It it 1960 and the McDonough children, the four of us– just shy of the last one, who will arrive in two more years–take our little Halloween sacks and scare the daylights out of our neighbors, and our grandmother’s neighbors especially. This is odd, because they know us from church and the weekly sleepovers and it is also thrilling and powerful there, inside our sweaty masks, this trick we pull on them, hiding our identity, which might also be hiding our potent evil. You never know.
It’s fun for a while but we have our minds turned toward Beulah’s house, many blocks away, so far we have to drive. We love Beulah and she loves us, has loved us since the days we were born. She and my grandmother are best friends of thirty years and we know how she drinks her iced tea, how her pot roast is different from ours but delicious, how her laugh is big and bigger still, the biggest thing about her, and she an abundant woman.
We go easy on her when we knock on her door. She won’t know who we are, but we don’t risk overdoing it. At some point she needs to figure it out because then she will invite us in and we know what will be coming next.
We don’t even look at the big bowl of suckers and bubblegum by the door. We sit in a row on her fancy settee– I think of it now as a fancy settee, but it might have been just a regular couch–and we watch as she opens the drawer of her secretary, her back to us while she rummages around.
She turns around with four nickel candy bars, fanned out in her palm like a hand of canasta. We hold out our sacks and into each she slips a bar. We are excited and special and greedy, sitting there in her overwarm house, our cheeks glowing red.
We don’t stay long, it is the last stop of the evening, and we need to get home to upend our sacks on the living room floor, to compare and trade, and plan the best hiding spot for that big bar of Hershey’s.
It was a simpler time and therefore, a bigger deal, I think, Halloween. Tonight there will be trick or treating across town, I am sure of it. But not everywhere. It has been ten years or more since I had a single knock on my door. Doesn’t keep me from buying bags of the fun size candy bars I like, just in case.
My littlest new relatives will don costumes and canvass their neighborhood, before true dark, and they won’t go all that far, but far enough for a Racer Driver, a Skeleton and a Butterfly, all with short legs. Then we will gather as a family to congratulate them on their haul and celebrate their mother, born just days before Halloween and who must, must, I tell you, always have a spooky-themed birthday.
I will not be passing out large candy bars. There is a nut allergy, and a sugar thing, and while it makes me sad, it also reminds me that the world moves on, and sometimes it is better. There will still be laughter,–big Beulah laughs–and at some point in the evening a quiet reminder, it was not only about the candy. Well, it is about the candy, but also about how little kids could scare the big people, and still be rewarded. On this one night.
Imagine, being so small and yet so fierce. And Daddy, or Granny or Mother, just there outside the beam of the porch lamp, waiting in the dark, for their little terrors to run back to safety, giddy with power to knock on another door and do it again. And again.
And on the quiet drive home the relief of losing the mask, which never quite fit right anyway.
