My friends and I spent a fair part of our middle school years antagonizing the neighborhood boys.
The boys played hockey in the Irish Center parking lot not far from my house. Kristin, Missy, and I would walk to Harry’s Delicatessen for a supply of Charleston Chews, then continue down the block to the unofficial bleachers — where we were officially ignored. The boys alternately feigned indifference and outrage at our presence, which only encouraged our efforts to provoke them.
When the boys joined a softball league with a team called the Del Sassers, we begged rides to far-flung diamonds and perfected our rowdy cheers and catcalls. Sometimes a player’s generous parent would offer us a ride home in the family station wagon, where the unlucky boy could only sit, red-faced, as far from us as the crammed back seat allowed.
And then it was October. We had just entered our first year of high school, rounding the bases toward adulthood. Although 14 years old felt dangerously close to too old for tricks and treats, we decided to make one more go of Halloween. That night, we planned to meet up with the boys for as long as they would have us.
I’d never before felt the serious stitches of a softball uniform. The material was dense and scratchy. Thick stripes lined the clinging gray pants. The words “Del Sassers” scrolled across my chest in fiery orange.
I adjusted my cap before the mirror, amazed by my own transformation. The costume nearly fit.
“That’s not a real Del Sassers uniform,” Kristin said when I arrived at her house.
But it was real. It was a coup, my donning of that uniform. Kristin was elegant and horrifying, painted into a Dracula costume with fangs and a sweeping cape. But I was a Del Sasser, a player on the team we had hiked across the county to jeer in every game we could manage. It was the ultimate provocation.
Costumed children scurried across the neighborhood. We arrived early and lurked across the street from Bishop Timon High School, our appointed meeting place. Crouched in a driveway, we stifled laughter in our unfamiliar skins. The fall air raised goose bumps on my bare arms.
We heard their boisterous approach, saw them pushing and laughing through the thinning light of evening. They had actually showed.
Kristin waited for the right moment, then charged out and shocked them in a swoop of her dazzling cape. They whooped and fell back before they recognized her. And then they saw me.
They studied me in uncharacteristic silence. Someone reached out to feel the realness of my rough jersey.
“Who gave you that?”
I shrugged off the question.
They stared and admired me, their adversary, their reflected selves. And then we were off, running house to house, determined not to waste a moment of our last real Halloween.
That night held us suspended between childhood and adulthood, still trying on the costumes for new, uncertain roles. Our bodies, and our relationships, were changing, the rules of the game becoming less clear.
The Del Sassers uniform hung in my closet for a time. I sometimes opened the door to feel its rough-hewn knit against my skin.
“My uncle wants the uniform back,” said my cousin Julie, niece of the Del Sassers’ coach.
I kept it a little longer. Then one day I folded up the borrowed uniform and carried it to Julie’s house. I would like to think I was ready to weave my own chrysalis of a costume, and feel its transforming sense of possibility.
Perhaps I had simply grown too old for Halloween.
KAREN DEMPSEY grew up in South Buffalo. She writes from Somerville, Massachusetts.
Copyright (c) 2001 The Buffalo News
Karen Dempsey 