Vacancies

Dad’s elbow knocks into a white ping-pong ball with a dark pupil, blue iris, and squiggly bloodshot lines. It rolls off the splintery wooden worktable and parachutes onto a maroon rug caked with dust. Our basement is filled with ping-pong eyeballs. Dozens of them. They peek out of old desk drawers and TV cabinets. They sometimes get batted around like toys by Izzy, our calico cat, her litter box situated next to a big black furnace that heats our house. They disappear under boxes of my old high school binders or trash bags filled with ratty t-shirts only to be found months, sometimes years, later.

“I want to be the Halloween version of this,” Dad once said as we drove through a nearby neighborhood, an infamous metropolis of Christmas lights.

“How do the neighbors fall asleep?” I asked, squinting at a large flashing Santa with arms curled around the chimney bricks.

Dad sits at his wooden worktable, screwing open a tube of acrylic red paint, the basement a dim gray all around him. His tanned Italian skin is rough; the beard and mustache he shaved a couple years ago have since given way to grayish stubble. Red spots mark the side of his forehead where he once had a skin cancer scare, likely induced by one too many summers spent on the Jersey Shore, cleaning the beach and carrying cinder blocks to build a now-shabby hotel, its bar frequented by MTV’s Jersey Shore castmates.

Each year, those ping-pong balls are inserted into eye sockets or glued onto heads that transform our yard for several weeks each October. (Then again, last year Dad forgot about the red bulbs near the front door, and I noticed them flashing a saturated crimson in mid-July.) In the past several years, Dad’s taken to inviting over friends to eat pretzel-shaped fingers and gawk at his decorations. This Halloween is no different—except he is also turning sixty, and Mom has ordered a big orange cake with a skeleton in a tuxedo, the words “Aged to Perfection” inscribed in black frosting.

Up the basement stairs in our family room are ordinary things: a light green love seat and couch; a mantel filled with photographs of honeymoons and proms and bus stops. Wooden cat figurines have been placed atop each doorframe so their tails hang down over the corners. Artwork is meticulously arranged on each wall: portraits of green pears and sheet music and the abstract purple sky streaked an enlightened yellow.

Dad walks by me with a tape measure, heading to his prized possession: the graveyard. Dad spent the majority of the past year building a new fence. Its gothic-style pointy spears are packed as precariously as a game of pick-up sticks. Inside it are two crosses stained a dark brown, with black rope tied where the two wooden pieces meet. Between those graves stands, a bit taller, one gray Styrofoam cross, which Dad chiseled out of a larger block during his grave-building phase. I endured this period through much of high school as his outwardly skeptical but secretly enthusiastic assistant. Even as a teenager, I couldn’t deny my delight in his hobby. “Thanks so much, kiddo,” he’d always say, after I neglected a lab report or Russian Lit paper to stamp bloody handprints all over a tombstone.

While we worked, Dad told me stories: How he once sank in quicksand searching for his golf ball, or when he had his car stolen from a gas station but found it around the corner without a stereo. Dad lives for his audience’s reaction. His favorite trick is the “fake fall,” in which he leans onto the balls of his feet, gradually tumbling forward like a domino block. Dad keeps a very straight face, a mechanical stoicism, but immediately smiles when I back away. Lately, Mom has started cracking down whenever he falls toward her: “Please don’t do that ever again,” she says, a serious glare on her face.

If you asked Mom to name her favorite holiday, she probably wouldn’t say Halloween. Maybe Thanksgiving? I imagine she’d shrug. She has her reasons. When I was in high school, Mom once arrived home from work to a trail of blood. It dotted the white kitchen table, lined the white tile floor, and climaxed with a pool of burgundy in the kitchen sink.

“Rich?” she began calling out. “Rich?”

His car was in the garage, and his cell phone was on the counter. She hurried from room to room, searching for her husband. The halls were empty and cold. The kitchen was spotless except for those puddles of red. She started calling local hospitals, one by one, her fingers shaking. Between dials, the phone began to trill.

“Rich?” she picked up.

“I called 911,” he explained from the emergency room. “I cut my wrist while trying to carve a damn skeleton . . . ”

Mom exhaled, gripping around the spiral phone cord, fingers weaving through the negative space.

“At least the blood on the skeleton will be authentic,” Dad later told me, his lower arm stitched up beneath several layers of tape and gauze.

On the right side of our yard is a smaller grave made of grittier Styrofoam. It reads, “Ezekial Aikle / Age 102 / The Good Die Young.” The letters are black, carved back into the foam with a knife and then filled with the darkest paint. Close to Ezekial’s plot is a grave to which Dad has molded a tiny skeleton head. Mom and I rolled our eyes when he first read it to us: “Here lies the remains of Ned / Who’s rumored to be undead / He rises at night it’s said / To try to find his head.” The skeleton’s eyes are large and hollow—no ping-pong pupils.

In the front left of the yard is Elvis. The letters RIP are carved, along with, “Elvis / Jan. 8, 1935 / Aug. 16, 1977 / Get over it.” And don’t forget Euell, located just behind The King: “Euell Gibbons / Ate Healthy / Died Anyway.” Dad tried to explain the comedy of this to me several times. “He was a real health food nut,” he’d exclaim. “Get it?” I was about fifteen years old and suddenly realizing the morbidity of it all—of pretending to bury dead people in our yard, of writing these wacky epitaphs. I knew a few people who died—a childhood friend with a brain tumor, my grandfather with cancer—but never talked to anyone about that grief.

Smack in the middle of the graveyard is a stone taller and wider than the rest. Dad plastered a mask like the face in Edvard Munch’s The Scream on top, its mouth stretched out into a holler, loud and terrified. One word is carved into the foam with care: “Vacancy.”

*

Today’s graveyard contains none of the stones I once printed with fake blood. Instead its graves are those built to replace those that were cruelly wrecked. In ninth grade, I came home to find Dad’s tombstones uprooted and smashed into pieces. Our pumpkins were taken from the front stoop and thrown against the brick walkway, chucked until they exploded into small orange shards. The debris was everywhere and Dad spent that night clearing it and salvaging what he could. His head hung low as he swept the walkway with an old broom. The next day, Dad returned to his worktable, chiseling and painting new graves while I did my math homework next to him.

Since that incident, there’s been at least one notable addition to the yard: Gus the gravedigger. Gus is an automated man Dad built in our basement. He has a wrinkly face, a mask with bold brows, and deep cavities for his brown eyes. The mannequin’s body is clad in a red and black plaid shirt and hooded blue sweatshirt (just in case he gets cold). The hood is used to hide Gus’s bald rubbery head. The last outfit layer is an outdated jean jacket. In his left hand is a lantern. Black boots protect Gus’s nonexistent feet; his legs are sad little stubs without his leather shoes. A shovel, wooden and long, leans against his chest. On Halloween eve, Dad plugs Gus into the cord that runs all the way back by extension, about sixty feet, to an outlet in our garage. Then Gus’s head begins to twitch in unassuming patterns, back and forth, as if he is searching for something but doesn’t know what.

A couple weeks before the Halloween party when Dad turns sixty, I agree to help set up the yard. It’s an especially fall-like Thursday, the pines swaying above like auburn streamers. Dad asks me to follow him to the shed, and I do. He squeezes inside and navigates so far into the small wooden house that I can hardly see him anymore. I move away, wondering why I am here, what help can I be if only one person can fit inside, crowded by plastic people and creatures. Dad maneuvers his way out of the door, carrying a large silver cage in which a skeleton hangs, covered in rags and brown leaves.

I back up onto the grass and wait for him to bring the decoration over to me. Dad breathes hard as he carries him, walking steadily until his foot collides with a root in the ground and, suddenly, the cage, the skeleton, my father, are all falling forward toward me: not fake, let’s-make-my-family-flinch falling, but real gravity’s-got-me-now falling. One by one, the cage, the skeleton, and Dad face plant into the matted brown earth.

“Dad,” I call out, running to him. “Are you okay?”

I hunch down on the ground to where he is wincing, face scrunched in pain. He doesn’t stir, just clenches his jaw even tighter and lets out a brief bellow.

“OWW.”

For a minute I am worried he cannot move, that he will be paralyzed.

Imprinted in my memory is a slideshow of every time I’ve watched someone take a bad fall. First: Nana reaching for a glass on the top shelf of our kitchen cabinet as her knees surrendered. Second: an elderly woman collapsing while at dinner with her young family. (Afterwards, I locked eyes with Mom, knowing she too was thinking about Nana’s fall in our kitchen, about children watching their parents grow old and weak.) And third: Dad breaking a dining room chair on Christmas Eve and colliding into the windowsill, fracturing one of his ribs. Afterward, he made a joke—something like, “Guess I should start up my diet again, ha, ha!”—but I could see he was in pain.

The look on his face now—shriveled and agonizing—reminds me of that night.

“What happened?” he asks me, disoriented.

“You fell,” I say, reaching down to him, placing a hand on his back. “I think you tripped on a root. Or maybe those spider webs. Or the bottom of the cage.”

“ACCCK,” he groans, hobbling to his feet in slow motion. Dad holds onto his hip, where the bone has been replaced by metal that sets off every airport security device. I pick up the skeleton and hold it steady and away.

“Is it broken?” he asks, nodding to the caged bones.

I lift the skeleton a bit higher off the ground. It’s heavy, and I have to summon all my arm strength to make it budge. “He looks okay,” I reply, surveying the damage. “Maybe a bit crooked.”

He limps forward to me and takes the cage with his right hand, grabbing onto his spine with his left.

“I think I may have fractured another rib,” he says.

In the evening I whisper to Mom about Dad’s fall, not wanting to embarrass him.

“He’s overdoing it,” she says. “He always overdoes it. It is just Halloween.”

The next day, Dad falls again. This time, down the neighbors’ basement stairs, while trying to carry a large box of decorations.

When I see Dad after his most recent fall, a big purple bruise blotches his forehead. His eyes are puffy around the sockets.

“Maybe this is a sign you should dress up as a zombie for Halloween,” I suggest.

Cars are finally lining up outside for this year’s Halloween party. The air is cold, the first bitter day of the year. Nothing can compare to last Halloween when it snowed—a freak October blizzard—as light, fluffy flakes dusted the tip-top of each grave. The wind’s weight pushed Gus forward so he looked like he was diving deep into the white earth.

Tonight, friends and family are all here to see our yard. Dad has the lights rigged so they flick on and off with the sounds of thunder, mimicking the epiphanies of lightning. From afar, our house is bright and bold, but inside, it’s the same old paintings, same tired wallpaper, and the occasional rubber spider nestled atop a painting frame or television stand.

Dad suggests we follow him outside with a few guests to see the lights. I grab a coat and make my way down the driveway, toward the unmistakable reds and blues, the open plots in this strange fake cemetery. Dad begins explaining how each motor works, the erratic Feng Shui of grave placement. As he motions, his body is a dark silhouette on the brilliant landscape, his own man-made city of lights.

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