That Night Read Free

there was no boredom in those suburbs, not on those summer evenings, or at least not until this one. For after this, after the cars and the sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight and the chilling sound of her boyfriend’s cry, after this, no small scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love. Venus, as I’ve said, was already bright.
    On their fifth or sixth time past our house, my mother said, “Maybe I should call the police.”
    “And tell them what?” my father asked her.
    She considered this briefly. “That they keep driving around.”
    “Nothing wrong with that,” he said.
    My mother looked at me. I could tell she didn’t want to call. If she’d wanted to, she simply would have gone inside and done it.
    “Somebody’s probably called already,” my father added.
    Now we were simply waiting, waiting for the cars to return, for whatever was going to happen to happen. Mr. Rossi was again at his front door, his shirt off and the newspaper now open and loose in his hand. There was a blue television light behind him.
    We saw Elaine Sayles walk to the mailbox on the opposite street (my mother swore she only pretended to put something in it) and then stop to talk to Mr. Carpenter, who was now sitting on his front steps with a beer. We saw them both glance up and down the street as they spoke. Mrs. Sayles was a tidy little blonde, the only woman in our neighborhood to wear tennis whites to the supermarket—to wear tennis whites at all, I suppose. She was said to have come from money, although her husband wore gray work clothes and carried a lunch pail She left him and their three children for Harvard while I was in college, but on that night she was still a silly short woman in a tiny white skirt, flirtatious, nosy, quite capable of merely pretending to put something in the mailbox.
    This time when the cars passed, the boy in the front passenger seat of the first one turned full face to us and grinned an enormous Sergeant Bilko grin. He wore sunglasses, maybe mirrored ones. I don’t know if he had a counterpart on the other side of the car, but when the last of the three had once again passed, Mrs. Sayles was already hurrying back to her house. Mr. Carpenter, still sitting on his stoop, was beginning to look somewhat mean-eyed.
    “She’ll probably call the police,” my mother said, a splinter of annoyance in her voice.
    But the cars passed again: we calculated that they’d just driven around the block; and again, they must have gone to the boulevard and back; and once more: around two blocks, or maybe as far as the grammar school and back. We waited.
    Now night was beginning to show itself, along the hedges, in the bushy center of trees. As we waited for them to return, the interval growing longer and longer, becoming the longest yet, we saw Mr. Rossi turn from his door and go back into his living room. We saw Mr. Carpenter crumple the beer can in his hand, stand and, bringing the can to the garbage, look up and down the street one last time. He too went inside, and Mrs. Sayles turned on a light and drew her curtains. We were beginning to spot lightning bugs. Down the block, the Sunshines (who were sports minded it was assumed, because they were childless) practiced a few golf swings with an imaginary club, he standing behind her, her arms inside his, and their cheeks together. The Meyer twins began tossing their small pink ball with a vengeance, aiming at each other’s thighs. One or two cars passed. The streetlights snapped on. My parents began to discuss something else entirely.
    I suppose we all believed that the boys had given up the game; that with the beginning of darkness they had gone on to the highway or to the broader, less peopled territory of the schoolyard or the parking lot outside the bowling alley; that they