Nora had been devastated, not only by the tawdry revelations—she hadn’t suspected a thing, of course—but also by the Reverend’s obvious delight in making them public. She hid out for several days after the scandal broke, mentally reviewing her entire marriage, wondering if every minute of it had been a lie.
Once the initial shock wore off, she noticed that she also felt a kind of relief, a lightening of her burden. For three years she’d been grieving for a husband who didn’t really exist, at least not in the way she’d imagined. Now that she knew the truth, she could see that she’d lost a little less than she thought she had, which was almost like getting something back. She wasn’t a tragic widow, after all, just another woman betrayed by a selfish man. It was a smaller, more familiar role, and a lot easier to play.
“You ready?” Karen asked.
They were standing in the doorway of the cafeteria, watching the activity on the dimly lit dance floor. It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves.
“I think so,” Nora replied.
She could sense the heads turning as they entered the cavernous party space, the attention of the room swiveling in their direction. This was what her friends had been hoping to protect her from, but she really didn’t care one way or the other. If people wanted to look at her, they were welcome to look.
Yup, it’s me, she thought. The Saddest Woman in the World.
She waded straight into the fray, raising her arms overhead and letting her hips take the lead. Karen was right there with her, elbows and knees chugging away. Nora hadn’t seen her sister dance in years and had forgotten how much fun it was to watch her, a short, heavy woman with lots of moving parts, sexy in a way you couldn’t have predicted from encountering her in any other context. They leaned in close, smiling at each other as they sang along: Little red Corvette, baby you’re much too fast! Nora spun to the left, then snapped her upper body back to the right, her long hair whipping across her face. For the first time in ages, she felt almost human again.
* * *
THE GAME they played was called Get a Room. It was a lot like Spin the Bottle, except the group as a whole got to vote on whether a couple could leave the circle and retire to a private space. The voting added an element of strategy into what was otherwise a simple game of chance. You had to keep track of a whole range of possibilities, recalculating with every spin who you wanted to keep around and who you wanted to eliminate as a rival. The goal—aside from the obvious one of hooking up with someone you were attracted to—was to avoid being one of the last two players in the circle, because they had to get a room, too, though Jill knew from experience that they mostly just sat around feeling like losers. In a way it was better with an uneven number of players, despite the embarrassment of finding yourself alone at the end, the odd one out.
Aimee rubbed her hands together for luck, smiled at Nick Lazarro—he was every girl’s first choice—and flicked the spinner, which came from a game of Twister. The arrow blurred, then slowed, regaining its shape as it ticked around the circle, inching past Nick to land squarely on Zoe Grantham.
“Jesus,” Zoe groaned. She was a pretty, voluptuously chunky girl with Cleopatra bangs and juicy red lips that left their marks all over people’s necks and faces. “Not again.”
“Oh, come on,” Aimee pouted. “It’s not that bad.”
They scuttled toward each other on their hands and knees and kissed in the center of the circle. It was nothing special—no tongue, no groping, just a polite liplock—but Jason Waldron started clapping and hooting as if they were going at it like porn stars.
“Hell, yeah!” he bellowed, the way he always did when there was lesbian action under way, no matter how listless. “These bitches need to get a room!”
No one seconded the motion. Nick spun next, but the arrow landed on Dmitri, so he got to go again. Those were the sexist rules they played by: Girls had to make out with each other, but the guys didn’t, for reasons that were supposed to be self-explanatory. Jill was annoyed by this double standard, not because she had anything against kissing girls—she liked it just fine, with the single exception of Aimee, who was a little too much like a sister—but because it was bound up with a second injustice: Girls could kiss, but they could never get a room, on the grounds that that would mean stranding two guys without female partners, disturbing the heterosexual symmetry of the game. Jill had tried a couple of times to get the others to reconsider this policy, but no one backed her up on it, not even Jeannie Chun, who would have been the most obvious beneficiary of the change.
On his second spin, Nick got Zoe, and they went at it enthusiastically enough that Max Connolly suggested they get a room. Jeannie seconded the motion, but everyone else voted no—Jill and Aimee because they wanted to keep Nick in the game, Dmitri because he had a crush on Zoe, and Jason because he was Nick’s lackey and never voted for Nick to get a room with anyone but Aimee.
That was the problem these days—there weren’t enough players, and all the suspense was gone. Back in the summer, it had been crazy; on some nights they had close to thirty people in the circle—this was out in Mark Sollers’s backyard—many of whom were strangers to one another. The voting was raucous and unpredictable; you were just as likely to get a room for a lame kiss as a steamy one. The first time she played, Jill ended up with a college guy who turned out to be a good friend of her brother’s. They fooled around a bit, but then gave up and spent a long time talking about Tom, a conversation that taught her more about her brother than she knew from living in the same house with him for all those years. The second time she got a room with Nick, whom she knew from school but had never spoken to. He was beautiful, a quiet, dark-eyed boy with lank hair and a watchful expression, and she felt beautiful with him, absolutely certain that she belonged in his arms.
The game got smaller and duller in September, when the college kids headed back to school, and it continued to shrink throughout the fall, their number dwindling down to a hard core of eight players, and every session was more or less the same: Aimee went off with Nick, Jill and Zoe duked it out for Max and Dmitri, and Jeannie and Jason ended up together by default. Jill didn’t even know why they bothered anymore—the game mostly felt like a bad habit to her, a ritual that had outlived its usefulness, but it was always accompanied by a slender hope that the group dynamic might shift in such a way that she’d find herself alone with Nick again and could remind him of how perfectly their bodies and minds fit together.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. She got him on her fourth spin, felt the familiar jolt of excitement as his face moved toward hers, and the equally familiar letdown when they kissed. He wasn’t even pretending to be interested, his lips dry and only slightly parted, his tongue stubbornly passive in response to the eager, questioning flicks of her own. It was such a lethargic performance—way less hot than the kiss he’d given Zoe; Jill wasn’t even in second place anymore!—that nobody even bothered to suggest that they get a room. When it was over, he wiped his mouth, gave a languid nod of approval, and said, “Thanks, that was great,” but it was just good manners. They might as well have just shaken hands, or waved at each other from across the street. It made her wonder if their summer hookup had even happened, if the glorious hour and a half they’d spent on Mark’s parents’ bed wasn’t just a figment of her imagination, a bad case of wishful thinking.
But it wasn’t—the sheets had been cool and white, with little blue flowers on them, really delicate and innocent-looking, and Nick had been really into it. The only thing that had changed since then was that he’d fallen in love with Aimee, the way every guy eventually did. You could see it in the way his face lit up when the arrow finally pointed in her direction, and in the slow, serious way he kissed her, as if there were no one else in the room, as if what they were sharing wasn’t part of a
game at all. Aimee couldn’t match his sincerity—there was something inescapably theatrical about the way she melted onto the floor, pulling him on top of her and arching her back so she could grind her pelvis against his—but the combination of the two styles had a potent effect on the judges. When Jason suggested that they get a room, Zoe seconded the motion, and the vote in favor was unanimous, not a single abstention.
* * *
THE BARRIER that separated Nora from the people around her thinned and softened as she danced; the others didn’t seem as far away or strange as they often did when she passed them in the supermarket or on the bike path. When they bumped into her on the dance floor, the contact wasn’t intrusive or unpleasant. If someone smiled at her, she smiled back, and most of the time it felt okay, like something her face was meant to do.
She took a break after a half hour and headed for the refreshment table, where she poured herself a plastic cup of chardonnay and downed it in two big gulps. The wine was lukewarm, a bit too sweet, but she thought it might be okay with ice and a little seltzer.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Durst?”
Nora turned toward the voice, which was soft and eerily familiar. For a long, blank moment, it felt like she’d lost the powers of thought and speech.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Kylie said. She’d cut her hair boyishly short, and it looked cute on her, a nice contrast to all that hipster ink on her arm, which Doug had apparently found so arousing. I luv ur tats, he’d told her in one of the text messages Reverend Jamison had published in his newsletter. I asked my wife to get one but she said no :(. “Can we talk for a minute?”
Nora remained mute. The crazy thing was, she’d imagined a version of this moment so clearly that she knew it by heart. For the first couple of days after learning about Doug’s affair, she’d fantasized repeatedly, and in great detail, about barging into Little Sprouts in the middle of naptime and slapping Kylie across the face, really hard, with all the other teachers and kids looking on.
Slut, she would say matter-of-factly, as if this were Kylie’s real name. (She’d experimented with an alternate scenario in which she screamed the word like a curse, but it was too melodramatic, not nearly as satisfying.) You are a disgusting person.
And then she would slap her on the other side of her cheating face, the sound of the blow reverberating like a gunshot in the darkened playroom. There were a bunch of other things she planned to say after that, but the words weren’t really the point. The slaps were.
“I totally understand if you don’t want to,” Kylie went on. “I know this is awkward.”
Nora stared at her, remembering how good—how cathartic and even righteous—it had felt to confront her in those daydreams, as if she were an instrument of divine justice. But she understood now that it was an imaginary Kylie that she’d wanted to punish, a prettier and more confident woman than the one standing in front of her. The real Kylie looked too flustered and contrite to slap. She also seemed a lot shorter than Nora remembered, maybe because she wasn’t surrounded by a sea of toddlers.
“Mrs. Durst?” Kylie squinted worriedly at Nora. “Are you okay, Mrs. Durst?”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“I don’t know.” Kylie studied her retro suede sneakers. In her skinny jeans and tight little T-shirt—it was also black, with a white exclamation point between what Doug had called her “little cheerleader boobs”—she looked like she belonged in a basement rock club, not a middle school cafeteria. “I just don’t feel like I have the right to use your first name anymore.”
“How considerate.”
“I’m sorry.” Kylie’s face turned a more intense shade of pink. “I just didn’t expect to see you here. You never came to the mixers before.”
“I don’t get out much,” Nora explained.
Kylie ventured a tentative smile. Her face was a little fuller than it used to be, a little more ordinary. Not so young anymore, are we? Nora thought.
“You’re a really good dancer,” Kylie told her. “It looked like you were having fun out there.”
“I’m all about the fun,” Nora said. She could sense people watching them from a distance, homing in on the drama. “How about you? Enjoying yourself?”
“I just got here.”
“Lots of older guys,” Nora pointed out. “Maybe even some married ones.”
Kylie nodded, as if she appreciated the dig.
“I deserve that,” she said. “And I just want you to know how sorry I am for what happened. Believe me, you can’t even imagine how terrible I’ve felt…”
She kept talking, but all Nora could think about was the silver piercing in the middle of her tongue, the dull metallic pearl she could occasionally glimpse when Kylie opened her mouth a little wider than usual. This was another of Doug’s favorite things, the subject of an e-mail rhapsody that Nora been unable to expunge from her memory:
Your BJs are amazing!!! Four fucking stars! Best I ever had. I love the way u go down on me so slow and sexy and lick me with your magic tongue and I love how much u love it too. What was it u said—better than an ice cream cone? I gotta stop now—I’m gonna cum just thinking about your hot little mouth. Love, kisses, and ice cream,
D.
Best I ever had. That was the line that had killed her, the one that had seemed like more of a betrayal than the actual sex. During the twelve years she and Doug had been together, she’d given him a lot of blowjobs, and he’d seemed happy enough about them at the time. Maybe even a little too happy, she’d come to think, and a little too entitled. She’d complained on a couple of occasions about the way he used to just shove her head down toward his crotch—no words, no tenderness, just a silent command—and he’d made a show of listening carefully, promising to be more considerate in the future. And he always was, for a little while, until he wasn’t anymore. It reached the point, near the end, where the whole act got poisoned for her, and she could no longer tell if she was doing it because she wanted to or because he expected it. Apparently Kylie was a much better sport.
“I wanted to call you,” she was saying, “but then I just, I don’t know, after everything that happened—”
She stopped in midstream, her eyes widening as she spotted Karen moving toward them with belligerent urgency, big sister to the rescue. She stepped protectively in front of Nora, getting right in Kylie’s face.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded, her voice stoked with indignation. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s okay,” Nora muttered, laying a restraining hand on her sister’s arm.
“No, it’s not okay,” Karen said, never taking her eyes off Kylie. “I’m just amazed that you have the nerve to show your face around here. After what you did…”
Kylie leaned to one side, trying to reestablish eye contact with Nora.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I better go.”
“Good idea,” Karen told her. “You never should have come here in the first place.”
Nora stood beside her sister and watched, along with just about everybody else at the dance, as Kylie turned and made the long walk of shame across the cafeteria to the exit doors. She kept her shoulders back and her chin up the whole way there, compensating with good posture for the fact that she was no longer welcome.
* * *
THE RULES didn’t require a couple to have sex once they got behind closed doors, but they did require both players to strip to their underwear. Jill and Max knew the drill and began undressing as soon as they entered Dmitri’s little sister’s pink-walled bedroom.
“You again,” he said, flopping onto the bed in a pair of tartan-plaid boxers that Jill had seen a couple of times before.
“Yup.” Jill was pretty sure he was equally familiar with her black panties and beige bra. “It’s Groundhog Day.”
“Oh, well.” He plucked a bit of fluff from his navel and dropped it on the floor. “Could be worse, right?”
“Definitely.” She climbed in beside him, usin
g her hip to shove him close to the wall. “It could totally be worse.”
She wasn’t just being nice. Max was a sweet, smart guy, and she was always relieved to find herself alone with him. He was easy to talk to, and they’d figured out a long time ago that they didn’t click as sexual partners, so there was no pressure on that front. It was more complicated with Dmitri, who was better-looking than Max and more interested in sex, but who also made it clear in all sorts of ways that he would have preferred to be with Aimee or Zoe. Sometimes they hooked up, but she was always a little sad afterward. The real disaster was getting stuck with Jason, but that almost never happened. She didn’t know how Jeannie could stand it. Maybe they just surfed girl-on-girl porn together.
Max poked her arm. “You cold?”
“A little.”
He unfurled the duvet at the foot of the bed and spread it over them.
“Better, huh?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
She patted him on the thigh, then rolled onto her side to turn off the lamp, because they both liked lying in the dark. Sometimes it felt like they were an old married couple, the way her parents used to be. She remembered going into their room to say good night, the two of them looking so cozy and contented in their pajamas, reading with their glasses on. These days, her father seemed a little lost up there, the bed off balance, like it was about to tip over. She figured that was why he slept on the couch so much.
“You have Mr. Coleman for Biology?” Max asked.
“No, I had Ms. Gupta.”