The Cleas

I found the Cleas on Craigslist, accidentally, while looking for a mattress frame. The ad said Two families looking to share after-school care for six-year-old girls. You: energetic young woman who loves kids. Background in art/early childhood education/creative movement a plus!!! I didn’t know about any of those things, but I needed money. Applying for graduate school was more expensive than I’d realized, and revising my undergraduate thesis on the complexity of Beyoncé as a feminist icon was taking longer than I’d thought. I’d begun stealing tampons and energy bars from my dog-walking clients. Extensive experience with young children, I wrote in my email. Whiz at arts and crafts!

They didn’t call my bluff, or my references. At my interview, I learned that the moms had met at a Gotham Kidz Club and become friends upon discovering that their daughters had the same name. They were both named Clea. (One was short for Cleopatra, and the other was not short for anything.) Then they discovered other similarities: they lived three blocks away from each other on Riverside Drive; the four parents, between them, had five Ph.D.s.

When I met the girls, I could not believe they were the same age. One Clea had about thirty pounds on the other. The bigger Clea was a stocky blond peasant type with a big gap between her front teeth. The smaller Clea looked vaguely malnourished, with large eyes in a pale heart-shaped face. They told me I could call them Big Clea and Small Clea. I said I would not do that, it was horrible to define someone by their body.

“I don’t mind,” said Small Clea.

“I do,” I said. “Pick a new name.”

Big Clea thought for a minute. “I choose Rainbow Clea,” she said.

Small Clea just stared at me and stuck her pointer finger up her nose.

“Don’t you want a pretty new name?” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said, and shrugged. Then she said, “OK. I choose Grass Clea.”

I thought this choice was unfortunate, but I did not force her to change it because it was her life, not mine.

Then Rainbow Clea turned to Grass Clea and said, “Let’s play Slave.”

“OK,” said Grass Clea. She lay down on the floor and Rainbow Clea began to whip her with a fun noodle.

I wondered how they knew about slaves. Or why they had a fun noodle—there wasn’t a pool or anything. I thought, isn’t it interesting how quickly children’s relational personalities solidify into dominant and submissive. I considered the early-childhood roots of violence. I’d come up with several plausible theories for Rainbow Clea’s behavior before I realized it was my job to stop it.

  

I picked the Cleas up from school on the Upper East Side every afternoon, waiting along with the blond mothers in Banana Republic or Lululemon and the Caribbean nannies in long skirts. I was the one thing not like the others. I wore dime-store earrings, duct-taped boots, hoodies, and leggings stretched from too many wearings between Laundromat trips: the uniform of the white twentysomething with a liberal arts degree and Medicaid, perpetually on the verge of a graduate program.

We’d go to this one playground in Central Park that had several knee-high hippopotamus statues, and the Cleas would pretend to ride them. Sometimes I squatted down onto a hippopotamus myself, and they shrieked with pleasure. There was probably something Freudian about their reaction, but I did not pursue the line of thought.

Sometimes, I just sat on a bench and watched them from the corner of my eye while texting the person I was sleeping with. At the moment, this was Zander, who I’d met at a midnight screening of Rear Window, because we were the only people there. I was there because I’d been bored in my apartment, and he was there because he was homeless. So I took him home, which worked out well for both of us: he had a place to sleep, and I was no longer bored. In fact, I learned something important that night about Zander: he had a zeal for cunnilingus, a real one, not one he affected to seem like a feminist. Some guys think you can’t tell, but you can.

He also had one habit I did not like, which was touching my face all over with his fingertips in between makeout sessions, like a blind guy in the movies. Some people find this romantic. I find it creepy. But I did not stop him.

In case you were wondering, Zander wasn’t homeless as in sleeping on the street. He was homeless as in he’d forgotten to re-sign his lease, so his landlord had evicted him and he was temporarily couch-surfing, which sounds like more fun than it actually is.

The morning after—which was very morning-aftery, bleary and incandescent—I went to my dog-walking job, and left Zander my keys so he could sleep late. That afternoon, he met me in Central Park to drop them off.

I was playing with Rainbow and Grass on the hippopotamus playground. When he called out my name, I acted shocked to see him. “What a surprise!” I said. (This was the agreed-upon signal, to make our meeting appear accidental.)

Zander spoke his line: “Tess! Hi! I was just walking by, and I saw you.”

“Girls,” I said, “this is my friend Zander.”

“Nice to meet you ladies,” said Zander, and he grinned.

Let me describe Zander. He was like a sexy clown. He played accordion in a band called Baby. They were big in the Bushwick scene. He wore an old tweed jacket with elbow patches that was about two sizes too big. He had a lean body and a lopsided smile and a face as pretty as a girl’s: dark curly hair and eyelashes long and black like calligraphy brushes. Most noticeably, though, he had extremely unusual eyes.

“Your eyes are two different colors,” observed Rainbow Clea.

“Yeah,” chimed Grass. “One green and one blue.”

“That’s true,” said Zander, thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered this fact before. “You know, it must be because my mom is part mermaid.”

The Cleas’ eyes widened like satellite dishes.

“Like Ariel?” whispered Grass Clea.

“Yeah,” he said. “But she has legs and stuff. She’s only part.” He shrugged self-effacingly.

Rainbow Clea was about to lose her shit. She actually started hopping from one leg to another. “Rainbow, do you have to go to the bathroom?” I asked.

She didn’t hear me. She was about to explode with the effort of racking her brain for the thing that would most impress Zander.

“I have a guinea pig!” she finally yelled.

“It actually belongs to our class?” said Grass. “Its name is Toothbrush, and—”

“We voted about what to name it,” interrupted Rainbow.

“‘Toothbrush’ was my idea,” said Grass.

Rainbow stood stricken mute; she had no idea how to compete with this.

“Did you guys know that guinea pigs aren’t actually pigs?” said Zander.

“Yeah, obviously,” said Rainbow, thrilled and grateful at the change of subject.

“Yeah, obviously,” echoed Grass.

“They’re related to trolls,” said Zander.

Rainbow frowned. “That’s not true,” she said.

“You think so?” said Zander. “Well, the next time you see a troll, look closer.”

They stared up at him. They were two girls in love. Collectively, we were two girls in love and one girl who’d achieved an almost poetic level of horniness.

“Come away with me to the hippos, Zander,” said Rainbow, breathlessly, like she was asking him to elope. She grabbed his hand.

“Okay, for a minute,” he said. But as the girls turned and ran in the direction of the statues, he slipped his hand into my back pocket and cupped his palm against my butt. Then he slid it back out, leaving my keys. I had to give it to him: that was a nice touch.

Over the next few weeks, I texted Zander the funny things that Grass and Rainbow did. He texted back lots of emoticons, and asked to see me.

We hardly ever met up, though; I usually lied and said I was busy. When I like someone, I try to keep things hypothetical for as long as possible. Everything eventually disappoints. There’s always that moment of turning away, on one side or the other. The best part is the waiting: you’re Ariel on the rock, windblown, full of desire.

  

During these weeks, Grass Clea developed a new and eccentric clothing habit. She insisted on wearing the same outfit every day: black leggings, black Mary Janes, and a brown cable-knit sweater of her mother’s that she’d retrieved from the dirty-clothes hamper. The sweater reached down to her ankles, the sleeves dangling limply several inches below her hands. It was cute, in a disturbing sort of way. She looked like a little Precious Moments street urchin. She called the sweater Mommy’s Dirty Sweater, and then just the Dirty—“Dirty” apparently both modifying the noun and serving as a noun itself. Once a week, her mother managed to wrestle her out of the Dirty long enough to wash it. But during the wash cycle Clea grew extremely anxious. She’d press her face to the washing machine, weeping quietly. Her mother would try to tempt her away—with Dora the Explorer, with Barbie, with Popsicles—but she wouldn’t budge. The cleaning process was a kind of death, one for which she was never prepared. She mourned the sweater’s absence like a military wife; she moaned and twisted her hair, refusing comfort. When it eventually came out of the dryer, she put it on and hugged herself into a tight, fetal little ball and whispered unintelligible messages into her stomach.

I wondered if she was depressed. I wondered if it was possible to be depressed at six. Then I thought, if anyone could, it would be Grass Clea.

Let me describe Grass Clea’s family. Her two parents had three Ph.D.s: in Russian Literature, German Moral Philosophy, and Holocaust Studies. The mother, Nadine, had the same wispy hair and large eyes—the same starving-alien beauty—as her daughter. When we got home, we usually found her sitting in an armchair with a book in her lap, staring into space, frowning. (She was the one with the Russian and Holocaust degrees.) Walter, the dad, was a little uptight, but at least he tried to have fun. He had one joke. His joke was the German language. He put “das” in front of everything. Like “das macaroni” or “das pajamas.” Nadine did not find this joke funny. Neither did Clea, really, but she smiled weakly anyway.

Ann, the mother of Rainbow Clea, was different. She had a high blond ponytail and did yoga every day and kept a piece of paper taped to the refrigerator that said “Keep the channel open!—Martha Graham.” I wondered if she thought about Martha Graham every time she opened the freezer for a SoyPop. I wondered if it made her happy or sad. I wondered if, in her estimation, her own channel was open. Her daughter’s certainly was. Once when I stayed for dinner, Rainbow Clea said, “You know, Miss Heidi should really wax her armpits,” and Ann hooted with delight. (Miss Heidi, the Cleas’ teacher, was the kind of hairy, organic, unapologetic feminist who always made me feel vaguely threatened and inadequate, though in theory I supported her choices.)

Like Walter, Ann had one joke. Her joke was sticking her hand in a sock to create a puppet that spoke in an accent somewhere between Russian and French. It said, “I vill poot it in zee microwave!” or “No Popseecle vissout zee vegetables!”

Ann referred to female genitalia as “the peeps,” which Clea explained was short for “peepeemaker.” This euphemism bothered me—so incomplete!—but I chose not to interfere. She encouraged Clea to sleep without underwear; at night the puppet said, “Don’t forget to air out zee peeps!”

 

I was already three or four weeks into the job when I met Ann’s husband, David. Rainbow Clea and I came in from the playground one day and found him in the kitchen.

“Hi, Daddy!” yelled Clea.

“Hi, princess,” he said. But he was looking at me. He was absurdly handsome, like a cartoon superhero, with black hair and a cleft chin.

“So,” he said. “You’re the famous Tess. The Cleas’ new favorite person. Let me see. From Illinois or one of the other I states? Creative Movement at Bennington?”

“Iowa. And Body and Media Studies.”

“Ah, I see. What did that involve? A lot of interpretive dance to Jodorowsky films?” He smirked, in a way that was somehow both derisive and intimate, as if we were in on the same joke, the joke that was me.

I frowned. “Well,” I said, “it was mostly analysis of pop culture. My thesis—”

“Daddy!” yelled Clea. “Want to play Candyland?”

David glanced toward his daughter. “We’ll both play”—he opened the refrigerator, keeping his eyes on me—“if Tess will let me get her a glass of wine.” He pulled out a bottle of white. “Don’t worry. You’re officially off-duty.”

He didn’t give me a chance to say no—just expertly extracted the cork, pop, and poured a glass with a deft flick of the wrist. Then he handed it to me, again with that smirk. This time, I understood, the smirk referred to both of us, to the scene we were playing out: the sexy husband handing a glass of wine to the nubile messy-haired babysitter. Wasn’t it funny that we were enacting these tropes? Wasn’t it clever and postmodern of us to mock them through inhabiting them, to ironically reappropriate this clichéd moment? Wouldn’t I join him in the joke?

I shrugged and accepted the glass of wine, although I had already decided, officially, that I disapproved of David Wright. He was just an older version of the hipster boys I’d messed with in college, whose every action exuded a whiff of mockery—for whom even the human body was such a cliché that they could barely bring themselves to have sex unironically. They’d rub their bony hips against yours in a way that seemed more expressive of annoyance than desire; then they’d ejaculate perfunctorily and offer you a cigarette. You’d walk-of-shame home clutching your jacket around you, embarrassed by the obviousness of your breasts, the slime in your underpants.

So I was somewhat surprised to see David Wright, playing Candyland, become distinctly silly. He had a different voice for each of the characters, and unlike his wife, he displayed an effortless mastery of accent and dialect. The witch in the Peanut Brittle House sounded like a Yiddish washerwoman; the smiling lollipops were garrulous Venezuelans; the Gingerbread Man spoke in a nasal, hesitation-riddled voice that reminded me of Steve Buscemi. When Clea advanced up the Gumdrop Trail, skipping several spaces ahead of him, David let out a comic howl of consternation, provoking a cascade of giggles. When I then drew the Lollipop Card and left them both in the dust, he distracted her by making up a song that went “Revenge! Revenge! Revenge shall be mine!” and chanting it along with her until she’d overtaken me again. Clea spent the whole game either delirious with laughter or reverently looking up at her father, waiting for his next move, practically vibrating with adoration.

Was he a good dad, or an attention-loving narcissist? Was there a faint air of mockery, or self-mockery, to even his performance of fatherhood? Either way, I’d fallen a little bit in love with him, in spite of myself, by the time Ann walked in, clearly fresh from yoga: blond wisps escaping her loose ponytail, cheeks flushed, spandexed body high and firm. “Hello, my leetle petoonia!” she called to Clea. “Hi, Tess.”

She didn’t say hello to her husband. She didn’t need to. In the dark looks they shot each other, I perceived their whole relationship, which is to say I understood their sex: Ann’s cheesiness transmuted into kooky, panting energy, David’s coldness shaming her into even deeper excitement. I could see the venom with which they’d attack each other, as soon as their daughter was safely stowed away in her big-girl bed.

I politely excused myself. As soon as I was out of the building, I called Zander and told him to come over. Something restless had gotten into me, and my waiting felt lonely. I felt like my body was heating up, its molecules moving in greater and greater arcs; if I did not act soon, I might become a liquid or gas.

  

“I want you to lie on top of me,” I said. “I want you to be as heavy as possible.”

“I want to do more than lie on top of you,” he said, kissing my neck.

“Whatever,” I said. “Just stop wasting time.”

We collapsed onto the couch and for a brief and delicious period of time, he did exactly what I wanted, which was to cover my whole body with his mouth. But then he did what I’d feared: he murmured a quiet question, to which I nodded with resignation, and then he put on a condom and began to fuck me very gently.

“Harder,” I told him. “Harder.” He obeyed, but it didn’t help. He’d opened the wrong door, and I’d flown away, and I couldn’t get myself back.

In theory I do not approve of faking, but in practice it’s easier than explaining. I prefer to call it performing, and over time I’ve grown expert: the breathing that quickens to match my partner’s, the soft moans, the desperate yelps that signal the formal end of another person’s responsibility for my pleasure.

When I sensed that Zander was close, I panted, yelped, allowed my breaths to slow—all from a great distance, as if by remote control. When he slumped onto my chest, spent from the hot bright journey he’d made alone, I slid out from beneath him.

The countdown had begun. I could see how the rest of this would play out. We’d sleep together a few more times, he’d say some tender gooshy things, and then he’d brush up against this cold part of me that repels other people the way the wrong end of a magnet does, and he’d start to drift away from me, and I’d let him.

And where did this big cold magnet thing come from? When did I absorb this allergy to the gentle fuck, this contempt for tenderness? Anyhow, at least the flying-away feeling was gone.

  

The next day, when I went to pick the Cleas up from school, Miss Heidi of the second-wave armpits pulled me aside. The girls were playing one of those games that involves hand slapping and a singsongy chant with dark psychological undertones. Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim, she put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.

“Clea Stein”—that’s Grass Clea—“had a little, ah, incident today,” said Miss Heidi. “I’ve already called her mother. She”—Miss Heidi glanced over at the two girls—“well, she bit another student.”

“Don’t all kids go through a biting phase?”

“Not usually when they’re six. And when I asked her why she bit Evelyn, she said, because Evelyn was being a”—here Miss Heidi leaned in and whispered an unspeakable word—the unspeakable word—into my ear.

I pulled back. “She said that?”

Miss Heidi nodded. “Afraid so.”

I took the two Cleas’ hands as we left the school. “Am I going to get in trouble?” asked Grass Clea, hopefully. I frowned.

“Obviously,” said Rainbow Clea.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s up to your mommy.”

“My mommy won’t care.”

“I’m sure you had a good reason to be angry,” I said.

“I wasn’t angry,” said Grass. “It was part of the game.”

“What game?”

She shrugged. “The game.”

I paused. “Did Evelyn know that it was part of the game?”

She shrugged again. I let it go.

  

That night, when we got to Grass’s house, we found Nadine hovering in the kitchen, rather than sitting in her habitual staring-chair by the window. She exchanged a serious look with me, then crouched down so that her face was level with her daughter’s.

“You’re not to say that word ever again,” she said.

“What word?” said Clea.

“The word you said to Evelyn today. Do you even know what it means?”

“It means…like, stupid.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Nadine. She stood up and paced back and forth across the kitchen. “It doesn’t mean that.” She crouched down again. “Who did you hear it from?”

“I don’t know.”

“From kids in your class? Clea Wright?” She lowered her voice, confidentially. “Or her parents?”

Clea shrugged. Nadine was standing now, arms folded, looking down at her daughter with a weary expression, as if she’d known all along that this day might come.

  

The next day, Ann picked up Rainbow Clea from school herself, unconvincingly claiming a forgotten doctor’s visit. She greeted me, and Miss Heidi, as exuberantly as ever, but didn’t acknowledge Grass Clea’s presence; she seemed to carefully avoid even looking in the child’s direction. Did Rainbow’s sudden “appointment” have something to do with the other Clea’s utterance of the Unspeakable Word? Was it possible, for Ann, that one’s channel could become too open?

Grass Clea and I had never spent the afternoon without Rainbow. I’d always favored her in my heart, but being alone with her was surprisingly awkward. I hadn’t realized how much Rainbow Clea contributed to the dynamic, how much my relationship with Grass depended on triangulation.

On the way home, I tried initiating a heart-to-heart. “You know,” I said, “about your sweater? When I was younger I had a favorite outfit too. I had this Cinderella nightgown, which used to belong to my older sister Grace, who I thought was the coolest person ever. So I didn’t want to let go of it, even when my mom told me I’d gotten too big.”

Grass Clea looked thoughtful for a moment, like I’d really gotten through to her. “You know,” she said, “cockroaches are smaller than mice. But they run faster.”

I gave up. Who could tell the reason behind the sweater, behind anything?

  

“When you were a kid,” I asked Zander that night, “do you think you were, like, aware of your parents’ happiness or unhappiness?” We had just shared a pizza on my couch. We were leaning against each other, and his hand was on my thigh and starting to slowly crawl upward, but I wasn’t really in the mood yet.

“What do you mean?” He stilled his fingers for a moment.

“Like, do you think their mood affected yours.”

“Of course it did. How could it not?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, when my parents got divorced, my dad was like that character in Peanuts with the constant cloud of dirt around him. But with sadness. For years.”

I pictured Zander, for a moment, as a child; he must have been heartbreakingly adorable, with those long lashes and weird beautiful eyes. Surging with a sudden tenderness for him, for the boy inside the man, I leaned over and kissed him deeply, playing my fingers over the edges of his ears. He responded hungrily, pulling my hips onto his and running his fingers through my hair as we kissed. But after a minute or two, he pulled away.

“What about you?”

“What about me what?”

“Were your parents unhappy?”

That was the kind of guy he was: the kind who cared about conversational parity, who would even pause sex in order to ensure it.

Instead of answering, I leaned in and kissed him, harder than I had before. I ground my hips against his. He moaned and pulled me in closer and told me I was beautiful and I felt a little twinge of gratitude and tenderness and said “You too.”

But when he gently made his way inside of me it was David Wright’s face that abruptly appeared in my mind, smirking at me, as if he knew my secret: my disdain for the trap of this body; my yearning to explode it from the inside; my fear that, after such an explosion, there would be nothing of me left.

In order to avoid this image, and what it implied, I opted to exit my body. I hovered several inches above the couch. First I focused on Zander. I watched him having sex with me. I felt mildly envious; he seemed like he was having a really good time. Then I focused on myself. I thought about how my face and body must look, in ostensible erotic transport—the o of my mouth, the flush of my cheeks, the muss of my hair. The image pleased me. I exaggerated my facial expression, and a moan escaped my mouth. This was my most reliable route to sexual pleasure: it was like I was fucking myself, through Zander, and thus having sex while simultaneously avoiding it.

“I feel like you’re not really here,” he said, afterward. We’d just finished, and he was holding me, doing the blind-guy thing to my face. “Are you OK?”

Briefly, I considered trying to actually answer his question. Then Grass popped into my mind, big-eyed in her dirty brown sweater. And I thought: where would I start.

The obvious tension between the families continued for about a week; Rainbow Clea rejoined us, but I perceived a sudden distance between the two girls. I wondered how much longer our arrangement would last.

Then, one rainy Friday, I was given money to take the Cleas to a movie. Unfortunately for me, they decided on a B-grade Pixar rip-off with environmental themes: a buxom, green-skinned fairy named Chloroplastia battles with evil condo developers to save the organic bean farm on which she and her fairy rock band record hits like “My Seed Is Your Seed” and “Worms!”

The movie made me want to stick razors in my eyes, but it seemed to restore the Cleas’ relationship: they exited the theater holding hands, and on the crosstown bus home they made me Google the lyrics to “Worms!”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said, as we approached Columbus. “Why do you think Chloroplastia fell in love with Bio D-Grade the Composting Rapper?”

“Because there was a spell on her, obviously,” said Rainbow Clea.

“I think it’s because he sang good,” said Grass Clea.

“That’s incorrect,” I said. “It’s because the movies want to make you believe that you can’t do anything unless you’re somebody’s girlfriend. It’s not true.”

“Are you Zander’s girlfriend?” asked Grass Clea.

“That is personal information,” I said.

“My dad has a girlfriend,” said Rainbow.

“What?”

“He does,” she said. “I saw them once. In the park. I was on the bus. They were standing next to a bench and he was petting her butt.”

I was speechless. I couldn’t say David’s unfaithfulness came as a huge surprise, but this public display of butt-petting? Rainbow’s best quality was her oneness with her id, and yet this distorted primal scene seemed enough to permanently disfigure anyone.

“I didn’t see the lady,” said Rainbow. “Just her back. She was really small and she was wearing a hat.”

“How did you feel?”

Rainbow shrugged. “She wasn’t naked, so it’s OK.”

I couldn’t bring myself to explain the flaw in this logic. “How about you guys sing ‘Worms!’ again?”

“Yeah!” they cried, and David’s girlfriend was forgotten, at least for the moment.

Worms! They are nature’s recyclers

Worms! They make our plants fertiliiiiized

Worms! They are vegetable-likers

Worms! What a slimy surprise!

  

I dropped Rainbow off first, leaving her with the housekeeper. When we arrived at Grass’s door, it swung open before I could knock, to reveal a haggard-looking Nadine.

“There you are!” she cried. She looked even paler than usual, her face tear-streaked and raw, dark hair matted strangely to one side of her head. “I left you like five messages. I just got a call from Connecticut. My mother’s in the hospital.”

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

“They’re not sure. They think a stroke. She’s still unconscious.”

“Jesus. Sorry, the girls were playing with my phone. What can I do?”

“I know it’s extremely short notice,” she said, “but can you stay over tonight? Walter’s at that Kant conference in Seattle.” She hugged herself, like she was cold: a little girl without her mother. “I just need to get out there ASAP.”

“Of course.”

“Is Oma going to be OK?” asked Clea.

Nadine looked down at her in surprise, like she’d forgotten she was somebody’s mother as well as somebody’s daughter. “I don’t know,” she said. She reached down and mussed Clea’s hair, then wandered off to her bedroom to pack.

  

When Nadine had gone, I ordered a pizza and told Clea she could stay up late. Then I rigged an endless DVR loop of Dora the Explorer, hoping Dora’s unrelenting positivity and vigor would have some kind of reassuring effect.

I sat very close to Clea on the giant lumpen couch, so that she could snuggle if she felt like it. It seemed like snuggling ought to be something I should offer at a time like this. But I wouldn’t initiate. I found myself infected by an exaggerated respect for her boundaries. She was more private than most adults; she wouldn’t take well to the condescension of an unsolicited cuddle. So we sat there mutely watching the antics of Map and Backpack, until she suddenly stood up.

“I’m tired,” she announced.

“Do you want to go to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Let’s get you into pajamas.”

She shook her head. “I want to sleep in the Dirty.”

I hesitated; was it my job to cajole her into something more appropriate? Or should I let her get comfort where she could? “Okay,” I relented. “But just for tonight.”

Clea brushed her teeth and used the bathroom. Then she got under the covers.

“You can leave now,” she said.

“You don’t want me to stay?”

She didn’t answer for such a long time that I thought she wasn’t going to. Then, in a small voice, she said: “Yes. Stay.”

“All right,” I said, relieved; I’d felt a terrible foreboding against leaving her alone. I sat in the chair next to her bed for a while, but it was impossible to tell when she’d really fallen asleep. Finally I stood up and tiptoed over to the bed. I observed her unmoving doll-like face, her shallow breathing. She had to be asleep, right? Yet there was something about her, a tension that her little body held even in repose, that made me doubt myself. It was possible that she was a superb faker; it was also possible that, even in sleep, she remained alert. “Good night, Clea,” I whispered. When she didn’t respond, I left the room.

Back in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator to snoop. I hoped to come across some expensive tapenade or cheese, or at least some Häagen-Dazs. That was the best part of babysitting: you got to eat all their stuff when the kid fell asleep.

But Nadine and Walter’s refrigerator was like a vision of some terrible past or future. The top shelf was occupied by six Tupperwares, into which celery sticks were packed like cigarettes. You could tell from the sheer volume that not just one but all three members of this family regularly ate a Tupperware of celery for lunch. The only other items were a tub of plain yogurt, half a gallon of skim milk, and a jar of beet borscht. I felt suddenly crippled by sadness.

I took my phone out of my pocket and texted Zander: spending the night at nadine and walter’s. want to pay me a bad-girl visit on the upper west?

His response came immediately: be there by midnight.

  

While I waited for him, I watched a game show called Secret Secrets Are No Fun, an updated version of The Newlywed Game. The first question was “What’s the craziest place you’ve ever had sex?” Jake and Jessika, from Atlanta, both said “On an airplane” and passed Round 1. Harold and Arlene, retirees from Wisconsin, fared less well. Arlene said “My sister’s house” and Harold said “Standing up.” Just as the Deduction Buzzer rang, I heard a key turning in the lock.

I looked up, confused: it was too early for Zander. But, just as it occurred to me that he didn’t have a key anyway, I watched the door swing open to reveal David Wright. We regarded each other across the room with a pulse of disbelief.

I stood up. “Nadine’s mother is in the hospital,” I said. “She went to Connecticut. I’m staying over.”

He remained in the doorway, one hand on the knob. “Ah,” he said. “I see. So I guess she was distracted. I was supposed to—”

He stopped short of offering an explanation, because we each suddenly knew that the other knew why David was really there. A quick montage flashed through my mind: the small hatted girlfriend, the subterranean distrust between the two families. Of course: the tension was about more than a child’s utterance of a forbidden word.

But how deep did it go? Were David and Nadine conducting a juicy, old-fashioned affair, or was there some kind of complex sexual arrangement between the two families, one that required the maintenance of a delicate emotional balance, upset by the smallest transgression? Just because I’d rifled through their kitchens, played with their children, I imagined I’d known these people—but I could hardly surmise the precise contours, the byzantine rules, of their adult games. I was basically a child myself.

David and I stared at each other, saying nothing. Slowly that mocking smile crept into his face. He was coming to find the situation amusing.

He hung his jacket on a hook by the door, casually, as if he lived here (which maybe, it occurred to me, he kind of did); he advanced toward me across the kitchen, that smile growing deeper and more knowing as he drew closer; he paused and turned toward a cabinet, then extracted a bottle of red wine from the back.

Whatever he was going to do or not do, he was going to make me wait for it. He poured two glasses and handed me one, just as he had at his apartment that day. Our eyes met over the rims of our wide wineglasses, but still neither of us said anything. I could tell he was relishing the moment, its saturation with erotic cliché. I, on the other hand, was unable to feel any sort of irony. I was deeply, terrifyingly in my body; my heart pounded in fear, and I was soaking wet.

“My boyfriend is coming over,” I blurted. “In about an hour.”

“Ah,” said David. This seemed to amuse him even more deeply. “I see.”

“Well, he’s not really my boyfriend, exactly.”

“Hm. Interesting.” He took a sip of wine. “And this nonboyfriend is named?”

“Zander.”

“Zander. That sounds about right. Let me guess, he’s a deejay? Or maybe he plays the drums? The accordion?”

I blushed so hard I didn’t need to answer. David laughed.

That was when it became unbearable for me: not my desire but my nerves, my terror of this moment, my embarrassment at the obviousness of my discomfort. I reached out and seized the moment by its belt buckle. I planted a kiss on the moment’s rough, derisive mouth.

David made a noise that was simultaneously a laugh and a murmur of pleasure; then he reached down and lifted me up onto the kitchen island and deftly pinned both my wrists behind me with one arm. He slid his other hand up my skirt and whispered, “See how wet you are. I knew it. I knew you were a hungry little cunt.” Then he shoved two fingers inside me, hard, and I gasped with shock and pleasure.

He had succeeded: he had caught me off guard. For a few minutes he touched me in a way that was so rough and delicious that I didn’t care at all about the fact that I didn’t like or approve of him, didn’t care that Zander was coming, didn’t even care about the fact that there was a small child in the next room, that this encounter would surely cost me my job; I just wanted him inside of me. I wanted, for once, to be fucked correctly, in a way that acknowledged and made use of my darkness.

But David Wright did not fuck me. Just at the moment when he should have—just at the moment when it became imperative for him to fuck me—he withdrew his hand and slid it down into his own pants.

He worked with grim purpose, with total control. I was too stunned to say anything. Soon he let out a curt, strangled cry and came onto my skirt, in a dark splotch just above my right hip. Only then did his other hand let go of my wrists.

It was the most specific and expert way I’d ever been disrespected. As he zipped himself up, I opened my mouth, about to voice some kind of protest—but then he looked up with a grin, and I realized I had it all wrong.

He thought I’d liked it, what he’d just done. Was this what he did with Nadine, with his wife? Had other women pretended to enjoy watching him masturbate? He kept smiling at me as he buckled his belt, in a way that conveyed his sense that things had gone exactly as they should have.

In theory, my feminist education had prepared me well for a moment such as this. Sitting around the seminar table, I could have come up with an articulate rebuttal to David Wright’s unspoken assumptions. But now there was the fact of him standing above me, wearing that grin; there was the fact of his splooge on my skirt, and of the cold granite of Nadine and Walter’s countertop beneath my ass, and I found I had no words.

He reached out and cupped my cheek in his hand. “You’re so young,” he said. He smiled with a serene self-satisfaction so radiant, it almost resembled tenderness. “So lovely and young.”

  

After David left, I took off my skirt in the bathroom and, hands shaking, tried to wash the stain out of it. Of course, I just succeeded in getting the entire skirt wet. So I hung it over the shower-curtain rod to dry. At least I was still wearing leggings beneath.

Then, with a rush of guilt, I remembered Clea.

I tiptoed over to her door and gently eased it open. She lay there on her back, in the same position I’d left her, but with her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling.

She must have heard everything. What kinds of adult darkness had her little body registered, seismographically, while she lay there in that narrow bed? How many times had she overheard this “game”—David Wright messing with her mother, using the unspeakable word she’d learned to repeat? Did she now assume that being messed with by David Wright was a rite of passage for all adult women? If she had somehow been able to articulate this in the form of a question—if she’d been able to ask me which rites of passage were unavoidable, and which were disgusting and which desirable, and how to navigate them—what could I tell her? What did I even know?

“Clea,” I said.

She didn’t respond. The long limp sleeves of the Dirty lay on top of the covers, empty; for some reason, this image flooded me with despair.

“Clea,” I said.

“What?”

“Why are you awake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should put on some pajamas. What if you took off the Dirty and put on some pajamas?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

My phone beep-beeped in my pocket: probably Zander, texting to announce his presence in the lobby. I ignored it.

“Your phone,” said Clea. “It beeped.”

“I know,” I said. “I heard it.”

“When the phone rings,” said Clea, “you have to answer. Otherwise something bad happens.”

“Who told you that?”

“No one,” she said. “I just know things.”

I picked up the phone and looked at it. Here! it said. How do I get in?

I left Clea, closing the door behind me, and approached the complicated buzzer by the front door: a gray box with a speaker and three unmarked buttons. Which button did I press to allow him into the building? Was he supposed to press first, or did he have to wait on me? Why were there no instructions? I suddenly felt very tired, so tired I could cry.

I have to figure out how this stupid buzzer thing works, I texted.

I’m not going anywhere, he said.

I pressed all three buttons simultaneously—fuck it—then pressed them again, hoping at least one of them would do the trick: would send the correct message down into the building’s nervous system, move its muscles and bones, cause it to open itself up and allow this stranger inside.