The Usual Rules

by Joyce Maynard

  Nights when her mother came home, over the dinner Josh had made them, he’d fill her in on their day. A bird landed in front of Louie at the park and he made a tweeting sound, Josh told her. We climbed the ladder to the slide and went down, and he loved it. Wendy taught him how to clap. Josh taught Louie how to beat out a rhythm in four-four time. Then he was riding a tricycle. They went to see the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, and Louie knew practically all the names.

  Much more interesting than my day, her mother said. All I did was take dictation.

  I love this, Josh told her. I can’t believe I waited all this time to find out how great it was. Nobody ever told me.

  Your dad, Wendy’s teacher said one afternoon when he was picking her up. I never saw someone who was better with babies. Louie was walking a little by this point and Josh had taken him over to the cage to study the fifth-grade hamster.

  He came into her class one time to teach them about the bass. Some people think the bass isn’t that important, he said, because bass players don’t play the melody. Then he played them a tape he had of Roberto and Omar doing “Brown Eyed Girl,” but without the bass line. Then he put the tape on again, only this time he picked up his bass and played along.

  Which one sounds better? he asked them. Everyone agreed it was the one with him playing. After that he let everyone in her class try making notes on the bass, and he didn’t even say anything when one boy, Jason, got paste on the wood. Before he left, they all said they were going to be bass players when they grew up.

  Times like that, Wendy never said he wasn’t really her father. Same as she never called Louie her half brother. Somebody else did now and then—Aunt Pam, for instance. The word had an unfriendly, tightfisted sound to it, like a person who’s splitting the cost of a candy bar right down to the penny. Wendy had to ask her mother what that meant. Half a brother.

  Some people have this crazy idea that you have to have come from the same parents to be brother and sister, her mother said. But we know all that matters is we’re in the same family now.

  So what would happen if your mom and Josh ever got a divorce? Amelia asked her one time. Who would get Louie?

  I would, Wendy said. But anyway, she wasn’t worried. Anybody could tell her mom and Josh were going to be together always.

  Ten

  We need to do something for Halloween, Amelia said. The boys are going to ask all those dumb girls like Robbie to the dance, and we’ll end up standing around or going to the water fountain every three minutes.

  The year before, in seventh grade, they were dice, and in sixth grade they were Spice Girls, but what can you expect out of sixth graders?

  A million girls were going to be Britney Spears, but Amelia said that was just to have an excuse to get around the dress code and show their belly button. Wendy wouldn’t have wanted to show hers anyway, particularly now, on account of all the ice cream she’d been eating.

  You are not one bit fat, Amelia said. You’re just going to be more of the Jennifer Lopez type, and I’m more Jennifer Love Hewitt.

  So we could be them, Wendy said. Just joking.

  You wait, Amelia told her. In another couple years when your chest evens up and I’m still all flat, I’ll be dying of envy. Wendy still had her problem with one breast developing faster than the other. Amelia was the only one she told.

  Ricky Pasiello had planned to have a Halloween party and invite a bunch of people from their class to some club his dad belonged to, and then go home and have a haunted house, but his parents decided it wasn’t a good year for that, so instead he was just taking a few kids to see Scream 3 and then have them sleep over at his house.

  Like we would ever have been invited to the party anyway, Wendy told Amelia.

  You never know, Amelia said. Actually, I think Ricky likes you. He just pretends not to notice us, but really he does.

  He’s a very good actor, Wendy said.

  Hallie Owens said she was spending Halloween night collecting money for the Red Cross. Buddy Campion said he was going to be Osama bin Laden, and Mrs. Volt said, Inappropriate, Buddy. She jerked her head in the direction of Wendy, as if she was trying to send him a subtle message.

  We could all go to Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Village and dress up like the characters, Seth said. Seth was one of those people who knew every single word in the movie and said them along with the characters.

  We have to take Wendy’s little brother trick-or-treating and then baby-sit, Amelia told him, because Seth was getting on their nerves. But once she said that, it was their plan.

  As much as he loved dressing up, Wendy wasn’t sure if Louie would be into Halloween this year, but he was. Every day when he came home from preschool, he’d be talking about what he wanted to be, only it kept changing. First a karate guy. Then a wizard. Then the Pokey Little Puppy. Then a robot. Then a karate guy again.

  The amazing thing is, the actual night of the thirty-first is the full moon, Amelia said. That makes the whole thing ten times as intense.

  Louie had been sitting in the kitchen with them, coloring, when they were discussing it. Halloween’s magic, right? he asked her.

  Kind of, Wendy said. Some people think strange things happen that night. But you don’t have to be scared. We’ll be with you the whole time.

  Are ghosts real? he said.

  I never saw one, Wendy told him.

  Some kids in my class said ghosts are real.

  Maybe if you went to a cemetery, Amelia told him. But you won’t have to worry here.

  Josh had a gig that night. It was only the second time since her mother disappeared that someone had called to have him play at a party, and at first he wasn’t going to take the job.

  Halloween’s a crazy-enough night on a regular year, he said.

  You should go, Wendy told him. Amelia and I will stay with Louie, and we won’t go anyplace except around the neighborhood.

  No subways, he said. Not the parade in the Village.

  We’ll rent a couple of movies, that’s all, Wendy said. We won’t even put them on till Louie’s in bed.

  Amelia wanted to see Carrie, and Rosemary’s Baby. My mom says those are classics, she said.

  Louie had gone back to the robot idea. They had put together a robot costume for him with a bunch of cardboard boxes spray-painted silver and some flexible air-conditioning duct tubes Amelia found in the basement of her building to go over his arms, but when they put the colander on his head, he started to cry. He said he didn’t want to be a robot after all.

  With all the costumes in his collection—his wizard suit and his cowboy chaps and his tiger tail and his golden cape and his pirate hook band and the little checked suit their mother had got him one time at the Goodwill that they called his Fred Astaire get-up—when it got to the actual time to dress up, Louie couldn’t decide on anything. In the end they put on his Spiderman pajamas, only with shoes on and a jacket, because it was starting to get chilly.

  He didn’t want to wear the jacket. If all anyone sees is my pajama bottoms, they won’t even know I’m Spidey, he told her.

  You can tell them, Wendy said. Plus, you can act like you’re crawling up walls.

  How?

  Pretend.

  Wendy and Amelia decided to put on witch costumes for taking him around. Amelia’s was a black leotard with a cape she’d found at the Salvation Army. Wendy had planned to wear a long black dress she’d gotten for her aunt Andy’s graduation party for becoming a paralegal last year, but when she tried it on that afternoon, it was too small.

  I bet there’d be something in your mother’s closet, Amelia said.

  Wendy hadn’t been in her mother’s room since the day it happened. She figured she had to go there sometime.

  Louie was watching a special, Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin. Amelia opened the door.

  Her mother used to give Josh a hard time about the way, when he took his pants off, he’d leave everything on the floor, like someone who’d
melted, and all that was left of him were these two scrunched-up pants legs with a couple of socks coming out the bottom and a pair of boxer shorts inside.

  Now there were many days’ worth of dirty clothes scattered on the floor. On the side of the bed where he slept, the sheets were bunched up and wrinkled, and a half dozen empty glasses lay on the floor by the bed.

  The bureau though, with her mother’s makeup and the photographs in their silver frames, was just the same as always. Her mom’s earring tree. The picture of her mom and Josh on their honeymoon in New Orleans, standing in front of the Louis Armstrong statue. A framed drawing Wendy had made for Mother’s Day last year in Japanese animation style—a picture of this superhero mother in a hot-pink jumpsuit with thunderbolts up the sides. A set of belly-dancer castanets Josh had given her one year, that she actually learned how to use, and an ankle bracelet.

  She opened the door to her mother’s side of the closet. Amelia was standing next to her.

  Remember, Amelia said, they’re just clothes.

  Her mom had always said she liked dress-ups better than regular clothes. She had to have a few of those for work, naturally—her gray suit, and a blue one that Josh said made her look like a flight attendant. She had one black skirt and a couple of dresses she called the Secretary Collection, but the rest of the closet was full of her other stuff, from before she got her job, or for times when she and Josh went out on the town.

  Wendy fingered them one by one: her gypsy skirt, her West Side Story dress and a leopard skin-print cat suit and a Chinese silk jacket trimmed with fur. The yellow dress she’d worn to the wedding where she met Josh. She had an actual tutu someone had given her, bought at a fund-raiser for the New York City Ballet.

  Nobody else’s mother had things like these in her closet: a pair of silver pants with a matching silver belt, that she wore with a gold leotard; a skirt made out of a fabric that looked like fish scales; an actual rhinestone crown—and she wore it one time, too. There was the black dress Wendy remembered, full length, with just the right sleeves for a witch, the kind that hang down like dripping icicles.

  Your mom had the coolest stuff, Amelia said.

  Wendy slid the dress off the hanger and pulled her shirt over her head. She stepped out of her pants. Even with a friend like Amelia, she pulled in her stomach and held the front of the dress against her bra.

  Look at this, Amelia said, studying the cosmetics. White powder. We could make ourselves really pale and put on dark lipstick. Wendy could hear Lucy’s voice lecturing Linus in the other room. She pulled the black dress over her head and slid her arms into the sleeves.

  Wendy never knew when it was going to hit her—some little thing that sucked her down into the undertow. It happened now, standing in her parents’ bedroom in her underwear, the dress halfway over her. She felt her throat tighten, and the bones in her knees seemed to go soft, and when she tried to breathe, the air seemed to sting.

  She felt dizzy. She wondered if this was how it felt to be drunk. She thought she might drop to the floor. She heard a voice say Mom before she realized the voice was hers. She was on her knees, with her head still buried in the fabric of the dress.

  It was the perfume that had hit her. Months since her mother had put on this dress, her scent clung to the fabric still. For a moment, it was as if she was there in the room. Wendy wished she could stay in this spot forever, just breathing her in.

  One good thing about Amelia was how she understood moments like this, and didn’t try to fix everything. She kept rummaging in the closet, commenting on the clothes, as if there was nothing strange about her friend lying there on the closet floor with her face buried in the fabric.

  I’ve got a dress like that, too, she said finally. I can never find the head hole.

  Wendy pulled the dress the rest of the way on. Her breathing was coming evenly again, though there were still tears in her eyes.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair had gotten longer in the last month, and in the shadowy room, standing among the piles of dirty clothes, she actually did look like a witch. She raised her arms out to the sides and let the fabric hang down.

  And as for you, my little pretty, she said. As suddenly as the wave of grief had hit her this time, it had passed over. She could hear her brother calling her.

  My show’s over, he said from the doorway. Can we go trick-or-treating now?

  Before they went back in the living room, Wendy reached for the bottle of aftershave on Josh’s bureau and patted some on her neck and arms. If you were going to smell like one of your parents, it was better to smell like the one who wasn’t dead.

  Louie was sitting by the door with his jacket on and his goody bag in his hands. They had safety-pinned the cape of his Spiderman pajamas on the back of his parka to make his character a little more recognizable.

  Out on the street, things were a lot quieter than on other Halloweens. They passed a couple of ghosts, a Power Ranger, and one princess, but nobody’s costume looked scary, and fewer decorations were up. The moon had not yet risen, but the night was clear, and though the air felt cool, it was a good night for trick-or-treating.

  They went to the building next door, where Wendy knew the doorman.

  Who do we have here? he said to Louie. A pirate?

  I’m Spiderman, Louie told him.

  They took the elevator to the top. We can work our way down the stairs, Amelia said, and then she stopped herself. Oh my God, she said. I wasn’t thinking.

  It’s okay, said Wendy. That’s what we always do.

  They went to four apartments on the twelfth floor, then walked to the eleventh. One woman gave them little American flags instead of candy, and a man in the other apartment told them to be careful as he sprinkled Hershey Kisses in their bags.

  These are totally safe, but why should you trust me? he said. For all you know, I could have loaded them with anthrax.

  At the tenth floor, they got mini Almond Joy bars and Tootsie Roll pops. On the ninth, more American flags. Louie was dragging.

  Other years, when she and her mom and Josh had taken him around, they couldn’t get him to go home, he was so into it. Now they had to remind him to say Trick or treat.

  At the eighth floor, he asked if they could go home now. Sure, Louie, Wendy said. But we hardly did any trick-or-treating.

  I thought it was going to be magic, he said. I thought ghosts would come.

  I told you we didn’t need to worry about ghosts, Louie, she said.

  She looked at him, bundled in his jacket, with the bottoms of his pajamas stuck into the tops of his work boots and one side of his cape drooping down in back where the safety pin had come undone. He was not sucking his thumb, but probably only because he didn’t have his hands free.

  I wanted there to be ghosts, he said.

  After they got him into bed, they fixed a pot of hot chocolate. I always wanted to see this movie, Wendy said. She was looking at the picture of Carrie in her prom dress on the front of the box. The actress playing her had blood dripping down her face and her hair was a mess, but Wendy was thinking how thin she was and wishing she could look that way.

  I brought over something else for us to do first, Amelia said. I was saving it for a surprise.

  She reached into the shopping bag she’d brought over to carry her costume. She pulled out a beat-up box. My mom’s old Ouija board, she said. She’s had this since way back when she was our age.

  Amelia set it on the table. My mom said this board actually told her one time that she was going to live in New York and have a daughter with brown hair. Not only that, but this other time when she was having a sleepover with a friend of hers, the friend’s dead grandmother sent her all these messages about how she needed to break up with her boyfriend because he wasn’t a safe person to be around, and the next year he got in a car accident and died. She probably would have been killed, too, if they hadn’t broken up. Either that or permanently paralyzed.

  Wendy looked at the boa
rd, the rows of letters and the little plastic piece in the middle that was supposed to move around all by itself and spell out the messages. Or not all by itself. Controlled by spirits.

  You never know how strong the power will be, but sometimes you can actually talk to the dead, Amelia said. If you want to.

  At first, they did easy things. Are you a good spirit or an evil one?

  Good.

  How are you feeling tonight?

  Fine.

  How old do you think we are?

  The plastic piece wobbled between thirteen and fourteen, but Amelia’s birthday was just one month away and Wendy’s soon after, so that made sense.

  Spirit, we would like to contact a person my friend has been worried about tonight, if possible. We’d like to know how she is.

  Are you sure?

  Amelia looked at Wendy.

  Yes.

  The two of them held hands tightly over the plastic piece for a moment before asking the question. You should do it, Amelia told her.

  I am looking for a lost parent, she said. She didn’t know why, but she had a hard time saying the word mother.

  There’s someone I need to reach, she said. Someone who went away.

  Sure you want to hear? Not always good news.

  I know.

  Outside the window, the moon had risen over the city. A siren sounded. In the apartment across the way, a man and a woman were watching television dressed in monster suits, but without the masks. The candle flickered from inside the smiling face of Josh and Louie’s jack-o’-lantern, making an orange glow, and from the kitchen came the smell of chocolate.

  It would be better knowing than wondering.

  Louie called from the bedroom, Sissy, where are you?

  I’m right here, Louie, she said. You can go back to sleep.

  Is Halloween over?

  Soon, Louie.

  It’s just us here?

  Just us and Amelia.

  She waited a minute to see if he’d go back to sleep. Silence. She turned back to the Ouija board.