The Halloween House

The family that lived next door to us consisted of an elderly mother and her three daughters. The house itself was enormous and almost macabre looking with turrets, black iron fencing and gingerbread everywhere, three stories high, dark and forbidding.

Ruth was the oldest daughter. Like her sisters, she had never been married and had worked all her adult life. She was slightly stocky, with close cropped grey hair and no discernible figure. June was next, a small, slight woman who had also worked all her life. She wore an out of style pageboy and long skirts. Betty was the black sheep - chunky, bleached blonde, hard drinking, chain smoking and able to curse up a landslide. She'd been born crippled and rarely held a job for more than a month or so at a time. She and my mother became fast friends, spending spring afternoons in the backyard downing sixpacks, reading cheap paperbacks and trashing the neighbors. Betty wasn't allowed in the house if Dad was home. In the winter, she didn't come out at all but would sit in front of her window smoking and pitching empty beer cans onto the lawn. She would talk on the phone for hours with my mother, her raspy, overly loud laughter carried on the air like bad music.

Three spinster ladies and their mother living out their lives in a mammoth old house that needed work and frightened the neighborhood children. I imagined sorrow and secrets behind those old walls, rage and despair and bodies buried in the cellar. On Halloween, it was passed by.

But it was just a house like any other and if it kept secrets, it was no different than the white house with the black shutters next door.