No!

But now, to Jessie’s horror, the day begins to darken. It could just be the sun going behind a cloud, but she knows it isn’t. The sun is going out. Soon the stars will shine in a summer afternoon sky and the old hooty-owl will hooty-hoo to the dove. The time of the eclipse has come.

No! she screams again. That was two years ago!

You’re wrong on that one, toots, Ruth Neary says. For you it neverended. For you the sun never came back out.

She opens her mouth to deny that, to tell Ruth she’s as guilty of wild overdramatization as Nora, who kept shoving her toward doors she didn’t want to open, who kept assuring her that the present can be improved by examining the past-as if one could improve the taste of today’s dinner by slathering it with the maggoty remains of yesterday’s. She wants to tell Ruth, as she told Nora on the day she walked out of Nora’s office for-good, that there is a big difference between living with something and being kept prisoner by it. Don’t you two goofs understand that theCult of Self is just another cult? she wants to say, but before she can do more than open her mouth, the invasion comes: a hand between her slightly spread legs, the thumb shoving rudely at the cleft of her buttocks, the fingers pressed against the material of her shorts just above her vagina, and it is not her brother’s innocent little hand this time; the hand between her legs is much bigger than Will’s and not a bit innocent. The bad song is on the radio, the stars are out at three o'clock in the afternoon, and this

(you will not die it’s not poison)

is how the big people goose each other.

She whirls, expecting to see her father. He did something like this to her during the eclipse, a thing she supposes the whining Cult-of-Selfers, the Live-in-the-Pasters like Ruth and Nora, would call child abuse. Whatever it was, it will be him-she’s sure of that much-and she is afraid she will exact a terrible punishment for the thing he did, no matter how serious or trivial that thing was: she will raise the croquet mallet and drive it into his face, smashing his nose and knocking out his teeth, and when he falls down on the grass the dogs will come and eat him up.

Except it isn’t Tom Mahout standing there; it’s Gerald. He’s naked. The Penis of an Attorney pokes out at her from below the soft pink bowl of his belly. He has a set of Kreig police handcuffs in each hand. He holds them out to her in the weird afternoon darkness. Unnatural starlight gleams on the cocked jaws which are stamped M-I7 because his source could not provide him with any F-23s.

Come on, Jess, he says, grinning. It isn’t as though you don’t knowthe score. Besides, you liked it. That first time you came so hard youalmost blew up. I don’t mind telling you that was the best piece of ass Iever had in my life, so good I sometimes dream about it. And do youknow why it was so good? Because you didn’t have to take any of theresponsibility. Almost all women like it better when the man takes overcompletely-it’s a proven fact of female psychology. Did you come whenyour father molested you, Jessie? I bet you did. I bet you came so bardYom almost bleu, up. The Cult-of-Selfers may want to argue about thesethings,but we know the truth, don’t we? Some women can say they want it, but some need a man to tell them they want it. You’re one of thelatter. But that’s okay, Jessie; that’s what the cuffs are for. Only theywere never really handcuffs at all. They’re bracelets of love. So put themon,sweetheart. Put them on.

She backs up, shaking her head, not knowing if she wants to laugh or cry. The subject itself is new, but the rhetoric is all too familiar. The lawyer’s tricks don’t work on me, Gerald-I’ve beenmarried to one too long, What we both know is that the business withthe handcuffs was never about me at all. It was about you…aboutwaking up your old booze-stunned John Thomas a little, to be blunt. Soyou can just save your fucked-up version of female psychology, okay?

Gerald is smiling in a knowing, disconcerting way. Good try,babe. It doesn’t wash, but it was still a damned good shot. The bestdefense is a good offense, right? I think I taught you that. Never mind,though. Right now you’ve got a choice to make. Either put the braceletson or swing that mallet and kill me again.

She looks around and realizes with dawning panic and dismay that everyone at Will’s party is watching her confrontation with this naked (except for his glasses, that is), overweight, sexually aroused man… and it’s not just her family and her childhood friends, either. Mrs Henderson, who will be her Freshman Advisor at college, is standing by the punch-bowl; Bobby Hagen, who will take her to the Senior Prom-and fuck her afterward in the back seat of his father’s Oldsmobile 88-is standing on the patio next to the blonde girl from the Neuworth Parsonage, the one whose parents loved her but idolized her brother.

Barry, Jessie thinks. She’s Olivia and her brother’s Barry.

The blonde girl is listening to Bobby Hagen but looking at Jessie, her face calm but somehow haggard. She is wearing a sweatshirt which shows R. Crumb’s Mr Natural hurrying down a city street. The words in the balloon coming out of Mr Natural’s mouth say, “Vice is nice, but incest is best.” Behind Olivia, Kendall Wilson, who will hire Jessie for her first teaching job, is cutting a piece of chocolate birthday cake for Mrs Paige, her childhood piano teacher. Mrs Paige is looking remarkably lively for a woman who died of a stroke two years ago while picking apples at Corrit’s Orchards in Alfred.

Jessie thinks, This isn’t like dreaming; it’s like drowning. EveryoneI’ve ever known seems to be standing here under this weird starlit afternoonsky, watching my naked husband try to put me in handcuffs while MarvinGaye sings “Can I Get a Witness.” If there’s any comfort to be had, it’sthis: things can’t possibly get any worse.

Then they do. Mrs Wertz, her first-grade teacher, starts to laugh. Old Mr Cobb, their gardener until he retired in ii964, laughs with her. Maddy joins in, and Ruth, and Olivia of the scarred breats. Kendall Wilson and Bobby Hagen are bent almost double and they are clapping each other on the back like men who have heard the granddaddy of all dirty jokes in the local barber-shop. Perhaps the one whose punchline is A life-supportsystem for a cunt.

Jessie looks down at herself and sees that now she is naked, too. Written across her breasts in a shade of lipstick known as Peppermint Yum-Yum are three damning words: DADDY’s LITTLE GIRL.

I have to wake up, she thinks. I’lldie of shame if I don’t.

But she doesn’t, at least not right away. She looks up and sees that Gerald’s knowing, disconcerting smile has turned into a gaping wound. Suddenly the stray dog’s blood-soaked snout pokes out between his teeth. The dog is also grinning, and the head that comes shoving out between its fangs like the onset of some obscene birth belongs to her father. His eyes, always a bright blue, are now gray and haggard above his grin. They are Olivia’s eyes, she realizes, and then she realizes something else, as well: the flat mineral smell of lakewater, so bland and yet so horrible, is everywhere.

“I love too hard, my friends sometimes say,” her father sings from inside the mouth of the dog which is inside the mouth of the husband, “But I believe, I believe, that a woman should be loved thatway…

She casts the mallet aside and runs, screaming. As she passes the horrible creature with its bizarre chain of nested heads, Gerald snaps one of the handcuffs around her wrist.