Crossroads by Mary Morris Page B

with a jerking stroke, as if he were raising a flag.
    â€œI need some fresh air.”
    â€œWe’ll open a window.” But I was adamant and finally he agreed to take a walk. “Let me get a little ice for this drink first, O.K.?”
    We passed Jennie. “I’m going for a walk,” I mumbled. She said something about when we were leaving but I didn’t quite catch it and she didn’t repeat it. The ice, it turned out, was in the kitchen of the house. Bobby fumbled in the freezer. I wouldn’t go beyond the kitchen, I told myself. The house had become in my mind some dark force of evil and corruption, some den of iniquity. Bobby hit the ice tray on the Formica and ice fell onto the counter. He plunked a few cubes into our glasses. The kitchen lights were bright and I didn’t want to look at him and be betrayed by a few white hairs, a wrinkle on my brow.
    When he started to lead me toward the living room, I protested. “Look, you wanta go for a walk? The door’s that way.” For some reason that made sense to me, so I followed, but when we got into the living room, which was very dark with only the light of the street light, he paused. “Boy, am I tired. Let’s sit for a minute. I wanta talk to you.” Why is darkness sensual? I asked myself. Why is it we never want to make love in a kitchen under fluorescent lights?
    But no one was going to make love here. I’d made that decision as we sat down on the sofa, and once I make a decision, I stick to it. The living room seemed like a good compromise, except after a few moments I felt uncomfortable there. The walls were covered with bad art, Jersey kitsch, and all the lamps had plastic slipcovers. The furniture was covered with white sheets, as if someone had recently died and the rooms weren’t to be used again.
    I sat beside Bobby, twirling my glass in my hands and feeling very much the awkward age he thought I was. “I like you,” he said. I kept turning the glass, faster and faster like a globe, and Mark’s mother with her endless motion of hands came to mind. I stopped. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
    I didn’t want to go but I found myself walking, climbing the stairs. We entered Rupert’s parents’ room, which had the biggest king-size fake brass bed I’d ever seen and yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. The whole house, I suddenly realized, was done in yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. I thought to myself, I can’t make love with yellow carpeting everywhere. And suddenly it was the carpeting and not the arms of an eighteen-year-old boy I couldn’t bear.
    The bedroom had the whole family photographed above the bed in various stages of development and ecstasy. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, graduation, a football victory, a million shots of the family dog, usually with a blunt object between its teeth. We lay down beneath them, and Bobby began to move across my body in a perfunctory and predictable fashion. It made sense that this rather pure, simple boy would be the one to shatter Mark’s hold in a rather simple, meaningless act. No real man could do it, so I submitted and began to breathe deeply, the way I do when I go to the dentist.
    He dug his tongue into my mouth about as far as a tongue could go and squeezed my breasts. “Take this off.” He tugged at my green T-shirt. His clothes, mine, were pulled off. Shoes fell like bombs. Two bewildered goldfish in a nearby bowl watched, wide-eyed but apathetic. Then he assumed what must have been his posture for a racing dive and proceeded to plunge. “I don’t have any birth control with me,” I said, suddenly brought back to my senses. “Don’t worry,” he gasped. “I’ll pull out.” Which is what he did, seconds later, spilling himself over the fake quilted spread, which matched the color of the indifferent goldfish. “Jesus,” he moaned, gritting his teeth, and I