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Her son flapped his arms to extend his bat wings while he ran.
“I’m flying!”
Their daughter dragged her witch’s broom between her legs. “Me too! I’m flying! We’re flying! Like Daddy! Look!”
After dinner the children fished through their loot, traded it, ate candy as quickly as they could.
“Can we trick-or-treat this way every year?” their little girl asked.
“Why?”
“You don’t have to say, ‘Trick or treat.’ You don’t have to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”
“Those aren’t good reasons,” her husband scolded. “You need to be comfortable talking to people.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk to strangers,” their daughter pointed out.
“Well…that’s true. But you’re always with a grown-up trick-or-treating, right? Talking to adults is an important thing to learn. You don’t want to be too shy.”
“Mommy’sshy,” her daughter grumbled.
She felt a bubble of resentment. “I can talk to grown-ups just fine, thank you.”
Of course her daughter had said something about her being shy. Of course her husband’s comments over the last year now knit through the little girl’s understanding of her mother. The girl had registered the judgmental tip of his head when he said, “Do you know you interrupted that guy?” “It was awkward when you didn’t…” “Why are you acting so nervous?” Little pinpricks that showed Mommy’s social ineptitude, an oblique collection of evidence that she’d misunderstood her father-in-law, that she’d misread the situation, reacted ineptly, because that was what she just did, had just done, didn’t she see that?
His father drops him alone in the woods again and again, and he’s still trying to find his way back with bread crumbs.
When she met her husband in a life-drawing class senior year of college, his open friendliness, his unselfconsciousness, had interested her. He’d been so comfortable tracing the soft curves of the naked bodies that the professor scolded him for his frequent joking with the models. She never managed to cork her embarrassment, had to imagine the subjects as inanimate as the wooden hands they’d sketched in the first week of class. But her quiet focus had seemed to fascinate him.
His lopsided smile was beautiful as he watched her work.
“I don’t think I could come close to drawing something that good.”
She’d never met a man who so readily admitted she was better at something, let alone one who seemed happy about it. His ease, hisappreciation, reminded her so much of the way her mother had made her feel—smart, special, capable—that falling in love with him seemed like fate, a connection to something elemental she’d thought was gone forever. Then there had been the steadiness of his eyes on hers. His gaze didn’t jump from marking to marking the way she was used to. When he traced their lines, he called them—calledher—beautiful.
“Was there something you did?” he’d asked, and she’d felt the first fissure in their marriage. Now, each time he criticized her behavior, desperate for his father’s approval, love, vindication, she felt a chisel lightly hammering,tap-tap-tap, hairline fractures invisibly weakening the keystone of respect that held up all they’d built.
“You know what I miss about trick-or-treating this year?” she asked the children.
“What?”
“Seeing the costumes! And the houses decorated, too. Maybe we can drive around, see what people have done for Halloween?”
“Yes, Mama! Do you think they’ll have the skeletons out again?”
“Yeah, remember that?”
“And the puffy dragon!”
“That’s right. That one house had a big inflatable dragon.”
They piled in the car and cruised slowly along the streets of the most popular trick-or-treating neighborhood nearby. Took their place in a line of cars likewise filled with dressed-up children plastered to car windows, looking out at the decorations.
Their daughter’s witch’s hat grazed the roof of the car. Their son smiled vampire bat teeth. They waved at costumed people sitting bundled on lawn chairs, watching the cars of kids go by.
“This was a good idea,” her husband said, happy at even tangentially being able to touch the outside world. “How’d you know this was going on?”
“I didn’t. But what else are people going to do?”
