Let's Go Play at the Adams'

would be held blameless from the results, mental and physical. The patient understood

that the operation might be witnessed by qualified medical students; the tissue removed

from her body might be laboratory studied or disposed of by suitable means. The patient

understood, the patient understood .... The girl had nodded dumbly, signed, and gone back

to looking at a magazine she couldn't seem to read. Afterward, the parents-Mommy and

Daddy-also had to read and countersign. They understood that as parents of the above

minor, etc.

What the patient, what Mommy and Daddy understood quite clearly, was that they had

mutually agreed to kill a baby-to-be, one presumably in healthy condition and fully capable

of becoming one of them. (That was the part that really horrified Barbara.) So be it.

The operation was performed as announced, at seven o'clock in the morning-neatly,

quickly and with professional speed. Forty-eight hours later, the patient was home again,

sick with nausea (womb returning to normal size), nausea of the spirit and nausea of living.

Which would it have been? What would it have been like? Who would it have resembled?

What have I done?

Nothing save death is fatal, of course. Some few months later, Barbara observed the girl-

hardly penitent, hardly broken-hearted-swinging out with that little bottle of pills her

mother's GN had prescribed. The abortion, she referred to simply as Mommy and Daddy's

little d and c: "It really shook them up." Thus lightly the matter was concluded.

Barbara, however, could not view it so. To her, the entire experience lay ahead like an

insurmountable barrier to further life. She would rather die first (and knew, of course, that

she would not). The invasions of the body so far endured might soon enough come to be

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trifling compared to the curette and the removal of a possible baby from her womb. The

time had come for her to look at the dim ceiling and wonder, "Am I, am I?" Then somehow

she was over it, and thinking about

John.

·

Barbara, too, had varying opinions of her coupling partner. There was John the young boy,

John the captor, John the damned rapist, John the just-possible father-of-her-baby, and John

the First One. Without surrendering an iota of her shock, sorrow, and bitterness, she was

still forced to remember the event with at least a degree of after-the-fact clarity.

By afterthought Barbara supposed that if it were her destiny to be raped at all (a large if,

but there was some measure of fatalism in her nature), then she was fortunate that it had

been a boy she knew and not some man animal up an alley or in the woods or wherever.

With John, lust was at least somewhat tempered by fondness. His touch-unwanted,

repugnant, unsure-had been gentle, even so. He bad tried to arouse her, tried to coax her,

and if at the last moment he had gone ahead and satisfied himself at her expense, give

him marks for effort.

Had she enjoyed it? Indeed not. She had been spread and torn (in a minor way, she

suspected; after all, she couldn't see); she bad been pumped, and there had been friction,

enough so that going to the bathroom afterward had made her burn.

So that's it, Barbara said, and considered.

Teacher Barbara was well enough sex-educated technically-but there is always the little

trick of actually doing a thing to really understand. Shouldn't I have felt anything at all that

was good? She couldn't remember; rape was more of a dorm subject than classroom topic

of discussion.

Here she was interrupted. Bobby ran down the hall outside her room. She raised her bead

and watched him run back by the other way, shotgun in his hand. The vision was a

momentary one but sufficient to impress on her the set, frightened look in his face, the

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measure of desperation in his movement, the utter need for haste.

After the first two days, when she had given up hope of release, Barbara had begun paying as

little attention to Bobby and Cindy as they did to her. They interrupted her difficult sleep, came

to gaze with large, innocent, and yet impersonal eyes on her misery, and then went away. She

neither feared them nor held them out as a medium of hope. At night when she was dozing

and dreaming 'of Terry or Ted or other things, the children came and went more as pictures,

things of imagination equal only to other things of imagination. Now this changed.

Impossibly, Barbara knew at once what the trouble was. Bobby's manner, his quick strength,

the gun in his hands told her'. She heard the kitchen lights turned off, heard the opening and

closing of the river door, and understood. There was a prowler somewhere. This, more than

anything else that had happened, really frightened her.

Enduring the small tortures of children, even child-rapists, was one thing, but helplessness

before the unknown was another. Whatever noise had startled Bobby was made by a human