Adultery & Other Choices by Andre Dubus

set on it.
    She was their last child, an older brother with eight years in the Army and going for twenty, and an older sister married to a pharmacist in Beaumont, never having gone farther than Galveston in her whole life and bearing kids now like that was the only thing to do.
    In the quiet summer afternoons when her mother was taking a nap and her father was at work, she felt both them and the immaculate house stifling her. One night returning from a date she had walked quietly into the kitchen. From there she could hear them snoring. Standing in the dark kitchen she smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes in her hand (there was only one ash tray in the house and it was used by guests). Then looking at their bedroom door she suddenly wanted to holler: I drank too much beer tonight and got sick in the John and Bud gave me 7-Up and creme de menthe to settle my stomach and clean my breath so I could still screw and that’s what we did : WE SCREWED. That’s what we always do .
    Now, looking out into the dark, Bobbie wondered if her parents were watching her. Then she knew they were, and they were proud. She was their last child, she was grown now, they had done their duty (college remained but they did not consider it essential) and now in the clean brightly-colored house they could wait with calm satisfaction for their souls to be wafted to heaven. Then she was sad. Because from the anxiety and pain of her birth until their own deaths, they had loved her and would love her without ever knowing who she was.
    After the ceremony there was an all-night party at Rhonda Miller’s camp. Bobbie’s date was a tall shy boy named Calvin Tatman, who was popular with the boys but rarely dated; three days before graduation he had called Bobbie and asked her to be his date for Rhonda’s party. The Millers’ camp was on a lake front, surrounded by woods; behind the small house there was a large outdoor kitchen, screened on all sides. In the kitchen was a keg of beer, paper cups, and Rhonda’s record player; that was how the party began. Several parents were there, drinking bourbon from the grown-ups’ bar at one side of the kitchen; they got tight, beamed at the young people jitterbugging, and teased them about their sudden liking for cigarettes and beer. After a while Mr. Miller went outside to the barbecue pit and put on some hamburgers.
    At first Bobbie felt kindly toward Calvin and thought since it was a big night, she would let him neck with her. But after Calvin had a few tall cups of beer she changed her mind. He stopped jitterbugging with her, dancing only the slow dances, holding her very close; then, a dance ended, he would join the boys at the keg. He didn’t exactly leave her on the dance floor; she could follow him to the keg if she wanted to, and she did that a couple of times, then stopped. Once she watched him talking to the boys and she knew exactly what was going on: he had brought her because he couldn’t get another date (she had already known that, absorbed it, spent a long time preparing her face and hair anyway), but now he was saving face by telling people he had brought her because he wanted to get laid.
    Then other things happened. She was busy dancing, so she didn’t notice for a while that she hadn’t really had a conversation with anyone. She realized this when she left Calvin at the beer keg and joined the line outside at the barbecue pit, where Mr. Miller was serving hamburgers. She was last in line. She told Mr. Miller it was a wonderful party, then she went to the table beside the barbecue pit and made her hamburger. When she turned to go back to the kitchen, no one was waiting: two couples were just going in the door, and Bobbie was alone with Mr. Miller. She hesitated, telling herself that it meant nothing, that no one waited for people at barbecue pits. Still, if she went in alone, who would she sit with? She sat on the grass by the barbecue pit and talked to