and wept for her own helplessness in all of this had it not been that she was now terribly
hungry and that this little meal was one of the pleasures she had been thinking about.
Afterward-and she pleaded for this-the children even allowed her to remain ungagged,
though her free hand was once again bound up with the other behind her back and the rag
and chloroform were left in plain sight to remind her of the children's power. It was another
little pleasure. Speech.
"Why are you doing it, Dianne?"
"Hrnnn?" Dianne' had finished her share of the morning's chores and settled down on
Barbara's bed (which she had neatly made) with her rather lewd book on ancient
practices--or so Barbara thought of it. When Barbara spoke, she looked up coolly.
"Me. Why are you keeping me tied up? Why did you do it in the first place?'' Barbara was
sitting faced away from Dianne, but she could see her in the vanity mirror.
"I don't know. It's only a game-s-" Dianne spoke offhandedly.
It stabbed Barbara. They did not know how much they were hurting her; even she did not
entirely know. It was only just beginning to pile up. Last night had been-appropriately-a
nightmare.
"It's only a game," Dianne said, "and besides, we aren't hurting you."
"You are, too," Barbara said, definitely.
"I haven't heard any crying and moaning and groaning."
"How could I?" "It isn't hard."
61
"How do you know?"
"The same way." Dianne continued to cradle her book though she had given up any
pretense of reading. "They've tied me up. Worse than you. We've all taken turns."
"You? The five of you? All of you?"
"Um." Dianne was nonchalant. "It's a game we used to play. One time I let them tie my
hands to a tree limb, and they left me there most all the afternoon. In the woods. That
really hurts."
"And that's a game?"
"Um." Dianne shrugged again.
"Where did you ever get the idea to do something silly like that?" Barbara almost said "like
this."
"I don't know. You see it on TV or in the comics." She looked down at her book. "Do you
know what people used to do when they were binding up the last sheaf of wheat in the fall
and somebody came by the threshing floor while they were doing it? You know what they
did to a king of England with a red-hot poker? Do you read very much in college?"
"Yes," Barbara yearned upward toward the ceiling and tried to stretch her shoulder
muscles. They had tied her overtight again. It hurt. Still, she was careful; at least, she
didn't have a gag in her mouth. "Not that, though."
"Oh." Dianne seemed disappointed. It was as if college wasn't going to be for her. "Anyhow,
playing Prisoner's not all that great an idea. You used to do stuff like that when you were
young yourself."
"No, I didn't.” Barbara wasn't used to being included in some older generation. It startled
her.
"Hmnn." Dianne barely made the sound at all, but she looked at the captive closely.
Barbara felt the scrutiny. Looking up into the mirror, she met Dianne's eyes. Perhaps
Dianne didn't believe her, or perhaps she did and thought it odd. Whatever the cause,
there was a degree of contempt in her look, and Barbara lowered her head and broke off
the match.
62
In fact, Dianne's question had started up a memory. Barbara had been raised in an apartment
building until nearly her senior year of high school. What she remembered now was an entire
and uncomfortable relationship with the other kids in the immediate-and crowded-
neighborhood. Specifically she remembered the whispering and sniggering of kids at one end
of the
-apartment parking lot at twilight after dinner in the summer, a low, confidential murmur that
dropped and turned to hostility if she approached. "Been helping your mother with the
dishes?" "Hey, Barb, what d'ya do for fun?" "I know what I'd like to do with her-" Guffaws in
the grand old manner.
If she had been walking toward them, inwardly anxious to be folded into the warmth of the
group that laughed and talked so intimately, this immediately repelled her. She might try to
face it out by asking one of the girls her age a question, or she might veer off and pretend to
be going somewhere else on an errand, but either way she would hear over her shoulder the
resumption of confidences and giggles.
They wanted her. She felt that boys and girls alike wanted her to do something or that they
wanted to do something to her, and afterward, form had it, she would be one of them. Barbara
didn't know what this suspected ritual act of initiation was-in her imagination, it was variously
any number of wild things-but she felt it would take place somewhere far from help, that it
would be in a crowd with a lot of snuggling up and hands on her body and the same knowing
sniggers the next day, and she knew that even if she forced herself to begin, she would cry or
get frightened in the middle of it and so wind up farther away from the group than now. Thus
the wall of privacy and selfness that the others wanted to break down in her was thickened.
She moved as closely to the other kids as she dared, but in the end she went her own sweet
and deliberately shining way. Barbara would not be dirtied. It wasn't anything that had been
taught her; it was just her own way.
63
"I don't know what the other kids did," she said to Dianne. "I never played that way."
Something of what Barbara had been thinking in her moment of silence-perhaps it was
conveyed simply by the set of her face=-seemed to reach Dianne. Her mirror image smiled a
faintly contemptuous smile, and Barbara thought how like one of the parking-lot gigglers
Dianne was at that.
At lunch they had been talking about her, though all they said, Barbara could not hear.
Afterward, when John came to take his tum at guard, he brought with him a certain tension
that quickly filled the space between them. It was so real that although she was still ungagged,
Barbara said nothing at first.
John came over and needlessly checked her ropes.
Then he moved to the room's other chair, which was out of her comfortable line of vision and
beyond the mirror's angle. Barbara heard him sit down, and then it was quiet again, except
that the room still held that tension.
After a while, Barbara turned her head back to the left and saw from the corner of her eye that
John was knotting one of the unused pieces of rope (it amazed her that there were any).
"What're you doing?"
"Nothing."
"Are you sure?"
"Sure." He looked up, mildly surprised. "What did you think I was doing?"
Barbara frowned and faced forward again, definitely a little nervous now. There was something
in the air that just wouldn't go away. When John said or did nothing, however, she said, "John,