She drove him into more affluent areas and took him from door to door as if he were five years old, and as if she were trying to make herself that age in the process. She too had a plastic jack-o-lantern pail. She too got chocolate thrust into the pile within her pail. Experiences accompanying him in a childhood that had been robbed from her, for whatever embarrassment they caused him, were a million times better than being a mother waiting on the sidelines with vicarious yearnings. The quest of a chocolate mendicant, a ghoulish monk seeking alms, was leading her into the simple pleasures that were the foundation for appreciating life, from disengaging out of one's limited perspectives and hopeful adult futuristic conquests, and to be in awe of the entity. And yet with each new house his aversion to say, "Trick or treat?" increased as with his tacit animadversion of his mother. House after house there were chocolate benefactors and benefactresses with similar wisecracks: "You are a little big and old to be trick or treating, aren't you -- I can't see how old your ghost friend is but he seems a bit tall too." As much as he tried to suppress it, his loathing of her was ready to disgorge from his mouth like vomit. An hour into this childish foray, she still did not have any Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and so she told him that with ten or fifteen more houses there would be a probability of acquiring her favorite brand of candy. Somewhere after the fifth extra house he felt a full abhorrence for the witch who put spells on men, drank their pee, had men, lost men, made a family by abandoning him when she went off to Europe, lost a family, found him an irritant when she was acting the part of the artist, suffocated him in embarrassments like this when she was trying to act the part of a mother, who never connected him to outside relatives like his real father or Peggy, and when he finally had some semblance of a father she caused his departure. "I'm sick of you," he said. I want to go someplace else but I don't have an aunt, an uncle, or anybody to go to. Nobody cares about me." "What is your problem?" she asked. "You taking me to trick or treating like I am six years old is pathetic. That's my problem. Pull it over. I'm getting out and walking home." "Christ, why can't you just be happy?" "Don't take the Lord's name in vain," he said. "Don't bore me in Michaelish babble," she told him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy."