Let's Go Play at the Adams'

by Mendal W. Johnson

Barbara is also not pretty in the sense that movie professionals are pretty. She is better than that: she is young and downy—or so you would say from looking at her face—and she likes everyone.

WhAat?

Fear-leading-to-panic can begin in soft, quiet ways, and it began now like a velvety moth circling around in her mind.

These rather complicated considerations did not, of course, come to Barbara as any neat, little mental essay. The component ideas were there, they had been there forever, and they simply flashed into a vague plan. She went from insight to surprise to possibility to conclusion in a very few seconds.

The trouble is, Barbara said, a kiss never ends anything but an old movie. Quite the contrary, she had found out: it was a place to begin with the other hand coming around under your breast and fumbling with buttons and all the rest. And if you stopped them, they went back to the frat house or wherever and called you frigid or did something mean when they got the chance.

“Well, I’m hungry.” Since the children had never cared about this, Barbara said it in a bored voice. “Thirsty.”

Each day instead of beginning newly, as it did when you were normally free, seemed—to her in helplessness—to begin with the weight of the previous days upon it, almost as if she hadn’t slept at all.

None of this was fatal, of course. She knew that. None of it would leave so much as one scar, and yet—considered as one—her small complaints added up to torture.

“Don’t worry.” It was the first time in Bobby’s life that he had ever done that thing that adults do so often, hidden his fear from others, but he did it out of compassion.

He rolled over on his side and pressed his face against his thin sister’s stomach as if he wanted to crawl into her womb. His legs curled up in the foetal position, he looked like something waiting to be born.

writhing under the rain like a vast muscle on the back of the earth.

Barbara’s nominal boyfriend, Ted, read about her death in the newspapers and had a very unpleasant thought. He was shocked, unbelieving, sad, deprived of something in his life, and he was genuinely sorry for Barbara. Since he had never had her, however (in fact, he had only had one girl so far and paid for that), she exited from his life as the forever unattainable girl. Her worth was heightened, and he wondered what it would have been like to do that to her. Simply by having the thought, he changed his own life. He knew himself, and that is a sort of death in itself.