Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Robin screamed into the phone, “Mommy, Mommy!”

  “Robin, I love you, baby girl; it’s okay!”

  “I want to see you, I want to see you!”

  Colin got on. Robin shrieked and gagged in the background. “She’s sick over missing you. Throwing up. Let’s meet halfway tomorrow. For dinner or something. Then at least she’ll see you.”

  “She’s so attached to you,” Jack said.

  “How can she, how can she miss me? I mean, I know how, but when I hurt her like that.”

  “I’m sure she knows you didn’t mean it.”

  “Oh, but I did mean it. That’s the thing. I keep wondering how I could have avoided getting so mad and I just can’t think of anything. Nothing.”

  “Valium? A lobotomy?”

  “I’ve never come that close before. I just, you know, just—” She thumped her fist into her palm.

  “What? Just what?”

  23

  ATE AND RUDY SNEAK PAST Topher’s room and down the stairs. Kate waves good night to Ella and Max, who are watching Letterman on the giant television. Rudy opens the side door and touches Kate’s waist under her jacket. “Talk to you later, okay?”

  “Okay.” She runs from the Andersons’ door to her own. Her father is waiting up in the kitchen, his papers spread out on the table. Again, he’s sorry, feels sorry for her, she can see—back and forth he goes, between anger and pity, like a man who forgets the same essential item over and over, leaving it in the front hallway at home so that he must return again and again.

  “You get your homework done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “Yes. Yes, yes.”

  And now she feels sorry; she feels pity. As if she’s duped him somehow, cheated, made him a cuckold. How rudely she drags him from his elevated place, from his investigation of the atomic bomb! Her lips sting. Her throat burns. Her mouth tastes of sour milk and lemons and salt. She must reek of it, of her escapade, her successful experiment. She’s got hickeys on her neck for all she knows, hair in her teeth, jism in her hair. He looks at her hopefully over his papers. She hurries to her room.

  RUDY DOESN’T TELL EVERYBODY what he and Kate did over the flash cards, but he does tell Topher, who in his rage (at Kate, all at Kate, not his beloved brother) tells everybody. At school, the boys make crude noises and move their thumbs in their cheeks. They write her number on their bathroom walls. She and Rudy bump into each other in the hallway between fourth period and lunch.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t …”

  She spits in his face.

  Bystanders cheer. He wipes the saliva from his cheek with the back of his hand.

  The older girls giggle, encountering her in the hall, the bathroom, the cafeteria. Someone plants a kosher dill in her locker. Someone sneaks a Popsicle onto her lunch tray.

  All this is humiliating but bearable. What’s not bearable is that the story gets back to her parents. Someone has written a note in class, discussing the episode, and a teacher has found it. Kate is called out of Latin and into the principal’s office. In front of Kate, the principal calls Kate’s mother at work and conducts a damning conversation. After school, Kate stays for as long as she can with her friends. Kate and her friends walk downtown to the Educated Burgher and sit around in the beat-up booths, eating French fries and toast. “You’re going to get it!” her friends shriek. Her father, with his gun and his treatment of the gnomes, is considered sinister and exacting. “It was nice knowing you!” At dinnertime they walk her to her door and hug her good-bye.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Kate’s family eats together at the table in the dining room. Most other nights Kate’s mother serves Kate and Miles an early dinner and eats hers standing up at the counter and their father eats in his study. Tonight, a Thursday, Miles has decided that he will do the cooking and that he will make pot roast. He stands before the stove and stirs his concoction: tepid water, a bouillon cube struggling to dissolve, a hunk of carrot, a sliced potato. Beside him their mother heats up another pot roast, the one that will actually be served. Kate offers to set the table. She brings out the hand-me-down china, the set her mother allows in the dishwasher. At her parents’ places she sets wineglasses. She folds cloth napkins and lays out forks and knives. Kate’s father comes home and, ignoring her, heads straight for his study. Naturally, Kate’s mother has contacted him at his office. Kate goes to her room. She does her algebra. She finishes it and begins tomorrow’s assignment. She solves equations. She finds the distance between two points. She finds the x-intercept. She finds the slope of a line from point A to point B. She calculates the equation of a line passing through C and D. Next door Topher will be working on the same problems. He will be recording the progress of the balloon and banana. Ella Anderson will be smashing garlic and setting the table; Max Anderson will be watching the game. At some point Rudy will be getting it from his parents as well, though not as badly as she’s going to get it—maybe Mr. Anderson will even pull him aside and slap him on the back, praise his sexual prowess. Mrs. Anderson will be horrified, but mildly, reparably! They will all move on without too much grief or trouble. The episode will be written off as vulgar but admissible—not ruinous, not the end of anything.

  She lies on her bed. She scribbles and calculates. The bed is a four-poster that once belonged to her grandmother. It’s big for a little person and so high she used to need a step stool to climb in. Her efforts, her experiments, are natural for her too, she thinks—even the bed, with its expansiveness, is asking to be filled; it wants two people, not just one. The sheets are soft and decorated with pale pink and green garlands. The wallpaper, which clashes somewhat with the sheets, is a pattern of vines and water lilies. Here and there a frog or a fish peeks through.

  Here she stays. Hungry, but willing to be so. Maybe her parents will forget about her and she will be permitted to spend the evening alone with her algebra, the algebra that has nothing to do with anything—with Rudy or Topher or the kosher dill or the Popsicle or her mother’s dismay or her father’s scary silence.

  But no. Her mother calls her down for dinner.

  “A talk, young lady.” This she promised as Kate walked in the door. When will it happen? Not at dinner—not with Miles there. Kate is suddenly, weepingly grateful for him. Though she, all of them, must sit, eat, and endure.

  She washes her hands and idles downstairs, holding on to the banister. She rubs her bare feet against the Oriental runner, tacked at the risers. Along the wall, along the stairs, are framed photos of her parents’ respective families. Her mother’s from Philadelphia: her mother and grandmother pose in coming-out gowns, their chins tilted upward. Her father’s from Galveston: his great-grandmother with her hair done up, her waist cinched painfully. His sloe-eyed elder sister who died at twenty in a car crash. His father, a midlevel employee at one of the big oil companies, who carried on the family tradition of corporal punishment with his sons, taking them out to the shed when they misbehaved and taking to them with his belt.

  The Allisons’ dining room is attached to the kitchen and across the hall from the living room. A crystal chandelier hangs, somewhat oppressively, over the table. A carpet of Persian needlepoint covers the wood floor. White Roman blinds hang in the bay windows. At the center window stands a table with a lamp on it. Kate sees that lit lamp from the street, walking through rain or cold or snow or dark down Livingston, hauling her backpack. She equates this light with her mother’s mute, passive, constant kindness. She resents it but moves persistently toward it.

  Kate has dressed herself in stretch pants and a giant, floppy sweatshirt, as if for protection, engulfment, as if the clothing might absorb her somehow.

  Her father emerges from his study as she cracks open a 7UP.

  Another mistake. He hates that she enjoys such junk, hates that Edie allows it. He sits, eyeing Kate the way he might a cockroach in the kitchen sink.

  Edie puts the pot roas
t, fetching in an Emile Henry tureen, on the table. Kate helps her carry in buttered noodles, salad, rolls. She sits, arranges the cloth napkin on her lap. She has poured her 7UP into a glass with ice, so as not to offend her father further.

  Kate’s mother distributes the food. There is the clinking of forks on china. Her parents begin one of their conversations.

  “Nero says the furnace will have to be replaced.”

  “Not this year.”

  “No, but next year, probably.”

  “Who says? Nero?”

  “They tested for carbon monoxide.”

  “And?”

  “Yes.”

  “How high?”

  “Well, I don’t recall exact percentages.”

  “Approximately.”

  “Not so high they had to shut it down.”

  “What’s carbon monoxide?” Miles asks.

  “Carbon monoxide,” Kate’s father says, “happens when carbon bonds to oxygen. An atom of carbon and an atom of oxygen make a carbon monoxide molecule. Too many of these molecules in the air can kill you. They bond with the hemoglobin in your blood and stop your blood from absorbing oxygen and you suffocate in your sleep.” He returns his attention to his wife. “They’re just trying to make a buck.”

  “Well, I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I call them for that reason, because I don’t know.”

  “At the very least they’re exaggerating.”

  “I looked at the meter.”

  “Probably fixed.”

  Kate makes an effort with her pot roast. She eats a chunk of carrot, one of potato. Another white like a carrot but sweeter. She separates the meat into strings. She shifts to the buttered noodles.

  “This is delicious, Miles,” Kate’s mother says.

  There are the awkward sounds of chewing, saliva, swallowing. They remind Kate of Rudy. “Yeah, Miles, it’s good.” She kicks her brother’s foot under the table harder than she means to.

  “Hey!” Miles says.

  “What is it?” Edie asks.

  “Kate kicked me.”

  Dennis pauses in his chewing. Puts down his utensils. Stands up from his seat. “Now you’re asking for it,” he says.

  He walks around to her side of the table. He takes Kate by the elbow.

  “It didn’t hurt,” Miles says.

  Kate looks up at her father. What are his intentions?

  He pulls her out of her chair. She is aware of her mother and Miles and of their attention on her, but she’s suddenly been separated from them, whisked into a parallel universe—her father and she both have. Like two people in love, they are elevated; ordinary things are ecstatically skewed. The gold rim of the china shimmers; the red roses jump from the Persian needlepoint. He guides her roughly through the swinging door. In the kitchen it’s warmer by several degrees. Magnets hold school schedules and Miles’s artwork to the humming refrigerator; tacks pin a calendar, vacation days shaded in gray, to the wall. The cherry cabinets have been softened by use. Some of their porcelain knobs are missing. Open shelving holds dishes and cereal. Dough for bread rises in the yellow ceramic bowl. The countertops, bright blue-and-green tile, speak of the Mediterranean. A wooden spice rack displays nutmeg, ginger, curry powder, rosemary. The air smells of meat, of caramelized onions, of cooked red wine and vegetables that thrive underground.

  “I know about you.”

  He faces her. She breaks away from him and backs off.

  “What about me?”

  “You and that kid from next door.”

  “Topher.”

  “No. The other one.” He steps forward. “Robby?”

  The swinging door settles in their wake.

  “Rufus?” He steps closer. He cracks his knuckles.

  “… five minutes,” Kate’s mother says, to Miles.

  His hands thump down on her shoulders.

  “Rudy. His name is Rudy.”

  He pushes her against the warm stove.

  “Rudy,” he says. “Rudy.” And all of his darkest notions about her are coalescing in the specter of Rudy. “I know all about it.”

  “About … what?”

  What does he know, exactly? She won’t give away more than she needs to; he won’t dupe her into that!

  “About you. And that kid.”

  “Rudy!”

  “Rudy. Jesus H. Christ.”

  Vigorously, he clears his sinuses and throat. He reclaims his hold on her shoulders.

  “Is that what you want? To run around town sucking cock?”

  He knows, then—he knows everything.

  She’s going to get what’s coming to her now; nothing to be done. She’s going to get it.

  She could slouch to the floor. She could cry and beg. Then—then he might stalk away in disgust. But something is rallying inside her. The Valeries are shouting for a fight.

  “I’m very disappointed, Kate. Disappointed and puzzled.” He releases her. Steps back. As if to surrender her, ruefully, to a career of conundrums and cocksucking. “I thought you were better than this.”

  Outside, snow crunches under the feet of Matilda Hellerman, walking the everlasting family dog. The furnace cycles off. The stove ticks. Kate shrugs. The gesture directed, partially, toward herself—is it? Is this what she wants? To run around town, etc.? Maybe … possibly … she’s not sure either way, not one bit.

  “Well,” she says. “Guess you were wrong.”

  His hand flies out. He strikes one ear, then the other.

  She falls against the stove. The thuggish force immediately inspires mortifying tears, but the contact also abruptly energizes her, sends invigorating messages from her skin to her brain—her ears are ringing, actually ringing, as if in misplaced celebration.

  “You’d better tell that Rudy to steer clear,” Dennis says. “Of both of us.”

  “He didn’t make me do anything.”

  “That so?”

  “I decided on my own.”

  “Did you!”

  “What we did was … my choice.”

  “Well, congratulations. What a liberated girl you are.”

  “Well, I …”

  “Your choice!”

  “I …”

  “Thousands of dollars on a private school education and what does she choose to investigate? The law of exponents? No! Not that.”

  “I had my homework done.”

  “The quadratic formula? The War of 1812?”

  “I—”

  “Nope, while the other little girls are analyzing Hamlet’s fatal flaw, my daughter, Kate Leigh Allison, is sucking cock.”

  “Please stop saying that.”

  Veins jump out at his temples. He grabs her upper arm and hauls her toward the opposite counter and shoves her face down into the ceramic bowl. The dough is cool and sticky and smells of caraway. She twists this way and that, rooting around for air. She delivers a kick to her father’s shin with her bare foot. He releases her, a certain brief respect established by this aggression on her part. She rights herself. He takes one step backward, now looking quizzical and disgusted, as if she has plunged into the bowl of her own accord.

  “Well, maybe …” She brushes dough from her forehead. “Maybe if you weren’t such a total ass—”

  “Christ! The mouth on you!”

  He whacks her across the face with the back of his hand. She stumbles sideways. He smacks her again. With his right hand, alternating between the back and then the palm, again and again and again. Across the kitchen, on the open shelf of breakfast cereals neatly aligned, the Rice Krispies box in its bright blue and the three elves in their happy little hats jump in and out of sight. His hand flies in front of them, the blue box and the elves; the cereal veers from right to left. Sweat accumulates at his temples. She throws her arms over her head. She slumps and ducks and cringes. His hands pummel her arms and elbows. She drops to the floor and huddles abjectly there. He kicks her in the side.

  Then the blitz ceases abruptly. He backs off, removing himself
from the vicinity of her. His temper recedes like the noise of a passing truck. Footsteps and a squeak of hinges proclaim his departure.

  And now she submits utterly to tears, finding herself in pain without even her persecutor as witness. She sobs. She runs up to her room. Later, her mother pokes her head in. “I hate you,” Kate announces, apathetically, and her mother goes away.

  Kate gets up and goes into the bathroom and looks in the mirror. Her face is red and scuffed but otherwise intact. The algebra, interrupted by the family dinner, no longer interests her. She drops it unfinished into her book bag. She lies on her bed. Eventually she realizes what to do. She calls her best friend, who calls another friend, who calls another friend, who calls Topher, who tells Rudy. At nine-thirty or so, Rudy calls her in a tender rage.

  “I’ll come over and …!

  “I’ll …!

  “I’ll …!”

  24

  NEVER WOULD HAVE GUESSED IT,” Jack said. He lay next to Kate in bed with his arms crossed behind his neck. The digital clock read midnight. She’d spent the last hour telling Jack everything, the whole story: the driving lesson, the slap, the flash cards. The principal’s office, the pot roast, the following struggle. And the sporadic but riveting recurrences.

  “The weird thing was,” she said, “that in a way, it was fun.”

  “I don’t buy that for a minute,” Jack said.

  “All the time it wouldn’t be, no way, like what I see at work. When it’s real. But … in a way it wasn’t; it wasn’t all the time; it was just like, your kid acts out, you get mad.”

  “Maybe it seems that way to you now.”

  “It was like—Colin and I used to go to the movies every Friday night? We’d see all these totally violent ridiculous action flicks. And most of them were bad, but fun to watch. My father and me, it was kind of like that. Look, it’s only relatively recently that corporal punishment hasn’t been the norm.”

  “Is that your secret?”

  “It’s not a secret. It just isn’t something I talk about at drop-off and pickup.”