Twilight

by Nancy Pickard

  Clearly, Nellie was not entirely blind to her daughter’s character.

  “Excuse me, Jenny,” she said, getting up. “I’d better get out there. She knows she’s not supposed to mix her business with ours. They don’t complain, but it offends some of our customers, and it annoys or intimidates a lot of the others.” Nellie’s voice had a defeated sound that I never heard except in the context of her daughter. “That girl has never listened to anything I say, but she still thinks her dad walks on water. If he’d tell her, she’d stop it.”

  “Nellie?”

  She glanced at me.

  I held up her tissue box next to me, and she took the hint.

  Her face was a mess from crying, and she wouldn’t have thanked me if I had allowed her to go outside looking like that.

  While she sat back down to repair herself, I borrowed her telephone.

  As I punched in the numbers, I glimpsed myself behind Nellie’s reflection in her mirror: pale complexion, thin nose, Swedish-blonde hair currently worn longish and straight, tucked behind my ears, with bangs. I wasn’t sure I liked the look, but Geof, my policeman husband, did. He said it gave me a virginal appearance that vastly amused him, the cad. I saw the gleam of one gold ball earring. Two blue eyes looked away from the mirror, as the phone rang a third time at my office.

  Then I heard the voice of a festival volunteer.

  “The Judy Foundation,” she chirruped.

  Oh, God, how sweet the sound of that!

  “Hi, it’s Jenny. I’m running late this morning, so if anybody comes looking for me, would you please tell them I’m on my way?”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  “Whatcha workin’ on?” I asked her.

  “The witches’ costumes for the tax collectors.”

  Made perfect sense to me.

  Based on attendance figures I had gathered from similar weekend festivals in New England, I had projected a “gate” of anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand people over the two days of our big event. It was an estimate that both exhilarated and terrified me. With our Halloween theme, the volunteers selling admittance tickets were to be costumed as witches. This being Massachusetts, we had dubbed them our “tax collectors.”

  I asked her, trying not to whine: “Does that have to be done there at the office?” Our new headquarters was already packed with festival paraphernalia. As much as possible, I encouraged my precious, beloved volunteer workers to take their projects away with them. But she said they were only holding a design meeting this morning, and they’d do the actual sewing in their homes.

  “Bless you,” I said to her before hanging up.

  I was leaving anyway, so I followed Nellie as she threaded her way through the crowded aisles of her store to the front. Already, she looked defeated—like a general who knows he’s going to lose the battle but who feels he has to make the fatal charge anyway.

  2

  OUTSIDE, THE MAYORAL CANDIDATE HAD TRANSFERRED HER ATTENTION to a flock of protestors in an empty parking lot across the street where my beloved little white Miata convertible was parked with its top up against the chill. There were three men, seven women, all of them neatly and conservatively dressed—the women in dresses, the men in suits—all of them marching raggedly in a wide circle, and all of them carrying signs protesting the celebration of the pagan ritual of All Hallow’s Eve.

  Halloween, girls and boys.

  They were fundamentalist Christians exercising their rights of free speech, but they were nothing like their more aggressive kin—the antiabortion pickets. This crew had been around for years, variously protesting at schools and at stores that sold Halloween items. It made sense for them to picket the Dime Store. I had nothing against them; they never accosted anybody, they were always quiet, never yelling or obnoxious, always rather sweetly polite.

  This year’s crop of protest signs read:

  Celebrate Christ, not Satan!

  Boycott pagan rites!

  Hex on Halloween!

  There was also a drawing of an evil-looking jack-o’lantern with an X through it, and underneath that, one of those Christian freeform fish symbols that you see on cars a lot. I wondered if any of them knew that the fish was originally a pagan symbol for the vulva. Whenever I saw one on a Volvo, I always thought: Volvos for Vulvas. Perhaps not what the drivers had in mind.

  “Mother!”

  The klaxon call reached us on the sidewalk.

  We watched Ardyth march across the street toward us, dragging two of the male protestors with her. She had hold of the edges of their signs; they had to grip their poles to retain ownership. And thus did she steer her following tugboats into safe harbor in front of us.

  In appearance, she was a younger version of her black-haired, sturdily built mother. They even dressed similarly—big shoulders, simple, draped, waistless dresses, practical pumps. But in demeanor, Ardyth was her mother multiplied by a factor of at least ten. And only her blue eyes proved that Bill had sired her.

  “Mother,” she began, “I asked you to show more respect to these people! Didn’t I say to take the Halloween displays out of the windows? Not everybody thinks it’s so innocent, you know. Some very fine people—” Ardyth gestured backward, nearly knocking the wind out of one of the men. Wisely, he stepped back out of her range, “—believe the opposite, and it is their God-given, constitutional right to say so, and it is our democratic obligation to—”

  Her stentorious speaker’s voice rose, her finger pointed high.

  I had always suspected that this might have been what it was like to live with Patrick Henry.

  “—invite them peaceably to assemble—”

  “Ardyth!” Her mother snapped it firmly, grimly. “May I speak to you a moment in private?”

  “Mother, you know I do not support the concept of closed meetings. There is nothing we could possibly say to one another in secret that I would not willingly utter in the presence of these—”

  “Ardyth!” Nellie grasped one of her daughter’s wrists and jerked the twit toward her. I was struggling to keep from laughing. Ardie was such a shallow pond you could have waded in her without getting your ankles wet. You could see clear to the bottom of her without half trying. Still, she was good for a laugh, so long as she wasn’t picking a fight with you. What she wasn’t good for was the higher development of my own character; Ardie drew pettiness out of me as if I were base metal and she were the magnet. When Nellie had got her daughter within a few inches of her own face, she whispered so that only the three of us could hear the words: “Dear, most registered voters love Halloween.”

  Ardyth blinked.

  I laughed. Bad move. Never laugh at a politician.

  She smiled briefly at her mother and even at me.

  Then she turned that smile on the minority voters behind her and said expansively, “My family will always support your right to demonstrate peaceably for the sake of your sincerely held beliefs. When I am elected mayor, I will see that your rights are protected. Do carry on.”

  Looking relieved and—did I detect it?—amused, the two men nodded at us and started to make their escape, clutching their signposts.

  “Wait, wait!” Ardyth commanded.

  With every sign of reluctance, they faced us again.

  Ardyth’s busy forefinger jabbed through the air—at me.

  “I’d like you to meet Jenny Cain,” she announced. “This is the woman who thought up the idea for the Halloween Festival—”

  “Autumn Festival,” I corrected her diplomatically.

  “Ardyth, please,” her mother begged, too weakly to have any effect.

  I smiled at the protestors. They stared at me appraisingly. I thought: If Ardyth Kennedy provokes these people into picketing my festival, I will boil her in oil.

  “Jenny heads that new foundation, the Judy Foundation—what kind of name is that anyway, Jenny?—that’s heavy into feminist causes—”

  I will grind her eyeballs to powder.

  “An
d she’s in charge of the whole shebang. The Halloween Festival was her idea, hers and the mayor’s. When our city should be thinking about large and important issues connecting our interests with those of other municipalities—”

  That was a favorite political theme of hers: “connections,” whatever that meant.

  “—our mayor thinks only about Halloween.”

  I will pulverize her bones and burn them to ashes.

  “Ardyth’s coming to the festival,” I cheerily informed them, “as the Wicked Witch of the West”

  “Very funny, Jenny.”

  And yet I saw it in her eyes, a sparkle of pleasure. There was nothing Ardyth Kennedy liked better than a good fight, except winning it. She argued only to triumph, never to compromise, or even to communicate. It unnerved me to realize that she had an uncanny instinct for picking the winning sides. What did that bode for my festival?

  “Some of us,” she was saying, “hold our sacred beliefs more devoutly in our hearts than others do, Jenny.”

  “Do you have beliefs, Ardie?” I asked her, feigning sweet surprise. “The same ones, I mean, from one week to the next? From morning to night? Of the same day?”

  “I’ve been talking to Peter Falwell,” she said.

  It was not such a non sequitur as you might think.

  My ex-boss, she meant, the president of the old Port Frederick Civic Foundation, and my archenemy, not to put too melodramatic a point on it. She and he had allied themselves against Mayor Eberhardt. Ardyth’s political savvy. Pete’s access to money and power. They were a team made in election hell. Demon spawn. These good folks should have been picketing the two of them.

  “Pete wonders whether you can handle such a big job, Jenny—”

  I will feed their livers to the crows!

  “—considering you were fired from your last one.”

  “I was not fired. I quit.”

  It rang hollow, as such defenses always do, regardless of how true. As she had known before she voiced her purposeful lie. It wasn’t the first time that she had lied about me; that first time lay back in the mists of our personal history. Now the appraising stare of the two protestors took on degrees of doubt and—was it?—pity.

  Her mother was clucking like a distressed hen.

  “Oh, Ardyth, baby! Please! Jenny’s our best customer!”

  Thanks a lot, Nellie.

  “Calm down, Mother, I’m only pointing out to Jenny that the entire image of our city rides on her ambitious schemes—”

  “Thank you,” I said, cutting her off at that pass before she got into a full gallop again. “It’s so good of you to put things in perspective. I have to go. Good-bye, Ardie. Nellie, I’ll see your friend Melissa whenever she wishes.” Another bad move. I should have known better, should have been satisfied with “good-bye.” But Nellie was obviously upset about her daughter’s obnoxious behavior toward me, and I just wanted to make her feel better.

  Indeed, she said, “Jenny, thank you,” softly, meaningfully.

  The strong businesswoman appeared overwhelmed by her daughter. Nellie must have wondered sadly sometimes: “How did my child turn out to be like this?” Or, maybe she had already pinned down the answer: a father—ineffectual, undisciplined, doting—who had irretrievably spoiled the girl.

  Really, someday I’ve got to follow my own rules and stop trying to save people who haven’t hollered for help. One day I will take the hint that when people want to be rescued they will, dammit, say so.

  I hadn’t learned that yet.

  The proof arrived immediately.

  “Melissa?” said Ardyth, with a rising inflection. “Not Mrs. Barney again? Mother, I don’t want you involved with that woman. We can feel sympathy without getting sucked into other people’s personal lives, you know. Heavens, I am the first to feel deeply her tragedy, but the woman is unbalanced, she’s gone quite overboard about the whole thing. Even though I sympathize, of course. And while we’re at it, let me repeat that I don’t want anyone in this family involved with God’s Highway, either—”

  I threw an apologetic glance toward Nellie as I turned away.

  “It’s a blasphemous name, anyway …”

  Ardyth’s voice trailed off.

  I turned my head and saw why.

  Her hypocritical politicking had been wasted, because the two men had finally made their escape. As they recrossed the street, dragging their signs behind them, one of them cast a glance over his shoulder at me. I was following them to the parking lot, but keeping my distance down the length and width of the street. The other man—short, dumpy, fiftyish, ordinary-looking in a brown suit—wasn’t looking at me. But his companion, younger by maybe ten years, paused for a brief moment to stare. He was scarecrow tall and thin, and he wore a blue suit and a burr haircut that disguised what I suspected was balding, graying brown hair. It gave his face a lean, rather surprisingly attractive ascetic look—the look of long-distance runners, saints, martyrs, and fanatics, the kind of elongated, soulful face that El Greco painted so hauntingly. I’d been struck by its odd and melancholy beauty as they stood silent and grave behind silly, ambitious, dangerous Ardyth.

  I gave him a little wave, since he was looking my way.

  His gaze remained sober, speculative, as he turned his long, handsome, dour face away from me.

  Damn. Now I had fundamentalist anti-Halloween fanatics to worry about … in addition to everything else. At least, they’d never been known to cause real trouble. Although, the more I thought about the kind of people who would picket Halloween near grade schools—as these folks were known to do—the less I liked them. People who would frighten children with the specter of a devil and a flaming hell were people who might do anything, no matter their peaceful history.

  Feeling a little awkward—and annoyed—after his rebuff, I kept going on toward my car, wanting nothing more than to make a wide enough circle around them that I could completely avoid any further contact.

  But when I was in the driver’s seat with the engine on, I heard a soft knocking at my window. It was the El Greco man, standing there with the post of his sign tucked under one armpit, obviously wanting me to roll down my window so he could say something to me.

  “Yes?” I said, with a polite smile.

  “I hope you’ll pardon me for accosting you like this,” he said, unexpectedly courteous. He still didn’t smile, but there was a politely hesitant note to his bass voice, and a depth of some sort of feeling, even warmth, in his dark blue eyes that made me soften a bit toward him. Maybe his vision was poor, maybe he just hadn’t seen my wave, and that’s why he hadn’t returned it. “I just wonder if I might say something to you?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “What is it?”

  “You look like a sensitive sort of person. I thought you honestly might not be aware that the celebration that today we call Halloween really does derive from a pagan ritual in honor of the Lord of Death. I thought you might not know, and that you might wish to be aware, that in honoring this holiday, you—although inadvertently, I’m sure—honor Satan, and that you are also paying sinful homage to the forces of dreadful pain, terrible evil, destruction, annihilation, and eternal damnation.”

  I stared up into his terribly sincere blue eyes, but my attention was caught by a silver cross pinned to his lapel, a heavy piece of jewelry that pulled down the fabric of his suit. The cross was about two inches wide by four inches long and about a quarter inch thick, and plain as glass. I could, in fact, see a bit of my face reflected, distorted like a troll.

  Jerking my gaze away from the cross, I looked back up into those somber blue eyes, and I said, “You know, the truth is I think I can understand your concern, in a funny sort of way …”

  He cocked his long skull to one side, interested, hopeful of my conversion, I supposed. And it was true that I found I had a feeling in common with him.

  “Between you and me,” I told him, surprising myself a little with my confession, “I feel rather that way about
New Year’s Eve. I look at all of the parties, the wining and dining, the festivities, and I get a sinking feeling, because I know that it was originally a rite intended to bury all the old goddess myths and religions. I understand that it was an essentially antifemale celebration, in which the patriarchy of the new male religions symbolically—and sometimes actually—put to death the ancient female power. And it makes me feel sad and angry, for all those centuries of ignorance and suffering.”

  His face hadn’t gone blank. He didn’t look outraged. But he was observing me soberly again, as he had when we were both crossing the street, with those blue eyes that seemed to burn out of an old Spanish painting.

  Plunging on, I said, “But then I realize nobody’s doing that on purpose now. It long ago lost all those meanings. Now it’s a symbol of hope for a new year, and people have a right to celebrate it any way they want to. So, I don’t mean to offend you, really I don’t—” I looked right into his eyes, hoping I could reach him, so that we could briefly meet on some plane where we had detente, if nothing more. “—but I’m afraid I feel that way about Halloween, too. I look at it, and I see only the faces of the children, having as great a time with their candy as I did. Do you see what I mean? I sympathize with your feelings, but I can’t possibly agree with you.”

  He inclined his head slightly, almost a bow.

  “God bless you,” he said.

  Pleased that he had taken my little speech so graciously, I said, “Well, thank you.”

  But it appeared I had only interrupted his benediction.

  “And keep you from your devilish ways. Fire waits for those who serve the Black Master. You will burn eternally, torn limb from limb by the horses of the Apocalypse, tortured by everlasting blisters and boils, with no one to save you, and no angel of mercy even to tend to your dreadful wounds.” He looked worried, even grieved, as if he could actually see the awful future he was predicting for me, and it broke his heart “I will not bother you again. I have issued the warning of the Lord.” He shook his head, sincerity and concern for me burning in his eyes. “Go very carefully, because the path you have chosen, the way of death, is the most dangerous one in all this wicked world.”