Halloween and Other Seasons

“About as expected,” I answered.

“You mean like all the rest?” There was an undercurrent of venom in her voice now. I told you so and I knew it and Here we go again, her tone said, without her saying it.

I tried anyway. “Have you ever felt, Jacqueline, that you just didn’t fit in? The children in this school are even worse than normal. They didn’t show any interest at all. It was like I was talking to thirty sacks of potatoes. And the Vice Principal was almost unfriendly. I have the same bad feeling, Jacqueline. Just like all the other times. Like I don’t belong. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

She sighed heavily, and turned her near-perfect face, framed in long black hair, slowly away from the window toward me. She pinned me with her violet eyes. “I’ve always belonged, Howard. The only question I’ve ever asked myself is why in hell I married you.”

I opened my mouth but she turned her attention back to the window and her drink.

“The back yard needs tending,” she said, tonelessly. “Every one of these houses we’ve rented, in every one of these rotten little towns, always has an overgrown backyard. This one’s worse than the rest. Do something about it.”

I said nothing.

As I turned and left the kitchen she called out casually, “I’m going out for dinner. There’re TV dinners in the freezer if you want something. And I’ll need the car again tomorrow.”

~ * ~

The next day was no better. When I entered the classroom all the desks were facing the back of the room. The day before, every student had been staring intently at the ceiling, which made me look, too. The boy in the cranberry colored baseball cap was among them. From that moment on, when they all broke into laughter, they had me. Today was no better. I should have made a joke, but nothing came to mind.

I tried to teach the day’s lesson, to ignore them, but instead they ignored me, kept their desks turned around.

Soon they began to talk and joke.

The chalk trembled in my hand. I closed my eyes, leaned my forehead against the cool blackboard and then turned around, trembling with rage.

“This isn’t right!” I stammered hoarsely, but they ignored me.

I dropped the chalk and walked out of the classroom.

The Assistant Principal was there in the hallway, and I almost ran into her.

“Having a bit of trouble?” she asked, and I couldn’t help but detect the near-disdain in her voice.

“Yes. I—”

She moved around me and stuck her head in the classroom door.

“That’s enough!” she shouted. “Get those desks back where they belong!”

There was instant quiet, followed by the shuffling of moving furniture.

The assistant principal confronted me again in the hall.

“Just treat ‘em like animals,” she said, giving me a smile that told me what she already knew: that I wasn’t capable of treating them like animals, or anything at all.

She turned on her heels and marched off.

When I walked back into the classroom the talking began again. By the end of the period they had all faced their desks toward the back of the classroom once more.

~ * ~

I took a different route home, the same I had ridden that morning. There had been no trouble then, but this time as I left the school behind me, turning my bicycle into a wide street with houses set well back on manicured lawns, a wall of hedges suddenly thrust up in front of me. I drew to a stop. The wall was rushing like a living wave toward me. I turned my bike only to see another behind me. To either side the houses began to disappear, sharp green buds pushing out from their trim fronts, doors and windows and shutters, devouring them. The hedge drew in on me from all sides. I felt cool wet green and smelled rich oxygen.

“No!” I shouted in panic.

There was a driveway to my right, still clear of obstruction, and I drove the bicycle that way, the hedges closing in on me as I did so. As the driveway reached the side of the house branches pushed out of the siding toward me. The house disappeared in a blanket of green. The hedges pushed the bike to the right, where another wall of green awaited me. I felt the caress of soft buds and a whisper in my ear.

Yesss…

 I screamed, driving the bicycle forward. There was a free-standing garage in front of me bursting into green before my eyes, the hedge closing in from both sides in front of it. But there was a slim opening to the left leading to the backyard and I peddled fiercely at it, pushing through as the branches like cold hands sought to pull me in—

And then I was through the suffocating hedge, the bike shooting forward into the clear backyard and toward a well-separated line of forsythia bushes that marked the backyard boundary between houses.

I stopped, skidding on the grass, and turned around.

The house was as it had been—neat, trim, unblemished by green limbs and tiny leaves.

The hedge was gone from the driveway, from the far street.

I turned and dismounted the bicycle, rolling it through a gap between forsythias and into the abutting backyard and then to a new street and eventually home.

~ * ~

I tried one more time.

“I just don’t fit in.”

Jacqueline laughed. “You’ve never fit in,” she said, her voice slurred, and then she laughed shortly again. “And I do mean that in every way.”

 She was disheveled, the front of her dress buttoned incorrectly. She had obviously had much more to drink than the vodka in front of her. Her lipstick was smeared and her eyes unfocused as she bobbed her head around to regard me.

She smiled.

“I’ll need the car tomor—”

“Have you ever felt physically smothered?” I asked, ignoring her.

She looked at her vodka tonic. “All the time.”

“No, I mean physically. For real. Like everything, everything you’ve tried and failed at, your whole life, all your unhappiness, was literally closing in on you. As if…hedges, actual green hedges, were pushing you in from all sides and wanted to swallow you whole—”

It was her turn to interrupt. She laughed and then hiccupped, then brought her drink to her lips before putting it down again.

“Harold, you are a moron.” She got unsteadily to her feet, forgot the drink, pushing it aside. It tipped over and fell from the kitchen table, breaking in a pool of clear liquid and glass shards.

She moved past me unsteadily, pointing languidly at the refrigerator.

“TV. Dinner,” she said. “I’m…out. Need the car…tomorrow. Ride your bike again…”

She walked to the front door, leaving it open behind her, and in a few moments I heard the car door slam and then the engine start.

In the empty house I looked out through the kitchen window at the backyard, overgrown with weeds and bushes and what looked for a moment like a rising tide of hedges, which abruptly vanished.

~ * ~

I took a third route the next morning. After Jacqueline had left the night before, the Assistant Principal had called and told me the school had decided it wasn’t working out and that I should not continue teaching. Would I please come in the next morning to sign some papers and pick up a check for two day’s work.

The new route was out of the way but clear. In effect, I was riding in a wide circle to get to the school. As I turned onto an unfamiliar street that would bring me back in the right direction, the boy with the cranberry colored baseball cap was crossing the street in front of me.

He leered at me as I went by and shouted, “So long!”