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"That was the TV listings," my wife told me.

"Oh," I said.

During dinner, after grace, the three of us found comfort in asking for things. "Please pass the peas," my son said. He was
sitting on the baseball mitt—I had told him all of the hints on How to Break It In.

"Here you go."

"Pass the butter, please," my wife asked.

"Sure," I said. And after the first bite, I made a show of appreciation. "This is delicious, just delicious. How Do You Do
It?"

She smiled.

"Pass the gravy." And the boy grinned when he said a long P-le-a-s-e.

I was at The Head of the Table, the facilitator of all passing, the slicer of Roast Beef. The conversation was minimal, centering
mostly on food, but we luxuriated in this serenity. We were travelers long delayed, finally coming to a hotel and calling
it Home.

The dishes were left in the sink, the pots and pans soaking in sudsy water, my wife saying that She Would Wash Them Later.

"Are you sure?" I said. "Let me do them."

"That's all right."

But I started anyway, scraping the food into the garbage, running the faucet. I rolled up my sleeves and took hold of a bristled
scrubber the shape of an old-fashioned microphone.

She was annoyed, her hands curling into fists and crossing her chest in a dead Pharaoh's pose. "You know we compost now. We
don't just throw things out on a whim, we Consider the Mess." My wife had the perfect ability to speak in broad analogy.

"How long has that been going on?"

"A while. And please don't just let the water run, that's such a waste." She reached over and turned the gush into an icicle.
"We Need to Conserve in This Day and Age."

"I hear you."

She watched me for a bit and then said, "Guess I might as well get the kid ready for bed."

It seemed too early for that, but I didn't say anything.

I made sure everything was spotless, even using the Brillo pads, though I hated the feel of them, the way I hated the feel
of aluminum foil and newspapers and non-gloss paint on a wall. For some reason I could taste those things in my mouth, and
that's all it took for me to gag.

Outside, the night turned the windows inward, and a few moths thumped against my reflection. They were desperate to get inside
and flit around a lightbulb. I wondered what they did during the day. Lie low? Fly toward the sun? Or maybe they just slept
off the glare of last evening.

My wife poked her head in. "You still at it?"

"Basically done."

"You didn't have to do that," she said. "But it's appreciated." She picked up a sponge and started to wipe down the countertop
around the sink, sweeping the wet crumbs into her bare palm. Nothing made her squeamish; she had the constitution of a nurse.

"That Was Really a Great Dinner," I said.

"Thanks." She leaned against the refrigerator, a life-size magnet waiting for me to pick her off. "I'm Glad You're Here."

"Me Too."

"It's Nice."

"Yeah."

She smiled, shaking her head. "These are things to say."

"They sure are."

She unstuck herself to pour a glass of water. "You think you could paint the house?"

"Paint the house?"

"Yeah, it could use a fresh coat."

"I'm sure I could." The whole idea made me sick. "I'm no professional," I said to her. "I haven't painted a house since I
was a kid."

"Just Fake It. You can do that."

"I suppose."

She told me to Go and Tuck the Boy In. When I got to his room, pausing at the door, I watched him read a durably made book.
His expression was serious, as if the bed were a desk and the book a quarterly report and I the interrupting employee asking
for a raise. "Good book?" I asked.

"Uh-huh."

"What's it about?"

"Well, it's about jobs, different kinds of jobs, a doctor, a policeman, a cook, those kinds of things."

I sat down next to him and looked over his shoulder. "Can you read now?"

"No, not yet. Sometimes, though."

"That's good."

He didn't answer.

"Would you like me to read to you?" I asked.

"That's all right."

"Okay."

Taped to the walls were pictures cut out of magazines, the edges raw with awkward scissoring. Most of them were lush photographs
from
National Geographic
—a pride of lions, a herd of elephants, a group of elk—and I wondered if they should mean something to me, maybe a view into
my son's mind, a puzzle of information a good father might be able to understand. Wildlife. Nature. No great realizations.
Then I searched the room for other clues, but there weren't many around. Some art supplies. A couple of action figures. Toy
cars and airplanes. In a wicker basket a few stuffed animals were having an orgy, the glass eyes of one teddy bear looking
strung out and unable to comprehend How He Actually Got Here. "Where's your mitt?" I asked.

"Under the bed." The boy had his knees bent below his chin in a highly flexible display. He seemed to be all cartilage. If
I had tried such a maneuver, I would've been sore for weeks.

"Where?" I said.

He tweaked a slight face—eyes widening, lips sucked in—which he didn't think I noticed. He leaned over the edge of his bed,
his spine a hinge, the tops of his pajamas lifting to expose smooth white skin and a perfect crease of vertebrae. He surfaced
with the mitt. "Like you said," he said.

"No no." I took the mitt from him. "Under the mattress, I said. It needs to get loose." I opened the pocket and dug my fist
in there. "You really need some twine and a baseball and oil, then you've got the makings for a Job Well Done. What you do
is sleep on it for a week, just sleep on it, maybe sometimes re-oiling, then you're ready. Makes a load of difference."

"To what?"

"To playing," I said. "You develop a pocket for the ball to fit into." I got up from the bed. "I really should've gotten you
a ball. Fucking stupid of me."

"That's all right," my son said.

"It needs to be broken in properly. It's pretty important. Otherwise it's all crap." I paced the room. I have that habit,
pacing, especially when I'm beginning a lie. I need to be on my feet and moving. "And you know what? I was going to save this,
but you know what?"

He shook his head with slow deliberateness, even his shoulders turned.

"Well, this is a secret now, but I have opening-day tickets to the Indians game. I do. A friend snagged me a pair."

"Baseball?" the boy asked.

"Of course," I told him, now feeling alive with this story. "And good tickets. Third base line. Fourth row. The best. And
the two of us are going. Have a great time. The two of us in Jacobs Field, that green grass, hot dogs, fucking banners waving,
seventh-inning stretch, the whole deal, and we'll have our mitts because you never know when a foul ball might zip toward
you. There's nothing more precious in the world. Nothing. People dive headfirst just for the opportunity to touch one. I swear.
Practically kill themselves. And to catch one in a mitt, well, that's the greatest rush. Pull in a liner from Lofton or Belle,
from Murray. Oh, man."

"Have you?"

"Not yet," I said. "But I'm waiting." My hands worked his tiny mitt. That leather smell was filled with the easy sentimentality
of Baseball, of Fathers and Sons, of Hope, and my lie seemed to fit comfortably within that false promise of Spring. "We got
to make you a pocket."

"A pocket?"

I slapped the inside of the mitt. "For the mitt, you know. Remember?"

"Oh yeah."

I reached into my jeans and scooped up my apartment keys and dropped them in the heel of the webbing, then for good measure
I tucked my wallet in there too. "This'll barely do," I said.

"Looks good," my son said.

"Yeah?"

"Sure." His arms flopped at his sides with indifference.

"Okay." I reached down and took ahold of his mattress and lifted it to my chest. It was incredibly light. The boy rolled to
the side, his body exaggerating the pitch, and he flattened himself against the wall. At first I was concerned that I had
inadvertently hurt him, fears of The Night I Broke His Arm pushing against my temples, but right now he was laughing.

"Fun," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

I placed the mitt in the center of the box spring and dropped the mattress down. He lurched to the other side, hitting my
knees with a giggle. "Whoa," he said. "That's a ride."

"Earthquake," I shouted, and I started to fling the mattress around, but seeing him bounce all over the place put the Fear
of God in me, so I stopped.

"C'mon, more."

"Nope," I said.

"Please."

"Nighttime."

He pawed at the bed like a cat. "I feel a something," he said.

"That's the mitt."

"Oh."

"But it does the job."

He said, "Okay," with a certain look, doubtful yet resigned, that I could've sworn belonged solely to me.

In the bedroom my wife had already changed into her nightgown and bathrobe, her hair combed out in feathered waves, and she
smiled a smile of Home Again. "He all tucked in?"

"Yep."

"He asleep?"

"Not yet."

"Well," she said while rubbing moisturizer cream into her hands, the white disappearing within cracked fingers. "I'll go in
and say good night. Be back in a sec."

Alone in the room, the bed seemed huge and the sheets seemed to glow and the pillows seemed to be arranged into a choir of
comfort. Spend the Night, they sang. But I was feeling like a heathen and I eyed the window wondering about escape—if I would
twist my ankle from the fall, if I could hobble to where I needed to go, if I could dodge this situation and find sanctuary.

***

"A baseball game?" she asked.

"Yeah, I was thinking maybe."

"That'd be great. He's already excited." Her arms came around my neck, her pendant head hanging below me. "Will you stay?"

"I guess. Yeah, sure," I answered.

"I've Missed You," she said, and when someone says that to you, you only have one possible reply, and I said it.

We made love. She handed me a condom before Things Went Too Far. "You never know," she said. It had been almost a year, and
she was off the pill, and with my Dubious History she had every right to think that you never know. But for this rational
behavior she apologized. "I'm sorry," she said. But I told her that I understood perfectly. "If it's a real bother," she said
a few minutes later, "you can take it off, just be careful, pull out or something, you know, because this is so nice, it really
is. I'm Very Happy." I held her wide face in my hands, my fingers massaging her scalp. She loved this. And I licked her neck
because she loved that too. And I gave her deep kisses without tongue. And I made sure to hold my weight off her. I did those
things with the inspiration of an actor reprising a tired role. Then I told her what she wanted to hear, wishing somehow that
these words could be safe, that they could give pleasure without the fear of possible transmission.

She slept draped over me, her leg in between my legs, her arm on my shoulder. Hot prickles of sweat developed where she touched
me, an awful sensation, too clammy for my stomach, but I didn't want to move and disturb her. Just a year ago I would've kicked
her to the other side of the bed. Outside, the moon was near full, bright enough to put shadows on the far wall. Cars passed.
Once in a while a person walked on the sidewalk, the sex determined by the clicks of the shoes. Couples were louder, their
voices drunk and in a certain turmoil. I listened to all of this. The occasional airplanes. The peel-outs. The mystery noises
of Friday.

And I wished that this room had a TV. I'd sweep the volume way down so that some dialogue was lost, the soft words, the whispers,
every conversation only partially understood, the secrets of plot left to the lip-readers. I'd try to find something worth
watching, maybe a fine old movie I hadn't seen in a long time, any Hollywood classic where a damaged life is repaired and
set back into motion. But all I had to distract me was the furniture, the bureau with silos of makeup, the chair with my clothes
draped over the back, the closet door half opened as if someone were spying from there, checking out this diorama, a temporary
display in a museum of natural history. This Is How They Lived. This Is the World Unspoiled. The background painted. The lighting
blue nocturnal. The taxidermist doing an expert job of covering up the fatal bullet holes, the scratching and clawing of bloody
instinct into a Pose of Tranquillity for the Dead Zoo. But my fingernails were clumped up with family.

"Are you awake?" my wife whispered.

The person peeking from the closet would see that I didn't answer but breathed a bit harder as if I were deep in sleep and
couldn't hear her. Maybe she would give up and let me pretend for a while longer that I was the Recovered Husband, that I
was the Returned Father to the son down the hall, my keys and wallet safely under his mattress, his dreaming body above them,
rising and falling, breaking in the mitt with his own weight.

She rubbed my shoulder. "Are You Awake, Honey?" she asked again.

don't go in the basement!

THERE'S GOING TO be a noise, a thwumping noise from the basement, a hollow noise that sounds every few seconds—thwump, pause,
pause, thwump—as if a clock is keeping time for a madman, and I'll hear this noise from the kitchen, my wet body wrapped in
a bathrobe, my skin flushed with recent sex, and I'll look long and hard at the basement door, at the doorknob in particular,
and I'll tentatively call out Chip's name—"Chip, you down there?"—but there will be no answer except for that noise—thwump,
pause, pause, thwump—so I'll question that noise again—"Chip, is that you?"—before opening the basement door, pressing my
palm against its brassy reflection.

This overhanging certainty frightens me, the same way final exams frighten me on the first day of classes. It is part of a
non-mystical future, the nuts and bolts of a syllabus, inescapable until the end. My sorority sisters consider me a fatalist
of the worst kind, a person who sees herself in the alcoholic form of her mother, who composes a eulogy for her father whenever
she's with him on holidays. The problem is that I lack the calm acceptance of a true fatalist. Instead, I'm simply impatient
while I wait for the statistics to kick in.

Someone screams, "Sally!"

"Yes."

"Are you coming, or what?"

"Or what," I say.

"Suit yourself." And they're gone, my sisters, the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma, all thirty-seven sisters marching in menstrual-cycle
sync across the lush lawns of Greek Way. I watch them from my upstairs window, the twenty-two with boyfriends, the nineteen
with the same favorite song, the fifteen with eating disorders, the eleven with cocaine desires, the nine with drinking problems,
the seven with secret abortions, the five on antidepressants, the one with unfortunate acne. These shared numbers shift from
day to day in what are public and often cruel exchanges, but tonight they are a union of desperate girls off to the Saturday
Night Homebrew Bash at Sigma Phi Epsilon. T-shirts and blue plastic mugs have been manufactured, as well as beer, all types
fermented in the basements of sororities and fraternities:
Y
"on your ass" amber,
M
"you'll be stewed" heiferweizen,
KA
"lights out" stout,
X
"see you later" lager, TKE "pukin' in the John" porter, AKA "47" malt liquor.

The sisters carry six-packs of
KK
" "I wanna scama" pilsner, like young executives with their briefcases swinging. Off to work they go. In five hours, at two
in the morning, those remaining at the
E house, the girls without boyfriends, the girls without one-night stands, the girls without cocaine, the girls without mysterious
blackouts, those defeated girls will slouch back to this house, the party sweat now bitterly freezing on their skin, and they'll
wash up and slip on their nightgowns in the silence of the drunkenly unloved. Luckily, there will be no time for them to think
before they pass out.

The clock radio on my bedside table glows a blue 9:37 P.M., the numbers shifting like the numbers of some dyslexic countdown.
Often, in the morning, I'll wake up just a few minutes before the alarm beeps, and I'll lie there within the safe sheets and
track the maneuvering of those stick-figure numbers. I'll try to tick off the seconds in my head, to test my internal timekeeping
ability, but I'm always a few seconds short or a few seconds long, and though I'm ready for t-minus zero to hit, the alarm
nonetheless startles me, as if my life will simply end at that moment.

At 9:40 P.M., the girlish echoes are gone, and I get up from the bed. But before I can make one step toward the bureau mirror
and its critical reflection, a hand shoots out from under the paisley dust ruffle and grabs me by the left ankle. I immediately
let out a high-pitched scream, but it combines with the other outside noises. On Saturday night no one can differentiate between
the levels of hysteria. With a sharp tug the hand pulls me to the floor, face first, so that my arms are stretched forward
like a failed Superman, and before I can start some defensive kicking, the other hand has control of my right leg. A body
quickly climbs up my backside, knees pinning my legs, elbows pinning my arms; a chin digs into my neck. I can't believe this
is just one person, it feels like a small army of well-trained limbs. There's no way I can move. A groin grinds my ass. A
tongue licks the smooth heel of my ear. The realization—I will be raped—doesn't really shock me. In fact, I can't believe
it's taken this long for something violent and awful to happen to me. A nose greedily snorts my odor.

In a few long instants I imagine the aftermath: the call to the police, the trip to the hospital, the I've-seen-it-all nurse
taking Polaroids to document the assault. It will be difficult to find the suspect, almost impossible, and even if they do
find him, in a bar, a scratch across his face, the telltale tattoo on his biceps, the case will be hard to prosecute. Where's
the evidence? No semen, no fingerprints, no positive ID—my rapist is a smart rapist and he will have worn a condom and gloves
and a ski mask. So I'll have to take the stand in that dusty courtroom, the old judge looking at me like he's my shamed father,
while my kindly lawyer guides me through the horrendous incident, and the cruel defense lawyer, his face pitted with vindictive
pockmarks, bullies me into revealing my sordid sex life. Do I have to remind you, Sally, that you are under oath?

A voice whispers hotly, "I'm going to fuck you."

"What?"

"Right here, right now. If you move, I'll kill you. I swear."

"Chip?"

"Shut up, bitch! I have a knife."

I stare at the hands holding me and try to notice something Chipish about them: a scar on the index finger, gnawed hangnails,
cracked skin. But the attacker has on wool mittens with a Nordic design. "Chip, is that you, you idiot?"

"C'mon, shut up." I can hear the conspicuous wavering in his voice, that little boy not yet released from uncertainty. At
times—watching TV, brushing his teeth, blowing his nose—you can spot the young Chip, cowlick and freckles, wearing his brother's
hand-me-downs. He still gets excited about fresh-baked cookies. And while I once envisioned myself going out with older guys,
the upperclassmen of this world, I found freshman Chip in History 203, his feet kicking the seat in front of him, my seat.

"Excuse me?" I said, and I turned around and gave him an annoyed aura perfected by four years of high school and two years
of college.

"Yes."

"Stop kicking." And he stopped just like that. "Thank you," I said, and I faced forward again and watched the professor try
to explain the causes of World War II to an auditorium of three hundred students. But Chip's face stuck with me, something
about the crooked smile, the misshapen hair, the bemused eyes, and while I listened to the tragic consequences of a passive
public, I couldn't get the guy out of my head. What was he doing right now? Taking fastidious notes or sleeping or gazing
around the room or doodling? My insides had that shaken feeling of an accident narrowly avoided.

"Chip, get the hell off of me."

The body slowly rolls to the side, coming to rest on his back, defeated like an animal confronting the alpha of the species.

"Take off that stupid ski mask."

Chip pulls it free, creating a static mess. He's very sweaty, breathing hard, thin not from athletics but from a highly motivated
metabolism. He's wearing a blue jogging outfit, Adidas, circa 1978.