“I don’t know. I couldn’t come up with anything else. I haven’t thought about it that deeply.”
“Shall I give you a trick or a treat?” I can hear him consider this. Someone, a woman’s voice in another room, shouts “Hey Darrel.” I want him to say, “Baby, your tricks are treats.” Something like that.
“Hmmmmm,” he says instead. “Let me think about this.” And he hangs up.
Only a few more trick-or-treaters come by: punk rockers, the requisite pirate, a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a tiny, tiny child on whose head someone has put a huge and hideous rubber mask of Richard Nixon. The child hovers by my knees thrusting out a small twine-handled bag, the little hands squirmy and pink as shellfish.
“Have a nice night,” I say, giving them all Hershey bars. These are better than the cough drops and Northern Spy apples my mother — all sternness and cold prevention — used to give out. With Hershey bars, I feel I’m finally normalizing my life, making something up to the trick-or-treaters of the world.
The Shubbys come by with Isabelle. They are all dressed as rabbits, large and small. Irv Shubby actually looks the most like a rabbit.
“Say thank you to Benna,” says Mrs. Shubby, with her pink nose and painted whiskers, coaching Isabelle.
“Thank you,” she says, a pip in the night.
When I first went trick-or-treating I went with my brother Louis, and stayed at the very first house we went to, not understanding we were supposed to move on. I went into the house and instead of hovering in the doorway, getting my candy, and dashing out, I sat down in one of their chairs, quietly waiting and chatting a bit, as if I’d been invited for tea. My brother Louis ran on ahead to the next house, impatient and oblivious (the houses were fairly far between, there was no time to spare), which I thought was a bit rude since we’d been invited in and given candy. Some sort of conversation seemed in order. I stayed for over an hour before these neighbors, sweet and bemused, escorted me back home. “Where did you go?” I asked Louis when he came back, loaded with enough candy to last until Christmas.
This has been my problem in life: I don’t move on well. I don’t trick-or-treat well. I don’t understand. I sit in the sludge of my life and stay there. In a drawer somewhere I have six index cards for each of my former lovers, and I’ve drawn pictures of their souls there, wispy and dark — a thin stack: I believe in thin stacks, I believe it’s important to keep these things, like credit card bills, under control. The word number, I realized when I was ten, can be pronounced two ways. “You haven’t slept with enough people to understand that none of it means anything,” said Gerard to me once, showing me a dictionary definition of fuck that read “in the present part., a meaningless intensive.”
But I had read in a novel when I was fourteen that more than seven and your soul goes.
At midnight when Darrel finally rings the bell, I open the door, step out and slip my head up under the paperbag with him, and we kiss, standing in the doorway like that.
“Are you crying?” he whispers. “What’s wrong?”
“No. I don’t know. Nothing.” And we go upstairs, leave our underwear dangling from doorknobs, Darrel whispering things while I try to speak while crying, doing the garbled hyena of weep-speak.
I awake at dawn, and it’s a beautiful irisy sky, like a movie set you don’t believe for one minute. Darrel reaches for me sleepily, all potion and skin, and I roll back into his arms like a child, this slow lovely grind that is love, that is the secret of bodies, private as grief.
“Are you mad at me for last night?” I ask Gerard on the phone. He is watching a football game on TV and this is half-time. Gerard says TV football is like watching cells under a microscope, that it’s all about conception and contraception.
“No, why? Are you mad at me?” he asks, as if puzzled. This is how we work, via amnesia.
It is All Saints Day evening. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, drying off Georgianne, marveling that the human race has managed to create such comforts for itself as the warm fluffy nubs of towels, the squirming, nearsighted silk of daughters.
“We’re going to Beruba for Christmas, I know,” she says, fogging the air with baby powder. She’s trying to bully me.
“How do you know?” I look at her and squint my eyes into small incisions.
George shrugs.
“Do you want to go?” I ask, rubbing her head dry, fishing for affirmations.
Beneath the moving towel she scrinches up her face. “Do you want to?” she squeaks, in imitation of someone, something, I don’t know what, and she tweaks my nose, my skinny merink, my bony pumpkin.
“Whatever happened to that little niece of yours?” asks Gerard.
“Niece?” I ask, disoriented.
“Yeah. Anna or Annie. The little one, your brother’s kid who used to come visit you.”
“Oh, Annie.” I’m quiet, take inventory, and then zip on ahead. “She and my ex-sister-in-law are off in Michigan. My brother Louis couldn’t even get joint custody. It’s very mysterious. Everybody misses her.” I lower my eyes. There’s a long silence. Gerard leans over and tweaks my nose. “What is this nose-tweaking jazz?” I grumble. I toss back orange juice like a gargle.
I am sitting at home with a pile of student poems. I have put the more interesting ones, usually the housewife poems, on the bottom, with Darrel’s at the very bottom, as a sort of reward. But now I’m looking at them in front of me, on the dining-room table, and I can’t read any of them. I have nothing to say, nothing to write, nothing registers in my brain. All these student lines fly away from me, scatter like pigeons in Venice, rise up around me like locusts. I can’t begin to get through this pile of poems. I would rather eat them than read them. I would rather do anything than read them.
Today is my husband’s birthday. He would have been thirty-six. I wonder what he would have looked like. I wonder if he would have been happy, if we would have been friends. I go right to Darrel’s poem. It is called “Dolphin.”
With my clicks and whistles
and 30,000 years
of history, the Iliad
and Minaoan prayers
and kisses hardened, curled
inside me like a coral reef,
it is music, the waves,
not the grinning angularity
of corners, coroners, sandwiches,
that washes, courts, and wins
me and my child’s rhymes. We
glide and scarcely touch for now,
desiring just the slick, silk share
of speed, the drink of seas,
oh love, the drink of seas.
I wonder if it’s about sex. If it’s about me. If it’s about why he’s not in love with me yet or never. Words, I think, words are all you need for love — you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.
But these words — I don’t know. I circle Minaoan, which he’s spelled wrong, and write “Good!” at the top; then I turn off the light and, terrified of literature, go straight to bed.
The teacher was at her office hours in the Union, sipping coffee, staring off into space. She leaned over to get something out of her bag on the floor — a pen wrapped in a Kleenex in case it leaked. Looking up from her bag, she saw a young black woman in jeans and a red sweater, standing beside her.