How do you explain Halloween to newly-arrived Ethiopian boys? They nodded with polite interest every time we tried to prepare them. Daniel formed the impression that it was necessary to badly scare the people answering their doorbells, in order to get candy from them. Consequently he changed his mind about the nice Spiderman costume I’d brought home for him from Target.. He wanted something worse-looking. A friend spared me the dreaded pre-Halloween visit to Party City and took Daniel herself.
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| Daniel as Evil Horrible Undead Creature |
He arrived home from the strangest shopping trip of his life, hurried into the bathroom, and emerged looking like Something from the Crypt: tattered clothes, protruding ribs, and three-dimensional dabs of blood everywhere. The mask was a scrunched leering bony bloody half-skinless skull under wild matted grey hair. I screamed appropriately. He was ecstatic. “I do Dad now!” he said and tore upstairs. His earnest awkward gait was evident under the layers of ugliness. There was a shout upstairs. Then Daniel reappeared. “I do Dad. Now I do Lily,” he cried, and dashed off again in his loping gait.
After these successes, he spent a long time in front of the bathroom mirror. He came out with his costume neatly folded under his arm. Suppressing a smile, he predicted: “Many candy me.”
But his Halloween was not a success! Donny and I wanted to walk with him, and Jesse offered to escort him, but Daniel said, “Go my friends,” which meant he would tag along with Fisseha to join crowds of other seventh-grade boys and girls. The first unhappy surprise for Daniel was that Fisseha strolled out at dusk in jeans and a t-shirt, while Daniel was dressed as Death Warmed-Over. He panicked and ran back into the house to change. “At least take your costume!” I said, hating to see him disappointed. So he wore the bloody black costume pants and a t-shirt. Fisseha and his friends were not really planning to trick-or-treat; as seventh-graders, they’ve nearly aged out of that activity, but I’d wanted Daniel to have one shot at it.
He hurried behind Fisseha and followed him to the most popular and crowded Halloween neighborhood, one in which families cover their yards, rooftops, mailboxes, and bushes with out-size spiders and inflatable black cats and blinking lights and flickering jack-o-lanterns. There is a Haunted Trail in this neighborhood, where witch’s cauldrons steam with smoke and live severed heads rest smilingly on a picnic table and middle-school boys dressed as ghouls leap out from behind gravestones. What happened next is a subject of dispute.
“He leave me,” Daniel accuses Fisseha. “I new. He know. But he leave me.”
Fisseha is indifferent to this charge. “I know!” he says, about the fact that Daniel disappeared. “I looked around and I didn’t see him.” Fisseha had spotted two eighth-grade boys from his soccer team who invited him to join them, and he’d peeled off from the seventh-grade group for a while.
“Why didn’t you just call Fisseha?” I asked, as everyone that night used cell-phones like walkie-talkies to find one another.
“No my phone,” he said. “Costume no pocket.”
Daniel found himself alone amidst hundreds and hundreds of bizarrely-dressed white people, while manufactured fog leached into the streets and taped screams bleated from speakers. Surely there were kids all around him whom he knew, who would have helped him, but make-up and masks disguised them. He panicked. He managed to fight his way out of the neighborhood, find the right direction, and stride home. Both Helen and Lily, out with their friends, saw him coming down the hill towards our house and they called to him. Head down and silent, he angrily waved them away. He loped into the house, ran down the stairs to his bedroom, locked the door, and got into bed. He responded to none of our entreaties, over the next several hours, to come out and try again. When I finally got into the room, he pulled the blankets over his head and rolled over to face the wall.
He was darkly furious the next day, boycotting Fisseha. I brought home a bag of candy from CVS to give to Daniel after school, and he said, eyes lowered, voice low, “No Mom. No candy me.”
“Daniel,” I said, sitting beside him on the porch. “Listen, Fisseha did not mean to lose you.”
“Yes Mom. He leave me.”
“Daniel, there were a million people there, he was running around with many friends…”
“No Mom,” he said, which meant: end of discussion.
But my friend Kathryn Legan offered the good advice to keep telling Daniel the rational information that Fisseha had not lost him on purpose. “People do hear you,” she says, “even if they appear to be completely opposed to the information. They do take it in.”
So I kept it up. “Daniel, Fisseha asked you to come with him. Why would he have done that if he meant to ditch you? He didn’t lose you on purpose. He couldn’t find you and you didn’t have your phone.”
And so forth.
He tilted into a depression of loneliness. He interpreted the events like this: “You have no friends and you are not wanted here.”
Yosef, the 10-year-old, is an ebullient, cute, out-going, athletic boy, and he is picking up English lickety-split. He trick-or-treated with two of his new best friends and he had a blast. He’s the one often asking to use the phone to call his friends in Ethiopia.
Daniel, 13, is less athletic, much shyer, still clumsy in English, often confused, fearing the worse. Probably even if his life had not been overthrown by the deaths of his parents and two brothers and his landing in an orphanage, Daniel would have been the out-lier, the odd man out, watchful, harboring misgivings, and a few steps behind.
The four boys—Yosef and Daniel, Fisseha and Jesse—choose to sleep in a single bedroom every night, in Daniel & Fisseha’s basement bedroom with two queen beds. An autumn litter of crumpled brown candy-wrappers soon covered the bedspreads and carpet; a rich chocolaty smell fills the air. Gobstoppers fell onto the floor like hail. “We’re going to get mice,” I told them 200 times. And: "It’s not good for your teeth to fall asleep sucking on caramels.” The riches were shared. Most of the candy was Jesse’s, who trick-or-treated the night away, reveling in the wildness of the night. “I went to one house 12 times!” he announced. A good portion of the candy came Daniel’s way. My calm words, sweetened by 10 miniature Milky Ways, softened Daniel towards Fisseha.
Now all is forgiven, their teeth are yellow, and we’ve got mice.
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| Jesse as a medley of fearsome brave heroes |
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| Yosef, Jack & Josh |
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| Yosef unmasked |
