Elizabeth sits in her kitchen, waiting to be surprised. She’s always surprised at this time of the year; she’s also surprised on her birthday, at Christmas and on Mother’s Day, which the children insist on celebrating even though she tells them it’s commercial and they don’t have to. She’s good at being surprised. She’s glad she’s put in a lot of practice: she’ll be able to walk through it tonight with no slips, the exclamation, the pleased smile, the laugh. Her remoteness from them, the distance she has to travel even to hear what they’re saying. She wants to be able to touch them, hold them, but she can’t. Good-night kisses on her cheek, cold dewdrops; their mouths perfect pink flowers.
The smell of scorching pumpkin drifts down the hall: their two jack-o’-lanterns, displayed side by side in the living-room window, finally, the legitimate way on the legitimate night. Already admired sufficiently by her. Scooped out on spread newspapers in the kitchen, handfuls of white seeds in their network of viscous threads, some grotesque and radical form of brain surgery; two little girls crouching over the orange heads with spoons and paring knives. Little mad scientists. They were so intense about it, especially Nancy. She wanted hers to have horns. Finally Nate suggested carrots, and Nancy’s pumpkin now has lopsided horns in addition to its scowl. Janet’s is more sedate: a curved smile, half-moon eyes upturned. Serenity if you look at it from a certain angle, idiocy from another. Nancy’s has a fearsome energy, a demonic glee.
They will burn this way all evening and then the festival will be over. Janet, reasonable child, will consign her pumpkin to the garbage, clearing the decks, ready for the next thing. Nancy, if last year is any indication, will protect hers, keeping it on her dresser until it sags and rots, unwilling to throw it away.
They’ve made her turn out the light and sit in darkness, with only one candle; she wasn’t able to explain to them why she doesn’t want to do this. The light flickers on the walls, on the dirty dishes waiting to be scraped and put into the dishwasher, on the sign she herself tacked to the kitchen cupboard over a year ago:
CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!
Sensible advice. It’s still sensible advice, but the kitchen itself has changed. It’s no longer familiar, it’s no longer the kind of place in which sensible advice can be followed. Or at least not by her. On the refrigerator there’s a painting, curling at the edges, Nancy’s from last year; a girl smiles a red smile, the sun shines, bestowing spokes of yellow; the sky is blue, all is as it should be. A foreign country.
A dark shape jumps at her from the doorway. “Boo, Mum.”
“Oh, darling,” Elizabeth says. “Let me see.”
“Am I really scary, Mum?” Nancy says, clawing her fingers menacingly.
“You’re very scary, love,” Elizabeth says. “Isn’t that wonderful.”
Nancy has made yet another variation of her favorite costume. She calls it a monster, every year. This time she’s pinned orange paper scales to her black leotard; she’s modified Janet’s old cat’s head mask by adding silver tinfoil horns and four red fangs, two upper, two lower. Her eyes gleam through the cat eyes. Her tail, Janet’s former cat’s tail, now has three red cardboard prongs. Elizabeth feels something other than rubber boots might have been more suitable, but knows it’s fatal to criticize. Nancy is so excited she might start to cry.
“You didn’t scream,” Nancy says reproachfully, and Elizabeth realizes she’s forgotten this. An error, a failure.
“That’s because you took my breath away,” she says. “I was too frightened to scream.”
Nancy is satisfied with this. “They’ll all be really scared,” she says. “They won’t know who I am. Your turn,” she says into the hall, and Janet makes a prim entrance. Last year she was a ghost, the year before that she was a cat, both standard. She tends to play it safe; to be too original is to be laughed at, as Nancy sometimes is.
This year she wears no mask. Instead she’s made her face up, red lips, arched black brows, rouged cheeks. It isn’t Elizabeth’s makeup, since Elizabeth doesn’t as a rule use any. Certainly not red lipstick. She has on a shawl made from a gaudy flowered tablecloth someone gave them — Nate’s mother? — and which Elizabeth promptly donated to the play-box. And underneath it a dress of Elizabeth’s, hitched and rolled around the waist to shorten it, belted with a red bandana. She looks surprisingly old, like a woman shrunken by age to the size of a ten-year-old; or like a thirty-year-old dwarf. A disconcertingly whorish effect.
“Wonderful, darling,” Elizabeth says.
“I’m supposed to be a gypsy,” Janet says, knowing with her usual tact that Elizabeth can’t be totally depended on to figure this out and wanting to save her the embarrassment of asking. When she was younger she explained her drawings this way. Nancy, on the other hand, was hurt if you didn’t know.
“Do you tell fortunes?” Elizabeth asks.
Janet smiles shyly with her bright red lips. “Yes,” she says; then, “Not really.”
“Where did you get my dress?” Elizabeth asks carefully. They’re supposed to ask before borrowing things, but she doesn’t want to spoil the evening by making an issue of it.
“Dad said I could,” Janet says politely. “He said you weren’t wearing it any more.”
It’s a blue dress, dark blue; the last time she wore it was with Chris. His hands were the last hands to undo the hook at the back, since, when she put the dress on to go home, she didn’t bother to do the hook back up again. It’s upsetting to see her daughter wearing it, wearing that invitation, that sexual flag. Nate has no right to make a decision like this about something of hers. But it’s true, she isn’t wearing it any more.
“I wanted you to be surprised,” Janet adds, sensing her dismay.
“That’s all right, darling,” Elizabeth says: the eternal magic words. It’s somehow more important to them to surprise her than to surprise Nate. Occasionally they even consult him. “Has your dad seen you yet?” she asks.
“Yes,” Janet says.
“He pinned on my tail,” Nancy says, hopping on one foot. “He’s going out.”
Elizabeth goes to the front door to see them off, standing in the lighted oblong as they negotiate the porch steps, carefully because of Nancy’s mask and tail. They’re carrying shopping bags, the biggest ones they could find. She’s been over the instructions: Only this block. Stay with Sarah because she’s older. No crossing in the middle of the street, only at corners. Don’t bother people if they don’t want to answer the door. Some of the people around here may not understand, their customs are different. Home by nine.
Voices other than theirs are already calling: Shell out. Shell out. The witches are out. It’s a revel, one of the many from which she once felt and still feels excluded. They weren’t allowed to have pumpkins and they weren’t allowed to dress up and shout in the streets like the others. They had to go to bed early and lie in the darkness, listening to the distant laughter. Her Auntie Muriel hadn’t wanted them running up dentists’ bills by eating a lot of candy.