Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [16]
Benjie said, “They have to go, you know. Or else.” And I got them back up for that and threw them in bed again.
“Let’s play something,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, and took out a deck of cards in case he wanted to learn Spit or Crackerjack.
He leaned back against the couch, opened his mouth wide, and rolled his eyes up until only the whites showed. Opening his mouth made him look much worse, the wet pink hole and the brown-tipped fern leaves almost grazing his bulging, blank eyes.
“Benjie. Benjamin.”
“I can’t hear you or see you. You are invisible.”
“Okay. You can unroll your eyes if you want. I’m now invisible.” I had a babysitter who would play this kind of game with me: Let’s pretend you’re an animal in the zoo, you get under the table and you can’t get out, while I go talk on the phone. I hated her when I understood, but if he wanted to play like that, I didn’t mind. I picked up a Life magazine and flipped through pictures of hundreds of girls getting their hair cut like the Beatles. Benjie unrolled his eyes, and they were very bright and liquid, like they’d been washed while they were up there. He stood up and pulled his nightgown over his head, making a flannel column with his arms, so I could get a good look at his naked body. It was like his brothers’ but bigger, and I had more time to look. His thing was like a soft, taupey cigar. A cigar with a droopy little bow around it. He kept standing there, and finally I picked up the magazine again.
“Any time, Benj.”
“You are invisible,” he said from within the nightgown.
“Oh, yeah. Okay, I’m invisible.”
He threw his nightie across the floor and took the magazine out of my hands, making me look at his naked chest.
“Do you want to play cards? I can teach you a game.”
“Okay,” he said. “Strip poker.”
“Definitely not. How about regular poker?”
“You’re invisible,” he said.
He dove onto the couch and began rubbing up against the cushions in this really disgusting way.
“Oh, Max, Max, Max,” he squealed.
“Come on, don’t be gross.”
He kept pumping away at the cushions and finally just lay there shaking, his little butt sticking up like another cushion, round and shiny.
“I’m going to look in my father’s room,” he said, and I followed him because I thought I should keep an eye on him and because I loved to look at peoples stuff.
“You want to put something on? It’s cold in here.” It was cold. The Stones must have kept their bedroom at fifty, and Benjie’s whole body was covered with goose bumps.
“Invisible,” he said, and headed for their dresser.
Which was exactly what I would have done if I was by myself. The things I liked best about babysitting, in the three jobs I’d had so far, were the eating and the snooping, both unfurling through the evening, lushly inviting, any small wave of shame easily subdued by the prospect of being, for once, satisfied. I ate smoked oysters and caviar for dinner, having discovered that people’s pantries yielded up interesting hors d’oeuvres tucked away behind the flour and the Crisco and the onion soup mix. And I ate ice cream with my fingers and shook Oreo crumbs down my throat when I’d finished the box. No one saw.
Benjie crouched in front of the dresser, his little thing dangling between his ankles. He held up a few pairs of his mother’s baggy white underpants, more like my panties than a grown woman’s, I thought, and then he put them back in the drawer. I certainly wasn’t going