(no subject)
Cross-posted from kickstartyrart, a community created to encourage people to write, to give them a little push or (ha!) kick-start. Apparently it worked, because I wrote the following essay:
Title: #3 - Halloween prompt, 9-13-09
Author: teenygozer
Genre: memoir
Rating: G
Warning: none
Notes: This really happened.
Critique Y/N: Sure, whatever!
I remember Hallowe'en when I was a kid...
Every year, as the weather changed from warm to winter, my snot-nosed schoolmates would show up in homeroom at Sacred Heart School, sneezing and coughing and shedding their viruses everywhere. In no time, I’d be laid up for a week or two by whatever plague it was that was going around. Inevitably, smack in the middle of that week-or-two of warmed-over death would be Halloween-chicken pox, measles, the “croup”, tonsillitis, the flu… as a result, I never got to go trick-or-treating.
My sister, three years older than me and disgustingly healthy, would be prevailed upon by my mother to share some of her precious loot. And “loot” it was; she’d been out egging and t.p.-ing the neighborhood and had pretty much liberated most of her stash from smaller, younger children, kids who were friends of mine. She’d grudgingly drop a couple of much-hated Maryjanes on the bed next to me, and maybe part with a Squirrel-nut-zipper or two, keeping the tastier Now-and-Laters, Sweetarts, and chocolate bars for herself. Due to medicine or illness, these candies would taste even worse than usual, so I’d spit whatever I’d taken a bite of into one of the many tissues heaped up at my bedside, making an “if you’re not careful, your face might freeze that way” face. My sister thought it was hysterically funny. She was always in a good mood on Halloween because as far as she was concerned, it was a license to commit mayhem for one night, covered by a winding-sheet made from one of my father’s many paint tarps and wearing a large rubbery monster mask that entirely covered her head, with as many eggs as she could get away with stealing from the refrigerator hidden in her trick-or-treat bag. My parents had no idea.
The year I was ten, the weather stayed beautiful through October, and I didn’t catch anything as nothing was going around to catch. The previous November, I’d played a huge role in my school’s Thanksgiving extravaganza as lead Pilgrim and narrator, and my godmother, who worked for Simplicity Patterns, had whipped up an adorable Pilgrim outfit for me, complete with a long brown gown with a white collar, apron and crisp linen hat. I hadn’t grown appreciably over that year, so it still fit me perfectly, and I was planning on wowing the neighbors as a door-to-door Pilgrim. Surely for once I’d clean up in the sweets department!
It was a time of dime store costumes; you’d buy a cheap paper box with the words “Costume And Mask!” printed on it in garish letters, with a crinkly plastic window cut into the top, the blank-eyed, snub-nosed mask peeking out at you. These were sharp-edged plastic masks with tiny, razor-edged holes cut out for a kid’s eyes and nostrils, and the costume portion would have the title of whatever it was the kid was going as printed on the cheap tricot fabric covering his or her chest. Helpful, as half the time it was otherwise impossible to tell what the heck the kid was supposed to be. A girl in a red skirt and blue vest with white sleeves would have “Snow White” and pictures of the dwarfs printed on her bodice. A boy would have the word “Pirate!” with a treasure chest and the words “Yo Ho Ho!” or a skull-and-crossbones printed on his chest, the flat, yellow-painted loop for an earring on one plastic ear and the flat representation of a pirate hat above the face of the mask apparently not obvious enough. You stepped into the satin-fabric legs of your box costume and tied it on via a pair of strings in the back at the neck, like a hospital gown. Years later, science would tell us that these costumes were so flammable we might as well have been bathing in lighter fluid before we hit the streets.
But not me! Not me; I was going to go trick-or-treating looking like one of those kids on TV, who showed up in the very special Halloween episode wearing costumes that had been rented from a costume shop or whipped up by the show’s design unit, with a real hat instead of an outgrowth on the top of a plastic mask, and a costume made of real cloth that zippered up the back.
Unfortunately, when we got home from school, we found that my mother had forgotten to bring her house keys with her when she came to pick us up from school.
“It could have been worse,” she said, an apologetic grimace on her face as she and I sat on the stairs in the front of our house, waiting for my father and his huge ring of keys to come home and rescue us from limbo. My sister had long since disappeared with her friends, happy to commit her Halloween mayhem costumeless, with borrowed eggs.
“How could this possibly be any worse?” I said in little-kid horrified disbelief.
“I could have left soup warming up on the stove and burned down the house!” She smiled, inviting me to join in the weak joke with her.
Secretly, I wanted her to have burned down the house. I wanted something showy and hot and destructive to let the world know how I felt. Neighbors offered me plastic bags with pumpkins printed on them and someone even had a small black domino mask on hand to lend, and my mother encouraged me to go off trick-or-treating without a costume.
“You’re wearing a school uniform, you can go as a Catholic school girl!” she said. It was an un-ironic time, well before anime and the popular culture had propelled a plaid skirt with matching tie into some sort of fetish-wear. “Nobody will care how you look!” she said, but I refused to leave those front steps until my father got home to let me in, so that I could go in and get my cute little Pilgrim outfit. Even as young as I was, I suspected that if I good-naturedly went off trick-or-treating as-is, it would assuage my mother’s guilt for having left her house keys on the dining room table, and as far as I was concerned, making her feel bad was strictly bonus points. If anything, it made me feel even angrier that she was trying to minimize the utter, utter disaster of the moment in her usual light-hearted, don’t-take-life-so-seriously way.
My mother wanted to go sit in a neighbor’s warm kitchen and have a cup of coffee while waiting, and she tried to get me to go with her, but I refused. She sat with me a while longer, trying to talk me out of my funk, then finally threw up her hands and left me pouting on the steps. My father didn’t usually come home late, but this time he did; not showing up until well after sundown, too dark for me to go out trick-or-treating that night.
Never a child who indulged in histrionics, I was about to sink into the kind of blank, mute, big-eyed misery that rips a parent’s heart out, but they can’t punish you for (the way they can punish you for a temper-tantrum) when my sister showed up, covered in flour and chalk dust where the big boys she’d been out running with had hit her with weighted socks; dried egg in her hair and crusted all the way down the back of her itchy wool Sacred Heart School uniform. In earlier years, she’d been wearing play clothes and covered by a paint tarp and rubber mask, and had been able to ditch the worst of the evidence before coming home, but not this time; the mask was in our toy closet in the house and the tarp was in the shed in the back yard, inaccessible.
Dry-cleaning costing what it did back in the day, she was grounded for a week, her candy confiscated, and suddenly I felt a little bit better. Listening to the screams of, “I’ll be damned if any daughter of mine goes out rampaging in the streets!”, “Those boys are teenagers, you’re only thirteen!” and “What where you thinking!?” coming from the other room, I liberated a handful of Hershey chocolate bars from my sister’s bag, ripping one open and taking a bite. For once, Halloween candy tasted pretty good.
Title: #3 - Halloween prompt, 9-13-09
Author: teenygozer
Genre: memoir
Rating: G
Warning: none
Notes: This really happened.
Critique Y/N: Sure, whatever!
I remember Hallowe'en when I was a kid...
Every year, as the weather changed from warm to winter, my snot-nosed schoolmates would show up in homeroom at Sacred Heart School, sneezing and coughing and shedding their viruses everywhere. In no time, I’d be laid up for a week or two by whatever plague it was that was going around. Inevitably, smack in the middle of that week-or-two of warmed-over death would be Halloween-chicken pox, measles, the “croup”, tonsillitis, the flu… as a result, I never got to go trick-or-treating.
My sister, three years older than me and disgustingly healthy, would be prevailed upon by my mother to share some of her precious loot. And “loot” it was; she’d been out egging and t.p.-ing the neighborhood and had pretty much liberated most of her stash from smaller, younger children, kids who were friends of mine. She’d grudgingly drop a couple of much-hated Maryjanes on the bed next to me, and maybe part with a Squirrel-nut-zipper or two, keeping the tastier Now-and-Laters, Sweetarts, and chocolate bars for herself. Due to medicine or illness, these candies would taste even worse than usual, so I’d spit whatever I’d taken a bite of into one of the many tissues heaped up at my bedside, making an “if you’re not careful, your face might freeze that way” face. My sister thought it was hysterically funny. She was always in a good mood on Halloween because as far as she was concerned, it was a license to commit mayhem for one night, covered by a winding-sheet made from one of my father’s many paint tarps and wearing a large rubbery monster mask that entirely covered her head, with as many eggs as she could get away with stealing from the refrigerator hidden in her trick-or-treat bag. My parents had no idea.
The year I was ten, the weather stayed beautiful through October, and I didn’t catch anything as nothing was going around to catch. The previous November, I’d played a huge role in my school’s Thanksgiving extravaganza as lead Pilgrim and narrator, and my godmother, who worked for Simplicity Patterns, had whipped up an adorable Pilgrim outfit for me, complete with a long brown gown with a white collar, apron and crisp linen hat. I hadn’t grown appreciably over that year, so it still fit me perfectly, and I was planning on wowing the neighbors as a door-to-door Pilgrim. Surely for once I’d clean up in the sweets department!
It was a time of dime store costumes; you’d buy a cheap paper box with the words “Costume And Mask!” printed on it in garish letters, with a crinkly plastic window cut into the top, the blank-eyed, snub-nosed mask peeking out at you. These were sharp-edged plastic masks with tiny, razor-edged holes cut out for a kid’s eyes and nostrils, and the costume portion would have the title of whatever it was the kid was going as printed on the cheap tricot fabric covering his or her chest. Helpful, as half the time it was otherwise impossible to tell what the heck the kid was supposed to be. A girl in a red skirt and blue vest with white sleeves would have “Snow White” and pictures of the dwarfs printed on her bodice. A boy would have the word “Pirate!” with a treasure chest and the words “Yo Ho Ho!” or a skull-and-crossbones printed on his chest, the flat, yellow-painted loop for an earring on one plastic ear and the flat representation of a pirate hat above the face of the mask apparently not obvious enough. You stepped into the satin-fabric legs of your box costume and tied it on via a pair of strings in the back at the neck, like a hospital gown. Years later, science would tell us that these costumes were so flammable we might as well have been bathing in lighter fluid before we hit the streets.
But not me! Not me; I was going to go trick-or-treating looking like one of those kids on TV, who showed up in the very special Halloween episode wearing costumes that had been rented from a costume shop or whipped up by the show’s design unit, with a real hat instead of an outgrowth on the top of a plastic mask, and a costume made of real cloth that zippered up the back.
Unfortunately, when we got home from school, we found that my mother had forgotten to bring her house keys with her when she came to pick us up from school.
“It could have been worse,” she said, an apologetic grimace on her face as she and I sat on the stairs in the front of our house, waiting for my father and his huge ring of keys to come home and rescue us from limbo. My sister had long since disappeared with her friends, happy to commit her Halloween mayhem costumeless, with borrowed eggs.
“How could this possibly be any worse?” I said in little-kid horrified disbelief.
“I could have left soup warming up on the stove and burned down the house!” She smiled, inviting me to join in the weak joke with her.
Secretly, I wanted her to have burned down the house. I wanted something showy and hot and destructive to let the world know how I felt. Neighbors offered me plastic bags with pumpkins printed on them and someone even had a small black domino mask on hand to lend, and my mother encouraged me to go off trick-or-treating without a costume.
“You’re wearing a school uniform, you can go as a Catholic school girl!” she said. It was an un-ironic time, well before anime and the popular culture had propelled a plaid skirt with matching tie into some sort of fetish-wear. “Nobody will care how you look!” she said, but I refused to leave those front steps until my father got home to let me in, so that I could go in and get my cute little Pilgrim outfit. Even as young as I was, I suspected that if I good-naturedly went off trick-or-treating as-is, it would assuage my mother’s guilt for having left her house keys on the dining room table, and as far as I was concerned, making her feel bad was strictly bonus points. If anything, it made me feel even angrier that she was trying to minimize the utter, utter disaster of the moment in her usual light-hearted, don’t-take-life-so-seriously way.
My mother wanted to go sit in a neighbor’s warm kitchen and have a cup of coffee while waiting, and she tried to get me to go with her, but I refused. She sat with me a while longer, trying to talk me out of my funk, then finally threw up her hands and left me pouting on the steps. My father didn’t usually come home late, but this time he did; not showing up until well after sundown, too dark for me to go out trick-or-treating that night.
Never a child who indulged in histrionics, I was about to sink into the kind of blank, mute, big-eyed misery that rips a parent’s heart out, but they can’t punish you for (the way they can punish you for a temper-tantrum) when my sister showed up, covered in flour and chalk dust where the big boys she’d been out running with had hit her with weighted socks; dried egg in her hair and crusted all the way down the back of her itchy wool Sacred Heart School uniform. In earlier years, she’d been wearing play clothes and covered by a paint tarp and rubber mask, and had been able to ditch the worst of the evidence before coming home, but not this time; the mask was in our toy closet in the house and the tarp was in the shed in the back yard, inaccessible.
Dry-cleaning costing what it did back in the day, she was grounded for a week, her candy confiscated, and suddenly I felt a little bit better. Listening to the screams of, “I’ll be damned if any daughter of mine goes out rampaging in the streets!”, “Those boys are teenagers, you’re only thirteen!” and “What where you thinking!?” coming from the other room, I liberated a handful of Hershey chocolate bars from my sister’s bag, ripping one open and taking a bite. For once, Halloween candy tasted pretty good.