The Essays
"Candy Apples and Cotton Candy"
It was almost Halloween of the year that I was nine years old. I worked hard on my candy apple costume -- mixing the paper mache, blowing up a giant balloon, ever-so-gently placing each piece of newspaper into the liquidy muck and then flattening it and smoothing it onto the round surface, and finishing with the layer of red cellophane to give it that real, shiny-sweet look. After three days of drying I was able, carefully, to pop the balloon and cut a hole for my head and two eye holes in the giant confection.
Halloween day arrived and I donned my pink leotard, tights and ballet slippers to look like a candy apple stick all the way to my feet. Proudly, I wore my costume in the school parade and won a prize for originality. My sister might have won with her cotton candy outfit, but she was home, sick.
After supper that evening, I assembled my UNICEF boxes and put on my costume. I knew I was in trouble when mom said, "Wait a minute young lady. I don't think you can see out of that thing." The only way I was getting out of my house to get candy that night was in my sister's costume. I was already dressed up as a good candy stick, so my mom took the fluffy white stuff and started winding it around me. It looked pretty good, but it wasn't my award-winning apple - the apple I had worked on for days! A bit disappointed but undaunted, I headed out, carrying a pillow case for my candy and boxes for the UNICEF money, with plans to fill them all to the top.
As we walked, first my neck began to feel a bit prickly and then my back. Then it was everywhere - I was so itchy it hurt. There were 10,000 needles sticking into me and every time one did, I wanted to scratch it. I only complained once to my step-dad who told me that if I didn't like that costume, I could go right home. Like any kid determined to fill that cotton sack, I shut up and kept moving - for two or three more hours.
Those were the days when kids trick-or-treated from when the sun was barely set to way past dark. I finally filled my sack and at least two boxes full of change for those poor kids around the world and came home; in tears, but satisfied.
When my mother saw my face, she knew something was terribly wrong. In the light, she could see the red blotches on my neck and cheeks and whisked me off to the bathroom for a more extensive examination. From the middle of my thighs to the top of my head I was red and irritated. She thought it was an allergy and set me in a warm tub of Epsom salts - the cure-all of the 60's. She looked closely at the packaging to find what the culprit might be and came back to me in horror. My dear mother had wrapped me in fiberglass! I didn't have 10,000 needles stuck in me, but 10,000,000 little shards of glass.
Well, it was a few days before I felt better, and a few years before I forgave my mother.
Now I'm the mom making the Halloween costumes for my son. I'm always very careful but I still can't help cringing whenever he asks for cotton candy.
Michele Samuels