Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman

Author:Ayelet Waldman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

10. Sexy Witches and Cereal Boxes

There are two kinds of twelve-year-old girls: sexy witches and cereal boxes. Older teens still go trick-or-treating on Halloween, but they do so ironically, wearing casual, thrown-together costumes and affecting a jaded superiority to the hordes of smaller children for whom Halloween is Nirvana, the celestial circle closest to God. Twelve or thirteen is the last gasp of innocent devotion to the holiday. It’s the last year that costumes are planned in the winter, refined in the spring, and constructed in the fall. It’s the last year that a full-sized Twix bar will elicit rhapsody and too many vanilla Tootsie Rolls will make you cry.

In seventh grade, some of the girls will apply black eyeliner with a novice’s shaky fingers, beg their mothers for false eyelashes, and slink around the neighborhood in their sexy witch (or sexy kitty, or sexy devil, or sexy vampire) costumes. The other kind of girl will construct bulky costumes that conceal as much of her body as possible, making liberal use of cardboard packing boxes with holes cut for her arms and legs. She’ll go as a box of cereal, or a jack-in-the-box, or a box of movie popcorn.

When Sophie was in fourth grade, I was standing in the school yard watching the Halloween parade. The seventh grade trooped by, a column of sexy witches and cereal boxes. I turned to the woman standing next to me and said, “Which is yours?”

With a sigh she pointed to the sexy dead flight attendant: stiletto heels, tattered and burned uniform (with plunging neckline) spattered with Halloween blood. “At least she’s not dressed like her older sister,” the mother said, nodding in the direction of an eighth grader wearing hot pants, fishnet stockings, a bustier, and Vegas showgirl makeup and tottering along in five-inch heels.

“Wow,” I said. With neither a cute set of ears, a tail, or devil’s horns, it was hard to determine exactly what species of sexy the costume was going for. “What is she?”

The mother gave another one of those convulsive pick your battles sighs. “A ho.”

“A ho?” I asked. “A ho?!”

“Yep,” the mother said.

We looked back at the line of children, the lower grades now making their giddy way across the blacktop. “I wonder what kind of seventh grader I’m going to have?” I said. “A cereal box or a ho?”

“Which is your kid?” the mother asked.

I pointed out Sophie marching along with the rest of the fourth grade.

“Oh, honey,” the mother said, sizing up my miniature flapper in her black fringed minidress, sequined headband, and rolled stockings. “You’ve got yourself a ho.”

Sophie is fourteen years old now, and soon I expect her to issue an edict that I may no longer say her name in public, let alone publish it in a book. But while I am still allowed to describe her, let me state for the record that she is smart and thoughtful, funny and wise. She is just beginning to think about boys, and so far has concluded that most of them are either boring or gross.

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