The Last Blind Date by Linda Yellin

Author:Linda Yellin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

BOO AND BOO HOO

It would be my first Halloween in New York, having missed what should have been my first Halloween in New York when I flew back to Chicago for my cousin Connie’s Halloween baby shower. Randy and the kids and I were sitting around the kitchen table drawing jack-o’-lanterns. Mine was pathetic, resembling something closer to a human kidney.

“What kind of costumes will you be wearing?” I asked Phoebe and Benjamin, reaching across Randy for a green crayon.

“A mutant ninja turtle,” Benjamin said. He was using blunt scissors to cut circles out of orange construction paper.

“I was going to be a horse trainer but decided to go as a teenager,” Phoebe said. She was sketching an intricate pumpkin outline, appraising, erasing, and sketching again.

“How do you dress like a teenager?” Randy asked. He was deeply involved in drawing a half-moon smile with jagged rectangular teeth.

These people were pumpkin-drawing professionals.

“High heels and makeup,” Phoebe said. At twelve, she was at the age where she was too old to trick-or-treat but still wanted the free candy. She had pierced her ears and overnight seemed to acquire a complete collection of tiny butterflies, daisies, and hearts. Her lobes were dotted with two startled black cats, their tails upright.

“Dad always wears the same costume,” Benjamin said.

I turned to Randy. “You dress up?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s Halloween.”

“As a what?”

“A pirate!” both kids said.

Randy stopped coloring long enough to smile at them.

“Sounds like fun,” I said, winking at their father.

“He’s got a hook,” Benjamin said.

“And an eye patch,” Phoebe said.

“And a cape,” Randy said.

That called for a second wink. Capes were hot.

“What are you going to be?” Benjamin asked, poking one blade of his scissors through his pumpkin to cut an eye.

“Will you come trick-or-treating here?” I asked, changing the topic. Halloween fell on a Wednesday night, their mom’s night. “Will we be on your route?”

“This building?” Phoebe said. For a kid, she had a real talent for conveying adult-like disdain.

“No way,” Benjamin said.

“Too small,” Phoebe said. “Our building’s much better.”

Randy explained how the goal was to gain entry into the highest high-rises in the city, start at the top, and work your way down.

“Wow, no coats,” I said.

I can’t remember one Halloween as a child when, despite spending weeks assembling my costume, I didn’t get screwed by the weather. Like clockwork, even if the city had been blessed by warm skies and a burst of Indian summer only days before, on October 31 the temperature plunged.

“You can’t go trick-or-treating without wearing a coat,” my mother would say.

“All right,” Brenda, the future religious zealot, would say. She was always dressed as a Jewish martyr or a refugee from a czarist pogrom, so a coat was never a hindrance to her overall ensemble.

But for me? “Jackie Kennedy does not wear earmuffs,” I protested. “And the only coat I can wear is one designed by Oleg Cassini and it’s certainly too late to arrange for that.”

“Here’s the deal,” my mother would say. “You want the candy, you wear the coat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.