Games and Rituals, page 1
Also by Katherine Heiny
Early Morning Riser
Standard Deviation
Single, Carefree, Mellow
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2023 by Katherine Heiny
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Several stories originally appeared in the following publications: “Bridesmaid, Revisited” in Narrative, “CobRa” in Grand Journal, “Games and Rituals” in Epoch (February 2023), “King Midas” in Meetinghouse, “Sky Bar” in Catamaran, and “561” published as a novella by Fourth Estate Kindle Division in 2018.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heiny, Katherine, author.
Title: Games and rituals : stories / Katherine Heiny.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022023592 (print) | LCCN 2022023593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525659518 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525659525 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3608.E3823 G36 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.E3823 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023592
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023593
Ebook ISBN 9780525659525
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover illustration by Anna Parini
Cover design by Kelly Blair
ep_prh_6.1_143148854_c0_r0
for Angus and Hector
Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
CONTENTS
Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented
Damascus
Twist and Shout
Turn Back, Turn Back
Games and Rituals
CobRa
561
Pandemic Behavior
Bridesmaid, Revisited
King Midas
Sky Bar
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
_143148854_
Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented
Colette has been a driving examiner for twelve years—she’s thirty-six—and yet it only occurs to her today that Ted Bundy had had a driver’s license. And that means that some driving examiner had taken him for a road test. Think about it: some driving examiner had willingly clambered into Ted’s VW bug and driven off with him. Maybe the driving examiner had even been a woman. A woman who never knew she had ridden next to Death, never knew she had docked Death points for improper clutch control.
Why has Colette never thought of that before? But she thinks of lots of things lately that she hasn’t thought about before.
* * *
It is early February in Maryland, the day as bleak as a pen-and-ink drawing done on old gray paper—bare trees, muddy snow, the road clear but scored with white salt stains like the scars from old injuries. Colette parks behind the DMV building and walks up the sidewalk to the employee entrance.
She’s a little late and the other driving examiners are already there: Vic, Gregg, and Alejandro. Vic is a pointy-faced man of about forty with slicked-back dark hair who looks like a weaselly sort of hood, or maybe just a weasel, with his small eyes and vicious smile. Before landing here at the DMV, Vic worked as a bouncer, a roadie, a security guard, a fitness trainer, an auditor, and a head cook—name a job where you got to intimidate people and Vic has held it.
Gregg is an older man with bushy salt-and-pepper hair, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, and horn-rimmed glasses. He looks like a retired history teacher and is, in fact, a retired history teacher. He likes to do cryptograms between examinations. No one knows why Gregg works as a driving examiner instead of enjoying his retirement and doing unlimited cryptograms at home in his underwear. Colette worries that Gregg has been unwise with his pension and is short of money but Vic says it’s undoubtedly that Gregg doesn’t want to stay home with his wife. Gregg’s wife packs him the most elaborate lunches Colette has ever seen, with all the food in undersized portions: tiny sandwiches, miniature quiches, itty-bitty salads in old baby food jars, cupcakes no bigger than a quarter. “Can you imagine living with the woman who packs those lunches?” Vic asked. “His choices are probably to come here or stay home and help her organize her toothpick collection.” Colette thinks he might be right.
Alejandro is a compactly built man in his late twenties with close-cropped black hair, bright brown eyes, an easy smile, and chiseled features. Not chiseled as in especially strong or sharp, but chiseled as in some sculptor had apparently chiseled them especially for Colette, had known what Colette would find handsome before she herself knew it.
Alejandro had started work here six months ago. Colette had been out on a road test when he arrived—she’d come back to the office and there he was. He rose to shake her hand and introduce himself and Colette dropped her clipboard. “Sorry I’m so distracted,” she said, leaning down to retrieve it. “My last road test drove the wrong way down a one-way street.”
That was true. Colette had never been so grateful to have an excuse for looking flushed and out of breath.
* * *
The driving examiners work at four metal desks in a room with cinder-block walls painted the color of curdled cream. The only window is one-way glass and the view is not of outside but of the four scuffed blue plastic chairs in the hall where test-takers wait to take their road tests. (The person who accompanies them—usually a parent—has to wait over in chairs on the other side of the building.)
A moment or two after the test-taker sits down, Trina or Gina from Written Tests pops open the door to the driving examiner’s office, tosses the test-taker’s folder into the tray on top of the filing cabinet, and retreats.
Vic always volunteers for the morning’s first test, and today it’s a burly guy in a maroon sweatsuit.
“Okay, I’m headed out for coffee,” Vic says. What he means is that he’s going to make the burly guy go through the McDonald’s drive-thru as part of the road test. He does it every single day, and no test-taker has ever thought to complain, not even the lady who chipped the Ronald McDonald statue and had to pay three hundred dollars in repairs.
“None for me,” Colette says.
Vic frowns. “Why the fuck not?”
“It gives me headaches.”
“What, after decades of drinking coffee, it suddenly gives you headaches?”
“It’s possible to develop an allergy at any time in your life,” Gregg says.
Vic looks at him, annoyed. “Now you don’t want one, either?”
“No, I want a premium blend, black with two sugars.”
“Alejandro?”
“Americano, with an extra shot of espresso. I’ll make up for Colette’s lack of caffeine.” He winks at Colette. The wink doesn’t cause her heart to leap with hope anymore. She thinks that must be a good sign.
* * *
The driving examiners are supposed to work in strict rotation, like a batting order lineup: the first available driving examiner taking the next test-taker. But Colette and Vic and Gregg have long ago developed their own system where they assess the test-taker through the one-way glass (and study the paperwork in the test-taker’s folder) and make their own assignments.
Rules apply, obviously. No one is allowed to strike every undesirable test-taker who comes their way because that would basically mean no one except pretty girls, men with kind faces, and librarians would ever get driver’s licenses. But they can pick and choose to some extent.
None of them liked to take old people. The problems with old people were endless: hearing loss, vision loss, memory loss, slowed reflexes, confusion. It broke Colette’s heart when she saw some elderly person shuffle out to take their test and knew that person had once been lithe and slender, brimming with intelligence and verve. And she knew that the old people still thought of themselves that way. They had no idea the younger, more capable versions of themselves had decamped decades ago. It was heartbreaking but it was also fucking scary. The old people led you out to their Lincolns and Buicks (they didn’t approve of foreign-made models) and the cars would be ringed with dents and scrapes, little souvenirs of the places the old person had driven. And off you went on a hair-raising road test with someone who could barely see past the hood. They straddled lanes, ignored stop signs, braked abruptly (without cause), accelerated suddenly (also without cause), pressed simultaneously on the brake and gas pedals, drove over curbs, nearly drove over people. All of them—every single one—remarked without irony about how more drivers honked their horns nowadays, how there’d been a mysterious uptick in honking recently. The old men said it was because young people are so entitled they couldn’t wait for anything; the old ladies said it just showed no one bothered to learn proper manners anymore.
No driving examiner liked to take teenagers, either. Teenagers were almost scarier than the old people. Teens had ex cellent vision and hearing, superb reaction times and hand-eye coordination, but their prefrontal cortexes were not fully developed. Teens were always speeding, running red lights, weaving in and out of traffic, tailgating, pulling out in front of oncoming vehicles—all this when they knew they were being tested. Shouldn’t teenagers be used to taking tests and know how to concentrate? Weren’t they beaten down by the educational system’s focus on standardized testing? Apparently not. Colette had had teenagers behave in ways she at first took to be pranks: checking their phones in the middle of the road test, answering their phones in the middle of the road test, taking their hands off the wheel to do a little victory car-dance after turns, reaching into the back seat while driving to root around for a water bottle. Nerves accounted for some of the behavior but Colette thought most of it was just plain old terrible teenage judgment.
But the test-takers weren’t all old people and teenagers. There were many other categories, and these were the ones the driving examiners were eager to volunteer for, depending on their own strengths and style.
Sometimes Colette thinks that Vic becoming a driving examiner had been like an artist picking up a paintbrush for the first time: that rush of exhilaration that comes from finding your calling. As a driving examiner, Vic can intimidate people full-time—and in the privacy of their cars. He breaks people down and enjoys doing it, like a professional torturer. He excels with aggressive test-takers: the impatient executives in power suits who carry briefcases to show how important they are, the medical professionals who wear scrubs or white coats to show how busy they are, the people who can’t stop tapping their shoes and checking their watches, the awful and angry types who shout at DMV employees. Vic meets these test-takers with a shine in his small eyes, his sharp crooked teeth bared in a predatory smile. He takes them on the most challenging routes, requests impossible accuracy in parallel parking, asks them to read road signs that have already blipped by, shakes his head and clucks his tongue just to unnerve them. Vic is a bully and a tyrant, but sometimes when Colette watches him swagger out to meet a suited, loud-voiced man who has just yelled at Trina or Gina in Written Tests, her heart swells with gladness. Justice will be meted out swiftly.
Gregg’s style is loose, casual, almost bumbling. He goes out to meet the test-takers still pulling on his coat, his clipboard fluttering with papers, a cup of coffee sloshing in one hand. He’s particularly good with people on a deadline: the young mothers who check their phones for messages from their babysitters, the housekeepers and domestic staff who have obviously called in sick to work and won’t be able to return if they fail, the anxious landscapers and construction workers whose livelihoods depend on them passing this test. They seem to understand that this cheerful, bearded man considers the test a quick disruption of ordinary life—the sooner it is over, the sooner they can get back to their jobs and he can get back to his cryptogram—and they adopt his efficient attitude.
Colette knows her own strength as a driving examiner is her ability to project calm. She’s like a kind of reverse microwave—molecules slow in her presence. She approaches test-takers with a gentle smile and a measured step, her fine blond hair smoothed into a low ponytail, her pale gray eyes free of makeup or judgment. She keeps her voice low, her gaze steady, her movements smooth. She volunteers for the extremely nervous test-takers (and all test-takers are nervous; it is just a matter of degree). She takes the teenagers whose hands shake so much they keep dropping their documents, the women who shred tissues compulsively and thin their lips into nonexistence, the men who grow unhealthily red cheeked and sweat huge amoeba-shaped stains on their shirts. And she takes the people who are not only nervous about the road test but seem nervous about life. People who come to the DMV wearing pajama pants and slippers, or cardigans with food dribbles and shoes without laces. Or—this is somehow worse—people who have dressed up. They wear clothing which has moldered unworn in their closets for years: shiny polyester blouses, corduroy blazers, mismatched suits, dresses bought on clearance with the price tag still attached. Men with crumbs in their beards, women with fearful white-ringed eyes, teenagers who swallow with loud clicks—all of them looking like they want to put their hands over their ears. Everyone hates going to the DMV but these people fear it. These people don’t function well in the world for whatever cause—anxiety, illness, trauma, abuse, or just a lifetime of having been bullied by assholes. But they still need to get places, so here they are to get their driver’s license, and Colette is here to guide them through the process as gently as possible.
“I know you’re nervous but this is no big deal,” she says to them softly. They look at her with mistrust—everything is a big deal to them. “I’m going to talk you through it. No surprises, okay? I’m not here to trick you. I’m here to help you. I want you to pass.”
She does want it. She wants them to have this triumph, this shining moment of success in a life that, for whatever unfair reason, has held precious few such moments. Some of them still fail—no amount of gentle encouragement and patient reassurance could calm them—but a lot of them pass, and Colette can share in their victories. Those victories are why she stays at the DMV.
In the beginning, Colette and Vic and Gregg had been nervous about how Alejandro would fit in. He seemed competent but lots of driving examiners are competent. But would he actually add anything to their lives, would he lighten their workloads in any way, would he find his own specialty? The answer to all of these questions was yes. Alejandro steps up to every test-taker with a welcoming smile and a very small and courtly bow. (Yes, an actual bow.) He takes the entitled people—the soccer moms and the private-school kids and the expats and the impeccably dressed rich people who disdain the blue chairs as too down-market to even sit in—and he defuses their entitlement with his apparent delight in their company. He flashes his dazzling smile at the cross, cranky older people who bristle with defensiveness and makes them goggle at him with unexpected pleasure. Alejandro also takes the “Mouths.” Mouths are people who talk so much in their professional and personal lives that they’ve forgotten how to be quiet even during a road test: hairstylists, bartenders, customer service reps, insurance salespeople, business recruiters, event planners, corporate fundraisers, backpackers who tell you how they’ve done Bangkok and it’s way too touristy and how they’re basically Buddhist now. No one likes Mouths because they talk all the way through the road test—usually they start talking before they even put the car in gear—and the test takes three times longer than normal. What’s more, Mouths usually fail the road test because they are too busy talking to hear instructions—and that means they’ll be back and the process will repeat itself. But not for Alejandro. He and the Mouth drive off and return precisely twenty minutes later, the Mouth having passed and Alejandro having somehow stayed sane. No one knows quite how he does it. He says it’s just a matter of really listening carefully to the first story, of making the Mouth feel heard and understood, but Colette knows it’s more than that. Alejandro genuinely wants to hear their stories (at least the first one) and this unfeigned interest makes the test-takers fall in love with him, just the way she had.
* * *
Vic returns, having failed the test-taker despite the drive-thru. “Sad sack didn’t use his turn signal once,” he says, setting a cardboard McCafé cup on Colette’s desk.
“Vic, I said—”
“It’s hot chocolate.”
“Oh,” she says, surprised. It’s so rare for Vic to be thoughtful. “Thank you.”
“You owe me two-eighty.”
Colette sighs.
Beyond this, the morning holds few surprises: Gregg completes a cryptogram in ninety-seven seconds, his personal best. A soccer mom impresses Vic by expertly parking her minivan and he reluctantly passes her. A Mouth tells Alejandro that dogs use eighteen muscles to control their ears. Colette takes an elderly man out on a test and then has to urinate so urgently that she forces him to do an unannounced and tricky left turn into a corner gas station so she can leap out and pee in the gas station’s horrible, sewer-smelling restroom.
