The Party
The wake and funeral went quickly. Katie and her mother went to both and were about the only people there. Katie tried to convince her friends to go, especially Mandy, but they all acted as if Elizabeth had a disease. Katie had no patience with them.
Then Elizabeth did a strange thing. Several days later Katie received an invitation in the mail, a silver-edged heavy piece of paper inviting her to an end-of-the-summer-beginning-of-school party. So did Mandy. So did everyone else. Parents were invited, too. The party was a costume party for the children, and the invitation said "Children, please arrive one half-hour before the party to dress. I will provide the costumes." When Katie asked her mother what this meant, she guessed it meant that Elizabeth had something up her sleeve.
The party was several days away, just before school started, so there was plenty of time for everyone to get together and talk themselves into going. Some of the kids still thought she was a witch, but no one really believed that for very long. Some didn't want to go, but Katie kept at them, telling them that it would be fun, that Elizabeth was a neat person, that this was their last chance to have a good time before they got trapped back in school. The last argument seemed to be the clincher. She told them to really talk to their parents, push it hard.
The invitations caused several interesting things to happen. There were parents in the neighborhood whose kids had played together for months but who had never met each other. Now they did. Phone calls flew from house to house asking whether it was safe to let their children go and eventually the calls ended up in Katie's kitchen. Katie and her mother found themselves the neighborhood organizers for Elizabeth's party, assuring people that it would be good for the kids, and in the process all these parents who had never really connected with one another now called each other by first names and made an effort to become visible.
On the day of the party Katie gathered all the kids together at her house and together they all trooped up the block. Over the last few days Katie found herself taking charge of the situation, and most of the other people didn't seem to mind - at least Mandy and Brie weren't telling her that she was being too bossy and the other kids seemed to need a lot of reassurance about going to the house of a person they used to think was a witch ready to cook their brains for supper. She sort of liked having people listen to her and not fight all the time.
They looked like some animal with a dozen heads and two dozen arms and legs as they stood in a cluster on Elizabeth's porch. Katie knocked. Elizabeth answered. She had put a slight bit of make-up on her cheeks and her eyes sparkled like a garnet. "Come in," she said, in a voice full of bubbles, and they all moved quickly over the threshold. She told them to come upstairs. In a room toward the back of the house she had laid out racks of some of the strangest clothing the children had ever seen.
"When I was a child," she said to them as they walked around the room and fingered the materials and began to lay dibs on the clothes they wanted to wear, "my mother would always have us dress up and put on plays and sing songs that she wrote. She collected quite a lot of clothes for us to do this. I've kept most everything she had. Choose what you like. The boys can get dressed in the bathroom, the girls in my bedroom."
There were dresses with high collars and long sleeves all edged with lace, with skirts that swept along the floor. There were suits made out of thick wool with military brass buttons and red piping along the cuffs. There were skirts that went straight down to the middle of the calf and which were incredibly difficult to walk in. There were suitcoats made out of linen, so light and sharply creased. There were straw hats with ostrich feathers (Katie and Mandy recognized the hats they'd worn), cloche hats, pill-box hats, berets, fedoras, panamas, bonnets, tam-o'shanters, top hats, turbans, wimples - more hats than heads, all sizes, shapes, and colors. The second floor of the house filled with excited voices as boys suddenly became military officers or well-dressed polo players and girls quickly transformed themselves into flappers or debutantes or smart-looking professionals.
Elizabeth was tireless through it all. In her bedroom she supervised the joining together of snaps and laces, explaining all the while how the unfamiliar dresses worked, why a particular fashion looked the way it did. She helped each girl put a slight blush on her cheek and a bit of color over her eye. She shuttled back and forth between upstairs and downstairs, seating parents and getting them something to drink and then running back upstairs to supervise the dressing.
In her bedroom tall gawky Mandy became a delicate blond-haired girl from the rich districts of Newport, Rhode Island, her hair curled up off her neck and the high collar of the dress tickling her chin with lace.
In her bedroom Katie slipped into a red sheath skirt, with a red jacket to match that had a little skirt on it that Elizabeth called a "peplum". On her head she wore a red beret and across her white blouse hung a strand of black onyx stones.
In her bedroom Kara wore a blue sailor's shirt with white duck pants, a broad white, red, and blue scarf tied around her throat and hung off to the side.
In her bedroom Brie felt silk against her arms as she carefully put on a blouse that had padded shoulders and a tight waist. The buttons were made out of pearl. A pair of black sailor pants swung their huge bell-bottoms against her ankles.
