. She dug a shallow hole with her booted toe and dropped the doughnut in. She covered the pastry up, sweeping the dirt back over it with the side of her foot, Robin assisting.

  “What are you doing?” Lila inserted herself between them.

  “Planting a doughnut tree,” Kate said. She poured her remaining coffee over the dirt patch. “There. It’ll grow.”

  They were directed by the toothless driver to a cluster of small wheelbarrows. Colin took one and forged ahead to the field, which lay up a brief incline against the trees and the sky. Kate and the girls followed and then they were in it. Pumpkins burst from twisting green vines. Straw, tamped down by traffic, coated the ground between rows. Roots as gnarly as an old man’s knuckles pushed themselves from the earth. The sun, setting garishly in the opaque sky, blacked out fellow pickers and pumpkin seekers so that the trudging human figures and their loaded carts resembled a children’s shadow play.

  Robin skipped ahead, flying spritelike and immune over the knotted turgid roots, singing her preschool song, improvising—“I looked out my window and what did I see, doughnuts a-growin’ on my doughnut tree …”

  “Oh, that’s clever, Robin.” Kate stepped around a root. Lila, beside her, compromised by old ballet slippers from the dress-up drawer, tripped on the same root, but Kate caught her and guided her on. Colin, both manservant and ultimate authority, trudged ahead, stooping over the wheelbarrow.

  Again they divided—Kate and Lila, Colin and Robin. “This one is cute,” Lila said. “It’s just a baby. May I pick it?”

  It hurt Kate to see Lila smiling over a baby, even just a squash baby. Even now, with this day—her creation—and her investment in it she was setting her daughter up for fundamental disenchantments.

  “You can pick it,” Kate said.

  Lila twisted the diminutive pumpkin off its vine. She trudged ahead and deposited the pumpkin in the cart. Returning, she said, “Mommy?” She went quickly to Kate’s side and took her hand. “I want to tell you a secret.”

  “A secret? Sure, baby girl. What is it?”

  “Well.” She leaned closer to her mother, bumping her as they walked. “Sometimes at school? The boys bother us.”

  “Bother you how?”

  “They push us. They push all the girls. On the playground. They throw dirt at us. And also they talk about killing us. They go like this.” She stopped, turned, and demonstrated, drawing an index finger across her throat.

  “Have you told Maggie? Did you tell her what you just told me?”

  “I told her but they weren’t doing it then. She said she has to see it.”

  “Oh, she does, does she.”

  “She says we’re supposed to work it out ourselves.”

  “Goddamn it,” Kate said softly. Lila looked up, startled but gratified.

  “Mommy?” She stopped walking and Kate did too. “When they do that”—again she drew her finger across her throat—“it makes me feel like I want to do it too. But I don’t like how that feels. I don’t really want to do it but I feel like I want to.”

  “Which boys? Ethan? Jeremy?”

  “Ethan and Lionel and Max and Jeremy.”

  Kate bit her lip. She envisioned taking the offenders out behind the playground and crushing them, kicking their six-year-old behinds—horrible, horrible children!

  “Don’t tell Daddy,” Lila said. She kicked at a root.

  “Daddy will want to know.”

  “Also they called Addie a fat butt.”

  “Little monsters.”

  Again, Lila looked up, impressed. Then she stopped over a squash that was black and dented in spots, as if it had gotten into a fight. She put her arms around it and pulled at it.

  “Let me help.” Kate pulled with her. Together, they twisted the squash from its vine. “Next time one of those boys pushes you,” Kate said, “you push him back.”

  She picked the pumpkin up in both her arms and carried it to the wheelbarrow.

  “It’s getting late,” Colin said. “We should think about going.”

  “I want the corn maze!” Robin ran to Lila for support. Kate looked at Colin.

  “I promised them the maze,” she said.

  “We need to get all the way home, guys. We got a late start, remember?”

  “Maze! Maze!”

  They clamored for it. Colin stepped behind the wheelbarrow, knocked back by their desire and its strenuous expression.

  “I’ll take them,” Kate said.

  “I can pay for these, load the car, I guess. Okay. Don’t take forever, though.”

  They walked back toward the barn, Lila kicking at the beaten trodden path, Robin riding in the barrow amid the pumpkins. At the corn maze they parted.

  “I’ll be in the car,” Colin said.

  There seemed to be, even in all that tall obliterating corn, nowhere to hide from him, or he from her. She watched him tread off with the barrow, in his brown coat, his hands red around the handles. He had remembered his gloves but left his head bare—and his upper scalp practically hairless—how cold that must be. She adjusted her own dark pony. He’d been balding, of course, back in the days of Stamford, the train, the East Village, the crowded bars, the waitresses with their pencil topknots, even the night of the clogged sink. Still, Kate felt implicated—what had she done, done to him, to cause this blight! She had terrorized him, stripped him of his natural protection against the elements—sun, cold, wind. She wanted to chase him down, cover his poor bare head with a hat or with her own thick locks.

  But how obstinate he was! How inflexible! His balding head loomed, symbolic of his stubbornness.

  Lila pulled at her sleeve. “Come on.”

  They stepped in and stood, breathing in the sharp tickling smell. From outside, the maze had seemed compact, a contained and navigable unit. But inside, everything vanished but the most proximate activities: the crackling and settling of straw, the cry of a crow, the activity of insects.

  “There’s nobody else here,” Robin observed.

  Lila pointe
d deeper into the maze. “Maybe they’re in there.”

  Robin bolted and ran through an opening in the corn—a sort of trapdoor through the wall to the adjacent section—and disappeared. Kate grabbed Lila’s arm and set after her. Through the corn she caught a flash of red—Robin’s coat. She rounded a corner and caught her younger daughter about the shoulders. “Don’t do that again.”

  Lila giggled.

  Above, the channel of gray sky darkened. “Just a little while in here, guys. Like Daddy said.” The girls ran ahead, lightly, over the snapping straw. Kate ran also, reached after their flying hair. “Guys! I said no!” The clouds moved above, poured, like smoke from a burning building. The girls veered off in opposite directions. “Freeze! Stay together, guys!” She retrieved them. “Hold hands. Everyone hold hands, okay?”

  They held hands then, twisting sideways like a paper-doll chain, the sort a child would make for a Christmas tree. They turned and turned again. Tough bowed leaves hooked on Kate’s hair and pulled at it. “We should go back now, guys,” she said. She didn’t know how to get back but she didn’t say so.

  “But we have to get to the end,” Lila said.

  “Where’s the end?”

  “We have to find it.”

  Kate looked up. A crow flew along the sky tunnel and vanished.

  “I can spell ‘scarecrow,’ ” Lila said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “S-c-a-r-e-c-r-o-w!”

  “Oh! Yes, good, Lila.”

  Kate had left her purse in the car. Her purse had her phone in it and her phone had the time. Anxiety surged in her, as in dreams where she could not get ready, someone waiting downstairs as clothing and jewelry slipped from her hands; as in days when errands stretched out and she searched, trapped in Target or Stop & Shop—late for everything, missing everything.

  Had it been five minutes? Ten? Fifteen? The dense stalks repeated themselves. She started forward again, pulling the girls along now, hurrying.

  “Are we lost, Mommy?”

  Kate tripped over a root. She fell to the rough ground on her hands and knees. “Damn thing. Goddamn it.”

  “Are you okay, Mommy?”

  “Can we get out?”

  “Are we lost, Mommy? Are we lost?”

  The girls towered over her, anxiously looking down.

  Kate pulled herself up. Her palms stung. Her knees burned through her jeans. She shouted, “Hello! Hello! Help!”

  “Call Daddy. On your phone.”

  “Lila, you’re so clever. But I left it in my purse. Which I left in the car.”

  “Oh, Mommy!”

  Robin turned and walked ahead, suddenly, on sturdy corduroy-clad legs.

  “Follow her,” Lila said. She hauled at Kate’s arm.

  They followed. The wicked stalks persisted. The maze whipped around and around again.

  But—abruptly—light and land showed ahead. Robin tumbled toward the exit, compact with purpose. They broke out into dusk.

  “Robin!” Kate scooped her up.

  “Robin saved us!” Lila cried.

  They ran, holding hands, down the rutted path toward the barn, past cornfields, past the geese and the ducks, past the pigs in their pen, past the bonfire, to the car where Colin waited, arms crossed. He saw them and got into the driver’s seat without saying hello. He started the engine. Kate buckled seat belts.

  “Thanks for making it quick,” he said.

  “We were lost,” she said. She did up her own belt.

  “We got lost!” Robin shouted. “Lost in the corn maze!”

  “You did, did you.”

  He seemed unimpressed at the prospect of nearly having lost them.

  “We got lost, lost, stuck!” Robin banged the back of his seat.

  Lila banged Kate’s seat. “And Robin led us out! She led us out of the maze!”

  “An hour,” he said to Kate. “You were gone an hour.”

  “Robin is magic,” Lila said.

  “Your daughter is trying to tell you something,” Kate said.

  “You said you’d hurry.”

  She looked out the window. Tears rose in her throat. She swallowed them back. “When you ignore the girls, when they’re talking to you? It makes me feel …” She searched her vocabulary, could not find a fitting word. “Like shit.”

  He pressed his lips together.

  She put her head to the chilly window. The other family, the happy family, piled into their Suburban, laughing, hay caught in the older girl’s long hair. Colin pulled onto the road. The radio played “Positively 4th Street.” Kate turned, sensing activity, and looked back. The girls were dancing in their seats, shaking their still-oversize heads to the beat.

  “Okay, tell me, Lila,” Colin said. “Tell me what happened.”

  19

  HE CARVED PUMPKINS ROTTED on the porch. The favorite candy was consumed and the rest of it grew stale in the orange plastic totes. Kate, thinking of Brooke and Trey, collected sexual positions from the Internet. She and Colin sprawled on the parental bed examining their options:

  The Panini Press

  The Hit and Run

  The Nice to Meet You

  The All I Want for Christmas

  The Sharper Image

  The Shotgun Wedding

  The Up and Adam

  The Air on a G String

  The Ass Menagerie

  They tried a couple, both of which seemed to thrill Colin but only amused Kate.

  Miles’s name appeared in the New York Times in connection with the mayor. Kate fell down the basement stairs carrying a basket of dirty laundry. Colin came home and found her on the sofa with an ice pack and a scotch, sprawled out, watching Dragon Tales with the girls.

  “You okay? What happened?”

  She told him. “I hurt my hip. And my ankle. And my arm. And my elbow. But yes, I’m okay.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s hard to see coming down those basement stairs with the laundry, that’s all.”

  “Doesn’t Beatrice do the laundry?”

  “Portia? No, she doesn’t. Only some of it. You know that.”

  “Well, have her do all of it.”

  “Oh, God, Colin. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times.”

  “Shush!” Robin hissed.

  “Robin. Not okay.” Colin held up his index finger. “I’ll get them to bed,” he told Kate.

  He ushered the girls upstairs. Kate changed the channel. The phone rang. She reached for the handheld, askew on the coffee table. Her mother. Upstairs, Colin shouted, “Teeth!”

  “Katie, I wonder how you’d feel if I went to Amelia’s parents’ this Thanksgiving instead of Judith’s,” Edie said.

  Amelia was Miles’s current girlfriend. Judith was Colin’s mother.

  “They invited me, and he seems to like her so, and I’m just thinking it would be nice for me to get to know the family a bit.”

  “That’s fine, Mom. Not a problem.”

  “May I visit with the kids anyway? Take them for the night, maybe?”

  “You want to? Take them?”

  “You and Colin could have some time alone.…”

  “We might kill each other.”

  “What?”

  “No, never mind, nothing. Yes. The girls would love that. Friday?”

  She hung up. Colin returned from bedtime and collapsed ponderously next to her on the couch.

  “I’m taking the girls to my mom’s Friday,” she told him. “And she won’t be at Thanksgiving because she’s going to Amelia’s parents’. So you should go out with the guys or something. Friday. Do you want to tell your mom or should I?”

  “The guys, huh? You don’t want to do date night? A little angel hair?”

  “Ha, ha. Well. I don’t know; I might spend the night up there too.”

  The words surprised her as she said them. She’d had no coherent thought to this effect. But as she spoke she knew she wanted to be away. From the house, from the mess, from Colin, just a
way.

  On Thursday night she e-mailed Jack Auerbach.

  Probably busy at such late notice, but …

  He wrote back right away. No, he wasn’t busy. Seven o’clock, the Q Club?

  Friday morning she packed a small bag for the girls and a smaller one for herself. She laid out clothes. A corduroy skirt, a camisole, a half-sleeve sweater, the boots. Lace underwear and a push-up bra.

  Doing so, she realized that she wanted to sleep with him.

  With Jack.

  She understood that if she got the chance, she would. There it was, the knowledge, right in front of her like a dish she hadn’t ordered.

  Well, what was she to do? She could send it back or she could dig in.

  She wanted to screw him. Of course she did. Why else would she bother with any of this, with the e-mail and the trip and the bra?

  She paid the bills. She unloaded the dishwasher. She sent Colin an e-mail. She showered and picked the girls up at school, one, then another. She passed them their snack, graham crackers and string cheese. Then she got on 95 and headed north to New Haven.

  “Wait till you see the house,” Edie said at the door.

  Kate and the girls followed her down the front hallway. Since their last visit, the living room had become a playroom. Sprightly children’s literature filled the bookshelf. Beanbags abounded, toys, puzzles, and games neatly stacked. The girls ran joyfully in, responding to the cheery appeal of organization, brightness, and neatness, everything as it should be.

  “It looks really nice in here, Mom,” Kate said.

  “I think it came out well too. It’s not like I have company, so …”

  “They love it.” The girls frolicked amid the toys and books and games. Even the disorder the kids immediately created didn’t get to Kate like it did at home. It seemed nothing to fret about, like someone else’s baby crying or someone else’s children fighting, just natural, a normal expression of normal needs.

  Kate hurled herself into a cushy chair. Her mother got down on the floor and helped Lila and Robin put together a puzzle.

  “I bet that puzzle actually still has all its pieces,” Kate said. “How did you keep everything so neat when we were kids? You worked full-time. I don’t get it. How did you do all the little things?”