Free Because They Wanted To: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

knelt and grabbed him by the shoulders. “If you want to play you have to be quiet. Okay?”
    He looked at her to see if she meant it. She tried to seem stern, but it was halfhearted and he could tell. As soon as she let go, he began to yell again.
    “All right,” she said. “I don’t want to play.” She went and sat by the window. In the window across the street, a woman was standing at a table and folding clothes. Even from a distance Elise could see that she was frowning resentfully. The boys yelled and ran. She ignored them. It was nine-thirty.
    At her father’s house, Elise had liked to climb on the roof at night. Her father’s upstairs den had a sunporch affixed to it, a small, roof-tiled square with a wooden railing that they lovingly called “the balcony.” One evening she discovered that if she stood on the railing she could get up on the roof, using her sneakers for traction. She climbed right to the top of the house and straddled it, gazing about the neighborhood.She felt very pleased with herself; with a slight maneuver, she had made a special pocket hidden in ordinary life.
    The roof had a number of peaks and flat surfaces, and she explored them all. She found she could sit comfortably outside Rick’s room and look in. She could see part of Becky’s room, and she could look right into the bathroom. Eventually, she grew bold enough to spy on her family. This gave her a strange pleasure she could not have explained. She could see Becky walking around the room listening to music, not dancing or singing but just pacing with an intent, furiously inturned face. She watched Rick while he wrote a song, crouching on the floor and rocking himself, gazing up with big, rapt eyes as he worked his lips, his pencil poised above the page. She watched her stepmother use the toilet. She watched her father sit on the tub and pare his nails. Seeing these things made her feel closer to her family than she did when she was in the same room with them. It made her like them more.
    But they got suspicious when they kept hearing muffled noises overhead, and one night her stepmother went out and saw her on the roof. Then they were all mad at her.
    “God,” said Rick. “What a freak!”
    “This is not normal behavior,” said their stepmother. “This is sick.”
    Their father stood and wiped his mouth.
    It was ten o’clock. Andy grabbed her arm and yanked it. “Come on!” he said. “Hide him again!”
    “No,” she said, and she pushed him.
    He thrust his little face into the air and sang his nonsense song as loud as he could. Penny began to scream.
    Elise stood. “Stop it,” she said.
    “Daylight come, banana wanna go home!”
    “Shut up!”
    “Daylight come daylight come!”
    She slapped him in the face. She slapped him so hard his head snapped around. He shut up. He looked up at her and smiled, tremulously.
    “I said stop it,” she said.
    He put his thumb in his mouth and went and sat in an armchair in the corner. Eric went and sat with the toys. Elise sat back down. She hoped Penny would stop crying without her having to do anything. It was after ten o’clock. She didn’t know what to do. She got up and put an unfinished bottle of formula back on the stove to heat. There wasn’t much of it left, she noticed.
    Her stepmother loved it when things were sick. Her favorite books were true-life stories about drug-addicted fashion models who died horribly or prep school boys who turned out to be murderers. She loved TV movies about people who seemed okay until they became obsessed with a coworker and wound up killing everyone in the office. She was always saying, “That’s not normal!” in a thrilled, disapproving voice. She could say it about a magazine story that described a jealous wife who stalked her husband’s lover so she could make her get on her knees and stick a gun in her mouth. She could say it about Becky sitting in her room and playing the same song over and over again.
    She disapproved, but