“The following little girls….”
It never crossed her mind that they would have to do exercises with their Halloween costumes on. It makes no sense. She stands against the coat hook, her head sweating under her pointed pompom hat, and waits.
“I don’t want to be a clown.”
It’s almost dark out. Younger children are already making the rounds, accompanied by parents and older siblings. Jack is up in Madeleine’s room, where she stands, clown hat in hand, her face glum despite her big painted smile, and framed by the ruffled collar. He wants badly to laugh but he stays solemn. “Why not, sweetie?”
Madeleine thinks. “I grew out of it.”
“I think it fits you fine.”
She looks down.
He asks, “What would you rather go as?”
“A golfer.”
“A golfer? How come?”
“I don’t know”—which is the truth.
“Well now, I have a set of golf clubs and a golf bag and we could fix you up with a cap and a moustache and whatnot …”
Madeleine brightens—a moustache?
“… but do you think that might kind of hurt Maman’s feelings?”
Oh. Madeleine hadn’t thought of that. She feels suddenly terribly sad for Maman, when she thinks of how Mr. March touched the beautiful clown costume she sewed. She says, “I could be a clown going golfing.”
Now he laughs. “Yeah, you could.”
“With a moustache.”
“Sure.”
They go into the bathroom and Jack wipes the red lipstick from her face — grinds it off with a face cloth, then takes one of Mimi’s eyebrow pencils and draws a handlebar moustache on her upper lip. She goes into her room and gets her pillow. Stuffs it under her costume, then enters her parents’ room and stands in front of the full-length mirror. She is Mr. March dressed up as a clown disguised with a moustache going golfing. She smiles. “Thanks Dad.”
She shoulders her golf bag and sets out with Auriel and Lisa. Auriel is a Hawaiian dancer with a coconut bra, and Lisa is Judy Jetson with go-go boots. Madeleine has taken only the putter so the bag won’t be too heavy — she will use it for candy. Her Unicef box jingles already with pennies that Dad put in “to get the ball rolling.” The PMQs are aglow with grinning pumpkins, alive with ghosts and skeletons, cowboys, Indians, pirates and fairies. Mike is dressed as a bedraggled soldier of fortune, despite his father’s offer to help rig him out as Billy Bishop. Arnold Pinder wears his dad’s camouflaged hunting outfit and totes a BB gun. Both boys have streaked burnt cork under their eyes. Roy Noonan is dressed as a hot dog.
After trick-or-treating at a couple of houses, Madeleine drifts away from her friends, drawn by a sudden urge to try out her golf swing in the park. “Fore!” she yells, and swings into the darkness. The iron weight pulls her around full circle. Grace and Marjorie scurry past. Marjorie is a pregnant lady, Grace is a teenager with a stuffed bosom and smeary lipstick. Marjorie turns and spits, “Watch what you’re doing, Madeleine!” Madeleine swings and swings until she is dizzy, and discovers a new kind of crazy laughter as a runaway ventriloquist puppet — opening and closing her mechanical jaw, head jerking back and forth in time with her evil laughter. She laughs out of the park and down St. Lawrence Avenue, past Claire McCarroll in her bunny costume holding her dad’s hand.
At the bottom of St. Lawrence she runs into a bear — just someone in an old raccoon coat, a paper bag over their head, with eyeholes. As Mr. March might say, this individual has not made much of an effort.
“What brings you out this evening?” inquires Mr. March with an English accent disguised as a clown with a moustache going golfing.
“Free stuff, what else?” Colleen Froelich. Who would have thought she would stoop to something as fun and normal as trick-or-treating?
They are at the schoolyard. Madeleine dropped a bar of soap into her golf bag before she left home, so she must have known she was going to do something bad, though she’d no plans to use it. She tips the bag over and some rockets and crappy candy kisses tumble out along with the soap. She has lost her Unicef box. She takes the soap and writes PEAHEN all over the grade four windows, staggering, scrawling and calling out like a parrot in a pirate movie, “Peahen! Peahen! Grawk!”
Colleen says, “You’re crazy.”
Madeleine collapses on the ground beside her, giggling uncontrollably. “Why thank you, Peahen.”
“What’s ‘peahen’ supposed to mean?”
“Hmmm, qu’est-ce que c’est la ‘peahen’?”
Colleen leaves. Madeleine lies on her back in the schoolyard in the dark, the laughter tapering off to no more than a dark trickle out the side of her mouth. Then she rises, slings the golf bag over her shoulder and follows Algonquin Drive up behind the houses, taking slap-shots, whacking pebbles with the putter as she goes. She hears one hit a garbage can. She wonders what would happen if she heard the smash of glass, and keeps on whacking. She cuts through the park and takes a swing at the oak tree. Bark flies up, exposing a slash of white. She chops and chops, each metallic blow an ache that numbs her palms, travels to her shoulders and rattles her head on its post; she chops until her bangs are slick with sweat, until her arms have turned to rubber, and she figures she has just about chopped that tree right down.
Mimi is surprised to find no candy in Madeleine’s golf bag. “What did you do all evening if you weren’t trick-or-treating?”
“We gave our candy to a little kid who lost his.”
It doesn’t feel like a lie because she didn’t think about it before she said it. She hides the bent golf club behind the furnace, and goes to bed with a stomach ache.
“You have a stomach ache because you ate all your candy, don’t tell me des petites histoires about poor little boys losing theirs.”
The next morning the grade four windows are perfectly clean. Maybe she didn’t soap them. Maybe it was all a dream. But after the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer, the principal, Mr. Lemmon, comes on the PA system and announces that there has been vandalism—“wanton vandalism”—in the park, and that school property has been violated. “The offenders are invited to come forward and confess. Otherwise, shame on you.”
Madeleine feels prickly, and clammy as though she had wet her pants, and her head feels set to burst like a smashed pumpkin.
Before supper.
“Dad, say someone commits vandalism, do they get sent to training school?”
“That depends on what they did and how old they are.”
“How old is a juvenile delinquent?”
“Under twenty-one.”
“Oh.”
“And over twelve. Why?”
“If a person was my age they wouldn’t send them to training school, would they?”
“Well, what did this eight-year-old person do?”
“I’m almost nine.”
Jack refrains from smiling. “What did this almost-nine-year-old do?”
“Nothing. But what if they broke something or something?”
“Well. I’d have to say that, unless it was something of great value, something that couldn’t be fixed”—it can be fixed. Windows get washed, tree bark grows back—“or unless it was a person who was harmed … I’d say it would be sufficient for the guilty party to apologize.”
“But no one knows they did it.”
“All the more reason they should come clean.”
“Confess?”