by Drew Magary
“Do you hear the music?” I asked her. “Isn’t this fun?” I kept waiting for the part where I could get up and go read a magazine.
She let up crying for a second and I sensed an opening.
“See?” I said. “It’s not so bad.” There was a giant cylindrical pad over in the corner of the room that looked like a padded log. Everyone loves logs! I pointed at it. “Look at the log! I bet you get to play with it.”
“Eeee!” she said happily.
“There’s my girl! You’re you again! Come on. Let’s sit.”
We sat back down and Cassie the instructor summoned us all to attention. Just the sound of a new voice was enough to get my daughter to ignore her lump and focus on something new. Teachers at all levels have a remarkable ability to get the attention of a roomful of children. I can’t do that. If I try to gather up a group of drooling one-year-olds, they end up farther apart than when I started. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our children. I had a name tag on. Name tags make any gathering six times more awkward and horrible.
“I’m Drew, and this is my daughter.”
“Welcome, Drew!” said Cassie. “So nice to see a dad here today.”
She jacked the boom box up to Oasis-concert volume and busted out all kinds of dirty used blocks and rattles for the kids to play with. In a matter of minutes, our cozy little circle of parents and toddlers broke apart as the kids rolled and crawled and spazzed out in different directions. I looked around at all the little padded ladders and trampolines, and I wanted a ray gun to shrink me down to half my size so that I could go play around on them. Then Cassie busted out the superlog and my daughter’s transformation into a happy child was complete. Cassie lined the kids up on one side of the log and made them roll it across the room. Half of them stumbled and did soft faceplants on the floor, which I found highly amusing.
Then the child of the woman in the elevator started to cry and I felt a wave of triumph pass over me. I looked down at my daughter and she was now fully recovered from getting her skull dented. She had no memory of the incident, and she never would. We could start fresh. We could always find a way out of pain and unhappiness.
For the grand finale, Cassie dragged out the Gymboree-standard parachute, which had clearly not been washed in over a decade. All the little kids and parents gripped the diseased edges, lifting it up (with the parents doing the bulk of the work), then pulling it back down very quickly so that we could all hide under it, as if we were huddled inside a makeshift FEMA tent shelter. Then we got out from under the parachute and let the kids crawl out to the center so that the parents could shake it, the kids rolling around inside the chute like marbles in a dish. Cassie busted out an economy-size bottle of bubbles and blew them into the air while we all sang . . .
There are bubbles in the air, in the air
There are bubbles in the air, in the air
There are bubbles way up high
Way up high in the sky
There are bubbles in the air, in the air
And my daughter floated out of class as if trapped inside by a bubble herself. There were other children who didn’t make it through the whole class because they freaked out. Oh, but I had outlasted them all. I had struck a blow for confused fathers everywhere. I won.
But we took the stairs back to the car. No way I was fucking with that elevator again.
SLOW GUY
Our daughter was two years old now, so this was her first real Halloween. You can keep your children away from candy for the first two years of their lives. But eventually, once they’re old enough to recognize what Halloween is and why it’s there, the evil executives at Big Candy dig their hooks into them. All it takes is one little Reese’s cup. After that, they’re ruined forever. You may as well trade them in for new children.
I asked the girl what she wanted to be for Halloween.
“School bussy,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure? A school bus?”
“School bussy.”
“That won’t be easy. I’m not sure the CVS has, like, school bus costumes. You could be the bus driver.”
“School bussy.”
“A princess?”
“School bussy.”
“I got it: Supergirl.”
“School bussy.”
Federal mediators couldn’t have broken the stalemate. I went to my wife.
“Oh, I can make her a school bus outfit,” she said.
“You can? How?”
“Haven’t you ever made your own Halloween costume?”
“No. What am I—a Quaker?”
“It’s more fun to make a costume. What do you wanna be?”
“I have to be something? I don’t have to be anything. I’m a father now.”
“Oh, come on. You have to be something. Something clever.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we could put a really big penny on top of your head, and then you could be A Penny For Your Thoughts.”
“Is that a costume or an art installation?”
“It’s a suggestion. That’s all.”
I spent the next day exhausting every last ounce of creative energy trying to come up with a decent costume idea. The last time I had dressed up for Halloween was years earlier, when I was Popeye and my wife was Olive Oyl. I wore a red striped shirt and took a hollowed-out coffee can and wrote “SPINACH” on it. Then I drank beer out of the can and smoked weed out of the corncob pipe I bought from a nearby bodega. I could taste little coffee grounds in the beer. I ended up booting into the toilet at 2:00 A.M. that night. It was a really solid Halloween. Thus, I endeavored to come up with a similarly acceptable costume.
Meanwhile, my wife went to the art store and bought all the yellow poster board she could find. She cut out the sides and the grille and the windshield of the bus, and pasted black construction paper cutouts onto the sides for windows. Then she showed it to me.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“No, it’s not. The taillights need work.” There’s nothing that wives enjoy more than asking you your opinion and then immediately ignoring it.
She pasted on two red taillights, and I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t resemble a working school bus. If I had tried to do something similar, the child would have gone out into the street with an empty Asics box strapped to her head. This was the sort of thing only a mother could pull off. Once they’ve borne children, mothers can construct virtually any costume using scissors, felt, Elmer’s glue, and a leftover pen spring. They’re like the Special Forces of crafts.
The neighborhood we live in has no sidewalks, so weeks earlier my wife had purchased a big yellow plastic SLOW sign in the shape of a crossing guard that was thirty-two inches high, all in the name of slowing down passing motorists. She felt compelled to buy it after two teenagers in a van went tearing down the street while my kid was playing outside. I mouthed at the kids to slow down (I even made the classic “STOP” move with my hands, raising both palms like I was a palace guard halting an intruder). In return, one of the little fuckers leaned out of the window and extended a double bird, and then they both screamed, “FUCK YOU!” Then they hit the gas even harder, banked around the curve at the end of the street, and screamed, “FUCK YOU!” a second time. I turned crimson with Old Man Rage, vowing to throw rocks at the car if I ever saw it again. Not only was I pissed that they’d told me to go fuck myself, but I was also doubly angry that I had evolved into the kind of middle-aged dipshit who yells at kids to slow down. That should’ve been ME tearing down the street with a joint in one hand listening to “Rocket Queen.” I wanted to buy a shotgun and sit out on my stoop every night until they came speeding by again. My wife bought the SLOW guy sign instead.
At a loss for a decent costume, I noticed the SLOW guy wore a red ca
p. Then I remembered I had a yellow T-shirt. So, the day of Halloween, I scrawled “SLOW” in black marker across the front of it, and then I bought a three-dollar plain red cap from the drugstore. When fully assembled, the “costume” didn’t make me look like the SLOW guy. It made me look like a slow guy. The hat should have had a propeller on top. I became terribly concerned that wearing the costume made it look like I was making fun of special-needs children, especially when paired with a child walking around dressed as a shortened school bus.
But it was too late to change anything. Trick-or-treating time was getting closer and this was all I had. I was stuck with being the SLOW guy. No way was I going back to CVS to buy more crap. My wife threw on her costume (she was Lady Gaga, because you can put yourself in virtually any ugly outfit and declare your costume to be a Lady Gaga costume) and we were set to go. Then I realized that, while scrambling to accidentally dress myself as a retarded child, I had forgotten about the bags and bags of candy my wife had bought at the grocery store and then stashed out of my reach.
“Hey, what do we do about giving out candy?” I asked. “We’re not gonna be here.”
My wife grabbed a metal bowl from under the sink. “We can use this,” she said.
“Do we need a sign?”
“Probably.”
I raced to make a sign for trick-or-treaters, instructing them to take just two pieces of candy (my wife turned down my idea of adding “WE WILL BE WATCHING YOU” to the end of the message). Then I tore open the bags, dumped in the candy, and ate three peanut butter cups in the span of half a second.
“I see you!” said my wife.
“I’m a man, dammit! I’ll eat candy if I want to.”
“You have chocolate on your SLOW shirt.”
“Shit.”
Despite its flawless construction, there were issues with my daughter’s school bus costume. My wife had cut a piece of ribbon and bored two holes on either side of the bus. Then she tied the ribbon through each hole so that we could hang the bus on my daughter’s shoulders. When I put it on the girl, she turned and knocked the bus into the TV set. Its life flashed before my eyes. Holy shit, no. Not the TV.
“Let’s just put this on you outside,” I told her.
Once we got outside, it was clear that the girl had limited mobility with the box hanging on her. Every time she went down a concrete step, I became terrified that the box would trip her and she’d end up eating the curb. I had a clear picture of it in my head, watching her fall and seeing her teeth shatter and her lips tear open. Blood everywhere. Scars. Lifetime deformities. I couldn’t stop seeing it, so I grabbed her hand. She immediately recoiled. My palms were very hot and clammy and she was able to escape them easily.
“No hand!” she screamed. She was under three feet tall and already a far more assertive human being than I was.
“You gotta take my hand. I don’t want you tripping and falling and dying.”
“NO!”
She ran ahead and I saw my wife go after her, finally convincing her to take her hand, since a mother’s hands are dry and soft and pleasant.
There was a group of parents congregating down the street. The plan was for all of the kids to go trick-or-treating together so that all of the adults could hang out and, in theory, socialize. We met up with the group, and one of the neighborhood moms asked me about my costume.
“What’s your costume?”
“Oh, this? I’m a SLOW guy.”
“A slow guy?”
“Not, like, a retarded guy. I swear. You know how we put a sign outside our house because those asshole kids drive too fast?”
“Not sure I saw it.”
“Well, it’s like this little guy and he says ‘SLOW’ and he has a red cap. So that’s me.”
“Oh! Oh, that’s very clever.”
“Oh, thank you. And again, not making fun of retarded people here.”
With every subsequent conversation, I felt compelled to explain my costume immediately, as a preventive measure. I was already socially awkward around other parents, and this added a fun new wrinkle to my discomfort. The moms fell in together and began talking shop about bedtimes and their kids’ eating habits. Moms are excellent at this sort of thing.
Dads, on the other hand, interact like a dozen horses tied together at the head. I shook hands and stammered out a couple of empty how you doin’s, but I wasn’t giving it my full effort because I was still a relatively new father. And new fathers despise talking to other fathers. I withdrew. My daughter was bumbling around in her school bus outfit and I stayed by her because hanging with your kids is such an effective way to be antisocial.
Then I noticed another dad walk up with a giant wagon filled with cold beer and I saw salvation. I didn’t know the dad well, but I had failed to bring out any beer of my own, which was an incredible oversight. I made getting beer a priority.
But then the trick-or-treating started. The sun began to fall and you could hear joyous squeals from kids ringing out from all around the neighborhood. Little flashlights strobed around up and down the street, and I heard the older kids plotting which house to hit next. I held a flashlight out in front of my daughter, but the bus was still causing her problems and she was dragging her candy bag along the ground. My wife was busy cavorting with her friends so I was left to hunch down and make sure every step the girl took wasn’t her last. Meanwhile, the beer wagon set off in the opposite direction. I knelt down by the girl and tried to turn her around.
“Maybe we should go this way, dear.”
“No.”
“There’s more candy that way.”
“No.”
She stopped at a nearby house that had fifty-three steps leading up to the front door. She may as well have declared her desire to scale Everest. The front stoop was tiny, almost as if it were designed so that a simple outward push of the screen door could wipe out hordes of trick-or-treaters.
“That’s too many steps, sweetheart. The other houses have candy too.”
“No.”
“What if we take the bus off of you so you can climb those steps safely?”
“No.” Gather together a hundred of the finest lawyers and you wouldn’t have as formidable a negotiating entity as a two-year-old.
I took her hand and gingerly walked up the stairs, the beer wagon getting farther away with every step. Midway through, my daughter slipped and I held her hand tight as she dangled in the air and righted herself, as if she were hanging from a cliff. The school bus outfit continually banged against the flagstone steps and eventually I stooped down to keep it raised as the girl ascended the staircase in full. The descent looked precarious.
We got to the top and I said a big “HI!” to our neighbor, a nice woman who held out a basket that had a handful of peanut butter cups scattered among all the Smarties and lollipops and Jolly Ranchers. The girl went straight for the shitty candy. I tried to steer her toward better options.
“You sure you don’t want one of these peanut butter cups? Ooooh, Baby Ruth! I haven’t had one of those in ages!”
“No.”
“You sure? It’s chocolate. MMMMM, CHOCOLATE.”
“No.”
She grabbed two generic lollipops and we carefully descended the steps. I was already tired and this was only the first house. Then one of the older girls in the neighborhood—who babysat the girl from time to time—walked up to me. She was surrounded by a group of friends. My daughter stared up at them in awe.
“Hi, Mr. Magary.”
“Oh, hi.”
She looked down at my daughter. “Do you want us to take her around?”
“Her costume’s a little rough to handle.”
“Oh, I can just take that off.”
She bent down and lifted the bus away with no resistance from the girl. Before I could say anything more, she was leading the girl
from house to house to pile up candy. I stood there with my flashlight and watched my daughter go off into the distance, the world filling up around her as the collective wail of all the kids in the neighborhood grew louder and louder the more they ate. I could hear the girl’s laughter close by and I could feel the knots in my shoulders begin to slack. Then I got a tap on the shoulder and wheeled around to see my neighbor. He had the beer wagon.
“You want a beer, Drew?”
“Hell yeah. Thanks.”
He handed me the bottle and looked over my costume.
“So what’s the costume?”
“Oh, me? I’m a slow kid.”
He laughed. “That’s tasteful. Cheers.”
We clinked bottles and melted into the group of other dads, and after a while I stopped worrying about whether I looked like a lame asshole with kids and instead luxuriated in being one. And when we got home, there was still plenty of candy in the dish waiting for me.
PRINCESSES AND PALESKINS
Miss Rhonda was the local ballet teacher—a short, cheerful woman who loved teaching little girls to dance more than anyone has ever loved doing anything. Once a week, my daughter went to Miss Rhonda for ballet class. I use the term “ballet” loosely here because you can’t force two-year-olds into pointe shoes and demand they lose five pounds before Swan Lake dress rehearsals begin. You can only hand them costumes and let them run around a room to Disney music.
Prior to meeting Miss Rhonda, the girl didn’t give a shit about princesses or princess culture. She was all about school buses and car washes. Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It’s the closest they’ll ever get to being inside a working spaceship. The girl loved school buses even more, as demonstrated during the previous Halloween. One time, I bought her a big plastic school bus that was fourteen inches long. It cost five bucks. She named the bus Charlotte and slept with the thing every night. I tried to take it away from her once because she kept banging me in the shins with it, and when I did, she screamed like a mother having her child being led away by social services.
