My Best Halloween Memory

This Halloween, we’re taking the baby out to trick-or-treat for the first time. This will most likely be a horrifying experience for her, spent clinging to my in order to avoid strangers and tugging endlessly at a witch hat she has no interest in wearing. On the bright side, we get candy for hauling her around the neighborhood. The witch costume is cute, but every time I see it on her, I can’t help but think of another Halloween.

When I was 5, my sister (then 2) and I were in our rooms inventorying our respective hauls from trick-or-treating. The rewards for vampirism and witchdom had been high that year, and the typical system something of counting, count 1, eat 3, was taxing my young pancreas. I don’t really know if it was temporary, sugar-induced deafness from the candy, or that I just didn’t care, but it suddenly occurred to me that my sister was screaming hysterically in the next room. She had been doing so for about 5 or 10 minutes.

Being somewhat curious, but mostly fed up with the noise, I went in to investigate. My mother was standing in my sister’s room wearing a ratty old pink bathrobe and panty hose over her head, giving her a pig noise. Her bottom jaw jutted out, and she spoke only in grunts and gestures. My sister was glued to the opposite wall, screaming her head off, her witch makeup running down her cheeks. In the nearly 30 years since then, I’ve never heard a person scream like that. Even though I recognized her, I was still a little skeeved out. Mom really sold it.

My sister sucked her thumb until she was 8. I never considered the connection until today.