Sunday, October 18, 2015
The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| Among their multiple imaginary personas. Photo found here. |
They were a one-tiara family and Ambulancia, as the elder sister, claimed the crown as hers. Sireena retaliated by grabbing all the pastel tulle from deconstructed prom dresses, lashing it about her waist, not unlike Odysseus and the mast, refusing to untie it or share unless some detente could be reached about the rhinestone head piece. The wailings they generated caused drivers to pull over and stop as they motored north on Fair Oaks Avenue, scanning rear view mirrors for emergency vehicles which never materialized.
Matters at school were no less fraught, the wearing of tiaras and ballooning net overskirts being unwelcome on any day that wasn't actually Halloween. The sisters, stubborn eyes agleam, were sent home for the duration. They seemed oddly jubilant. Even victorious. The unplanned holidays gave them uncommitted hours to squabble and plot. To be continued. Honest.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Episode 2: The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| A frou-frou bonanza. |
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| The tiara in question. |
The vintage tulle was taking on a fatigued air, belted as it was with gift wrapping ribbon and worn for days - and nights. The tiara fared somewhat better, being more sturdily made and not being sat or slept upon. Ambulancia built for herself a head-cradling pillow mound, tucked against the far wall side of her bed, that allowed her to sleep with the tiara in place and kept her unreachable by any hands seeking to plunder. Her mother thought in sleep she resembled a half-mad dowager of royal ancestry determined to keep the throne, the rest of the world be damned.
As household nerves and costume materials began to fray, their mother asked the girls who exactly they planned to be for Halloween. There was some muttering that sounded like "princesses" but one couldn't be certain. "If we had two tiaras," shrilled Sireena, "we could be, like, zombie bridesmaids or, you know, just sort of Grey Gardens bridesmaids."
"Wilted, withered bouquets," Ambulancia volunteered. "Chipped manicures, torn hems, smeary lipstick." One of the things the girls loved best about costumes was makeup. Lots and lots of experimenting with makeup.
"What if I got you matching tiaras, like bridesmaids would have?" their mother asked. "Would that work?" Shrugging, turning their faces away and mumbling, the girls said, "It might." Their mother, whose temples already throbbed at the notion of these children referring to Grey Gardens as inspiration for costumes, nodded gently and said, "Good." She helped Sireena release herself from the bunchy cloud of old gowns and saw that Ambulancia removed the antique tiara and put it away.
When their mother was out of the room, the sisters scowled at each other, battling with mean-eyed, squinty stares and stuck-out tongues. Then each began to chuckle softly, little "heh heh heh" sounds. Oh help us, with Halloween still so many days away. To be continued.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Episode 3: The sisters creep up on Halloween
In their defense, the sisters, in addition to soaring inventiveness, could be said to possess, let's call them virtues. They could sew like no others of the same ages and, at flea markets attended with their mother, collected not only bits of vintage fabrics and garments but sewing implements from another time, another place. These they stored with surprising care in a shared curio cabinet. The same piece of furniture was home to the disputed tiara but as though the glass-fronted case were sacred ground, no monkey business would ever intrude upon it there.
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| Cabinet photo source. |
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| Vintage Chinese pincushion. |
With the sisters' afternoons now full of costuming, a word they spoke in italics, home life became less high-pitched and confrontational. Though one occasionally, and purely by accident, jabbed the other with a pin on its way back to the pincushion, the tone might have been called sedate. Halloween was three days away.
"I am simply not tatty enough," shrieked Ambulancia suddenly. "I need more trashed flowers flowers for my corsage." They had not stuck with bridesmaids for long but shifted to something that sounded like (mumble, mumble) punk-slash-zombie prom girls, who, of course, would have wrist corsages., though they could still be bridesmaids. "We never tell everything we know," was one of their mottoes.
"Is it too late to go to Blanche's?" Sireena shrilled, referring to a favorite junk/thrift/second hand store. It was not too late, their mother drove them in their not-abnormal states of disarray and they plunged into the bins and boxes in which Blanche offered the ragout of hard-worn remnants of other lives that was her specialty. Suddenly Ambulancia grabbed her little sister, none too gently, and held out an old studio photograph that caused Sireena to gasp. They shuffled it in among their finds and hurried back to the car where they exchanged sinister grins and sidelong glances all the way home. To be continued.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Episode 4: The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| Photo found by Ambulancia at the second-hand shop. |
Sireena took just a moment, swallowed, before saying, "It kind of scares me, in a good way. They look just like us." When she said, "In a good way," she gave a short cough to cover up nervousness. Oh, it scared her. And not in a good way, yet it was okay. "Are we ghosts?" she asked. "I mean, us, now. Is that who we used to be?"
"Don't be such a duck," said Ambulancia scornfully. "What a find! We'll have to start our costumes all over again."
"What about our tiaras?" asked a somewhat down-hearted Sireena, who had become very fond of her bridesmaid/prom girl ensemble. "I was looking forward to being faded pretty."
"I know," Ambulancia told her. "Let's wear them the last day before Christmas vacation. We'll say we thought it was a party day. And no one else will be in costume. All for us." At which they both smirked and muttered, "Heh heh."
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Episode 5: The sisters creep up on Halloween
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Episode 6: The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| Perhaps a life of ease and options, thought the brothers. Photo found here. |
| (For those of you who saw the earlier version of this post, I've
changed illustrations. I presumed to borrow another artist's work,
which had inspired the story, and did so without her blessing. She was
enormously gracious about the whole thing.)
|
While Ambulancia and Sireena threw themselves like volcano sacrifices into the costumes of the season, the brothers favored clothing as close to normal as they could muster and extravagant face makeup, for which the sisters were their advisers and practitioners. The boys would gladly have sported their Halloween pallor and smudged, sunken-appearing eyes year 'round but had to be content with as many days as they could squeeze out of the holiday without being ejected from public places, like the library. When a staff member hissed at them, "Go wash your faces or go home," they invariably chose home after a pair of deep glowers and what they hoped were death-ray stares. Yes, they practiced, in the mirror, on each other, on their parents, on the sisters. They were actually quite fond of the library employees but boundaries were meant to be tested, or so they told themselves. In their journals, each kept a running list of potential adult employment for which their painted faces would be suited. The jobs of clown and mime did not appear on the list of either. It pretty much narrowed down to something in the arts or wealthy eccentric. Being creepy for no good reason didn't appeal to them, yet the thought of growing up wearing nothing but their own pinkish complexions day in and day out made them gloomy. Ellington had the task of reassuring Henri that just because there was no solution today didn't mean there would never be one. Henri hoped with crossed fingers that he was right.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Episode 7: The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| Comedian Harold Lloyd as a giant papier mache head. |
For the sisters, the love of old photographs began with their grandmother, whose collection of family members, contemporaries and chums kept the girls engrossed and quiet for hours on end, listening to stories, gossip and opinion concerning every face they studied. Their mother inherited the stockpile and, knowing they'd learned to tread gently among the fragile portraits and snapshots, let the girls visit their ancestors as they wished. In its way, the collection was a time machine. They did love to look at some of their mother's almost-historic discoveries, referred to as The Archives, too, especially the giant heads, though they took equal delight in her vintage photographs of balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. None of them had yet devised a way to replicate those great floating beings but they were not ready to give up on the possibility.
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| Laurel and Hardy, from The Archives. |
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Episode 8: The sisters creep up on Halloween
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| Cover art and illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree." |
With their mother acting as trail boss and the voice of reason, the sisters and the brother-friends eventually began to arrange themselves in the car for the ride to school. Mrs. Garrick would pick them up, assuming no incident occurred before the last bell rang. Sireena had already been told she could not go barefoot, regardless of how that compromised the authenticity of her costume. The sisters had each made a copy of the photo showing their vintage selves with dollies and wore it like a Comic-Con badge around her neck. They wanted everyone to know how exactly like the long-vanished girls they were. They hoped some of the less attentive students would believe they were their own ghosts.
Starting somewhere around dawn or perhaps earlier, Ellington and Henri had arrived, ready for their make-up. They'd made a pretty good start of it (had they slept at all?) but needed help reaching the backs of their necks and ears and the girls' unsurprisingly professional touches. The pomade used to slick the boys' dark hair even smelled vaguely of flowers. Ambulancia pulled a tin of it from their, as they called it, Trunk of Wonders where it may have rested since the 1930s. One could not be sure.
Once they finished sewing their costumes, the girls took the various pieces outside, rumbled them around in dirt and dust, then smacked them half-way clean again so they had a lived-in look. They powdered their skin and hair, shadowed their cheeks and eye sockets and did look convincingly spectral. The last thing they wanted was to be mistaken for zombies, a costume they felt was just too common for words, though they understood why so many chose it. Odd and screamy as they were, neither girl was unkind. They rehearsed together paying sincere compliments to fellow students. They were not snobs as some assumed, they were simply great fans of nuance, as were the brothers, not that many of their contemporaries would notice. Before piling in the car, they posed together and separately for photos to document this year's achievements. The boys looked happily peculiar with clip-on bow ties attached to horizontally striped tee shirts, worn with plaid shorts, the waists of which reached nearly to their armpits. None was trying for a Best Costume prize but instead savored the contentment which came from hard work and goals achieved.
As the car stopped at the curb, a minor hoard of zombies pretended to claw at the windows. "Menace 101," whispered Ambulancia. "Tell Allison her hair is fab," she reminded her sister. "Tell Jaleel his fingernails terrify you." With dramatic shudders at the horror they faced, the quartet squeezed from the car and the sisters began to shriek, another reason why Halloween was their favorite holiday.
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