Before we had kids, my husband Phil and I always dressed up for Halloween, plotting our costumes months in advance.
One year I was Circe, the sorceress of Greek mythology who lured Odysseus’ men to a feast laced with the magical potion that turned them into swine. As I knotted green lamé over my shoulder, Phil cut pink ears out of felt and snapped on a rubber pig snout.
The following year, he bought a stunning black velvet evening gown at a thrift store. Even more stunning? He found patent leather heels to fit his size 13 feet — giving me the much simpler task of dressing as his escort.
We both loved the masquerade of Halloween, Mardi Gras and Purim. As writers and artists, we were prone to reclusive flights of imagination. But physically putting on costumes and taking to the street was an entirely different thing.
On Halloween, the dead once again walked the earth while the living tossed social and gender norms skyward like a deck of cards.
After our children were born, Halloween felt less like a theatrical lark. Within the designated two-hour interval for trick-or-treating, we needed to 1) remember it was Oct. 31, 2) get home early to put dinner on the table, 3) wrangle the kids into costume and out the door and 4) leave a bowlful of candy on the front step with the porch light on.
If we scored on all four counts, we’d high-five as we headed back to the house with the cutest bumblebee and ladybug the neighborhood had ever seen.
My costume, in those years, went one of two ways: Mostly I sported the same Harried-Mom Cape I wore every day. Or, when the kids weren’t sleeping through the night, I could achieve the white-faced, bleary-eyed Mask of the Walking Dead — with no face paint whatsoever.
Later, as our children got older, I morphed into the Facilitator of Artistic Visions. A waterfall called for yards of silver ribbon, while Artemis asked me to save the empty oatmeal canister to be transformed into her quiver of arrows.
Then, at Target one Halloween, I had a revelation.
Speed-wheeling a red plastic cart from the Snickers shelf to the checkout, I slowed in the costume aisle. Hanging from a peg, a 36-inch cascade of rainbow tresses caught my eye. I picked up the wig — instant glamour and camp! — and tossed it into my cart.
When I descended the stairs in my new look, Phil did a double take. “I need to up my game,” he said.
As the kids ran down each walk, I’d strike a pose under the streetlight. Neighbors didn’t recognize me until long after I’d greeted them in character, unsure who I might be. Beneath my wig I heard the night hum, the way it had when I was a teen.
The passage from self to self is fluid for young children, continually trying on and casting off ways of being in the world like so many tutus and Batman capes.
But as someone who wears a half dozen masks of adult responsibility, the last thing I thought I needed was one more. Bewigged, I stepped outside myself — without severing the threads of family, home and work that weave the tapestry of my everyday life.
In Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary goes to a costume ball. Cross-dressing as a man, she wears velvet breeches, red stockings, a wig and tricorner hat. She dances the night away, awakening on the theater steps with sailors and dockhands she wouldn’t normally associate with given the strictures of provincial 19th-century French bourgeois life.
There’s bright freedom in stepping out as your bad self, your glam self, your imagined self.
But Flaubert knew the darkness as well. Suffocated by social constraint, Emma built fantastical, alternate realities that end up eclipsing — and eventually destroying — her actual life.
It’s possible, like Emma, to commit so much to fantasy we lose our actual selves. Or, like me, to be swallowed up in everyday roles for years at a time.
The year after I debuted my wig, Phil and I both dressed up last-minute, slapdash. After trick-or-treating with friends who invited our girls to a sleepover, we headed out for our first Halloween on the town in more than a decade. I would share the details, but they dissolved at sunrise as we returned to our waking lives.
Masquerade was buried for a decade, in my imagination, like an underground stream. But ancient traditions of masking and Carnival kept running through the street, reminding me that who we are and what we can be is never fixed.
All our lives, we can keep putting on new personae or rummaging through the bin of past selves for remnants we want to keep or reimagine.
I haven’t finalized all the details of my costume for this year. But if you’re out in Cleveland this Halloween, you just might catch a glimpse of Emma Bovary running down Euclid Avenue in her velvet breeches and tricorner hat.