Down on Blackhawk at her workshop, Cate spray-paints the desk for the sergeant’s office in At Ease. The shop is a small brick building on an industrial block south of the North and Clybourn junction. The rent is ridiculously low. Her landlord appears to have forgotten her. He hasn’t raised the rent in five years. If he does, she probably won’t be able to afford it anymore.
Warm air is coming in gusts, and she is dancing around outside the back door in a mask and goggles, dodging the paint as it plays in the wind. Her workshop is in a neighborhood of factories, but also dance clubs, and she notices that a small pack of large women who all seem to be costumed as Adele are running with peals of hilarity across the street. Warming up for some later, main event. They wave at her, possibly thinking her mask and goggles are a postapocalyptic costume.
Shit, she thinks. Halloween. She’s late. Trick-or-treating has already begun.
She finishes up, then tents a tarp loosely over the desk. She needs it to dry by tomorrow morning, when Stig will come by to help load it into her SUV and get it to the theater.
Halloween in the city has been escalating the past few years. Now the parties start the weekend before, and trick-or-treaters are a mix of kids and adults. It’s five when Cate gets to Neale’s house; the winds have died down and evening is coming in—mild, with a thin glaze of winter approaching. The crowd is already swelling. Trick-or-treaters flood the sidewalks and parkways, a renegade traffic jam, stumbling over their elaborate costumes, blinded by their masks, urged by their parents toward the candy.
Lawns set up as small graveyards also feature zombies emerging from holes in the grass. Feet stick out of a glowing Weber. Fog billows from doorways. A couple of guys lie in their front yard moaning, knives stuck in their bloody chests. Behind one front window obscured by a translucent shower curtain liner, stooped ghouls creep back and forth, then press their palms wildly at the window as though trying to escape. Someone has hung a giant plush-toy tarantula from a tree branch over the sidewalk. It’s on an elastic string and a pulley, and drops down on one unsuspecting kid after another, so there’s about a scream a minute.
BLOOD—5 CENTS
with a pitcher and cups is offered at an unattended card-table stand.
Almost as many adults as children are in costume. Pennywise the evil clown is popular this year, along with a strong perennial contingent of SpongeBobs. A significant part of the population has made its own costumes, some so idiosyncratic you have to ask, “What are you?”
“I went out for a look earlier. We’ve got some stiff competition this year,” Neale says as she hangs a cardboard sign in the front window, drawn to approximate neon tubing:
BATES MOTEL
VACANCY
“What do you think?” Joe says about his costume. He has just come out onto the front porch. Kiera is right next to him. She’s wearing a lime-green jacket and dark green tights. Joe has on a white dress shirt he asked Neale to get him at Value Village. This now has the initials NV markered in monogrammy letters on the front pocket. He’s also wearing a Richard Nixon mask he must have found at one of the pop-up costume shops along Clark.
“We’re together, that’s what you have to think about,” Kiera says.
“You’re green with envy!” Neale says, and both kids start laughing so hard they have to hold each other up. Sailor jumps up on both of them, to join in the fun.
“Do you think everyone will guess right away?” Joe says, his voice boxed in by the mask.
“No,” Cate reassures them. “It definitely takes some putting together. I didn’t get it until your mother did. What’s the Richard Nixon part, though?”
“Just I don’t like my face so much tonight. The mask is good.” Cate wonders what this is about, this self-consciousness. He is a beautiful boy.
They’re itching to go. Sailor thinks he’s going with them, which he is not.
Cate thinks Joe is a boy out of his time. He lives in a culture he has created to the side of his peers. The good thing about this is Neale doesn’t have the standard-issue parental concerns. She doesn’t have to worry about him spending too much time on video games, since he doesn’t play them. She doesn’t have to worry about him getting a concussion on some playing field, since he is not interested in team sports of any kind.
His interests are obscure. The noise music. According to Neale, he listens a lot—maybe too much?—to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, essentially the sounds of a tape wearing out as it plays over and over for hours. And of course, there are the Mexican Porno Nuns. He’s also into film history. None of the other kids are, and so he watches old movies, sometimes with Neale, but more often by himself. He can stream almost anything he wants from the twentieth century. They go downtown to the Siskel Center or over to the Music Box for what he calls the “theatrical experience.” Neale is grateful for Kiera’s presence, Theo’s too, to dilute Joe’s solitude.
“I can drive you over,” Neale says.
“Actually, it’s like two blocks away,” Joe says. “At Michael’s house.”
“Don’t cut through the vacant lot,” Neale says.
“I know. We won’t. I mean of course we won’t.”
Once they’re gone, Neale says, “What’s up with ‘actually’? Suddenly it’s all over the place. Isn’t ‘actually’ supposed to imply a mistake being corrected? I don’t believe I said anything that would require a correction.”
“I think it’s a little snippiness entering the larger conversation. I get it all the time. Like I call someone’s office and an assistant answers and I ask if I can speak with Mr. Boomba and she says, ‘Well actually, he isn’t here.’ ”
“I’ve noticed that, too. It’s probably part of something bigger. It’s probably hooked up somehow with that voice sales clerks use at Banana Republic, high-pitched and so insanely cheerful you’re supposed to understand it’s ironic. That it means they hate their job and think you look fat in the sweater and are an idiot to pay as much for it as you are.”
They set up their candy distribution point on Neale’s front steps. They offer fun-size Snickers from an orange plastic bowl with a creepy gray-green rubber hand coming out of its center. A motion detector sets off the hand whenever someone reaches for the candy. At the moment, it’s responding to five grabby little Spider-Men.
THANK you!!!! the creepy hand screeches in a loud, witchy voice while it squirms around a little. Other times the hand cackles HAP-py Halloween!!!!
Sailor is unflapped by these spasms; if he has to go past the hand to get the candy, he will. Cate gets him to move around to her other side and puts the bowl between herself and Neale and he simmers down. Being part Lab, he’s in general a laid-back guy. He leans against Cate, watches the action, plots how to get back around to the Snickers.
When the spider-kids have squealed at the scary bowl, taken candy bars, and begun their retreat toward the sidewalk, Cate, holding the bowl, says, “Just think. This was someone’s job. She got home from the casting call and told her husband, ‘Honey, I got a gig today.’ And he said, ‘Oh baby, that’s great. What’s the play?’ And she said, ‘Well, I won’t be on a stage, it’s more of a dramatic-narration thing.’ ”
“ ‘But with a big impact on the audience,’ ” Neale says.
Neale goes inside, then brings out a couple of Coronas. They each eat a fun-size Snickers. Sailor gets a Milk-Bone, then Neale says, as she does quite often, “I’m a terrible parent.” This time it’s about Joe’s lunch. He’s been getting the one they sell at school. “He insisted. It’s apparently social death if you bring a sandwich in a bag from home. I never thought to ask what the school served. I guess I was thinking of the old cafeteria with ladies in hairnets ladling out vegetable soup, but now it’s premade meals, and I asked if they offered vegetarian options and he gave me the look of welcoming me to the planet, and so I gave in and now I just pay for the lunches at the beginning of the week. Then he started getting zits and I asked if the lunches had any fried foods in them. He said a better question would be if they had any unfried foods. Like yesterday it was fried chicken tenders. What are those even? Chicken rectums? The vegetable was fries and the dessert was fried apple pies. I’ve got to figure out some other way. Maybe I fix him a lumberjack breakfast and he just brings an apple for lunch, then I fix something intensely nutritious for dinner. Something with kale. Why didn’t I twig onto this sooner? I know why. Because just handing over the lunch money was the path of ease and ignorance.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Cate says, and brushes her two knuckles across Neale’s cheek.
There was a time when this contact would have been way too loaded with subtext. Cate and Neale have been friends since ninth grade, through Cate’s straight years, then her fake straight years, then her coming out after holding on to the secret a little too long. She was already sleeping with women by the time she told Neale she thought she might be interested in sleeping with women. Their friendship for a time became tentative, folded around confusion, hovering over its former version. They had to not talk about whether Cate had been in love with Neale, which of course she had. And whether Neale aided and abetted that, which she probably did. Now all that is far behind them. While she can remember particular events, Cate can’t call up the emotional content anymore, even though there was so much of it. This, she supposes, is the drape that closes off pain so everyone can get on with the rest of life.
“Do you think this is the worst house on the block?” Neale says.
“No. The green house is the worst.”
“Because they keep chickens in the back.”
Neale’s neighborhood is changing, bettering itself, but slowly. Tonight they get a few upmarket kids, like Frida Kahlo in a body cast with a chubby Diego Rivera. But there’s still a steady traffic of dispiriting visitors. Earlier, a homeless sort of couple showed up—a large, lumbering guy with a childlike face and a cartoon—Cate couldn’t make out the character—tattooed on the side of his neck. With him was a small, wiry woman, eerily tan and smelling of washable parts that hadn’t been exposed to daylight or water in a while. “Trick or treat,” they said, in tandem, with absolutely no human inflection. Candy-seeking cyborgs. Sailor growled. Cate distracted him. It’s embarrassing when your dog growls at people because they are poor. Or in wheelchairs. Or fat, which sometimes happens, and who knows what that’s about.
And there are still more to come—whole families, children and adults, none of them in costume. One has just arrived, each member holding out a thin plastic grocery bag.
Trick or treat, hahahahaha!!!! the witch’s hand screams at them.
None of them squeals or laughs or smiles or even seems to take notice of the writhing hand or its crazy talk. They appear beleaguered. All of them have combed but extremely dirty hair. They are wearing super-cheap sneakers that appear to be made from cheesecloth and Styrofoam. Maybe this family has just arrived from someplace where they have already been seriously scared, not just by a crappy rubber hand. Each of them, including the mother and father, takes two Snickers, and then they all turn around to trudge off to the next house.
“Hey!” Neale shouts after them. “Hold on for just a sec.” She raises her index finger, then gets up and goes inside and is back with her wallet. She pulls out a couple of twenties and pats them onto the father’s palm. Both parents look at the money and nod, then leave. Cate knows how improvident this is, given the financial situation of someone who owns a yoga studio and cannot count on as much as she’d like for support from an ex-husband who lives in Pondicherry, where he has put aside material concerns. But it’s no good scolding someone for her generosity.
Neale looks in the bowl. “They’ve cleaned us out of candy. I’ll go get more.” She ducks just inside the front door and grabs what’s left in the bag of Snickers, dumps it all into the bowl, setting the hand off on its entire litany of proclamations.
THANK you!!!! Trick or treat, hahahahaha!!!!
Come here, take some candeee!!!!
The flow of trick-or-treaters starts to wind down. The hand screeches on. It seems to be on a roll—maybe there’s a short in the circuitry. The two of them stare at the hand as though it’s a hysterical friend, and then Neale reaches underneath and switches off the bowl. Now seems like a good time for Cate to bring up the matter of Maureen and Maureen’s sister.
“So, you know—Maureen?”
“Well actually, I don’t. And I think I’m going to need to sometime soon. Give her the gimlet eye.”
“Right. We need to set up something.”
“What? What were you going to say about her?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing, really.” Nonetheless, after a little more holding off, she winds up spilling the beans. She’s using Neale as a litmus test. She’s the most principled person Cate knows. So it’s surprising when Neale says, “Oh, that’s nothing. That taboo was put in so people didn’t have babies with pinheads. I think when it’s between sisters, it’s not really a problem.”
“Really?” Cate says, so grateful.
“No, not ‘really’! What are you even saying? She had sex with her sister? For years?!”
“Well, only a couple, I think. Years.”
“The sister who’s a weaver?”
“Quilter.”
“Oh well then, okay.”
“It probably took care of that boring lull after holiday dinners,” Cate says.
“She never should have told you.”
“Well, I’m meeting her tomorrow, the sister. She’s in town. We’re all going out for tea.”
“Nice. Very Jane Austen.” Neale stands to look at a house down the block, which still has creepy fog rolling out its front windows and door. “I know this goes against reason, but I felt better about you when you were with Dana.”
“You were totally against it! Remember? ‘Afflicting someone’s relationship.’ ‘The sleazy nature of an affair.’ ”
“I know, I know, but I was impressed at the amount of connection you had with her. It’s what everybody wants.”