I’m not sure how Max wound up in my life. Our family didn’t drape cobwebs across the porch railings or set up fog machines in the foyer. Jack-o-lantern trash bags were as spooky as we got. So the fact that my mom gave my older sister and me a six-foot inflatable skeleton when we were in grade school seems peculiar now. But, back then, it didn't matter how he got there. He was there to stay.
Max was everything I dreamt of in a romantic lead: tall (72 inches, according to the packaging), dark, and handsome. Trim build, perfect teeth, permanent smile, quiet demeanor, easily portable.
Max wound up hanging around long after the piles of fallen leaves had been jumped in and swept away. He donned Santa Hats and clown costumes. During lazy summer months he would come with us to the pool, showing off his impeccable dead man's float. And, if the other mothers were any indication, I wasn't the only one who had my eye on him. Max was prime cougar bait. Lounging in vinyl-strapped chaises, they couldn’t take their eyes off him. That was my first taste of the primal joy one feels when one's mate is coveted by others. The perfect boy pool toy.
After a few months it occurred to me that it was a bit indecent for Max to wander around all day in his eternal birthday suit. I decided to dress him in some play clothes I had long since found too childish for my sophisticated seven-year-old palate. Propped in a chair, scooted so close that the edge of the table pressed against his inflated sternum, Max would join my sister and me for lunch. Six legs dangling down towards the sparkling laminate floor. Four limbs tanned dark from the summer months. Two limbs blazing white with neon-colored hems reaching halfway down puffed out shinbones.
Most women have difficulty identifying exactly what brought about their body image issues. Normally it’s a complicated cocktail of blame: side comments from adult figures, peer pressure from - well - peers, and societal expectations glossily staring back from magazine covers. Mine wasn’t. It started with my skeletal best friend, straight up. If Max could fit into my Osh Koshes, I clearly needed to grow about twenty-four inches taller and no more than two inches wider. Oh, and weigh approximately half a pound. No more. After all, his name is Max.
But Max had his own insecurities. He was clearly very self-conscious about his lack of hair, if not his lack of skin. I didn't mind at all, but I could see it bothered him. And I wanted him to feel good about himself. One day I took a blond wig, a remnant from my sister's former days as a mermaid, and Scotch taped the frizzy bleached hairpiece to Max’s skull. Despite his neck snapping back from the weight, he loved his new look. Long, ratty hair. Gaunt cheeks. Pure hair band bad boy.
Shortly after I began dressing Max, I discovered how much easier it was to put him in dresses than pants. No safety pinning of the waist (a dangerous endeavor around Max’s delicate constitution), no fishing up a pant leg for a collapsed femur. Eventually Max wound up cross dressing more and more. It was just simpler. I remember my mom recommending that we switch his name from Max to Maxine. Ridiculous, I thought. That’s a girl’s name, and Max is clearly a BOY.
Over time, though, Max started to show his age. A few months in he wasn’t as perky as he used to be. He’d feel fine in the morning, but by early afternoon, sitting at the table, he’d start to slouch. His shoulders slumped with the weight of the pastel-colored overall jumper I had wrestled him into after breakfast. When riding in the car, his chest would surrender to the seat belt, effectively folding him in half. At first I thought it was just a phase. A mid-after-life crisis. He'd eventually snap out of it. But when he didn’t even have the conviction to wear his blond hairpiece anymore, his cranium caving in from the burden, I knew it wasn’t good.
My mom tried to perform emergency surgery on him. We laid him out in the family room, his whiteness standing out in clinical contrast to the dark tan carpet. My mom pushed down on his chest while I lowered my ear close to his joints, listening for that malignant hisssss. Every time we located a puncture, my mom would apply a makeshift bone graft using a patch from a raft repair kit. After each session Max would recover for a little while. But, eventually, we had used up an entire repair kit and Max still struggled. The patches hardened into callouses that snagged his skirts and caught his hair, strands ripping out of his damaged mane.
My mom knew it was time, even though I denied it. I was certain that another surgery would make him right as rain again. More and more often, though, I would just leave Max in my room, slouched between the toy chest and the closet door. It took too much effort to clothe him every day. It grew depressing, being around his deflated state. Eventually I moved on to other friends, Barbie and Breyer Horses and Skip-It. All fun and carefree. It wasn’t until after a few weeks that I even noticed he was gone. One day, while cleaning, my mom had deflated Max and rolled him up, wedging him into a crevice in the toy chest. A few years later, our family moved into a new house. I don’t think Max made the cut.
For the first Halloween in our new home, my mom went to the store and bough another inflatable skeleton, this one just 48 inches tall. I tried dressing him up, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe it was a matter of scale, the fact that Max was a good head and shoulders taller than me, that made him seem real. On this smaller, squatter skeleton, the wig looked ridiculous and out of place. It was like putting lipstick on a bike. It didn’t make any sense. We hung up the skeleton by our front door to welcome the Trick-or-Treaters and them promptly stowed the flattened bones away with the pumpkin baskets and orange trash bags.
It has been years since I last saw Max. Looking back, I’m actually pretty impressed that my mom was so accepting of my imaginary life with him. A twelve-year-old playing with a full-sized skeleton? That scene would definitely raise some eyebrows in most nosy neighborhoods. But I never remember my mom saying a word about what the people down the street or around the pool would think. She didn't care why I cared about him. She just let me play, let me take care of this other being. And then, when I felt burdened being around him, when I felt guilty about abandoning him, she let me off the hook.
This October was the first Halloween of my adult life where trick-or-treating preparations were in order. I had moved into a new home, my first house, on a suburban street streaming with children. A few days before the night of begging was to take place, I stopped by a store on my way home from work to pick up some bags of chocolate-covered charity. Wandering the aisles of FUN SIZED! and PAKS A PUNCH! and SWEET TREATS!, doing borderline calculus to figure out the best deal, I spied Halloween decorations peeking out from an end display. I couldn’t resist.
I walked over, scanning the shelves of plastic cauldrons and preposterously hairy spiders. I thumbed through costumes of Sexy Nurse! and Sexy Bumble Bee! and Sexy Nun! (Halloween is about zombies and vampires. When did slutty replace scabby, may I ask?) Eventually, I came across what I had been searching for: strung up above the bottom-shelf fog machines, a row of skeletons of all shapes and sizes. Glow-in-the dark ones, glittery ones, ones with red eyes and motion detection.
I don’t know if it was their lecherous stares or the fact that they were molded out of polyurethane, but none of them seemed worth taking home. None were like Max, with his open smile and vulnerable softness. None of them came alive. None of them needed me.
I picked up my shopping basket, heavy with Kit Kats and Butterfingers, and headed toward the check-out counter. I could try to search for him on the store's website. Heck, I could Google him. But that somehow feels cheap. I've always been a little queasy about the idea of internet dating. I'd rather just wait for fate to bring us back together. If it's meant to be, it'll happen. Maybe next October we'll meet again.
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