The shop is a monument to the imagination. With the help of its elaborate props, children–and adults–can transform themselves into anything from a cow to Satan. I spot, among other things, a wall of wings for would-be butterflies and fairies and an assortment of hats and wigs that could convert any child into a master of disguise.
My kids, 9 and 13, don’t even consider the wings or the wigs. They head straight for the wall of horror with its severed hands and lacerated eyeballs. My daughter wants my opinion about blood capsules. My son zeroes in on a $30 mask with a pump for spurting gore.
In the past all this would simply have seemed like very bad taste. But this year Halloween, like everything else, has taken on a different tone, and some of what’s for sale seems truly offensive. It is out of the question to use body parts as costume props. There is no way they are going to stroll around the neighborhood looking like the disfigured or the dead.
It’s hard to explain my heightened sense of revulsion to my kids. Like most parents, I censored what my children saw on Sept. 11 and after. Our family did not watch the network that showed bodies falling from the Trade Center towers. When the kids got home from school, I curbed my own obsession with the news and turned off the heartbreaking reports of rescue workers standing for a moment of silence when they located human remains, however small.
My kids know the condensed version of what happened: Planes flew into buildings; the buildings fell down. People–many people–died. I didn’t tell my children about the funerals behind the numbers. I only relayed the stories of people who lived, people who came home that night because they’d gone to the dentist or failed to set the alarm clock.
I’ve tried hard to create for them the “life goes on” stability that I find so difficult to achieve for myself. The adults I know say everything changed on Sept. 11. But, for my kids, things are pretty much the same. Even though they stood on the deck of the Trade Center only two years ago, the catastrophe seems distant to them. What matters is homework, soccer practices, computer games–and Halloween, the holiday my son proclaims as “better than Christmas.”
For them, my reaction to their costume preferences really is a surprise. After all, I’ve always tolerated a certain amount of violent play. From a tender age, my kids turned even the most benign objects into weapons, and I decided not to stifle the impulse but to contain it. “Guns–toy or imaginary–can be used only to shoot monsters” became my mantra. Over the years I’ve watched them work out anger, fear and rivalry using pretend weapons and villainous plastic figures.
My husband, who has always been more critical of this kind of play, tries to steer them in another direction. “Maybe you could be community heroes,” he says hopefully. There have been newspaper reports about stores that have sold out of costumes representing firefighters and Lady Liberty.
But that’s not what our kids want to do. When I look more closely at the costumes they favor, I see they really aren’t parodies of suffering people. They are truly monstrous–something you’d never see in real life. They are fantasies about what evil might look like, utterly unrelated to what it has turned out to be. To be really scary this year, I think to myself, my kids would need to dress up as shoppers buying box cutters, airline passengers paying cash for tickets, smiling soccer parents harboring secret plans to steer planes into buildings full of people.
Suddenly the costumes my kids want to wear suggest that they are not oblivious to what has happened. Perhaps for one night, they want to make evil visible and vivid. Maybe these costumes are their way of getting inside what is monstrous and blunting its power by making it over the top and laughable. For one night, it seems, they want to be scary instead of scared.
The most damaging legacy of terrorism is the fear that monsters lurk everywhere, disguised as neighbors and co-workers. I am determined to resist that paranoia, to take people at face value until there is reason to do otherwise. So, this Halloween, though I plan to censor any costume that resembles a wounded person, I will let my kids impersonate the scariest inhuman creatures they can imagine. For one night, I’ll indulge my children–and myself–in the fantasy that evil is obvious and monsters are readily recognized.
