Let's Go Play at the Adams'

Dianne didn't believe her, or perhaps she did and thought it odd. Whatever the cause,

there was a degree of contempt in her look, and Barbara lowered her head and broke off

the match.

62

In fact, Dianne's question had started up a memory. Barbara had been raised in an apartment

building until nearly her senior year of high school. What she remembered now was an entire

and uncomfortable relationship with the other kids in the immediate-and crowded-

neighborhood. Specifically she remembered the whispering and sniggering of kids at one end

of the

-apartment parking lot at twilight after dinner in the summer, a low, confidential murmur that

dropped and turned to hostility if she approached. "Been helping your mother with the

dishes?" "Hey, Barb, what d'ya do for fun?" "I know what I'd like to do with her-" Guffaws in

the grand old manner.

If she had been walking toward them, inwardly anxious to be folded into the warmth of the

group that laughed and talked so intimately, this immediately repelled her. She might try to

face it out by asking one of the girls her age a question, or she might veer off and pretend to

be going somewhere else on an errand, but either way she would hear over her shoulder the

resumption of confidences and giggles.

They wanted her. She felt that boys and girls alike wanted her to do something or that they

wanted to do something to her, and afterward, form had it, she would be one of them. Barbara

didn't know what this suspected ritual act of initiation was-in her imagination, it was variously

any number of wild things-but she felt it would take place somewhere far from help, that it

would be in a crowd with a lot of snuggling up and hands on her body and the same knowing

sniggers the next day, and she knew that even if she forced herself to begin, she would cry or

get frightened in the middle of it and so wind up farther away from the group than now. Thus

the wall of privacy and selfness that the others wanted to break down in her was thickened.

She moved as closely to the other kids as she dared, but in the end she went her own sweet

and deliberately shining way. Barbara would not be dirtied. It wasn't anything that had been

taught her; it was just her own way.

63

"I don't know what the other kids did," she said to Dianne. "I never played that way."

Something of what Barbara had been thinking in her moment of silence-perhaps it was

conveyed simply by the set of her face=-seemed to reach Dianne. Her mirror image smiled a

faintly contemptuous smile, and Barbara thought how like one of the parking-lot gigglers

Dianne was at that.

At lunch they had been talking about her, though all they said, Barbara could not hear.

Afterward, when John came to take his tum at guard, he brought with him a certain tension

that quickly filled the space between them. It was so real that although she was still ungagged,

Barbara said nothing at first.

John came over and needlessly checked her ropes.

Then he moved to the room's other chair, which was out of her comfortable line of vision and

beyond the mirror's angle. Barbara heard him sit down, and then it was quiet again, except

that the room still held that tension.

After a while, Barbara turned her head back to the left and saw from the corner of her eye that

John was knotting one of the unused pieces of rope (it amazed her that there were any).

"What're you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure." He looked up, mildly surprised. "What did you think I was doing?"

Barbara frowned and faced forward again, definitely a little nervous now. There was something

in the air that just wouldn't go away. When John said or did nothing, however, she said, "John,

why're you doing this to me?"

"I don't know." He was quiet a long moment.

"We thought it'd be fun, I guess."

"Is it fun, hurting people?"

There was no answer, but the tension in the room tightened still more.

Barbara sighed. Yesterday the kids had not no-

64

ticed or cared that she hurt. Now she was telling them. It seemed to make no difference

one way or the other. What she could not understand was why-all right, so they were going

to go on with it-but why she couldn't raise even a hint of guilt or sympathy or fear of

punishment from any of them. Dianne was barely polite.

I just can't get through, Barbara thought. They don't care. In fact, I’m getting farther from

them all the time. But it isn't my fault, is it? Barbara thought about it for some minutes.

When you got right down to it, what did fault have to do with anything, anyhow? What she

wanted was results, relief. Maybe she had been embarrassing them. Taking a deep breath,

she contritely said, "I'm sorry, John. I won't ask you that anymore."

John seemed somewhat relieved. The tension in the room seemed to drop a degree. "Aw,

that's OK," he said, "there's nothing to be sorry about." When Barbara remained silent, he

said, "Is it too tight?"

There! Sympathy!