i.
Our fathers were unlikely friends. Hers played chess, taught at the university, and spoke three foreign languages. Mine played checkers, worked as a union shop steward, and took a strange pride in declaring that he fell asleep reading anything more demanding than the comics page in the newspaper. What they could possibly have in common was a mystery for a long, long time.
ii.
When our mothers had their girl's nights out, it was our fathers who were charged with babysitting us. What that meant is that they hung around somewhere in or around the house while we retreated to one of our nearly identical bedrooms, either Rikki's or mine, depending on who was visiting whom. There among our posters, stuffed animals, music, and magazines we did each other's hair and nails, told each other secrets, and eventually discovered the magic our little fingers wielded to open up an explosive galaxy of pleasure in the other. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary.
iii.
On one such evening, at my house, as it happens, we heard a heavy thud from below that made the fine china we never used rattle behind the glass in the dining room hutch. What followed, more unsettlingly, was an alarmed cry. We ran downstairs and, finding neither father in the room where we had left them watching a ballgame on television, we went on a merry hunt throughout the house. We were spurred on by a trail of mysteriously empty rooms to the basement, coming at last upon the one door that, in retrospect, shouldn't have been opened. Behind it, my dad stood over her dad. What presented itself to our eyes was a vision so unprecedented it took a long time to recognize it for what it was, another year, actually, like those stories about indigenous island people who literally couldn't see a ship coming towards them over the horizon because they'd never seen anything like a ship before. Both dads were naked, except for the baffling leather harness Rikki's dad wore, which pulled his arms sharply back and behind his pale, bluish, bloated-looking body. He had a bright orange ball in his mouth which grotesquely stretched his lips in what looked like a lewd air-kiss. His eyes bulged like hard-boiled eggs.
iv.
No one said a word. I was mesmerized by the sight of my father's thing, which seemed to summarize and symbolize the meaning of the entire scene, although I couldn't have said how. If I close my eyes, I can see it still, in every veiny, meaty detail, more real than real. It was dark, blood-colored, and slick and had not yet drained of whatever it was that had so grotesquely swelled it. For a long time, I came to think that the stiffness of my dad's thing summed up his cruelty towards my mother and his indifference to anyone's needs but his own. Now I feel that perhaps that was a little too harsh and simplistic a judgment.
v.
Anyway, the ambulance came too late. We didn't go to the funeral. For a long time my mother was not my mother. She would periodically reappear from her disembodied funk long enough to advise me that right-minded people never dwelt on the kind of thing I'd seen in the basement, nor did they ever talk about it, not with anyone. Ever. Not even with oneself. You forget it. Period. "Sssh!" she hissed, whenever I made to ask…but what would I have asked if permitted to finish my sentence? I still don't know. For a long time my father reappeared only to pick up more clothes.
vi.
Somehow the marriage between her and my father survived and it survives to this day. It's a mystery how. Stranger things have happened but I can't think of a single stranger thing that ever did, not to me, nor to anyone I'd ever heard about. I wonder if anything ever stranger ever happened to Rikki. I never talked to her after that day and soon she and her mother and brother moved away and I never saw or heard from any of them ever again. But that doesn't mean I won't one of these days.
vii.
Stranger things have already happened.
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