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.
I took her inside a real school bus once and it was like a grown man being led onto the field at Yankee Stadium. She was awed. She treated the rows of cheap green vinyl seating like church pews, making a point of sitting in every single one. I made sure to show her the hump seat in the back, the one that rests over the rear wheel well.
“That’s where the awesome kids sit and write out dirty Mad Libs,” I told her. She nodded in reverence.
The day of her first ballet class, I ran into a mom who asked me if my kid liked princesses.
“No, she likes buses,” I said, proud the girl had resisted the whole phenomenon. She wasn’t a sucker like the rest of her peers. Her interests were real, not some byproduct of corporate brainwashing. “I don’t think she really cares about princesses.”
“Oh, she will,” said the mom. She had a gleefully ominous air about her, as if she enjoyed the prospect of my future suffering.