Halloween

by Paula Guran

  Donny went on, barely audible: “Yuh, Neva said . . . said she wanted us to wear these special masks . . . and . . . she—” He broke off, for a long moment, staring at the screen, as it loaded another level. “—wants to show us how to play the game tonight . . . Oh, sweet: Next level is Kill-frenzy . . . Yeah she’s coming tonight to . . . to . . . ”

  “Uh, riiiiiight, Donny” Juno said. She and Linda exchanged looks. It was like Donny was a Mynah bird, just repeating something.

  Mom made one of her frustrated noises, a kind of a low growl, and went to the videogame—and surprised Juno by shutting it off. Donny looked at her in outraged shock. “I hadn’t saved yet!”

  “Tough,” Mom said, “I’m sick of you doing all that video-killing and not participating in . . . in . . . family stuff.”

  “What—stuff like Halloween? Where we can, like, pretend to be Jason or Freddie and carry toy knives with fake blood on ’em and stuff? That’s not violence? Shit, Mom, I was just about to—”

  “Watch your language, buddy-boy! Now tell me what your cousin Neva was going to do with these masks? We’re trying to plan the evening. We want to do something together as a family this year.”

  “Neva?” Donny brushed some lank brown hair out of his eyes and blinked at her. “Neva was going to do what?”

  “You were just saying you’d talked to Neva?”

  “Like, a month ago . . . well, not ‘talked,’ you know, she messaged me online . . . You could’ve warned me before you switched off the game so I coulda saved. Now I have to replay that level.”

  “That’s, like, such a tragedy, losing your saved videogame,” Juno said, dripping sarcasm. “It’s tragic if you’re a retard, I mean.” She stared. “God, Donny you haven’t even got any pants on—running around in a shirt and underwear . . . ”

  “That’s just disrespectful,” Linda said. “I have to say. None of my business but . . . I mean . . . Excuse me? It’s like he’s all . . . ”

  “Why’re you looking at my ass, Linda?” Donny jeered, unfolding his long, bare legs to get up. He stalked angrily out, going down to his room; to his computer. He liked to walk out on things, on people, to make a point. The picture of Eminem on the back of his T-shirt glared a reproach at them, as if “getting Donny’s back,” all the way down the stairs. Slim Shady’s printed-on face receded into the shadows of the downstairs hall.

  “Donny’s being such a butt-head,” Juno said. “Like, he’ll just not tell us now about Neva because he’s mad.”

  “Boys are confused, at his age, pretty easily,” said Mr. Carpenter, always the conciliator. “He’ll be fine.”

  Juno wondered what Mr. Carpenter would say, instead, if he hadn’t been taking his Paxil.

  From Donny’s room they heard the muted chiming of Instant Messages, one after another, as his Buddy List told his friends he was once more in their shared digital world.

  Wearing only a bra and panties and feeling a little sick from the cooking smells of instant dinners coming up through the grate in the floor, Juno was standing in her bedroom-closet door with Linda, trying to decide what to put on. She was supposed to wear some artsy-craftsy mask that her weird cousin Neva had made, tonight—made for them without even asking them all first—and since she didn’t know what mask she would have she didn’t know what costume to put together to go with the mask.

  “Some, like, tights—black tights and a leotard, that’d go with any mask. You look cute in tights anyway,” Linda was saying. Linda took a fashion design course and was good with design software. She was into pictures, into color and texture, like her mom had been.

  “I’m putting on weight, I can’t wear tights,” Juno said.

  “You are so not putting on weight.”

  Juno whispered: “I’m scared I’ll end up like . . . ” She glanced at the door.

  “You have more your dad’s metabolism, from what your doctor said that time,” Linda said, abstractedly, riffling the outfits hanging in the closet. “How about this?”

  Then the doorbell rang, and the tightness started in her stomach: it was her dad.

  “Ju-noooo!” her mom called, from downstairs. “Your dad’s here!”

  Dad was bringing her half-brother, six-year-old Little Mick, over for the party—probably Dad was going to some office Halloween thing with his wife. He worked for UniNet, where they were supposed to be “just like a family” and their CEO was heavy into having “family holidays” and it was so weird how that was like her mom lately, too. Mom was on a “family togetherness” kick. Like that would make up for Dad being married to some skinny lawyer bitch.

  “Yeah, I’ll put on my Danskins for now, I guess,” Juno said. She took the tights off the shelf inside the closet, next to the hanging clothes, and drew them on, then shrugged and wriggled into a matching scoop-necked leotard; black Danskins. If Russell came over, it’d be worthwhile to wear clinging things.

  She contemplated herself in the mirror, smoothing out wrinkles in the stretchy fabric; Linda pulled up on the elastic for her, from behind. “Yow, easy, I might want to have babies some day.”

  Linda giggled and the two looked critically at Juno: a tortoise-shell barrette flipped her long, wavy brown hair just a little to one side; her pert, angular face; the deep-set green eyes she got from her dad. Her glossy-black fingernails were already painted for Halloween, no reason to change that. But the almost painted-on Danskins—you could see her nipples—oh, so what, Mom probably wouldn’t object. Mostly her objections were just noise anyway.

  “Don-neeee! Ju-noooo!”

  Juno exchanged a sigh with Linda and they went downstairs.

  Mick was orbiting his dad, trailing one hand on his dad’s legs as he circled him, making a rrrrr sound. Dad, still wearing his tieless suit, was tall, gangly, with glinting green eyes, a wide, easily-smiling mouth and lots of flashing white teeth.

  Mick stopped dead still, his small round face beaming up at Donny when he came slouching into the front hall. “Donny!” Mick shrilled. “Can we play Killforces?”

  “Yuh, sure—split screen, dude. Hi Dad.”

  “Hi Donny,” Dad said. “So, are thirteen-year-old guys allowed to have any fun on Halloween?”

  “Yuh sure, whatever. We’re, like, having a party or something.” Donny trailed Mick into the family room.

  “You give Mick a chance to win!” Dad yelled after them, smiling. He pretended to gawk up at Juno as she descended the stairs. “Who’s this terribly skinny vision in black?”

  “Oh right like I’m so skinny.” She made herself go to him for The Hug.

  It was hard to be mad at him after six years, especially with him trying so hard when he came over. But it was hard to hug him too. She wanted to hug him—and she wanted to push him away; and the tug-of-war made that tight, ill feeling inside her when he came to visit.

  He let her go. “So what’s up tonight? Hi Linda!” He waved at Linda, who sat on a step halfway down.

  “Hi Mr. Weiss.”

  “Um—we’re not doing much,” Juno said, relieved to be able to step back; to hug herself, instead. “Neva . . . cousin Neva . . . is coming over . . . bringing some masks . . . ”

  “Cousin Neva?” He frowned, looking puzzled—and shrugged. “I can’t keep up. Time marches on. And so must I.” He kissed her cheek. She let him. He grinned down at her—holding her shoulders cupped in his big hands for a moment, looking into her face.

  Did he have to have that it’s-all-good expression, when he didn’t live with them? Like it was so good to be not married to her mom.

  He squeezed her shoulders gently, once, and turned to go—then turned back long enough to check: “Oh—I think your mom has Mick’s costume. He insists on wearing the same one from last year for trick or treating. Should still fit, one more time. Donny and Linda’s dad are taking him . . . ?”

  “Yep, that’s the plan.”

  “That’s a done deal, then. Okay kids—Happy Halloween.” He blew Juno a kiss, waved to Linda and then he
was gone, closing the door softly, swiftly, behind him.

  It was after dark and they were in the living room, doing busywork to avoid the discomfort of having to wait for anything like a real party to start. Aunt Laura had set out punch and cookies and put on music: Classics from the Crypt. Mom, perched on the sofa, had Linda and Juno putting up the Halloween decorations she’d bought at The Big Halloween Store, a discount place that rented a space at the mall for one month out of the year. Juno grimaced at the decorations: cut-outs of clichéd witches, trite ghosts, hackneyed werewolves, stereotyped Frankenstein monsters: bright chirpy images printed on cereal-box cardboard.

  Russell, the jerk, didn’t come over. He would have some good excuse, he always did, and he’d been careful not to promise. They weren’t really going steady, after all. One blowjob didn’t make him her boyfriend.

  Don’t try to date somebody that popular, Linda had warned her, and she’d been right, as much as Juno hated to admit it.

  Her friend Marcy couldn’t come. She was volunteering to help run some dance at her Catholic school. They were really lame, the dances at that school—they played, like, Justin Bieber; would never play Lady Gaga—but it was a place to meet the boys from St Anthony’s. Dandridge couldn’t come, he was doing some DJ thing somewhere. Atesha and Ahmed had made excuses so lame that Juno couldn’t even remember what they were. They knew what Mrs. Wiess’s Halloween parties were like.

  So it was just Linda and Mr. Carpenter—Linda’s dad—after he got back with Donny and Little Mick and Mom and Juno and Mom’s sister Laura. Aunt Laura was a nervously active, medium-sized woman with her rusty hair up in a bun and pants that were way too tight for her big derriere. Later, Granddad Morris, Mom’s father, was supposed to come over. Thrill. Granddad was deadly dull when he wasn’t bitching. Some Halloween party.

  “What I hate,” said Juno, looking around, “is how they make the ‘monsters’ in Halloween decorations all happy and jolly and grinning and . . . like they’re trying to make you feel they couldn’t really hurt you. Don’t want to scare the kids on Halloween . . . ”

  “Or piss off the fundamentalists—the fascist scrubs—” said Linda, whose mother, Lupe, had been rather a political activist with the Catholic Workers before she’d died of an embolism when they were in fifth grade. “If you make Halloween stuff scary they think it’s . . . it’s . . . you know . . . ”

  Juno pushed a tack through a ghost’s eye. “Like . . . demonic?”

  The doorbell rang. Juno got the door, and there was Neva, and things were instantly more interesting. Neva had her jet-black hair in long, rank-looking dreadlocks; she had some kind of white coloring on her lips, not lipstick, more like white paint, so that they were dead white, and the same on her eyelids; her nose was doubly pierced by little emerald and ruby studs, her ears quadrupley hooped. Her heart-shaped face was pretty but abjectly solemn; her black eyes were like polished onyx. When she blinked, the flashing shift from bone-white to onyx was sometimes startling.

  But her smile put Juno at ease. “Cousin Juno!” Neva said, reaching out to press Juno’s hand; and Juno saw the shiny silver stud piercing Neva’s tongue, in the dead center of that laughing, open-mouthed smile. “I haven’t seen you since you were so little . . . and now you’re bigger than me!”

  It was true—Neva was probably in her twenties, but she was a small woman, a well-turned but pixyish shape, no more than five-foot-one. She wore a flat-white, sleeveless sash-belted shift like something a servant girl would wear in a movie about ancient Rome. The cloth was sewn, here and there, with runes. She had a silver armlet of a snake biting its own tail, and a really old, worn-out pair of sandals on her small feet.

  Neva hesitated in the doorway as Juno frankly stared at her, forgetting her peevishness about the mask game, beginning to appreciate Neva’s style. “Whoa, nice toenails,” Juno said. Neva’s toenails were alternately black and white. “Black and white and—”

  “—and black and white and black and white!” Neva laughed. Her voice was both soft and husky, and her laugh was infectious so that Juno found herself laughing too. “And you’ve got all black fingernails, Juno! If you do a handstand next to me, just right, some piano player may stroke his fingers on the ends of us. I know just which octave I am too.”

  What a weird-ass little thing to say, Juno thought.

  “Well do come in, for heaven’s sake, Neva!” Mom called, from the sofa, where she was watching Linda put up black and orange crepe paper. “Juno you’re making her stand out there!”

  “Sorry.” Juno closed the door behind Neva—who stood on the carpet, looking around, smiling like the Mona Lisa at their decorations. “Very . . . nice.” She put down a large satiny black bag—the kind of material that was black and gold both, depending on how it shifted around in the light. The bag was full, its contents covered with a coarse white cloth. Neva gazed benignly at Mom. “Good to see you, Judith!”

  Mom looked at Neva with slightly narrowed eyes, her head tilted. “Um . . . You too, Neva.”

  “Are those the masks you made?” Juno asked, looking at the bag. She was embarrassed, suddenly, by the party, and her family—Neva was so cool, so confident, and she found she wanted to know her better.

  What did Neva do for a living? Juno couldn’t remember. She remembered something about Neva, doing . . . what? Going off to school somewhere? Studying art in Europe or something? She must have: she was so effortlessly exotic.

  “Yes, those are the masks,” said Neva. “Oh! That music—Night on Bald Mountain. I like that.”

  “It’s Classics from the Crypt,” Aunt Laura said. She was stringing unnecessary crepe paper.

  “Is that what it is? I’ll bet it’s much quieter in a crypt than that,” said Neva.

  Linda and Juno laughed. Aunt Laura turned and blinked at Neva in confusion, then managed a chuckle.

  “Have some punch!” Mom said. “You can have the grown-up punch with the white wine in it . . . Laura would you get her some punch?”

  Neva dutifully went to stand by the transparent plastic punchbowl, to wait for her drink. The bowls were on a folding table covered with black construction paper, set up against the wall. With exquisite care, Laura ladled out a waxed paper cup of wine and Hawaiian Punch from the “grown-up bowl.” Juno got herself some punch from the other bowl—a mix of canned juices with floating orange slices.

  “Mmm, thanks.” She sipped at the cup, her eyes darting from one person to the next, and around the room. “Delightful. Lovely.”

  Mr. Carpenter had taken Donny and Little Mick out trick or treating. Mick was Batman. Donny had decided to design his own Halloween makeup—he’d ended up with scribbles on his face and what looked like unreadable graffiti.

  The doorbell rang. Laura let Granddad Morris in. He stumped in on his aluminum cane that sprouted into four legs near the bottom; Granddad scowling, nodding, shuffling. “Thank you, Laura. Kids, how ya doing, there. Judith. Where’s Little Mick?”

  “Trick or treating, Dad. I’ve got your water heating . . . ” Laura took his arm, and slowly escorted him into the kitchen for the instant de-caf coffee and Oreos he always had when he arrived.

  The trick or treaters began to arrive. Neva stood near the punch, watched Juno and Linda take turns answering the door, offering the bowl of miniature Snickers and Mars bars and Baby Ruths to kids wearing store-bought masks of Freddie and Zero the Zombie; to more kids in green monster makeup their parents had put on them by hand. Now and then groups of black kids, most of them looking like they were at least fifteen, came to the door and mumbled, “Trickertreat”; they usually didn’t bother with masks. Linda gave them candy.

  Mom seemed to be watching Neva—Mom’s gaze wandered from Neva’s dreadlocks to her piercings, to the eyes that seemed so familiar and so unfamiliar . . .

  . . . And watching Neva, Mom ruminatively ate mini-Mars bars from a sack, one after another, forgetting her diet, accumulating a pile of discarded candy bar wrappers.

  Neva drif
ted over to the lamp table, beside Mom, where the wrappers were piling up and ran her fingers through the crinkly pile. “Like a heap of autumn leaves . . . ”

  “You can sit on the couch, you know, or a chair, hon,” Mom said

  “I need to stand for a while. But thank you.”

  She needs to stand? Juno thought.

  Still gazing at Neva, Mom put a mini-Mars bar down half-eaten, and sat up a little straighter in sudden animation. “I remember . . . Gosh—you’ve grown so much, Neva . . . ”

  “Oh I wish I’d grow some more! I’m so damnedly short. But you get used to it. It gives you a more realistic sense of scale.” She looked at Juno.

  Mom cocked her head at this, considering it, frowning. Juno looked at Neva for a moment, some half-memory of what might’ve been a dream stirring in her . . . and then she turned away and emptied another family-size bag of Halloween candy into the trick-or-treat bowl.

  Aunt Laura came in long enough to change the music to Disco Inferno; she did a few dance steps in place—it was disco music but she was doing an Irish folk dance, with her arms straight at her side. She’d taken lessons. She did all her dancing that way—she said Michael Flatley proved you could Irish-dance to anything.

  Neva stared at Laura a moment, then drifted up beside Juno to watch as a disparate batch of masked kids came to the door at once—two Wolverines and one Mystique from the X-Men movies, one fourteen-year-old boy with The Crow makeup, one Fairy Princess with sparkles on her cheeks—not long out of diapers—holding her dad’s hand, one Scary Movie mask.

  “Some masks speak so deeply, Juno,” Neva murmured. “—but some drip onto our faces from the glass screens . . . and some only mock us from dreams we forgot we had.”

  Juno looked at her, thinking: What was that? Something from some lame community college drama class? “When are you going to show us the masks you brought, Neva?”

  “Soon as the trick or treating dies out,” Neva said, going to stand by the punch table again. She’d stayed there most of the evening, but hadn’t drunk anything else.