Gerald’s Game

the fire, using the barbecue tongs to turn the glass square this way and that like some sort of weird camp delicacy. Jessie burst out laughing-it was mostly the oven-mitt that struck her funny-and he turned around, also grinning. The thought that the angle made it possible for him to look up her dress crossed her mind, but only fleetingly. He was her father, after all, not some cute boy like Duane Corson from down at the marina.

What are you doing? she giggled. I thought we were having hamburgers for lunch, not glass sandwiches!

Eclipse-viewers, not sandwiches, Punkin, he said. If you put two orthree of these together, you can look at the eclipse for the whole period oftotality without damaging your eyes. You have to be really careful. I’ve read; you can burn your retinas and not even know you’ve done it untillater.

Ag! Jessie said, shivering a little. The idea of burning yourself without knowing you were doing it struck her as incredibly gross. How long will it be total, Daddy?

Not long. A minute or so.

Well, make some more of those glass whatchamacallums-I don’t wantto burn my eyes. One Eclipse Burger or two?

One will be fine. If it’s a big one.okay.

She turned to go.

Punkin?

She looked back at him, a small, compact man with fine beads of sweat standing out on his forehead, a man with as little body hair as the man she would later marry, but without either Gerald’s thick glasses or his paunch, and for a moment the fact that this man was her father seemed the least important thing about him. She was struck again by how handsome he was, and how young he looked. As she watched, a bead of sweat rolled slowly down his stomach, tracked just east of his navel, and made a small dark spot on the elastic waistband of his Yale shorts. She looked back at his face and was suddenly, exquisitely aware of his eyes on her. Even narrowed against the smoke as they were now, those eyes were absolutely gorgeous, the brilliant gray of daybreak on winter water. Jessie found she had to swallow before she could answer; her throat was dry. Possibly it was the acrid smoke from his sod fire. Or possibly not.

Yes, Daddy?

For a long moment he said nothing, only went on looking up at her with sweat running slowly down his cheeks and forehead and chest and belly, and Jessie was suddenly frightened. Then he smiled again and all was well.

You look very pretty today, Punkin. In fact, if it doesn’t sound tooyucky, you look beautiful.

Thank you-it doesn’t sound yucky at all.

His comment pleased her so much (especially after her mother’s angry editorial comments of the night before, or perhaps because of them) that a lump rose in her throat and she felt like crying for a moment. She smiled instead, and sketched a curtsey in his direction, and then hurried back to the barbecue with her heart pounding a steady drumroll in her chest. One of the things her mother had said, the most awful thing, tried to rise into her mind.

(you behave as if she were your)

and Jessie squashed it as ruthlessly as she would have squashed a bad-tempered wasp. Still, she felt gripped by one of those crazy adult mixes of emotion-ice cream and gravy, roast chicken stuffed with sourballs-and could not seem to entirely escape it. Nor was she sure she even wanted to. In her mind she kept seeing that single drop of sweat tracking lazily down his stomach, being absorbed by the soft cotton of his shorts, leaving that tiny dark place. It was from that image that the emotional turmoil seemed chiefly to arise. She kept seeing it and seeing it and seeing it. It was crazy.

Well, so what? It was a crazy day, that was all. Even the sun was going to do something crazy. Why not leave it at that?

Yes, the voice that would one day masquerade as Ruth Neary agreed. Why not?

The Eclipse Burgers, garnished with sauted mushrooms and mild red onion, were nothing short of fabulous. They certainlyeclipse the last batch your mother made, her father told her, and Jessie giggled wildly. They ate on the deck outside Tom Mahout’s den, balancing metal trays on their laps. A round deck-table, littered with condiments, paper plates, and eclipse-watching paraphernalia, stood between them. The observation gear included Polaroid sunglasses, two home-made cardboard reflector-boxes of the sort which the rest of the family had taken with them to Mount Washington, panes of smoked glass and a stack of hotpads from the drawer beside the kitchen stove. The panes of smoked glass weren’t hot anymore, Tom told his daughter, but he wasn’t terribly competent with the glass-cutter, and he was afraid there still might be nicks and jagged spots along the edges of some of the panes.

The last thing I need, he told her, is for your mother to come homeand find a note saying I’ve taken you to the Emergency Room at OxfordHills Hospital so they can try to sew a couple of your fingers back on.

Mom really wasn’t exactly crazy about this idea, was she? Jessie asked.

Her Daddy gave her a brief hug. No, he said, but I was. I wascrazy enough about it for both of us. And he gave her a smile so bright she just had to smile back.

It was the reflector-boxes they used first as the onset of the eclipse-4:29 p.m… edt-neared. The sun lying in the center of Jessie’s reflector-box was no bigger than a bottlecap, but it was so fiercely bright that she groped a pair of the sunglasses from the table and put them on. According to her Timex, the eclipse should have already started-it said 4:30.

I guess my watch is fast, she said nervously. Either that or there’sa bunch of astronomers all over the world with egg on their faces.

Check again, Tom said, smiling.

When she looked back into the reflector-box, she saw that the brilliant circle was no longer a perfect circle; a crescent of darkness now dented the right-hand side. A shiver slipped down her neck. Tom, who had been watching her instead of the image inside his own reflector-box, saw it.

Punkin? All right?

Yes, hut…it’s a little scary, isn’t it?

Yes, he said. She glanced at him and was deeply relieved to see he meant it. He looked almost as scared as she felt, and this only added to his winning boyishness. The idea that they might be afraid of different things never entered her mind. Want to sit on my lap, Jess?

Can I?

You bet.

She slipped onto his lap, still holding her own reflector-box in her hands. She wiggled around to get comfortable against him, liking the smell of his faintly sweaty, sunwarmed skin and a faint trace of some aftershave-Redwood, she thought it was called. The sundress rode up on her thighs (it could hardly do anything else, as short as it was), and she barely noticed when he put his hand on one of her legs. This was her father, after all-Daddy-not Duane Corson from down at the marina, or Richie Ashlocke, the boy she and her friends moaned and giggled over at school.

The minutes passed slowly. Every now and then she squirmed around, trying to get comfortable-his lap seemed strangely full of angles this afternoon-and at one point she must have dozed off for three or four minutes. It might have been even longer, because the puff of breeze that came strolling down the deck and woke her up was surprisingly cold against her sweaty arms, and the afternoon had changed somehow; colors which had seemed bright before she leaned back against his shoulder and closed her eyes were now pale pastels, and the light itself had weakened somehow. It was as if, she thought, the day had been strained through cheesecloth. She looked into her reflector-box and was surprised-almost stunned, actually-to see that only half the sun was there now. She looked at her watch and saw it was nine minutes past five.

It’s happening, Daddy! The sun’s going out!

Yes, he agreed. His voice was odd, somehow-deliberate and thoughtful on top, somehow blurry down below. Right onschedule.

She noticed in a vague sort of way that his hand had slipped higher-quite a bit higher, actually-on her leg while she had been dozing.

Can I look through the smoked glass yet, Dad?

Not yet, he said, and his hand slid higher still along her thigh. It was warm and sweaty but not unpleasant. She put her own hand over it, turned to him, and grinned.

It’s exciting, isn’t it?

Yes, he said in that same odd blurry tone. Yes it is, Punkin.Quite a bit more than I thought it would be, actually.

More time passed. In the reflector-box, the moon continued to nibble away at the sun as five-twenty-five passed, and then five-thirty. Almost all of her attention was now focused on the diminishing image in the reflector-box, but some faint part of her became aware once again of how oddly hard his lap was this afternoon. Something was pressing against her bottom. It wasn’t painful, but it was insistent. To Jessie, it felt like the handle of some tool-a screwdriver, or maybe her mother’s trackhammer.

Jessie wriggled again, wanting to find a more comfortable spot on his lap, and Tom drew in a quick hissing mouthful of air over his bottom lip.

Daddy? Am I too heavy? Did I hurt you?

No. You’re fine,

She glanced at her watch. Five-thirty-seven now; four minutes to totality, maybe a little more if her watch was running fast.

Can I look at it through the glass yet

Not yet, Punkin, But very soon.

She could hear Debbie Reynolds singing something from the Dark Ages, courtesy of WNCH: “The old hooty-owl…hooty- hoosto the dove…Tammy…Tammy…Tammy’s in love.” It finally drowned in a sticky swirl of violins and was replaced by the disc jockey, who told them it was getting dark in Ski Town, USA (this was the way the “NCH deejays almost always referred to North Conway), but that the skies were too cloudy over on the New Hampshire side of the border to actually see the eclipse. The deejay told them there were a lot of disappointed folks wearing sunglasses across the street on the town common.

We’re not disappointed folks, are we, Daddy?

Not a bit, he agreed, and shifted beneath her again. We’re aboutthe most happy folks in the universe, I guess.

Jessie peered into the reflector-box again, forgetting everything except the tiny image which she could now look at without narrowing her eyes down to protective slits behind the heavily tinted Polaroid sunglasses. The dark crescent on the right which had signalled the onset of the eclipse had now become a blazing crescent of sunlight on the left. It was so bright it almost seemed to float over the surface of the reflector-box.

Look out on the lake, Jessie!