Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “Colin?”

  He raised an eyebrow. He filled a glass with water and drank it.

  “Say something.”

  “What’s there to say? Jesus, Kate. You don’t want me. I don’t think you love me.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why don’t you ever want to sleep with me?”

  “Oh, that’s so normal, Colin!”

  “It’s not normal.”

  “Brooke and Trey—”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Never mind. But it is normal; it is. I’m tired. There’s a lot going on. We’ve been married for years.”

  “Kate, I really don’t think it’s as normal as you seem to think it is.”

  “Oh, really. Well, aren’t you the expert.”

  “I’ve talked to my friends,” he said ominously.

  “Your friends?”

  “Yes. My friends.”

  “You talked to your friends about our sex life. Well, that’s just great. No, I don’t feel too humiliated.”

  “What, you never talk to your friends about our sex life? Or lack thereof?”

  She recalled the conversation with Brooke and Mave. “No,” she said.

  “Even when we actually have sex, you don’t enjoy it.”

  “No, I mean, yes, I enjoy it! Yes, yes!”

  He headed toward her, suddenly, holding the lavender surface spray. She stepped back. He put the bottle away under the sink.

  “You don’t,” he said. “You think I can’t tell but I can.”

  She said, “We have sex once a week, or at least every ten days. That’s not bad. We pass, okay? That’s enough. That’s enough sex. I looked it up.”

  “But you don’t want to. You don’t want me.” He took hold of her waist. He pushed her gently against the counter.

  “I do want you!” she cried. She shrank away from him. She covered her eyes with both hands.

  She closed her eyes behind her fingers and breathed through her nose. Tomato and garlic, lemon and soap.

  He released her. He backed off. She felt his hurt and his vulnerability, both her creation, the same way she’d felt Lila and Robin earlier vibrating at the table.

  She dropped her hands from her face and, with some effort, looked at him.

  He seemed all right—at least, she detected no signs of recent harm.

  Calmly, he said, “I’m a grown man. And …”

  “And … what?”

  “And I need sex to be a part of my life.”

  Intolerable! Unspeakable!

  “Maybe if you unloaded the dishwasher once in a while …”

  “I see. So now you’re withholding sex.”

  “Not feeling like getting down because I have too many other domestic chores on my list is not the same thing as withholding sex.”

  “Oh, go to hell.”

  “No, you go to hell!”

  He plucked a paper towel from the roll by the sink and turned away and shook his head and his shoulders, shaking her off. He wiped down the range. Then he paused. He held his hand to the oven door.

  “Colin?”

  He ignored her, entirely preoccupied with the oven. He opened the door. Inside sat the second pizza in its cardboard box. He removed the box and opened it. He examined the pizza, cooked slowly over low heat to a crisp, black boils erupting at intervals. He clicked the oven off.

  She watched him. Then she turned back to the sink and began to scrub the lamb chop pan—further evidence of her delinquency.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you want that on?”

  She paused. Gunfire tore through her. She resumed scrubbing.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did. I do want it on.” She threw the sponge into the sink and turned around. “I want to burn the whole fucking house down.”

  He closed the pizza box, walked toward her, and hit her backhanded across the cheek.

  She stumbled against the dishwasher. She caught onto the lip of the sink and leaned over the basin. Her hair swung into the suds and the pan.

  “You okay?”

  In the pan, grease persisted. The water separated and reflected the tasteful recessed lighting in tacky little rainbows. She touched her cheek—still intact.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Fuck, Katie. I’m sorry.”

  She straightened and seized the dishwashing soap and squirted it at him.

  His arm went over his eyes. Then his hands to her shoulders. He pushed her. She fell against the counter, then to the floor.

  Down there, the crumbs dismayed her. She must ask Portia to get under the table, the fridge, the cabinet doors. Hopeless, this struggle against crumbs, a magically proliferating trail of crumbs that led from the kitchen to the living room and up the stairs and into the girls’ bedrooms and her own.

  She got on her hands and knees. Her ears swarmed and the veins in her head thumped. She felt as though she might be sick. She clambered up and again hung over the sink, unsure of where else to go.

  “You okay?” he asked again.

  “I think I might throw up.”

  “Want some ginger ale? Or something?”

  There was the pan, still sudsy, still soiled. She put her hands on it. She lifted it and turned to Colin, holding it high. Water ran down her arms and into her armpits.

  “Don’t even think about hitting me with that,” he said.

  She tried to hit him with it. He grabbed her wrists. The pan smacked the floor and, seemingly, some vulnerable part of Colin’s foot.

  “Motherfucker!”

  She backed away. Pressed her spine against the granite overhang, held on with both hands. Outside, the compressed snow creaked under the boots of one of the Hesselgrove sons. The Hesselgrove dog yapped. A door slammed. “There, boy,” the son said. Marijuana again, through the ill-fitting windows, evoking Rudy Anderson.

  Kate recalled the moonlit park, Richard Feynman, Oreos. Headless gnomes, breakfast cereal neatly aligned, mnemonics. How I Like a Drink, Alcoholic of Course. Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain. The flash cards, the principal’s office. The night of the pot roast.

  The stove ticked, shutting down. The furnace kicked on and warm air blew from a vent.

  The Valeries elbowed her. You see now, they said. You do, don’t you? Look. Look around.

  The girls’ art, attached to the fridge with whimsical magnets, flapped and made whispering sounds.

  The dishwasher thumped. Dough rose in the ceramic bowl.

  Colin twisted Kate’s wrists behind her back and turned on the cold water and pushed her head into the sink.

  She wasn’t going to cry, not this time.

  She tried to kick him between his legs.

  He yanked her hair.

  She screamed.

  He put his hand over her mouth.

  She bit his palm. Blood ran onto her tongue.

  He let go of her and she flung her wet hair back and straightened and swung at him. She used her weight. She kept her thumb outside her fist.

  He slapped her, hard, across the face.

  No Rudy now, no Topher searching all through the house, no father waiting for her at home, no one searching or waiting for her at all. She lived here—if anyone cared or wanted to know she could be located right in her own kitchen, exactly where she was supposed to be.

  28

  YING AWAKE THAT NIGHT, as Colin snored downstairs on the couch, Kate thought about fleeing to Miles in the city. She envisioned his shock and embarrassment. Or to Darcy on the West Coast. She thought about packing the car with clothes and books. Leaving a note for the girls. Buckling up for a long ride.

  The mark on her cheek went from red to blue to brown. The girls inquired about it and she explained somehow, implausibly—poor little creatures who believed in fairies, in Santa Claus, who would believe that Portia was Miley Cyrus in yet another disguise, if Kate chose to con them so.

  She avoided chitchat with the other mothers. She hid her bruise under winter gear. She quarantined herself. She a
voided Colin and he avoided her.

  She instituted a tumult of neatening. She picked up, put away, labeled. She cleaned the crud off of every plastic toy. She located every puzzle piece and recycled the puzzles she couldn’t complete. As she organized she looked for a way around what had happened. She looked under sheaves of artwork and in abandoned containers of paint and in the baskets of breeding synthetic animals. But there wasn’t a way around it. She kept looking until she’d uncovered everything but there wasn’t.

  That Thursday, the girls’ respective schools broke for the holidays. Kate picked up Robin and headed to Wintergreen. A snow flurry commenced. Kate hustled Robin out of the car and into Lila’s classroom, then both of them across the street to where the station wagon was double-parked, hazards flashing. The girls chattered in the back, unwrapping string cheese. Kate glanced into the rearview mirror. She recalled them on the pumpkin expedition, swaying to Bob Dylan.

  She turned the car onto Linden Street. In the bright snow, the red globe of the abstract iron sculpture shone like a planet.

  “We want to touch it! Stop!” the girls cried.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Kate pulled over. She put the hazards on. She got out of the car and directed the girls out—she picked Robin up and, holding Lila’s hand, guided them across the street. She hoisted Robin up to touch the red globe. The little girl stood on Kate’s shoulders and Kate held her waist. Then, with more effort, she hoisted Lila up in the same manner. She craned her neck to look at her older daughter, who patted the globe, then threw her head back and caught snowflakes on her tongue.

  The girls finished their snack and fell asleep on the drive home. The snow stopped. Kate pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. She turned around, assessed her slumbering daughters.

  What are they doing? she might ask Colin.

  Their heads hung heavily, Robin’s to one side and Lila’s to the other. Their coats, which they’d shed, as they did at the least opportunity, tangled between them on the middle seat like another passenger. Exhaustion transpired in the girls’ damp, gently odorous breath.

  If she woke them now, they’d object.

  She considered the house. The paper star hung in the window like a bat. Behind the star soared the Christmas tree, which Colin had last night managed to string with lights. Kate and the girls had admired the spectacle, and then, forgotten, the bulbs had burned all night and all day. They shone dull and pale in the belated afternoon sun. In the girls’ bathroom also a delinquent bulb anemically gleamed. It picked out a cluster of fairies and gnomes, frolicking above the tub. There Colin had sat, on the edge, and mopped Lila’s creased neck.

  How gallant he’d been, tending so sweetly to a little girl!

  Still, Kate sat in the driveway, reluctant to wake her offspring, reluctant to exit the car and enter the house. The sun receded. The cold settled in, reached below her coat and felt her up. Shadows lengthened; the light flattened.

  Two teenagers—the neighbor’s son and his girlfriend—erupted from the house to the right. Both kids wore parkas zipped to their necks. His black, hers pink. He wore a black knit cap, she an exuberant high ponytail. Both wore gloves and blue jeans. He dragged a shovel after him down the steps. She was laughing—he was talking to her, amusing her. She swung her arms happily. She bent forward and hung from her waist. He leaned the shovel up against the side of the house and went up behind her and smacked her on the behind. She fell to her knees in the snow. She shrieked. Then she struggled to her feet and scooped snow into her gloved hands and shaped it. The boy watched her. She threw the snowball and it hit him in the chest. He brushed at himself. He packed his own snowball. She covered her head with her arms. He threw the snowball into her abdomen. While she was fashioning her second he lobbed another at her face. The snow stuck to her skin. She screwed up her eyes and nose and wiped off the white deposits. She looked at him from under her brows and ponytail, goading him. Her eyes were bright and excited.

  They went at it, packing and hurling their ammunition at each other. His, for the most part, hit its mark. Hers, flung spastically from under the bombardment, fell apart in the air.

  He lost interest. He slogged to the side of the house and retrieved the shovel and began to clear the walk. Kate heard his crisp footsteps, the activity of his jacket. The girl examined the house, then the occupied boy pitching dense shovelfuls this way and that. She watched the white mounds fly and scatter. She dropped and lay on her back. The pink parka rustled. She stirred her arms and legs, composing her shape in the faintly bluish snow. He finished the walk and they went inside together.

  The temperature inside the car dropped. The blue intensified and sundown followed. Details disappeared; shapes emerged. Kate rubbed her arms. In her house, the bathroom bulb and Christmas tree lights began to radiate warmth and comfort.

  Robin snored. Lila whimpered. Kate twisted the key in the ignition. Heat and music rolled through the wagon’s interior. Kate turned the car around, pulled out onto the street and back toward the highway.

  She got on and headed north, toward New Haven and Livingston Street.

  She passed the exit to the steakhouse, the dangerous diner, the Showcase Cinemas, and the first-floor apartment where Lila had spent the first three months of her life, where Kate and Colin had merged their shabby furniture and unpacked their wedding presents, where they had ambitiously pursued a certain sweetness—more than just a taste, more than just a bite, more and more and more. Yellow cake every day, yellow cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, yellow cake for a snack, chasing the crumbs like ravenous, sensitive children.

  She had no idea if at that point things could have gone one way or the other, or if only one way, this way, had been available. They’d lain awake in bed the night before leaving that apartment for the Fairfield house; they’d stayed up talking, holding hands, vaguely nostalgic already but energized and expectant. To recall this scene was crushingly sad. Again, Kate sensed Colin’s sincerity throughout the whole endeavor. But she too had felt sincere in that moment. His sincerity had leaked into her anxious, porous self.

  She passed familiar signs: Ferry Parking, P. J. Murphy Moving & Storage. Pleasant Moments Café, offering stag parties and fifty dancers weekly. She passed the industrial structures of Bridgeport, the convenience stores and Italian restaurants. Somewhere among them Eva, lighting an advent candle, fixing ornaments to her tree, rigging an angel on top.

  Kate stuck to the middle lane. Homeward-bound cars boarded and exited the interstate. Heat blew gently around Kate’s ankles. On the radio, a female country star sang about unrequited love. There was something direct and uncomplicated about the song, something internal but external also. It described the singer’s interior life but also acknowledged a certain kind of heartache that had to do with critical attachments to other people.

  Lights flashed in the opposite lane and the green-and-white highway signs glowed: 8 to Waterbury, 95 to New Haven. Billboards offered entertainment and sustenance. The interstate rose up on concrete legs and crossed the Long Island Sound, where tethered boats clustered against docks. A train passed below. Cement towers jutted to the left, oil tanks to the right, casting vast shadows over the sullied water. After Stratford, the highway narrowed. Little vinyl-clad houses cropped up on either side of the road. Holiday lights trimmed front doors and porches. American flags swayed from aluminum poles jammed into front lawns. Traffic cleared. The lanes darkened and opened up, beams hitting blacktop, the road to Livingston Street and the red house with the playroom and puzzles in boxes.

  Kate checked the rearview mirror. She registered the sleeping girls and a truck on her tail. The mammoth headlights illuminated the wagon’s interior. She accelerated. The truck did too. Then the lights abruptly vanished, and she felt the force of the truck passing on her left. The station wagon wavered as the air around the outsize vehicle separated and surrounded the wagon with a disruptive current. Kate contracted her hands and steered through it. Gorgeously stripped trees
posed in white against the infinite sky. But Kate watched the road and the red taillights and the green shimmering signs, keeping her eyes on where she wanted to go.

  Games to Play After Dark

  Sarah Gardner Borden

  About this Guide:

  The questions, discussion topics, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Sarah Gardner Borden’s Games to Play After Dark, an intimate portrait of a marriage.

  For discussion

  Does Kate’s reaction to Colin’s proposal and the future she envisions show a lack of maturity and self-knowledge [this page–this page]? Does she ignore or dismiss the flaws and inequalities in their relationship? What is the significance of the following passage: “She could see that doing what he wanted was compelling for both of them, and that to resist would interfere with the sexual chemistry that served as foundation for their bond” [this page]?

  How would Kate describe her treatment of her father and the reasons for it [this page–this page]? What details illuminate the emotional undercurrents of the father-daughter relationship and set the stage for the flashback to her childhood?

  Why is the visit to Colin’s sister and the trip through Europe a turning point in Kate and Colin’s marriage [this page–this page; this page–this page]? Are they equally complicit in exploiting each other’s proclivities and weaknesses?

  After several years of marriage, “Kate and Colin wandered from room to room like bored teenagers.… The sex got rougher, as if to compensate. And every once in a while they would fight, badly” [this page]. Is the boredom, lack of passion, and tension they experience a natural progression in marriage? What do Kate’s memories of these early years indicate about her need to see her marriage—and herself—in a certain light [this page–this page]?

  What are the implicit and explicit messages Kate receives about femininity and sexuality during her childhood [this page–this page; this page–this page]? Do her father’s opinions about marriage and the roles of men and women and their relative value represent a particular class, time, and place? Do you find Dennis’s devotion to Kate and his condescension toward Edie reprehensible? Does Edie reinforce the lessons Kate gets from Dennis? Is she guilty of neglecting her responsibilities as a mother?