Games People Play Read Online Free PDF

explanations. Business meeting? Maybe. No way can it be Jehovah’s Witness, Ivan would shut the door in their faces, never invite them in for two hours. Maybe it was secret meeting he didn’t want to have at club. Yes. He will be so angry with Elsie for saying it, if that’s the case.
    I go back inside but everybody now is looking at me like it is me who is a criminal. Rachel has gone away on her bicycle. I should have rung Ted and told him to come now. I don’t want to be here, although my friends are trying to cheer me up: they talk too loudly about the proposed plans for the new court surfaces; they peek anxiously at me over the rims of their wine glasses as if suddenly they are worried I will explode, pffff , and shower them all with my criminal tendencies – for of course whatever evil is in Ivan has come from me.
    Listen to me. Shame on me, for assuming my Ivan really has done something bad. It’s probably a complete misunderstanding. Ivan has made mistakes in the past, but that was in the past. I don’t even think about those now, unless I have to remind him of something. I think basically he is honest. So honest that he would buy a Permit to Travel on a train platform at night when he knows there will be no inspector on board the train. That’s how I brought him up. I smacked his bum over and over, that time he stole a water pistol from the toy shop; smacked him right there in front of the shop owner. He never did it again.
    It’s part of life, to make mistakes. I make big mistake by letting that butcher’s boy get me pregnant, when I was young and silly and didn’t know any better. Ivan make mistakes too...like when he went to live at that university in Kansas and came home with a wife and a baby, so young himself and his scholarship down the drain. But still, that baby was Rachel, and I wouldn’t be without Rachel for any of the tea in China. Sometimes mistakes work out for the best. My own mistake turned into Ivan, didn’t it?
    Yes. If it is not a misunderstanding, it is more likely to be a mistake than a dishonesty.
    I tell this to Andrea and Maureen. Then to Liz and Lorraine, and Esther and Helen. They all nod and purse their lips and put their heads to one side with sympathy. I have another glass of wine. Nobody will speak to Elsie, and she sits on her own until a little Indian man comes inside and tells her the taxi is ready, then she goes and no one except Humphrey says goodbye. Humphrey loves Elsie, even though she once told him she has a garden gnome who is the spitting image of him.
    I feel better now...but still something niggles at me. I don’t like to not know everything that is going on with my son.
    It is only after Ted has picked me up, at eleven-thirty on the spot, and I am in the car telling him everything about this awful night, and how after all that Rachel rang to say Ivan is in bed with migraine, when I suddenly stop and clap my hands over my mouth.
    ‘What is it, Dana?’ says Ted, looking worried.
    ‘I left my wine glass on Miranda Matheson’s car,’ I tell him, and burst out with something, which I’m not sure is laughing or crying.
    Ted shakes his head, and drives on.

Chapter 5
    Susie
    The first time I came to live in Lawrence was in 1979.
    I was nearly twenty, on an exchange programme with my British university, where I was halfway through a degree in American Studies. Myself and another girl, Corinna, were allocated places at the University of Kansas, and, boy, were we ever pissed off. Everybody else on our course got to go to one of the various colleges of the University of California: surfers’ paradises, home of the stars, year-round sunshine…We got Kansas . All we knew about Kansas was that it was bitterly cold in winter, boiling hot in summer, and in the middle of nowhere. Wheat, tornadoes, rednecks, Toto, the Wicked Witch of the West.
    Corinna was distraught. She had visualized herself spending a year in a bikini, on a beach, surrounded by gleaming bronzed