Dance Real Slow (17 page)

“We eat oatmeal,” says Meg, suddenly.

“I know you do, sweetheart.”

After Joyce and Rob leave, I dress Calvin and Meg in the rest of their costumes. Meg wants to wear plastic high-heeled shoes, but it has been wet out and I insist she put on boots.

“No princess has these,” she says, disgustedly kicking the boot into the middle of the room.

“Some do.”

“I don't think so,” says Calvin.

“What do you know about princesses, anyway?” I ask him.

“Some things.”

“No things.”

“I know 'bout the frog.”

“That's right, you do. What else?”

“They drink tea,” says Meg.

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And they ride horses,” shouts Calvin.

“Yes, sometimes they do.”

Then I know what he is going to ask next.

“Hey, maybe we could get Zoe's horse for us to ride.”

“A cereal box on a horse?” says Meg, scrunching her nose in disapproval.

“That could be. Like maybe the princess wants to take some food along with her.”

“It doesn't matter because we can't do it anyway,” I say. “Zoe is working tonight. But we'll go see her later.”

“Is she with her horse?” asks Calvin.

“No.”

“Then I don't want to see her.”

“Me neither,” says Meg.

“Come on, now. That's not nice.”

Taking Calvin by the shoulder, I string the sandwich-board cereal box onto him, making sure to tie knots in three places on both sides. Straddling the arm of the couch, near the doorway, Meg is prodding the jack-o'-lantern with her scepter.

“Are we gonna carry this with us?” she asks.

“No, we're going to stick it in the front window of the office for everyone to see.”

Meg gives a nod of approval and then Calvin waddles over to her, his knees knocking the underside of the cardboard.

“I don't want to be cereal,” he says.

“It's too late now.”

“I wanna be a princess! Look, she gets a wand and I get nothing.”

“If you behave, you'll get a big bag full of treats.”

Then they are quiet and I lead them into the waiting room, where I place the jack-o'-lantern on a coffee table and slide it in front of the window. As we walk toward the car, I peer back, asking, “Doesn't that look good?” But neither answers.

For the first several houses Calvin is numb, bewildered
by the prospect, the reality of receiving free candy from people simply for ringing their doorbells. He wants to unwrap it, eat it immediately, and go back again and again. But I explain that after he is finished trick-or-treating he may have one item tonight and then one—and only one—every day until he has emptied the bag. When I tell him this, Meg lets out a little sigh, as if to say, “We'll polish off the whole stash inside three days.”

The flat, newly paved eastern stretch of Eliot Drive is the best place to go door to door, claims Charlotte Cooper. They have closed off the street to allow children to walk right down its well-lighted center. Every so often Calvin and Meg pause to stare at an especially ghoulish or grotesque costume, and it is then that I bend over to remind them it is all pretend, like we see on television or in the movies.

After we have collected booty from houses on both sides of the street, I direct the two of them back toward the car.

“Can we go again?” Calvin asks.

“No, that's not allowed. One time through.”

“How about if we go to another place?” says Meg.

“Oh, I don't think so. Look at all the candy you both have,” I say, lifting up Calvin's quite full shopping bag. “Where are you going to put more?”

They look at each other and then Calvin suggests they dump their candy on the backseat of the car to make room.

“No. We're going to see Zoe. Maybe she'll have something for you.”

In the square front window of Cale's there is a jack o'-lantern
painted on orange construction paper that I am sure Zoe created. Above, in cutout letters from the same paper, are the words
Happy Halloween
. Inside, crepe-paper ribbons of orange and black hang in large loops from the ceiling, with store-bought rubber spiders and bats suspended randomly on strings of various lengths. On the left side of the room, behind the bar, Zoe is serving drinks dressed in her black turtleneck and black jeans. She is also wearing heavy black eyeliner and lipstick and a pointed witch's hat.

“Hey, look at Zoe,” I say. “Doesn't she look great?”

Meg shrugs. Calvin has walked over to the jukebox and is standing beside it, his face glowing in artificial blue-and-red light. I lead them both over to the bar, lifting them onto stools. Calvin cannot sit down in his costume, so I slip it off and lean it against the brass foot rail.

“Howdy,” Zoe says. “Did you get a lot of candy?”

Meg nods as Calvin begins eating candy corn from a peanut dish.

“You look
very
pretty, Meg. And I loved you, Mr. Cornflake. I saw your costume the minute you walked in the door.”

I tap them both between the shoulder blades and they mumble thank yous.

“And what are you supposed to be?” Zoe asks me.

“An exhausted father. Trick-or-treat.”

She hands me a bottle of beer. As we talk, people come over to question Meg and Calvin about their costumes and their candy. One man apologizes for giving away his last package of chewing gum and hands the two
of them a dollar apiece. Finally, we leave Zoe to her work.

“Why don't you tip her?” I whisper to Calvin and Meg. “Leave her a piece of candy.”

Reluctantly, they both surrender something: Calvin a miniature Milky Way bar, and Meg a Saran-wrapped candy apple. They drop the items on the bar and then the three of us wave our goodbyes from the front door.

Once the car has reached a stop in our drive, after we have taken Meg home, Calvin bolts to the far side of the porch. I call out to him, but he only tells me to wait, that he has seen something. At first I think this is some sort of ploy Meg has told him about, a way to hide his candy. But then he lets out a loud, shrill howl, and from where I am standing, in the scattered spokes of light beside the stairs, I can see him lying flat on his back with his legs kicking against the bushes. The stench is immediate.

“Oh, Cal,” I say, running to his side.

He has been sprayed, rather directly, by a skunk. His hands, palms down, move rapidly over his chest as he tries to wipe the scent off.

“That's not going to do it,” I say, using the placards of his costume to fan the air away.

After a moment more he begins to cry and I reach down and take him by the arm, leading him to the porch, where I seat him on the swing.

“Stay here for a minute.”

He complains about the cold, but I tell him it won't be long—I'll be right back. What I want, really, is to leave him there, alone. To climb into my bed and sleep
long and soundly and awaken tomorrow morning in an empty house with Calvin clean and scentless and somewhere safe and faraway. It's the same feeling I get some days when I wish the womb of basketball practice could last another hour or so. Then I drive around to escape, however fleeting, escape from Calvin, escape from this life that surely must be borrowed. I am not awful, I tell myself, only reaching blindly—fingertips exposed—for familiar contours, some groove I will eventually recognize.

I plunge a can opener into the side of a quart of tomato juice—a can I was saving for some special Sunday morning I hoped to turn soggy with Bloody Marys. When I pull loose the opener from the barbed aluminum lid, gritty red juice spills to the floor.

Maybe the odor has made me lightheaded, but I seem incapable of thinking straight. There are no more paper towels and I can't find a sponge. The puddle becomes a tiger and then a staple gun before finally reaching the soles of my shoes. I call Zoe at Cale's and she tells me not to fret. They are beginning to clear out and she will see if someone can fill in for her behind the bar.

I wrap Calvin in an old, dirty blanket and move to the opposite end of the porch, where the two of us wait for Zoe. I make an exception and allow him to eat more than one piece of candy, but after his second bite he grows sickened by the smell and throws the chocolate at his feet.

“It was a skunk,” I say, solemnly. “Don't ever go near one of those again.”

“I thought it was Moonie.”

We don't say anything for a long while, with Calvin rocking himself in the swing, his nose and mouth covered by a corner of blanket.

“Maybe some things children just need to be told,” I finally say. “Little things fathers might never think to tell them until it's too late or until it passes randomly through their minds. You didn't know about skunks, huh?”

He shakes his head, simply.

More silence passes until it is broken by the sound of Zoe's truck grinding to a halt. Briefly, she sits behind the wheel staring up at the two of us as we stare back.

“You stink!” she shouts to Calvin from the driveway. She is carrying a brown paper bag.

“
You
stink,” he yells back, pulling the blanket over the rest of his head.

The three of us go into the basement and I undress Calvin, lifting him into a large metal utility sink. We leave his clothes in a pile by the staircase and Zoe says we will have to burn them or throw them away. She unpacks the paper bag and first we wash Calvin hard, with syrupy tar shampoo. Then she pulls out two disposable douches and begins squeezing them onto Calvin.

“It works,” she says, sensing my trepidation. “The vinegar solution helps kill the smell.”

“Makes sense.”

Before we put Calvin to bed, I spray deodorant on his sheets to drown any remaining scent of skunk.

There is a bowl of Granny Smith apples on the kitchen table and Zoe slices one into sections, taking a slab of cheddar cheese from the refrigerator and cutting
it into separate pieces as well. The two of us sit on the floor, in the living room, eating apple and cheese and drinking Budweiser.

“Where's your wife?” Zoe asks, rather suddenly—unexpectedly.

“Now she's back in Texas, with her family.”

“You stay in touch?”

“Not so much. A little, I guess. She called here the other day—mostly to talk to Calvin. Actually, she wants to come see him.”

“Is she?—coming, I mean.”

“I don't know yet. I haven't really decided.”

“And it's up to you?”

“I suppose. We kinda have this unwritten code. Seeing as it was her that left, I get to call the shots—as far as Calvin's concerned.”

“Hmm.”

She pulls off her boots and crosses her legs, yoga-style.

“You don't agree with that?”

“It's not for me to say.”

“I'm asking you to say.”

“In that case,” she says, taking the last sip of her beer, “then I don't think I agree. Obviously, I don't know your ex-wife, but she must have, at one time or another, been a decent person for you to have been attracted to her—for you to have married her. Maybe we selectively forget those things, those good things about somebody that made us love them, once the romance is gone. It makes it easier, I guess.”

“She left him.”

“You know why?”

“Really, I think it was that she was confused. She was too emotionally immature to be a wife, a mother. It wasn't her time.”

There is still so much of Kate's life, my life, I do not yet understand. Namely, what caused her to wander in the first place? It was as if by magic: something lost between us that we'd never get back. Suddenly she felt differently about me, Calvin, us. “You're too hard on people,” Kate once told me. It is a thing I have not forgotten. She repeated this proclamation the day before she left, arms crossed, indignant. “You're wrong,” I said, because, really, it was all I
could
say. Please, not this: do not leave me alone, almost alone. There I stood, in the hallway, lamely clawing for words, trying to keep the discussion alive. And now, I confess, there are times when I hold tight to her belief—looking to accept blame. I want an explanation, even when there really isn't one to be had. Not one I can reach out and feel swimming between the swollen bellies of my fingers, like motor oil.

When Zoe comes back into the room, after she has returned the remaining portion of cheese to the refrigerator and placed the empty bottles in their box beneath the sink, she kneels down so close that her hair tickles the side of my face. She takes my head in her hands and pulls me toward her, kissing me gently, first on the chin and nose and then full on the lips. I can taste the beer and tart apple in her spit and there is the slight smell of cheese, and I'm not sure if it belongs to her breath or mine.

Once upstairs, we pause beside the bathroom, embracing
in its doorway. Our stocking feet slide on the smooth tile floor, pulling us farther inside until we collide with the back wall. We drop down, not stopping until my butt cheeks hit the edge of the bathtub. Zoe straddles me and the two of us fall back into the tub, my calves hanging over its porcelain lip.

“You warm?” she asks, unbuttoning my shirt.

Two nights before Kate wandered into her private, emancipated life, she and I made love for the final time against an old player piano in our living room. The felt pads covering the hammers had long since worn through, so when we banged into the keys the even, hardened ends colliding with the strings made a clanking noise that echoed against the sagging wood, resembling the pitch of muffled doorbells. When we had finished and my arms were extended so they formed a V, pinning Kate awkwardly to the empty roller, she dropped her chin on my collarbone and whispered, “Try not to breathe.” I could feel my penis getting soft, shriveling, shrinking back from the tangled yarn of her groin. Also, I could feel the sticky wetness of semen creeping down the inside of her thigh. Again she said, “Try not to breathe,” and this time I did. It seemed like for a long time and my lungs began to shiver before I finally inhaled, taking the musty air from behind the back of her neck, the air that belonged to the piano. There is nothing especially significant about this memory, other than it being the last time we made love, the last time I made love.