Peripheral Vision
Halloween falls the weekend before Election Day. Come as a political character! the invitation says.
"Who shall we be?" asks Walker, Meg's husband. He assumes they're going, and going as a couple. She's teetered on the cusp of leaving him all fall. He seems oblivious, surely grounds enough for leaving.
At night in bed, he sleeps while resentment rises and hangs above her like steam off a compost pile on a winter morning. Younger, angry with him, she could drop through the escape hatch of sleep into dreams of sex with her old boyfriend; then, aroused, she'd wake Walker to make love. Now they don't make up that way: symptom or cause of the trouble?
Lying beside him, tense, awake, she walks through their house in her imagination, inventories the contents of each room, labeling the furniture and artifacts of their marriage for some apocalyptic yard sale. Carving up their shared lives would be as delicate as separating Siamese twins joined at the heart.
In daylight, she starts with her closet, filling bags with clothes she's too old or heavy or sad to ever wear again. How subjective is the line between trash and treasure, Meg thinks, stuffing a beaded black dress into a bulging grocery bag for the thrift shop.
Christ Episcopal Church runs the Bargain Box; its proceeds support the homeless shelter. After turning in her cast-offs and receiving the tax receipt, Meg trolls the aisles. It is a box, overflowing today with the detritus of an affluent congregation in the throes of an epidemic of house cleaning, or divorce.
On a folding table littered with china and candy dishes and chipped figurines, she finds them: the Kennedys, Jack and Jackie. The celluloid masks are vintage souvenirs, the original price tag still stuck inside—thirty-nine cents.
Holding the brittle masks gingerly, she scans the racks for a simple sheath: brocade or silk. She'll wear her mother's white gloves and pearls.
The suit almost jumps off the hanger. Pure '60s. Pale pink wool, pencil skirt, and brief boxy jacket with a deep, round collar. The label reads Peck and Peck. She remembers their elegant black-and-white ads in The New Yorker when she was a teenager wearing go-go boots and minis. Size eight. It should fit.
"Could you hold these masks for me? I want to try this on," she says to the plump volunteer at the cash register.
"Oh, my goodness," says the woman. "Jack and Jackie."
The skirt's waist is snug, but she can leave the button at the placket undone. The jacket is perfect. Meg preens a moment, admiring how the scoop neck frames her collarbones. Once, long ago. Walker kissed his way along her clavicle. When she was younger, people said she looked like Jackie, or Audrey Hepburn. Maybe it was her long legs, wide eyes, high cheekbones, and ballet school posture. She'd laughed it off but been secretly flattered. No one's noticed a resemblance for years, even before both Jackie and Audrey died.
She fastens the buttons—like little blackberries, glistening, glittering against the pale blush wool. Meg can't resist showing off and steps into the shop.
The cashier nods approval. "Fits like it was made for you. And look what I've found!" She holds up a black pillbox hat with a ruffle of veil.
Meg slips the mask on and steps to the mirror, holding the hat. Her reflection startles her: the stiff celluloid face above the pink suit has come alive. Jackie looks back at her.
"Eerie," the woman says.
Meg smiles bur then remembers her face, her own face, is hidden.
"What did you say?"
The mask distorts her voice; she'll have to speak louder, pitch her words higher.
"I'll wear the suit home. Give my husband a surprise."
Meg drives in her sneakers and the pink suit, Jack and Jackie lying on the seat beside her, staring at the ceiling of the car. In the driveway, she puts on her mask then rings the doorbell.
"Trick or treat!" she says. "Here's Jack, for you.".....
Published in Iron Horse Literary Review: Vol.11/No.5, Halloween 2009
Included
in Amazing
Graces: A Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women
