Today, all the Halloween costumes will go on sale, racks and racks of them. And, every year the racks remind me of when the costumes were packaged in cardboard boxes, stacked high, each with a peek- window of cellophane for the masks to peer through. The shifts of slippery cloth imprinted with pirate stripes or the outline of a nurse’s dress or the spots of a leopard were secondary. In the choosing of costumes, the masks came first.
Eyeless and animated, witches and devils and bears smiled, or open mouth “O”-ed, or sneered their cut plastic and painted expressions. Nightlong we lifted such masks off our sweaty chins to squirrel away candy in a single cheek pocket, the red and orange sugar lipsticking the outline of our real mouths.
One year, after too firm a memory of cutting my tongue on the sharp edge of the plastic mouth, I held out, or settled, for homemade.
Mid-October, and my father readied his supplies: a bowl of plaster, a blow dryer, a spoon, a dull putty knife. He rubbed his hands together like Dr. Frankenstein and carefully placed cut straws in my mouth so I could breathe once his work began. I remember the dentist-office-scrape as he mixed the plaster, the cool shock of it on my cheek, more startling still over my eyes, under my chin and the swallow-choke of trying not to laugh, of sucking air, of waiting for the goop to set.
The next week, after he drove home in the cold night, over the freeways sudden with off-ramps, after he came in the front door, rain beaded on the black shoulders of his coat, after his briefcase was stored, after a glass of wine with my mother, talking and talking on the green couch, after dinner and play and pajamas and handing us back again to her — the one with all day and ever comfortable there — at least from a child’s vantage point, which was all that mattered then, after all this, he sat at the table with the mask, and more putty, and paint and brushes and he built a witch for me.
The outside of the mask grew sharp bones, gaunt shoals, a nose long and hooked and curved to nearly touch the pointed, craggy, chin. It was a beauty of ugliness, and I tried it on over and over, mirror-preened, shocked to see my own eyes through the cutouts. Each time after, I put it, carefully on the ironing board, up and high away.
Perhaps it was the rain — my little brothers doing the knee- punch turn and run, then grab- you-down-again wrestling of boys in the house. I remember the crash. The stunned silence. They were still shifty footed and spot-frozen when I arrived and saw the ironing board tipped over, the mask smashed flat to the floor.
What happened next surely had my mother swishing away my brothers with a fire-gaze of “I’ll deal with you later.” It probably involved so much from her that as a now-mother I bend a little with guilt that the memory is lost to me. Surely she tried to calm me, but I still remember the hysteria of knowing the mask could never, ever, be fixed.
But, still, and anyway, my father sat at the table and slowly bent each piece to find its shape, then fit them with glue beside another. He mixed colors and painted each glue vein with a slightly darker color. The mask appeared more wrinkled and lined and aged with each brushstroke — every inch became even more of a witch than it was before.
This, of course, is a child’s story — the repair of a broken mask. Bigger things, weightier things, break to pieces in an adult world; too many things to list here, sometimes too many things to list to ourselves.
When something or someone is broken to bits, or forced into change unwanted and unwelcome, when we find ourselves starring at the pieces, our words can fail us mightily. They can drum with “this is ruined.”
That week, my father helped me learn the power of maybe. It’s a word with contour and roundness: Maybe we can fix it. Maybe we can change it. Maybe.
When all is draped with regret and loss, when the change will surely ruin everything, there’s that one word:
“Maybe.”
Keep it close; it holds hope like a bowl.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
