Fifth Draft
Updated November 2010
Supplantation
by James Hart
My wife loves Halloween much more than I do. Her favorite part of the holiday, for the past twelve years, has been dressing our children in terribly inappropriate ways. When Samantha, our youngest, was only a few months old, we took the kids with us to a party and my wife dressed her in a cute tomato costume she bought somewhere and then spread fake blood around our infant’s mouth. Her friends thought it was hysterical, but it is one of my loving wife’s few vices and I find it less than charming. I believe Jessie was dressed up like a serial killer, in an apron streaked with blood and a plastic knife. He was just someone who wanted to kill you. Usually the kids get excited about their costumes but this year I still haven’t heard what they’re going to be.
Samantha is sliding back and forth across the linoleum floor of our kitchen, the slick bottoms of her cheap, costume ballet slippers threatening to topple her over. I grab her by the shoulders near the kitchen door. “Be careful, Samantha, you’re going to hurt yourself.” Samantha is just over six years old and she has taken to wearing a costume tutu around the house as a way of telling us she wants to take ballet. I’m sure we will eventually give in, telling ourselves she might have some untapped potential, that it might be what she’s destined to do, but I expect she will give it as much devotion as she did playing harmonica.
My wife comes in through the front door. “Why is Sam wearing the tutu under her robe?” I ask. In her hand is one of the bulbs from the porch light.
“She won’t take the thing off,” my wife explains, “so I guess this year she is the death of dance,” my wife says. She doesn’t smile; the edges of her thin lips just stretch, drawing out creases in her tight cheeks. It is a precious expression of contentment, I’ve noticed, and it means more to me now than her laugh ever has.
“Isn’t that what the kids from Footloose dressed up as for Halloween?” I joke. “Where’s Jessie?”
“He left to meet some friends a little while ago. It’ll just be you and our little dancer tonight.”
My wife and I share a long simple kiss. It is a carefully calculated act that makes both our hearts race without appearing excessive to any onlookers. We’ve perfected this public display over the years and trained ourselves to understand its subtlety. The unexpected times, the variations in pressure, whether or not we hold hands during the act and if we do, where do we hold them. These complexities define our love.
Samantha is standing at the edge of the kitchen looking up at us, smiling. She has a beautiful and indifferent smile. It is sometimes hard to tell whether it’s a smile or a sly grin, like she is being deceptive.
“What are you looking at girl?” I kneel down to invite a hug. Her black robe is made from thin costume fabric that feels like plastic under my fingers. It is unzipped in the front revealing the tutu underneath. She is caked with white makeup and bright red lipstick and her hair is pulled back so that it is hidden when her hood is up. Samantha is short for her age but she can almost reach her arms around me.
“You ready to take daddy trick-r-treating?”
“Yeah!” She leaps back from me, then her eyes widen. “No, I need my pillowcase.” Samantha runs upstairs.
“Not your pillowcase, Sam, get one out of the closet,” my wife instructs her. She is digging through an overstuffed drawer in the outskirts of the kitchen cabinetry for a fresh lightbulb.
“Is she wearing lipstick?” I ask.
“I told her she could.”
“I didn’t know you had lipstick that color.”
“It’s really old.” She finally pulls from the drawer one of the teardrop shaped bulbs.
“It’s nice.” I give her a brow raising grin as if I think it would be sexy on her.
She playfully slaps my shoulder. “I like to think of myself as a subtle woman. Though if I ever feel like hunting down a shiny new husband maybe I’ll dig it out again.”
Samantha comes back downstairs. “Got it.”
“Hold it up,” my wife says, examining the pillowcase. “Yeah, that’s a good one.”
“Can I have a glow stick now?” I give her one of the individually wrapped glow-sticks we bought and put the rest in my pocket.
Samantha tears open the package from one end, the way she opens cheese sticks. I watch her pull the stick from its package and immediately break it with her thumb.
“This one is already broken.” She forces down her brow the way she does when she wants something.
“Well, when it runs out you can break a new one.”
“But I didn’t get to see it.”
“You’ll see the next one Samantha. Let’s get going.”
“Here, one of the porch lights is out.” My wife hands me the replacement bulb.
Samantha walks over to her mother who zips up the robe. It is a layer on top of her tutu, which bulges her out at the hips. Her tummy has gotten noticeably smaller. Six months ago I was beginning to worry about her weight because she looked almost bloated, like the children in the ‘pennies a day’ commercials. My wife told me it was simply a product of her height and that she would grow out of it. It appears she was right. Before Jessie was born I read all the ‘what to expect’ books but my wife was the only one who continued to read them after the kids were born. I guess I thought infancy would be the only phase with surprises.
I get Samantha’s bright red coat from a hook by the front door and I hang it over my arm. Then I take the fake scythe from the corner where it’s leaning and head out the front door, the spare bulb still between two of my fingers.
I screw the new bulb into the glass enclosure near the garage door, signaling that my house is open for business to all costumed scavengers. I wait for Samantha to come out and meet me. She is putting on her shoes.
I hope that I can work things out.
Samantha hops down the front step, startling me. She has slipped on her pink and white boots. They are a bit too big for her. They come halfway up her shins and they clunk as she walks. I carry the scythe in my left hand and take my daughter’s hand with the other.
Every Halloween in Colorado seems to be disturbingly similar. It always snows the week before, and while the warm daytime melts much of the frost, we are always left with a thin layer of snow covered with dead leaves, and the occasional collection of mud along the sidewalks. Tonight is no different. It’s cold, on the edge of freezing. There are patches of ice beginning to form from the day’s runoff and the wind is bringing in the next storm. Trick-r-treating is an endurance sport here.
“Samantha, are you sure you don’t want your coat?”
“No, then people wont know what I am,” she informs me.
What is she, exactly? I’m not sure if she is actually supposed to be the grim reaper, and if so, how the white makeup fits in. To be honest, this is possibly my wife’s weakest attempt. While I’m glad I’m not parading around a pair of junior monstrosities, as I have in past years, it’s a disappointment that my wife was not as successfully startling this year as she has been. I hope this isn’t a sign of something. I hope that she’s happy.
“Keep holding on to my hand, Samantha.”
Walking down our driveway my mind turns to the Hutchinson-Brown proposal. There is so little between me and the next common man that losing it may be the last thing I do at the firm. I graduated in a line of over one-hundred and fifty different business majors, a fact which has loomed over my career. I was never the top of my class, or of any class. I never broke the curve; more often I relied upon it. When I got my job I attributed it to skillful use of charisma—a trait I seem to have lost—and a glowing letter of recommendation from the supervisor of my internship, a man who was my source for marijuana during the four months I knew him. I am replaceable.
When the firm finds out I lost the account they will finally have more reasons to terminate me than to keep me on. Finding another job in this economy will be practically impossible, considering I will have been let go from one of the most prominent firms in Denver. With my wife’s inconsistent income, we will likely find ourselves in a tight squeeze. The financial woes might put unnecessary strain on our marriage.
Samantha slips on a patch of ice. I quickly jerk my hand upward, bracing myself with the scythe, and keep her from hitting the ground. She laughs a little and gets back up to her feet.
The first house is Rita Bellamy’s, a wonderful woman in her early seventies and as active as anyone I’ve met. She spends half her time away from home, either visiting family or on some adventure. Last year she sojourned in Africa. She told me she wanted to see a herd of wild giraffes. They were her favorite animal when she was little. When she’s gone we watch after her dog, a black Newfoundland named Earhart, and I mow her lawn. At the end of the summer she said she would like to have Jessie start mowing her lawn, since she’d seen him mowing ours and she thought it’d be nice for him to have a good neighborhood job. I agreed, of course.
As I walk up to the house with Samantha I hand her the scythe, which she stumbles along with until I take it back from her, recognizing that she cares nothing about the accessory. My wife didn’t like the toy weapons at the store, so she bought one and asked me to make it better. I replaced the handle of the scythe with a broomstick, and painted the blade with an old can of chrome spray-paint from the garage. The nozzle was clogged with metallic paint, but because all the cans are the same the nozzles are easily replaceable. Had I known my wife was going to dip it in her fake blood concoction I might have primed the plastic first because now the paint is stripping off and mixing together to form the color of Dorothy’s shoes from The Wizard of Oz. The weapon looks like something from a cheap death metal video.
The door opens and the first thing I notice are Rita’s breasts. After winning a battle with breast cancer fifteen years ago by way of a double mastectomy, Rita congratulated herself with a new synthetic pair. She showed them to my wife, who told me that Rita went an entire cup size larger than her natural breasts and that as freakishly nipple-less as they are, they feel quite natural. That thought plagues my mind every time I see Rita. She is dressed like Sacajawea with a low cut top that I’m sure no other woman her age could pull off.
“Oh, look at you…” she begins. Earhart is inside the house pressing himself against a wooden gate, excited to see my daughter. Samantha rushes inside past Rita and her bowl of candy. “You look so wonderful,” Rita continues. Earhart is actually on the small size for a Newfoundland but her tongue is still wide enough to cover Samantha’s face in a single pass. Samantha loves dogs.
Rita always hands out full size candy bars, except for last year when she was in Africa. She holds out the bowl for me to take one, “Here,” she says, “daddy gets one too.”
“How are you doing, Rita?” I ask.
“Dandy peachy keen. How’s Carla?”
“She’s great. She’s been volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club, teaching sign language.”
“Yeah, she told me she was thinking about that. I didn’t even know she spoke sign language.”
“She didn’t, sort of. I guess she took a class back in high school but never used it. She thought the best way to make herself learn it again was to try and teach it to people.”
“Good for her, that sounds like fun.”
“She’s really enjoying it. Samantha says the kids all love it, don’t they, honey?”
Samantha is dodging Earhart’s excited kisses in an attempt to keep her makeup from being stolen away. “Yup,” she giggles.
“Come on Samantha, let’s keep moving. It was nice seeing you Rita, you look good.”
“Yes, I do. Here, darling, pick whichever one you want.” Samantha reaches up to the woman’s bowl and shyly takes the candy she wants. She knows not to accept gifts eagerly, lest they cease being gifts. “Oh, that’s a good one,” Rita assures her.
Samantha doesn’t rush to the next house. Last year the man who lives there—a man I’ve never met but who works construction based on the pickup in his driveway—dressed up like a scarecrow. He wore a flannel shirt and heavy boots and stuffed hay up his pant-legs and the sleeves of his shirt. He pulled a pair of pantyhose over his face and drew a smile on them with a sharpy, and he topped it all off with a straw hat. He sat there with his bowl of candy next to him on the porch and when Samantha came close, suspicious at first of the inanimate creation but drawn ever closer by the promise of chocolate, he jumped and scared her. It was an innocent prank and while I don’t blame him for it, I hope he learned his lesson and will not repeat the mistake again this year.
Samantha hesitates at the end of the driveway and as she starts up to the house by herself I feel guilty that I don’t follow her to the door. A few steps away from me she turns around and signals for her weapon. I hand it to her and she continues the journey, both hands on the broomstick, ready to strike. I suddenly hope that the man has foolishly decided to repeat last years performance. I’ll make whatever appologies I have to just to see her smack that man with a plastic blade.
A minute passes with Samantha waiting at the door before she turns back towards me. I shrug and she walks back to the curb, dragging the bottom of the weapon along the cement.
People don’t seem to hand out candy as much anymore. We seem to be going two or three houses between each one with its porch lights on. Samantha is holding my hand at arm’s length, as far ahead of me as she can be, rushing toward the next house. She’s in a hurry, she wants to withdraw candy from as many houses as she can before we have to go home, and I don’t want to slow her down. This is a night when people I’ve never met open their doors to give my daughter candy, and I like the idea that the more houses we visit the happier, more optimistic person she’ll grow up to be. More like my wife and less like me.
When Carla and I met she was like a combination of Mary Tyler Moore and Annie Hall and she has spent the last twelve years of our marriage proving to me how superficial and easily surmountable those expectations were. We met at a gas station, which strikes me as particularly unusual. We were both driving the same car in the same color, a coincidence that we were able to turn into fate. She was a freshman without a major and I was a stalwart business student. She eventually dropped out and took up a life of random, short term jobs interspersed with volunteer work. As a man who counts money, I am amazed that she survived during that time of her life.
If I revised the Hutchinson-Brown proposal by Monday, I might be able set up a meeting and re-pitch the idea. Even if I can’t redeem the account, the firm might see the extra work I put in as an acceptable payment. I might convince them that I am not as easily replaceable as I am.
Samantha places her other hand on my wrist and tugs, drawing my attention on the house ahead of us.
Joe White is a friend of Jessie’s. They’ve known each other since they were in second grade. He and Jessie and a few others are gathered at the end of Joe’s driveway. Two of the boys are slightly outside of the circle hitting each other with short sticks and the two girls in the group are standing close together, chatting quietly, keeping their comments secret from the boys.
Jessie and I haven’t talked much lately. Our relationship is in a period of transition. Back in the summer Carla sent us on a camping trip up into the hills for the weekend. She kept calling it as a weekend for ‘the men’, a term she used to keep it clear to Samantha that she wasn’t allowed to go. I didn’t like the idea of talking about sex with my son. I would have to reveal to him the details of what it means to be a man, a definition I’ve never been clear about, and I’d have to explain the biological inner-workings of humanity, a speech I’d never received myself. My father had simply left my schoolmates to reveal the fine details of reproduction to me. This lack of education left me open to a few embarrassing moments in my young life, moments that made it laborious for me to talk with women until well into high school. My father’s only real contribution was a drastic increase in crude humor, as if joking about the subject would break down the barrier of ignorance between us. When Jessie was born it was one of my most prominent fears that someday I would have to have that talk with him.
“Jessie,” I call to the kids as Samantha and I get close. “How are you kid’s doing? It’s a great looking house Joe, tell your dad he did a good job. Is that supposed to be a body hanging in the tree? Yeah? Spooky. So what are you kids doing, planning to go make some mischief? Jessie, can I talk to you for a second?”
Jessie says something to the taller girl and then walks over to me near the White family mailbox. The tall girl is wearing a tight, black skirt that goes down to her knees, fishnets, and a red top without a back. She has drawn fake blood drops around her mouth with lip stick. I can see the strap of her bra from where I’m standing. She has a name like Jennifer, or Allison, or Vanessa, something dangerous. She is the kind of woman that a man learns to be afraid of by the time he’s fifteen, but my son is only twelve. This girl can smell a man’s quixotic desperation and she likes her fabricated feeling of control. I worry for her, but not as much as I worry for Jessie.
“What are you guys doing tonight? Just hanging out?” I know he wont tell me everything, I only hope that whatever they have planned, Jessie has the will to turn back when it goes too far. Which it will. He’s out in the open now.
“Nothing, Dad. We’re just gonna walk around.”
“Who are those girls?” I ask.
“They’re from school.” He’s tense and uncomfortable. He shifts his eyes away from me and moves his hands into his pockets. He’s transparent to a man like me. “Is Sam still wearing the tutu?” Jessie asks.
The front door of the White house opens. Joe’s father is wearing a hockey mask and jabbing at my daughter with a fake chainsaw that makes an inorganic buzzing sound when its buttons are pushed. Samantha giggles loudly and the older kids all turn to watch her. I’m not sure if they’re judging her, or Jessie, or Mr. White, but they laugh condescendingly among themselves.
“It makes her look obese doesn’t it? If ever there was a chance to run away from death…” I joke.
I see Jessie smile.
As Samantha runs back to me with her bag of candy, I tell Jessie, “Go on, go have fun,” pointing to the rest of his group. It’s a non-physical gesture that assures him he isn’t expected to hug me. “But don’t be out too late, your mother will get worried.” I’ve never been the disciplinarian, so the only tool I have is guilt.
Jessie tugs his sister’s hood down over her head and then presses his hands against her temples. “Hey,” Samantha complains, recognizing that the embrace resembles a hug. She is smart enough to brush off his teasing as love.
As Jessie takes off down the street with his friends I think back to the Hutchinson-Brown account. Re-pitching the proposal will look like an act of desperation, which will only undermine the legitimacy of its ideas and draw more attention to my failures. Even if it worked such an act would guarantee that my next failure would be my last. Everyone replaces florescent blubs before they actually go out because they begin to flicker and give people headaches. Re-pitching the proposal might cause headaches. Better to take the loss and hope that the paperwork needed to fire me is simply too much extra work for the men above me. This is a foolish thought, however, since those men will simply decide to fire me and allocate the technical paperwork to my replacement. Those men probably don’t even know my name.
“Daddy,” I’m holding Samantha’s hand too tightly and she is pulling it from my fist. I loosen and she rushes up to a light blue ranch house with a large wooden deck occupied by a collection of white plastic chairs, each one dirtied by the melting snow.
When the door opens Samantha is greeted by a small dog and its owner. The dog is some kind of a terrier mutt. From here at the curb I can see it standing next to its owner, a short, round woman whose curly hair flares down from the top of her head like the frayed end of a wire. The dog is short and loving, and Samantha leans down to pet and adore the animal. The dog disappears into the wide skirt that the robe leaves draped over her dancing outfit. I hear her giggle and watch her jump and turn as she grasps for the dog’s tail, which is still sticking outside her robe.
Samantha recently brought home a bean plant from school. She was learning about plants in her class and as a horticultural study the children were given a bean and a plastic bag, which they coupled with a moist towel and taped to the inside of the large window in their classroom. After a few weeks it sprouted roots and a light green growth that, as soon as it revealed its first leaf, was considered a success. Samantha was given a check-plus and sent home with her bean plant. When she showed it to me it was clear that she had high hopes for the scientific aberration. She spoke about planting it in the yard, about it growing beans for us to make into soup. She prided herself in having done something to save us money, like the time she had poured our unfinished drinking water into the ice trays after dinner to conserve water. Thirteen days later the plant was dead. It was still a bright green color, like a young spout should be, but it had just shriveled up in the night without any warning of illness.
The next day, taped to the inside of the kitchen window, there appeared a plastic bag. Inside was a handful of dried beans taken from a jar on the counter. The jar had been a Christmas gift from my wife’s sister and apparently contained the necessary beans for the best bean soup. Samantha swaddled the beans in an excess of damp paper towel and water pooled in the bottom of the bag. She wanted so badly for the beans to grow. I left them there on the window. Weeks passed and Samantha said nothing about the beans. Last week, when I thought she’d forgotten them, when the paper towel had turned a brownish-green color from the water-logged seeds, I threw them out.
I look back at the door where Samantha is petting the dog. The dog looks heavy, taking each step slowly and swaying side to side as it walks back to its master.
“Carlin?” the woman says, “Carlin are you alright?”
Samantha squeals, holding the bottom of her robe in her hands and looking up from her shoes at me. Tears are beginning to well up in her eyes.
“Oh, sweet darling, I’m so sorry.” I hear the woman say as I come up behind my daughter.
There is a pile of chocolatey mush on the porch and on Samantha’s cute pink and white boots. The dog has vomited across the tops of her feet. Samantha is starting to panic, squeezing her arms in tight to her body and wiggling and twisting her legs in a vain attempt to cast off her boots. She isn’t making any sound but tears are streaking down the thick white makeup on her face, revealing the freckles on her pudgy cheeks.
“Daddy,” she finally says, dropping her bag of candy and the rim of her robe and placing her arms out for me to hug her. She feels helpless and she wants me to fix everything.
“William, have you been feeding the dog chocolate? the woman shouts at the man sitting inside on the couch.
I grab Samantha with my left arm and lift her up, just enough that I can grab each of her shoes with a firm grip, my palm in the moist chocolate, and yank off each loose boot, revealing the ballet slippers she refused to take off before putting the boots on. I place each boot in one of my large coat pockets and then hoist Samantha up into my arms. She is heavy, too heavy for me to carry for long. I bend down, probably damaging my lower back for the rest of the weekend, and grab up her pillowcase of candy, and then I take my daughter back to the sidewalk.
“Sorry.” As the woman closes her door behind me I hear her tell the man to hose off the porch.
“It’s okay, honey.” I hold Samantha tight and begin walking down the sidewalk.
There isn’t much I can do. I just keep walking, holding Samantha in my arms, passing dark house after dark house. When I finally arrive at the next porch with its light on I walk up and ring the bell. A young man in his twenties opens the door, releasing the chatter of the crowd and the music from inside.
“Trick-r-Treat,” I say, holding Samantha’s pillowcase in my right hand, pressed against Samantha’s backside. “This is Samantha and she’s having a bad night.”
“Aw, man, that sucks.” The young man takes a handful of miniature candy bars from the bag by the door and, grabbing the pillowcase from me, drops the loot into Samantha’s bag before handing it back. Then he wishes us both a good night and shuts the door.
I proceed to the next house, and then the next house, introducing my daughter and then happily taking a sympathetically large serving of the resident’s candy. Once Samantha’s sniffling dies down I ask her if she’s ready to walk. She nods and makes a snorting sound like she’s trying to slow down her breathing. I place my daughter down on her feet and crouch down, the cold, wet ground bleeding through the knees of my pants.
“Are your toes cold, honey?” She shakes her head. I run my thumbs down the streaks in her makeup and smile directly at her. “It’s going to be okay,” I assure her. “But be careful in those slippers out here, it’s slick.”
Samantha slides her arms under mine and squeezes me as tightly as she can. I reach into my pocket, below one of the soiled boots and pull out a glowstick for her. There is a little regurgitated chocolate on the wrapper, so I open it myself and then hand it, unbroken, to Samantha. She looks closely at it, shakes it and examines it again for bubbles. She slowly bends it, watching the small, fragile piece inside until it snaps and the liquid begins to shine. Samantha smiles her indifferent smile and drops the stick into her pillowcase of goods.
We continue around the neighborhood until we find ourselves close to home again. A group of older kids, hardly dressed up at all, are walking away from my house. They’re much older than Jessie, probably juniors or even seniors in high school, and they are simply stuffing the candy into their pockets.
Carla sees us coming up the driveway and she waits for us at the door.
“How’d you do, Sam?”
“Great,” Samantha says, holding up her heavy bag of candy.
“What happened to your shoes?” Samantha slips past my wife into the house.
“I’ve got them with me. There was a little accident.”
“What happened?”
“Dog got sick.”
“Ew. Well, leave them out here. We’ll wash them off later.”
I take the boots out of my pockets and drop them by the front door, then I turn off the porch light as I come inside. The high schoolers can find other suckers.
Samantha has already dumped out her candy onto the kitchen table when I get into the house.
“So what happened?” My wife persists.
“Oh, nothing bad. Some lady’s dog got into the chocolate and got sick while Samantha was getting her candy.”
Samantha stops sorting out the candy and sits down at the table, staring at the sweets. She isn’t deciding what she wants to eat first, she’s deciding if she wants to eat it at all.
I sit down at the table with her. My wife is pouring the left overs of our house’s candy into a bowl behind me. “So, which one’s first?” I ask.
Samantha shrugs.
I take Rita’s full size candy bar from my pants pocket and open it up. With each bite I can see Samantha loosen, reassuring herself that the candy will not instantly compel her to vomit.
“How many can I have?” she finally asks.
“As many as you want tonight, but take it easy.”
Samantha places her finger on one of the candies and slides it slowly across the table, guiding it between the others until it reaches her. I chuckle.
Being a parent is full of conjectures. I wonder if I’ll be alive to see her give birth to her first child. Will I be there to walk her down the aisle or will my wife do it in my place? After she leaves college will I worry more or less often about her than I do now? Will I cry when she graduates? When her first love breaks her heart, will I be there to prove that not all men are scum? And when that boy first comes to the house, will I know him by the uncomfortable way he stands on my porch? Where will I be when she gives up on dancing?
“Where’s the scythe?” My wife asks.
“Dang it, I must have left it at that house. I can walk back and get it.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s got our broom stick.”
“We can go by tomorrow, it’s not a big deal.”
“Who knows if it’ll still be there.”
“If it’s not we’ll get a new one. It’s late and I want you here. Sit down.” She rubs the spot between my shoulder blades.
There is a cracking noise in Samantha’s mouth and she reaches in and pulls out one of her teeth. Her fingers are tipped lightly with blood.
“Daddy,” she says my name.
