It was time to get serious about costumes, so that week they made another trip to the dime store, to look at the Halloween stuff again. They'd been right the first time; none of the costumes were quite right.
The store had gotten in a few more cardboard decorations though: a bat with a mean, fanged face, that was almost too exaggerated, and a green, warty witch stirring a cauldron. Jessy liked that one because of the small toad lurking in the bottom of the picture. None of them were as good as the ones she'd already bought, that she admired on her door every night.
Then she saw the pop-up cat.
It was a small jack-o-lantern, bright plastic orange, with eyes and features indented and painted black, smiling the crooked-tooth smile. On the back, there was a small push-button. When she pushed it, the top of the pumpkin’s head flew open with a sound like a squeal, or a squeak, and a little black cat head popped up from inside. Its slanted eyes and nose and whiskers were painted white. Suddenly, Jessy loved the pumpkin, the cat, the squeak. She had to buy it.
“What did you get now?” her mom asked when she got home. Jessy pulled the pumpkin out of the bag and popped the cat, and her mom said, “You spent your money on that? It’s a piece of cheap plastic. You’re just like your dad, both of you, always picking up junk.”
“I like it,” Jessy defended the pumpkin.
“It’ll be broken within a week,” her mom predicted.
The girls went up to Jessy's room. She pressed the little stub, and the pumpkin-top flew open, the black head jumping up with a squeak.
“Okay,” they got down to business. “We agree, no gypsies and no hippies.”
“Ghosts would be so fun, but the sheets aren't practical,” Jessy mused.
Karma suggested, “Maybe we could make wings. Like when we made the angel wings for the Christmas program.”
“That's a good idea. But we can't be angels for Halloween.”
“We could make owl costumes. Or bats.”
“Bat wings!”
“My dad has a ton of cardboard,” Karma said. “I'll ask him to break some boxes down, and then we can get started.”
Once that was officially decided, Karma told her about an article she found, about how to make a piñata, using a balloon and basic paper-mache.
“We have paper-mache experience,” she pointed out. Last spring they made a model of the solar system, squashing rounded balls of paper-mache into the relative sizes of planets. Then they poked wires into them, and lined them up in roughly the right distances from a light bulb sun.
“I think there's some old balloons in the junk drawer,” Jessy said.
They found one that seemed big enough, and then dug at the bottom of her dad’s newspaper pile, found the oldest ones, and grabbed some to tear into strips. Out on the porch, they mixed some flour and water in a big metal mixing bowl, and slathered the strips with the paste. Then they blew up the balloon and covered it with the wet paper, smoothing out the gluey surface, until it had a solid layer, and added more on top of that.
By the time they were done, their hands were as stiff with sticky white as the balloon was.
They left it there on the porch to dry overnight, perched in the center of more spread-out newspapers.
Twyla came up to her room later just to ask, “What is that blob on the porch?”
“It's a piñata,” Jessy said. “It's going to be a jack-o-lantern.”
“And what’s this?” She reached over to the plastic pumpkin, and used the tip of her fingernail to flip the tiny knob. The lid flew open, and the cat head jumped out.
“You're really putting a lot of work into Halloween,” she said.
Jessy shrugged.
“It's like when we talked about how Santa Claus is really everybody,” she said. “We have to do the same thing to make it Halloween.”
****
The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 22
