“Remember that groggy wasp last weekend?” Darrel is saying.
In fall my house is particularly susceptible to insects looking for summer, confused, wondering where it has gone. When it gets cold outside, they reel, stumble, come into my house to die.
Darrel, with a grin, reads me a new poem. It’s fraught, apparently, with meaning. He’s lost his diffident eyes. He leans back and gives me a twinkle. “ ‘To Bee,’ ” he reads. “ ‘Though sometimes I believe you’re black I’m told / you are a wasp / graceful, tiny, tired bird / I am afraid of you / your thrumming / and have you trapped / between my inner window and my summer screen / banging lady-quiet / at the wired sun / the difficult checkerboard of day / and dying green.’ ”
There is a long quiet.
“Good,” I say.
In the morning Darrel fumbles with his clothes. I lie in bed watching him. A sock falls from his shoulder. He turns his shirt right side in and underwear drops to the floor. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“Magic tricks,” he says.
“ ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another …’ ” The teacher was reading this aloud, pointing out the significance of the commas. Stacy Harold and Tracy Fay were sitting to her left, trying on each other’s jewelry. (She recalled Tracy’s soul — it had been shaped like a lavaliere.) They wore sweat shirts and strings of pearls. Stacy’s crystal earrings refracted the afternoon sun. In every class the teacher had taught at Fitchville, there had been a Tracy or a Stacy who liked to try on other people’s jewelry in class. And a guy named Joe or Jim or Tom who slept, chin against chest, occasionally startled awake by something in his own dreams though never by anything happening in the classroom. Then there were those students who sat and listened and nodded like angels. They took notes. They were so wonderfully attentive it embarrassed her. She loved them. She was grateful. She wanted to buy them things — candy, pencils.
A black student named Darrel was late for class. He pushed open the door, nodded at the teacher, saying “Good afternoon,” then strolled the length of the class, nodding and saying “Good afternoon” to no fewer than five other students, until he reached his usual seat in the back. Everyone smiled at him. They liked him. He was popular.
“What are you doing, Darrel?” asked the teacher. “Running for president of the student council?”
Darrel took his coat off, sat down, and then leaned back in his seat. “I’m just being my usual friendly self.” He winked, and the teacher hoped no one had seen it.
Every year Fitchville has a Halloween parade, replete with band, floats, horses, and costumed schoolchildren. On Saturday I take George and we walk to the corner of Fitch Boulevard, the street of the parade. The crowd along the curb is fairly large. George taps me on the leg: “Is it coming, Mom? I think I hear it.” The wind blows hair into her eyes, in behind her new glasses. The autumn sun glares off the lenses, distorting the look of her face; she appears lost, or handicapped, a sweet, tiny, telethon child. I lift her up for a few minutes so she can look down the street over the heads of the people. Something is coming, an orange and black crepe paper dragon with people’s feet. “I can see a monster, Mom,” she says. People turn around to look at us and smile. Some of them have children, some of them don’t. I see the Shubbys with Isabelle about fifteen yards away, and I wave.
Because George is too heavy, I finally have to put her down. I stand her in front of me and play with her hair, tucking it behind her ears because I know she likes that. She leans her head all the way back and looks at me upside down, giggles. Behind the dragon are cowboys and horses whose hooves are shoed and clack heavily on the pavement. The palomino closest to us lifts its tail and defecates onto the street, never missing a step. George opens her mouth, covers it with both hands, looks up at me in delighted horror. Behind the horses come the ten winners of the children’s costume contest, and one of them, a very authentic-looking Heidi, while waving to her parents in the crowd, marches through the pile of manure. She looks down, visibly dismayed, and tries to shake clean her shoes and socks, scraping and scuffing her soles along the road, trying not to lose the beat. We can hear a band coming up, and soon it’s loud and upon us. It’s the Fitchville High School Marching Band, and the percussion section all wear masks — E.T., Ronald Reagan, state-of-the-art stuff. We march in place and put our fingers in our ears. The parade is badly paced, however, and after the band is by us there is a strange lull. The band and humdrum have passed quickly. The trumpets now honk faintly in the distance to our right, like a memory, and the drums are a far-off thunder. What cars and floats remain behind, minutes later, trundle forward and by us in a slow, chilling quiet, an unfestive lag, a huge, guilty ooze like age.
For a moment a cloud passes over the sun and there is a short shower, a sprinkling of rain. We hold out our hands, palms up. We pull our sweaters tighter and squint up at the sky, until the sun suddenly bursts through again, lighting up the trees like an idea.
Halloween night I go trick-or-treating as the Bride of Frankenstein, and George goes as Joan Baez, with a small plastic guitar and peace-sign pins. The neighbors chuckle and put candy in our shopping bags and send us on our hypoglycemic way. We’ve gotten an early start. The Shubbys tell us we’re the hit of the street. George says, “Who’s Joan Baez again?” and walking along the sidewalk I teach her the words to “Kumbaya,” a cinch, and “Pretty Boy Floyd,” a bit harder. “I like Joan Baez,” she says. The air is cold and I hug her. We only do two streets.
At home George lays all her candy out on her bed and counts it.
Gerard phones on a break from the Ramada. “It’s wild here,” he says. “Someone’s dressed as a condom and someone else here who is six-feet-six and three hundred pounds is Nancy Reagan. Quick, guess what I am?”
“An opera singer.” I say it too quickly, without thinking. It’s unkind.
“Right,” he says and hangs up.
Eleanor calls from a party at her house. There is a lot of noise, like a television set. “Aren’t you coming?” she yells. “You should see me, I’m costumed as the Dean of Sophomores!”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes, I’m kidding. Actually I’m dressed up as the Dissertation Muse. I’ve got a giant bedsheet around me and rhetoric books and job lists and cigarettes and photocopies of abstracts dangling around my neck. It’s very complicated. No one understands it. They ask me what I am and then say ‘Oh.’ You’re not going to come rescue me?”
“I don’t think so I—”
There is a sudden click and we are disconnected.
Darrel, too, calls from a party. “All kids at this party,” he says. “It’s a drag. I feel like an old man.”
“Why don’t you stop by here,” I say. “I like old men.”
“I just might do that,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the paper bag over my head. I’m going as the Unknown Negro.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”