Let's Go Play at the Adams'

Indeed they had left her for the night in a position that Dianne had invented-tied back

against the pole, hands and arms behind, standing on one foot with the other bound up

behind to her wrists. It was not endurable and could not have lasted except for the ropes

which, winding around the supporting column, her leg and body-ropes entirely supervised

by Dianne firmly held her in place. Even fainting, Barbara would have done no more than

slump down an inch or two still standing up.

It's too much, it's too much, Barbara said. By tomorrow morning she would be in some

unimaginable state nearly vegetable. The melodramatic pity with which she repeated this

to herself-she could think of nothing else-was not so much due to present discomfort as to

the fact that this, too, was added on.

The point of the game as the children had played it among themselves, was to inflict,

observe, and experiment with the feelings of helplessness, humiliation, and-occasionally-

pain. It was a tentative exploration in at least one of the relationships people have with

other people. No one, however, had ever gone four hours let alone four days and nights as

it. Time was the ingredient they did not understand, or-not understanding-wished to play

with now. The reality of time.

Dianne understood it.

183

"Leave her alone now," she had said. Dianne had been angry all day, but now she was cooling:

Barbara could almost see her slipping into the calm obedient role she would play when she got

home ball an hour later. "Leave her just like that. No letting her go or anything just because

she makes a little noise .... "

"Chicken," John added.

"OK, OK, I won't." Bobby sighed.

"You better not." Paul, whose game with the knife bad seemed to very nearly put him over the

edge, was writhing beside Bobby.

"I said OK."

"All right then, let's go. We're late." And Barbara had watched them leave. She was broken,

and they didn't care. She was broken, and that wasn't the point at all.

Tiredness verging on exhaustion prevented her from speculating specifically on what the true

end of the game would be (since even she realized it must end). In place of particular ideas,

her mind raised up only a general aura of dread. The morning's aborted struggle had polarized

her own and the children's position. Yes, they were-to anyone outside of their own circle-a cold

and unfeeling little group, and they had progressed almost smoothly, almost naturally, from

the idea of capturing Barbara to the execution of the idea and steadily to the abuse of her.

Until today, however, the process had been gradual, one in which tormentors and victim alike

knew that forbidden things were being done. A wordless but agreed-upon limitation as to what

could be done to her lay upon the house.

From the morning's battle on, however, a brutal streak-something beyond idle torment-had

emerged in them. She bad not believed that they, or anyone else outside of fiction, could

actually tie a person's arms up behind her and then enjoy the consequent agony, but yet they

had done it to her. She bad not believed that just kids-John and Paul-were capable of real feroc-

ity, the one by rape and the other by torture, and yet they had so spent their summer's

afternoon with her.

184

She could not have believed that another girl, like Dianne, could condemn her to a night in

this position, and yet, of course, Dianne bad done so and shown every satisfaction in the

act.

They were capable.

Barbara's mind only reluctantly supplied the end of the thought, They were capable of

anything now. They might not even know it themselves-in fact, Barbara guessed they did

not-but they were capable of doing anything, including killing her. They might not know

they could, and she did not know if they would. To that extent, they were all adventuring

together.

And still the minutes and the half hours ticked on.

Barbara could no longer entertain herself with imagination or even fuzzy speculation-what

various people would say or do if they knew of her plight, for example. The faces most

easily summoned up-Terry, her mother, Ted, Daddy-all hung mistily unrealized and just

beyond her vision, and with the failure of this picture-making, imagining function, she was

wholly and finally isolated. Her world shrank until it included only her own, central,

anguished, and most selfish self, and the bright, pretty, fleeting ring of children around her.

At dark, before Bobby went to bed, he came down and did a surprising thing: he took pity

on her. He came into the cellar room as if fresh from a struggle with his conscience; be

appeared guilty. Nonetheless, he untied her left ankle so that she could lower it to the floor

and support her weight on both feet. After consideration (and walking around her a couple

of times) be untied all the ropes except the ones that held wrists and elbows together

behind the pole; then he pulled over the picnic bench to which she had been tied in the af-