The Laws of Gravity (2 page)

Halloween: I Told You I Was Sick

The Huntington School District had decided to hold its registration in the fall, instead of spring—so Nicole found herself registering her daughter, Daisy, for kindergarten on Halloween. As she signed the form, her coat sleeve slid back and the childhood scar on the inside of her wrist revealed itself.

The neighborhood was a riot of witches, goblins, and ghosts hanging from doorways. Front yards were converted to graveyards with cardboard headstones that read “Now I’ll finally have some peace and quiet,” “I told you I was sick.”

“I want our pumpkin to look friendly,” Daisy had said. “I
want
people to come to our door.” Not many trick-or-treaters would show up, although Nicole had strung orange lanterns over the house and put out a smiling jack-o’-lantern and would keep the porch lights burning till nine. Potter’s Lane was a narrow street up a small steep hill from town, and most kids would skip the incline.

Daisy would be one of the older kindergartners next fall. Nicole and her husband, Jay, had debated about whether it was best to push her forward
or hold her back. She was a September baby—typical Virgo, the eternal caretaker, order-loving, neat as a pin.

“Think about it this way,” Nicole’s best friend, Mimi, said. “Do you want Daisy going off to college when she’s only seventeen?”

“No,” Nicole said. “I don’t want her going off to college ever.”

“You’ll change your mind when she’s fifteen and steals all your makeup,” Mimi said. Mimi was the wife of Nicole’s cousin, Ari, which made the two friends feel related. “Blood is thicker than water, but I never understood why that was a good thing,” Mimi would say. They spoke on the phone every day, sometimes more. It might be just Mimi testing out a new joke, but Nicole was a bad test audience, she said—she always laughed. Mimi was a comedy writer. Occasionally she performed stand-up, though she suffered from stage fright. She taught comedy writing at Nassau Community College; she lectured about it at elder hostels; she ghostwrote for famous comics; she took being funny seriously.

Nicole stood alone in the main corridor in her wool coat among a gaggle of other women, most of them ten years younger than she. All of these young women seemed to know each other and stood chatting in a close knot of five or six. Nicole wished Mimi were there to keep her company, crack some jokes. A few of the younger mothers rocked baby carriages back and forth, perpetual motion machines. Nicole felt lonely, like an outsider. She hoped this didn’t mean that Daisy would be, too. The parents—nearly all of them mothers, with one or two fathers skulking around—lined up and filled out the kindergarten registration forms. They listened to a woman trying to enlist them in future PTA fund-raising events. Finally they were all congratulated, then dismissed like schoolchildren themselves.

Nicole clutched her registration form as she made her way blindly down the hall. She was shocked by the desolation she felt at the prospect of leaving her daughter in public school all day. The tiled walls were painted a pale institutional blue that no sprucing-up or Halloween decorations could disguise. Daisy now went to a Montessori preschool program three mornings a week. What would it be like dropping her off at eight every morning, not getting her back till almost three in the afternoon? The hours apart seemed to stretch ahead endlessly. They had begun a long, steady process of separation from which there was no return.

A large boy came racing by, probably a fifth-grader. His hair fell over his eyes, his belly bounced as he ran. He was as tall as a grown man. Nicole felt tempted to holler at him,
Pay attention!
Daisy was still petite, almost Lilliputian, the lower fifth percentile in both height and weight.

The first-graders had crayoned huge-eyed owls for Halloween. They were taped in rows to the walls. The owls all looked alike, with large cylindrical bodies and immense glowing yellow eyes the size of platters. Nicole couldn’t see them clearly; her own eyes were filled with tears. She spotted another woman about her age, one of the few black women she’d seen on line, also studying the owls. When the woman finally turned her head toward Nicole, tears glittered on her chocolate-colored skin and ran toward her jawline.

“Look at me,” the strange woman said. “I’m acting like a damned fool. Darnell is my baby. He’s my last one home.”

Nicole dug a clean tissue out of her purse and offered it to the woman. “Daisy is our only,” she said. “We’ve been trying to have another, but it hasn’t happened yet.” She didn’t normally confide in strangers like this.

“I’m Ruby,” the woman said, accepting the tissue and blowing her nose. “Aren’t we a pair?”

Nicole gestured toward the other parents gliding out of the building, chatting and laughing. “I don’t know how they do it.”

“Hard-hearted,” the woman named Ruby said. She half smiled through her tears. “You’d be surprised how many women get pregnant once they got a child in kindergarten. I seen it happen time and again. Could happen for you.”

“That would be nice,” said Nicole.

“We should count ourselves lucky,” Ruby said. “I know one woman, she registered her daughter for kindergarten last year.
Same afternoon
, she finds out she has a brain tumor. Incurable cancer. Dead before that child hit the third grade.”

“Oh, God. That’s awful.” Nicole shivered, though she was sweating inside her wool coat. She suddenly felt sick. The story filled her with dread—as if some fortune-teller had wandered over, read her palm, and foreseen something terrible. Halloween was getting to her, all those fake ghouls and gravestones.

She wanted to cry to this woman, Take it back! Untell me that story! She wondered if the dead woman had lived there in Huntington, but didn’t ask. Besides, what difference could it possibly make?

“Trust me, this is a nice school,” Ruby said. “Your little girl gonna love it here.”

“I’m sure your son will, too.”

Ruby’s face relaxed into a split grin. All trace of tears was gone, except the crumpled tissue still held in one large fist. She was a tall woman, athletic. “Darnell loves everything,” she said. “He’s a big kidder. Class clown type—I just hope he gets a teacher with some sense of humor.”

All the way back home Nicole brooded about the woman who’d died. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. That daughter left motherless—
dead
before that child hit the third grade
, the grade she would soon be teaching again. She knew what little girls were like at that age; she remembered one motherless child in her class who had shown up at school still wearing her pajamas, egg smeared on her face. All that Halloween morning, the woman’s words swooped in and settled crowlike in the back of her mind.

And there was that lump at the side of her neck—a swollen gland, her doctor said. But it would not go away, like the thought of this dying woman. When she’d mentioned it to Jay months earlier, he’d told her to go to a specialist, adding, “I’m sure it’s nothing,” his eyes bright blue. There was something about his confidence that irked her. Did he think people couldn’t die? Did he think he could bat it all away, like an easy home run? She found her fingers returning to the swollen place on her neck again and again. Yet she refused to speak about it, as if ignoring it would help it disappear. And here it was Halloween, a holiday. Soon would come Thanksgiving, then the winter holidays. Time enough to deal with it in the new year.

Nicole and Mimi had arranged for their children Daisy and Julian to go trick-or-treating in Mimi’s posh Glen Cove neighborhood. Later they’d come back to Huntington and answer Nikki’s doorbell in their costumes. Julian’s neighborhood was richer, safer, and gave out better candy. Whole candy bars, free movie tickets, packs instead of sticks of gum. Nicole’s cousin Ari had bought individually wrapped Lindt dark chocolate truffles and organic dried fruit rolls. He insisted on giving each trick-or-treater one of each.

“Chocolate is high in antioxidants, and organic is organic,” he said. “There’s no excuse for giving kids junk.”

Nicole decided not to mention that they had Snickers bars and red Twizzlers back at her house. In the old days, he would have known exactly what was in her cupboard. In the old days, as children, they would have had the same junk food and they’d have eaten it in secret together, up in the attic, playing board games.

Daisy and Julian dressed up as vampires that year. Second cousins, three years apart, they looked nothing alike, and were an unlikely pair. Yet they’d been inseparable almost from the moment of Daisy’s birth, closer even than Nikki and Ari had been decades earlier. Each child seemed to feel safer in the other’s company. Perhaps it was because they were each, in their own way, a little bit odd. For Halloween Daisy wore a long black silky dress with tiers of uneven layers and a hooded cloak trimmed in velvet, from a secondhand store. Julian kept drawing his vampire cloak partway across his face, showing off his plastic fangs, gargling “Nyah! Ha! Ha!” and pretending to bite Daisy.

Nicole took out the baby blanket she was knitting for Mimi’s baby-on-the-way. The work was almost halfway done. Ari and Mimi already knew it was going to be a girl, so the blanket was yellow cable stitching with a new pink stripe. Mimi had taken every prenatal test available, under orders from the ever-vigilant Ari.

“The only test this baby hasn’t taken yet is the SAT,” Mimi said. “But Ari’s already got her enrolled at Kaplan’s.” The mothers sent the children upstairs to nap for half an hour or so before the trick-or-treating began.

Mimi sank into a chair with a groan. She had just gotten past the first rough trimester a few weeks earlier. Till then she had been existing on crackers and peppermints. “Julian won’t sleep, but Daisy might. We should let them rest, or they’ll be basket cases by tonight,” Mimi said. “You’ll see next year, when Daisy goes to school all day. Hundred Book Challenge. Learning
her colors and shapes. She’ll come home with bags under her eyes, looking like death on a cracker.”

Nicole’s hands felt clammy, just hearing the word
death
. Trying to sound casual, she mentioned the woman she’d heard about that day, the one who had died so young of a brain tumor. She knit faster, as if she could push the story away with the clicking speed of the needles. “That mother died before her daughter even reached third grade.”

“There’s nothing scarier than having kids,” Mimi said, her dark eyes wide. “Halloween can’t touch it.”

“I know. But just think—” Nicole began.

“I can’t,” Mimi said. “I won’t. And you shouldn’t, either. Everything to do with having children is terrifying. You can’t afford to sweat the details—and it’s all details,” she added. “Now talk about something else, or I’m going to start telling knock-knock jokes.”

Nicole knew there was no point in pushing. And anyway, Mimi was usually right about these things. “Are we dressing up for Halloween?” Nicole had brought along a large pink witch’s hat with a broad brim. Some of the trick-or-treating grown-ups went the whole nine yards, bought expensive costumes, wore masks, cloaks—the works. Others just went disguised as suburban parents, trailing behind their kids.

“Maybe I’ll go as a pumpkin,” Mimi said, patting her stomach. She already had a high, small round tummy. She pulled her T-shirt tighter, to demonstrate. “See? I can paint the bump orange, with a little stem on top.”

“Suit yourself,” Nicole said. She unraveled and started over at the beginning of the row.

“It’s not fair,” Mimi said. “If I went a year from now, I’d have this cute little baby, and no matter how I dressed her, people would coo and say, Aw, how adorable.”

“
I
think you’re adorable right now,” Nicole said.

“Well, you’re in the minority,” said Mimi. “Julian thinks I’m gross. Ari tactfully avoids the subject, and Dr. Kassis thinks this baby is going to come early. She wants me on bed rest by the time I hit six months.”

“You’re kidding,” Nicole said.

“Nope. The baby’s head is pressed too far down. My muscles aren’t tight enough down there. That’s what the doctor said. It’s my own fault. I should have done more exercises.”

“I don’t believe this,” Nicole said. “You’re blaming yourself. Seriously. You are, aren’t you?”

Mimi blushed. “I am not.”

“You are.” Nicole set down her knitting in her lap and looked sternly at her friend. She pointed one needle at Mimi. “Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong with my vagina.”

“Okay,” Mimi said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“Repeat after me!” Nicole waved the knitting needle like a baton. “There is nothing wrong with my vagina!—Say it with me.”

They chanted it together. “Again!” Nicole called.

“We’re going to scare the kids,” Mimi said. They chanted again, this time more softly.

“Thank you.” Nicole picked up the needles and resumed knitting. She frowned, counting her stitches.

“You are completely insane,” Mimi said. “I hope you know that. You
seem
normal, but really, you’re not.”

“Quiet, or I’ll make you chant again,” Nicole said.