All Hallows' Eve (12 page)

"No," Dad counters, "but I don't want him to look and sound like an effeminate little pansy like your brother, Warren, either."

Mom gives a squeal of protest, but before she can say anything in defense of Uncle Warren, Nona stamps her foot. "Stop, stop, stop!" she shouts.

I try to escape down the hall and into the kitchen, but they follow me.

They always follow me.

"Come on," Dad says, "let's try to make this visit pleasant, for a change."

"You're the one who started it," Mom tells him.

I look at the clock on the stove.

They've been here for something like two minutes and already I feel like I'm about to throw up from anxiety, the way I did two years ago.

They followed me into the bathroom that time and made negative comments, based on my vomit, about what my grandmother feeds me.

At least moving into the kitchen sidetracks them from our relatives and from the dress my mother wore to her cousin's wedding ten years ago. This is the first time my parents have been to this house, and there are all sorts of fresh things to criticize.

"Butcher-block counters." Mom sniffs. "I didn't think anybody actually
did
butcher-block counters anymore."

"Please," I beg. "Is critiquing Grandma's decor really why you came?"

"Of course not, darling." Mom's fingers brush my cheek. "We came to see you. To make sure your grandmother is doing a good job of raising you—"

"—and not turning you into a pansy, like Warren," Dad finishes.

"I'm doing well in school," I say, to change the subject.

But it's a bad change.

Dad wants to know exactly what I mean by "well," and apparently B minus in most of my subjects doesn't count as "well." Of course he zeros in on the C minus in geometry. "Math is important," he lectures me, though I don't ask him how—ever—geometry has enhanced his life. The A that I've gotten in literature doesn't impress him. "Literature would be ... like, what?" he demands.

"This particular unit is on poetry," I admit.

He smacks the palm of his hand against his forehead and proclaims, "Poetry is definitely for sissies. I don't know why these female teachers always try to emasculate—"

"Neanderthal woman-hater," Mom spits out at him.

Nona interrupts, saying, "You're here to visit Matt. How do you think this bickering and name-calling are making him feel?"

That calms them down for about another minute or so.

"So those weren't your friends?" Mom asks, going back to the kids they saw as they were coming in. "Don't you have any friends?"

My father says, "I hate overage hoodlums who go around on Halloween without even the pretense of a costume."

"They were collecting for Unicef," I say.

"Yeah, right."

It's the same thing I thought, but it sounds so petty and mean-spirited when he says it.

"Why
don't
you have any friends?" Mom asks.

"I didn't say I don't have any friends," I protest. "I just said
those guys
weren't my friends." Of course, I don't have many friends, as my grandmother and I move around a lot, but I hate how Mom has jumped to that conclusion.

"You belong to a team yet?" Dad asks, poking a finger at my chest. "You look kind of puny."

Mom slaps his hand down. "He does not."

"Track and field," Nona announces proudly.

"Like running and jumping?" Dad's tone clearly shows he's thinking
skipping and hopping.
"Oh, man. You need to try out for football," he tells me. "Put some meat on you."

"Oh, here we go again," Mom says. "Let's relive those glory days of yours—when men were men, and girls all carried pom-poms." She claps her hands, cheerleader-style. "Give me an
S.
Give me a
T.
Give me a
U-P-I-D.
How pathetic that you peaked in high school."

"Yeah? And you never did peak."

"Barry," Nona warns.

Earlier, Nona and I brainstormed for topics to use to try to deflect them from sniping at each other, but my parents have a way of making my mind go blank.

Dad says, "You just sat around the house letting your butt grow to legendary size."

Mom squeals and puts her hands on her rear end. "I wear the same size now I did when I was in high school."

"Same size," Dad agrees, "but
a lot
more stress on those seams."

Mom glances around the kitchen, obviously looking for something to throw.

It was a mistake for me to come in here.

"Yeah?" Mom demands. "Yeah?"

Nona recommends to Mom, "Why don't you just take the high road and ignore him? Visit with Matt. You only have another"—she glances at the clock—"two hours and fifty-three minutes."

Is that all? It could just as well be two hundred and fifty-three years.

Of course, Mom doesn't want to take the high road and ignore Dad.
High road
and
ignore Dad
are not in Mom's vocabulary. She tells Dad, "Well, all your fat's between your ears."

"Anybody want to hear my essay on why there'll never be peace in the Middle East?" I ask.

"No," Mom and Dad say simultaneously.

Peace in the Middle East? What about peace when my parents come to visit?

"Shrew," Dad calls Mom.

"Cretin," Mom retaliates.

We are never going to make it to midnight.

I try to slip inconspicuously out of the kitchen, to get away from all those knives that could be used as weapons, but my parents notice and follow me into the living room.

Nona says, "Do you see Matt's trophy?"

If I could have gotten her attention I would have signaled her
not
to mention the trophy.

Dad reads the plaque, then snorts. "Participation award. Participation award in track and field."

"It's good to participate," Mom says. "What is it with you that you think someone always has to grind somebody else's face in the turf and be declared"—she gestures quotation marks in the air—"'The Winner.'"

"Because that's better," Dad says, "than being"—he makes quotation marks of his own—"'The Participator.'"

Rather than defend me, Mom says, "Oh, here we go. This sounds like an introduction for the long, boring story about running fifty-seven miles for the winning touchdown."

"Fifty-three," Dad corrects, "
yards.
"

"You sure it wasn't miles? End zone and back? In the snow? Uphill both ways?"

"Maybe you can brag on the time you got your nails done," Dad suggests. He holds his hands out and flips his wrists and—in a breathless falsetto—he says, "Aren't they just gorgeous? My hairdresser, Antonio, assures me, this
is
the color of the moment."

Nona is saying, "Who cares? What's it matter?" but this time my mother can't contain herself. She has to throw something at my father. She picks up my trophy and flings it.

He sidesteps and the trophy knocks the clock off the mantle.

I don't think either of them notices that both clock and trophy land in pieces. So much for my one and only trophy—even if it
was
just for participating.

"Beast!" she calls him.

"Psycho witch!"

"We wouldn't even be in this situation if it wasn't for you!"

"Me? You started it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?" Mom launches herself at Dad, ready to use her nails on his face.

He grabs her wrists, but the force of her attack makes him take a step back and he trips over a stool. Still holding Mom, Dad staggers backward into the antique tea cart, where my grandmother has a bunch of her plants. Cart, plants, Mom, Dad—all crash onto the rose-colored rug.

The first few times this sort of thing happened, I tried desperately to get them to stop.

Now I worry about Grandma's rug.

I can smell the crushed greenery and the rich, loamy smell of the potting soil my grandmother has so lovingly used.

Mom catches hold of one of the plants. I don't know what it is: something stalky and sturdy. She swings it—ceramic-pot-end first—at Dad's head. The pot cracks from the impact with Dad's skull, showering dirt and leaves halfway across the living room.

"Stop it!" Nona shouts. "Can't you see what you're doing? Can't you ever learn?"

I don't say anything. They
can't
see. They'll never learn. What's the use?

Mom stands up, tottering a bit on her high heels.

Dad has dirt in his hair and blood running down the left side of his face; but before Mom can get away, Dad manages to catch hold of her ankle.

Mom pitches forward, arms flailing, taking the floor lamp down with her. The glass column part shatters, the shade snaps off and bounces, to land at my feet.

I pick up the shade and see the bottom rim is dented in. I concentrate on getting it straight without ripping the fabric while my father puts his hands around my mother's neck and squeezes.

Nona runs into the kitchen, fills a bowl with water, then comes back in to fling that water at my parents. I've heard this sometimes works with dogs or cats, but it has no effect on my parents.

By the time I have the shade looking as good as it will ever again look, my parents have begun to fade—almost as though the water has washed away their substance, but that isn't it. This happens every year. Sometimes Mom finds something to stab Dad with, once Dad pushed Mom down the stairs, another time—in an apartment my grandmother had that had a real, working fireplace—he pushed her into the fire, though she managed to hold on to him.

That was the worst.

Sometimes he starts the violence, sometimes she does, but it always ends the same.

"Damn," Nona says as they grow fainter and fainter, then disappear entirely, "and I had such hopes for this year."

Of course, she says that every year.

Nona sighs. "You'd think that having killed themselves once would have been one of those lessons with sticking power."

I was there that first time, too. I was only six at the time, and we'd been in the car, driving home from a Halloween party at the house of my father's boss. The party had been mostly for adults, but the boss had two kids that Dad had coached me on being nice to: a boy a year or two younger than me, who whined continually and smelled liked he wasn't thoroughly potty trained, and a girl a year or two older, who figured
she
was
my
boss. I'd had a terrible time, not to mention that it was way beyond my regular bedtime.

Apparently my parents hadn't enjoyed themselves any better than I had, though they didn't have that beyond-their-bedtime excuse. They squabbled and criticized, and each found fault with everything the other said until my mother took her can of hair spray out of her purse and squirted it into Dad's face.

I have no idea what she hoped to gain from that.

And I have to say that, even at six years old, I thought if Dad had spent more time trying to regain control of the car rather than—still—screaming at Mom that she was an idiot, we might not have hit that bridge embankment.

My parents were killed.

The only thing that saved me was being in my booster seat in the back.

My grandmother took me in and has been raising me ever since, which is mostly fine except that my parents come to visit every Halloween.

Nona thinks that if we could get them to refrain from killing each other until midnight—until the day after they died—that would break the cycle and they'd stop coming.

But it's a long time between nine and midnight.

"What a mess, what a mess," Nona sighs, her feet squishing in the puddle from the water she threw at them. She picks up the overturned tea cart. Some of the plants have come right out of their pots, and during Mom and Dad's struggle, they ground the dirt into the wet rug, which I'm guessing will probably never be the same again. Still, I get out the dustpan and start to sweep up the biggest chunks of dirt, plant, broken lamp, clock innards, and trophy bits.

"Next year," Nona says, "you'll have to try having some of your school projects in the front room, ready to show them. Just keep on talking, even if they criticize..." She corrects that to: "Even
when
they criticize. Try to just keep talking right over them."

"Okay," I say, not really believing it will work. Not really believing anything will work. Several years ago we hoped, my grandmother and I, that we could do that old trick—moving without leaving a forwarding address—but everybody showed up just as scheduled.

Nona must be able to read my discouragement in my voice. "You poor dear," she says. "You know your parents love you."

"Yeah, right."

"That's part of what keeps them tied to this night, coming back, despite all the harping they do on you. They want what's best for you."

Before I can say, "Then they should stop coming to visit," she finishes, "They just don't know what
best
is, and they don't know how to show it."

"Yeah," I agree, because it's what she wants to hear.

"I love you, too," she says. "And so does your grandmother, even though she can't stand to come down here to be with you."

"Yeah," I say again.

Nona stands on her tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead.

I'm already able to see through her, too, even though it isn't midnight, and she didn't die on Halloween. She died the year after my parents' accident, of a stroke. She isn't tied to Halloween but comes back to try to help me.

From the upstairs bedroom, Grandma Jean—my mother's mother—calls, "Are they gone yet, Matt?"

"Yup," I say as Nona disappears into the air.

"Go on up to bed," Grandma Jean says. "We'll clean the mess tomorrow."

"All Hallows' Eve," the old man said.

Edward, who had been rethatching the roof of the cottage, prickled and itched all over, and his hands were blistered from tossing pitchforks full of fresh bundles of straw onto the roof and then arranging them. He had just climbed down, finally finished with the task, and now he rested the pitchfork against the side of the cottage and gingerly opened and closed his fingers, knowing that—as much as they hurt now—they would hurt worse tomorrow.