My Tiki Girl (13 page)

Zamboni’s not convinced. “I still don’t like it.”

“Lighten up, Zamboni. It’s not like Dead Aunt Mary is much less gruesome,” says Dahlia. She reaches up to her chest and adjusts the knife, jiggles the handle back and forth.

“‘Dying/is an art, like everything else,’” she says in her poetry-reciting voice.

“Sylvia Plath?” I ask.

“You guessed it. Lady Lazarus herself.” Dahlia plays with her knife handle some more, then concludes, “It’s fun to be dead for a night.” With this, she twirls out of Leah’s room and back toward the kitchen.

“Put on your beekeeper’s suit, LaSamba,” she instructs. “Hurry. I think there’s a swarm coming.”

I find my bee suit hanging in the back of her closet and slide it on over my clothes.

The kitchen smells like Christmas from the gingerbread men we baked earlier. We decorated them with white icing, turning them into goofy, cartoonish skeletons with little cinnamon red-hot candies for eyes.

Dahlia helps me lift the veil so I can taste one.

“My beekeeping clown,” Dahlia says, smiling at me as I nibble on the arm of a skeleton. Then, as she holds the veil up over my head, she leans in and kisses my cheek.

“Happy Halloween, LaSamba,” she whispers.

The cuckoo clock in the kitchen says it’s about 6:30 when Leah announces it’s time to hit the streets. We each take a couple of skeleton cookies wrapped in wax paper to bring to the cemetery. Leah’s got a thermos full of special Halloween tea with mugwort that’s supposed to make you see visions.

It’s hot in my suit and I’m happy to get out into the cool air. Dahlia links arms with me and her walk is more like a dance. We’re practically skipping along the sidewalk, our feet hardly touching the ground, my bum leg not hurting a bit.

I keep reliving the kiss, the throaty sound of her voice so close to my ear. Sure, it was just a friendly little peck on the cheek, but still, Dahlia Wainwright’s lips touched my skin. If lightning struck me down now, I would die happy.

Leah leads us, carrying her head, holding it in front of her like some gruesome lantern. She takes us down to Main Street, which is crowded with trick-or-treaters. It’s early yet, so it’s mostly little ones out so far, kids young enough to be guided by parents, pushed in strollers, picked up and carried when they’ve had enough.

Some of the shops are still open. We see through the windows that the checkout girls at Ferraro’s are dressed as three witches. One-armed Lucky is a pirate with a black eye patch and hat with skull and crossbones.

We cut through the park and head down School Street to Elm with its rows of stately Victorian houses. The beams from flashlights held by tiny goblins dart back and forth across the street. Porches have jack-o’-lanterns with beckoning smiles, bunches of dried cornstalks leaning around the doors. There are kids dressed as aliens, cats, and ghosts. They carry bright orange plastic pumpkins loaded with treats. We carry empty pillow sacks like we’re looking for kittens to drown. We don’t stop at every house on this street, just the few Leah chooses. There doesn’t seem to be any formula for what makes a house good, but she must be seeing signs of some kind, signs I don’t know how to read.

“I’m Dead Aunt Mary!” Dahlia’s calling. “Screw the living! Being dead is where it’s at!”

There is a man walking with two young children dressed as bumblebees in front of us, and he herds them across the street.

We’re a motley crew. Dahlia’s damning the living. I’m limping along beside her in my beekeeper’s suit like some honey-loving, secret-lesbian zombie. Leah is quiet, swinging her head around, stumbling over curbs because she’s had a pitcherful of margaritas and it’s hard to see through the slit in the neck of her dress. Jonah is walking well behind, waving his wand, maybe pretending not to know us, maybe doing a spell so that we might disappear.

“I’m Dead Aunt Mary! No one can mess with me. I’ve got a fucking knife in my heart!” Dahlia jabs a finger at a passing princess. “Top that, will ya?”

We crisscross various streets, take inventory of neighborhoods we’re not used to seeing, notice how some have more streetlamps than others, more carefully manicured lawns. We’re on a street I don’t recognize now, and three kids ahead of us are soaping a car, decorating a lawn jockey with toilet paper. They wear long cloaks with hoods, white
Phantom of the Opera
masks that just cover half their faces. Dahlia rummages around in her pillowcase, brings out a pack of firecrackers and a book of matches. Leah, Dahlia, and I each light one, throwing them into the street. Jonah does his last, dropping it into a sewer grate to scare the trolls away, to keep them at bay.

“Dead Aunt Mary blows up the world!” Dahlia shouts, lighting a bunch at once, tossing them into a mailbox where their explosion echoes, is amplified. Dahlia howls. Leah stumbles in the street, laughing. The strange half-faced kids ahead of us run off, frightened of what we might do next.

We stop at every few houses to ring bells, say
“Trick or Treat”
like it’s a threat, then hold our pillowcases open wide. We smash pumpkins at houses we don’t like the looks of.

Now we’re on a long, wide street called Stony Brook Drive. I’ve been down this street a thousand times, but tonight, through my beekeeping veil, it’s like I’m seeing it with new eyes. The houses are farther apart here, and each one is as big as an apartment building. They’re all pretty new houses, like hundreds of people got rich all of a sudden and needed someplace to live. These houses have roofs with lots of angles, extra chimneys, and walls that seem to be all window. Even the pavement feels new and clean, like the men from the houses come out every night with hoses and brushes to scrub it down.

Stony Brook Drive is crowded with trick-or-treaters going from door to door. It’s getting late, and the little kids have all gone home to gorge on candy. The trick-or-treaters are older now—the costumes more gruesome. There’s a girl dressed as Carrie, her pink prom dress drenched in blood. There are several Jasons, tall kids with white hockey masks looking for teenage campers to kill.

Stony Brook Drive is nightmare country. You’d think the most gruesome sights would be in the poorer parts of town, but the truth is, the scariest monsters live in the fanciest houses.

“Be on guard,” Leah warns, her voice muffled as she swings her head in her hands. “We’re in troll country now.”

Across the street, two devils are sharing a cigarette. They look our way and lean in to whisper to each other. I think for a minute that maybe those aren’t just masks: maybe two devils really came up to play with our fates tonight. The masks are scary as hell, if you want to know the truth. Bright red faces, black arched eyebrows, pointed chins, and curved horns like goring bulls’.

We spend the next hour trick-or-treating and the whole while, I’m sure those devils are following us. I say so to Dahlia, and she keeps looking behind us.

“I think you’re right, LaSamba,” she says.

“So what do we do?”

“Ignore them. We just ignore them.”

Right. Like you can ignore the devil.

We fill our sacks with M&M’s, small candy bars, lollipops, and Bit-O-Honeys. We’re done pulling tricks, so now we just haul in the treats. Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of the two devils. Leah and Jonah have seen them, too. Jonah’s got his salt out. Leah says they’re trolls for sure.

It’s quarter to nine, and we’ve made our way back to my neighborhood, but Dahlia doesn’t know it. She has no idea where I live, which is weird, but it’s just never come up. All she knows is it’s a fifteen-minute walk from her place. The houses where I live are nothing like the mansions on Stony Brook, but suddenly I see them through the Wainwrights’ eyes—the freshly painted siding, the clean two-car garages, the carefully landscaped yards. Dahlia smashes a couple of garden gnomes to show how disgusted she is with the bourgeois suburbs. I’m just praying she won’t take us too close to my house. All I need is for my dad to see me and come out and make a fool of himself.

Then we catch sight of the two devils a block down the street, moving in our direction.

“Come on,” Dahlia says, taking my hand.

Now we’re running, cutting across yards, around swimming pools, over long driveways. Dahlia’s got her hand wrapped tight around mine, and I’m limping along as fast as I can to keep up with her. Jonah’s right behind and Leah’s bringing up the rear, her head swinging in her hands.

My leg is screaming, and I’m sure I can feel the metal grinding against bone, but I won’t slow down. When I’m with Dahlia like this, anything is possible.

Finally, we reach the cemetery and go in through the back gate. Dahlia stops and leans against a headstone, getting her breath. She still has hold of my hand, and I’m thinking I could run miles more if she just promised not to let go.

“I think we lost them,” Dahlia says.

“Yeah, we outran the devil,” Jonah says.

“Two devils,” Leah corrects.

We eat candy and dance around on all the dead people. Leah pours us some mugwort tea, which tastes awful, but I gulp it down, thinking maybe I’ll see ghosts. We pour tea into the ground, leave small piles of brightly colored candies on the graves. Our skeleton cookies are broken, but we leave gingerbread body parts scattered around tombstones: a head here, a leg there.

We talk about what it must be like to be dead for real—if it’s quiet or you’re in a world of bright light and noise.

“It’s a place where irises and lilies of the valley are always blooming and angels play trumpets all day long,” I say, thinking that’s the heaven my mother would choose, the heaven she painted on those stupid sympathy cards.

“The hell with the trumpets—there’s a big mariachi band up there and everyone’s dancing like there’s no tomorrow, because there really isn’t anymore,” Dahlia explains.

“It depends how you die,” Jonah tells us. “My spirit guide says you have to wait for your soul to be released if your death wasn’t meant to be. Until then, you’re stuck between the two worlds a while.” He leans back in the grass to commune with his invisible guide some more.

I wonder if that’s where my mother is: stuck in limbo-land, all because I forgot the damn stuffed dog. She probably would have lived to be a hundred if I hadn’t been so stupid and careless.

“I think death is what you make it,” says Leah. She’s got the top of her dress unbuttoned so that her face sticks out. The mannequin head lies off to her side, its eyes focused up into the sky, stargazing.

“Maybe it’s quiet, maybe you meet God or the devil,” guesses Leah. “Maybe you meet your old friends. Maybe you just stay for a while, then move on, your spirit turned into something else. One thing I know for sure, though,” she adds, slapping at the ground, “these people are finally at rest. It’s the ultimate peace. No more earthly burdens.”

“I’ll drink to that!” proclaims Dahlia, taking the cup of terrible-tasting tea from her mother’s hands and chugging down a few deep swallows.

“To no more earthly burdens!” Dahlia says, and passes the cup to me. I take it in both hands, drink slowly, the mugwort tea bitter in my mouth.

“No more earthly burdens,” I echo, thinking that at least my mother doesn’t have to deal with dumb crap like grocery lists, oil changes, and having a screwed-up lesbo daughter anymore.

I pass the cup to Leah, then lean back on the grass, my head touching a gravestone, my body in its white beekeeper’s suit laid out right on top of the bones underneath. Dahlia lies down next to me, and she’s laughing, but no one asks why. She’s got her head resting against my shoulder. I watch the sky spin above me, or maybe it’s the ground that’s spinning. I hear that hum in my ears, the familiar drone of a thousand bees inside my own head. I see the String Man’s cave and the family of dolls he created from nothing but trash.

But mostly what I see is Dahlia, and I don’t need to turn my head to look at her. It’s like she’s everywhere, her laughter drowning out everything, even quieting the buzz in my ears. But I think maybe she’s the cause of the buzz, that she emits some kind of electricity, like static that gives you shocks, raises the hair on your skin, shoots sparks. You can’t be near her without picking up on it. And you feel like maybe it’s dangerous, like you can almost hear the bones in the ground beneath you whispering a warning, but you don’t want to run. It’s like the way kids put their hands on an electric fence even though they know what will happen. And when they get that first jolt and the tingling subsides, they see they aren’t dead or even harmed, so they do it again. That’s what it’s like. Dahlia’s still laughing and I’m still here beside her, my hand gripping the wire, letting go, then reaching out to touch it again.

13

It’s the day
after Halloween, and we’re back on Stony Brook Drive, here on legitimate business. Troy Farnham lives here in a huge white house with an acre of lawn in front of it. I’ve got my clarinet, and Dahlia’s brought along the notebook she keeps her poems and songs in. She’s got on a shimmering lime green dress and these huge fish earrings. She looks like some kind of alien mermaid.

“Ninety-two,” Dahlia says, checking the number on the mailbox just to make sure.