Hallowe'en

We have been blessed with a daughter who has always loved simple costumes. Princess, vampire, spider, zombie. Her little sister is even easier—she always wants to be what big sister was the previous year.

Then there's our son.

“I want to be a school bus,” he declared when I asked him, two weeks ago, what his costume would be. My reaction: despair. Though I did look forward to getting mildly high again from the spray paint, I still had nerve damage and Popeye forearms from cutting cardboard boxes last year, when he was a monster truck. (With scissors, of course. Finding the X-acto knife? Needle in a haystack.)

“Maybe he'll change his mind,” I thought. A couple days later, he did.

“Merman,” he said that morning. He had put two feet into one pant leg, a makeshift fish tail. “I want to be a merman.”

Unconventional, perhaps, but doable. No boxes, no paint fumes. I was optimistic. It wouldn't take much to make our lavender-and-turquoise sequined Ariel costume a little more boyish. If not, we'd do it up—a wig, full makeup. A three-year-old boy in mermaid drag would be adorable. The grownups would shower him with candy—half of which I would later stash for myself, of course. It could be a banner year.

But that night, all hope was lost.

“I want to be a streetcar,” he said, and before I could confuse or distract him out of it, he flashed a wide, sparkly-eyed, “you-can-do-it, Mom” grin. Who was I to crush his dreams? He only got one Hallowe'en as a three-and-a-half-year-old.

I set to work making a fucking streetcar costume. 

I cut thick cardboard with dull scissors. I spray painted boxes. I actually did this two days in advance, to allow the paint to dry. In my distracted rush I painted the boxes on our deck, and got red spray paint on it. I made a towering, unwieldy box costume that my son—bless him—thought was awesome. My girls also got into it and painted him a steering wheel and dashboard radio--so he could drive while listening to top 40 hits.

The costume sat in our dining room for two days, during which time I constantly fended off my son for fear of my own shoddy construction.

"Stay away!" I shouted. "The sides need more duct tape!"

"Don't touch it!" I said. "The roof will come off!"

In the end, he didn't want to wear it to school, for fear the other kids might want a turn in it and break it. On Hallowe'en night, the cumbersome ensemble barely allowed him to walk, let alone to make it up the stairs to a neighbor's house, without teetering over. He lasted about 15 minutes. Once back in our yard he left his meager loot on the ground and proceeded to do what he had wanted all along: to play in the damn thing.