She always did what she was supposed to do, this child of the war, with hair that was made to curl and lips as beautiful as a doll's.   She was the pretty child in family photos, effortless, almost embarrassed.   White gloves, patent leather shoes.

Then as a teenager, oh what a teenager, bouffants and black and white polka dot evening gowns with tiaras and elbow-length gloves.   Never without a date on Friday nights, mainly Wake Forest boys, whom she met while working behind the soda fountain counter at her father's pharmacy, making root beer floats and vanilla Cokes the boys would order just to watch her.

Then there was the boy who really mattered, different from the rest.   She was nineteen, and her parents told her she was supposed to get married.   So she did.

And she was a fine wife.   Her meals were wonderful, based solely on his preferences.   He didn't even have to ask.   She sewed him shirts and pressed his suits.   And how lovely she looked while doing it, her hair always set and sometimes covered with a chic scarf, the liquid line on her eyes always a perfect complement.

The kids came along and she joined the PTA, made cupcakes for class parties and chaperoned field trips.   Nothing out of the ordinary.   Ordinary was good.   She worked for ordinary.   Strived for it.   When her kids were small and didn't want to go to school in the mornings, she would patiently dress them while they lay sprawled out on the couch, lazy and ungrateful as they watched cartoons.

But there came a time when she looked in the mirror and saw only what other people saw in her.   And she didn't like it, this person who was defined by everyone else.   When was the last time someone asked her what she wanted?   When was the last kiss, the last hug, the last thank you?

Then there was the divorce.   No one understood at the time.   She always did what she was supposed to, and she always did it perfectly.   And she made it seem like she enjoyed it, which was like cutting herself where only she could see.   But finally, at fifty years old, her life was her own and it made her heady.   She would smile for no reason.   She bought things she and only she liked.   It didn't matter what anyone else thought.   She looked at her hair one day and realized how long she had dreamed of dying it red.   No one else liked the idea, but what did that matter?

So she dyed her hair.

Bright coppery red.

And those cool women downtown she used to see while shopping with the girls - she'd secretly admired them in their Birkenstocks and tie-dye and small gold studs in their noses.   How free they always seemed.   She wanted to be like that.   She wanted a nose ring.

So she got one.

She endured the teasing from her grown children.   It didn't matter.   She liked her red hair and nose ring.   "Looo-ise," great-aunt Charlotte would say, trying to convince her to take out the nose ring on Sunday for church, as if God wouldn't like it.   "Why would you do such a thing?"

"Because I wanted to," she would say, simply.

My mom's selflessness is tattooed on her bones.   She's still the sweetest, most generous person I've ever known.   But now she's not afraid to say, "Because I want to."

And the words sparkle as they come from her mouth.

There was always a party on Halloween night at Uncle Lester's house.   The entire extended family would show up.   His was the oldest house in the neighborhood, a sprawling tower of creaking timber held together by dovetails and family stories.   The little kids would go trick-or-treating in Uncle Lester's neighborhood.   The adults would indulge in what they called the Family Liquor, the good stuff from Uncle Lester's basement.

His neighborhood was always alive with doorlights on Halloween night.   Kids in homemade costumes roamed the streets in search of a sugar high, a silent network of ghosts and princesses sharing in passing which houses had the best candy.

I remember being one of those kids.   We were a focused band of sweet teeth and sweaty hands.   At that age, Halloween was about the candy .   The costume was just a means to get the candy .    It was a prop, nothing more.   It wasn't like fishing, when the better bait yielded a bigger catch.   We figured we could make up anything and the adults at the door would buy it.   They wanted to give us the candy.   It wasn't unusual to see a kid wearing a spaghetti pot on his head and calling himself a robot, or someone who'd put ketchup in his hair and saying he'd been murdered.

The year I turned thirteen, I was too cool to go trick-or-treating in Uncle Lester's neighborhood anymore.   But hanging around the adults at the party was an appalling idea, because some of them would always dress up in what was a frankly embarrassing display of Elvira wigs and Elvis sideburns.   At thirteen, I discovered, Halloween became all about the scare .   The darkness behind doors became alive with giggles as we merry band of teenaged cousins hid and waited to frighten unsuspecting family members.   That Halloween, after one too many scares in the bathroom when we hid behind the shower curtain and one too many complaints from parents around the neighborhood for chasing trick-or-treaters down the street with black licorice ropes we said were snakes, we were ordered to stay inside, upstairs , and to behave.

We were thrilled.   Upstairs was undoubtedly the scariest place in Uncle Lester's house.   Here is where the real history of the house lived - in the seven bedrooms.   We knew by heart the rooms where great-grandmothers were born and great-great grandfathers died.   And we all knew Lindy's room.   Lindy would have been one of our gaggle of white-haired great-aunts, had she not died of tuberculosis at age ten.   In her bedroom.   We knew it was three doors down from the upstairs bathroom.   And we never went in there.   Uncle Lester once said he saw the ghost of Lindy in there when he was a boy.   He stored stuff he never needed in that room, just as an excuse to stay out of it.

Now in exile, we teenagers decided to sit in the long hallway outside Lindy's room that night while the party carried on downstairs.   We found candles and lit them, then we took turns trying to psych each other out by making up rhymes to summon Lindy's ghost.   Someone swore they heard a knock in the room.   There were several dares, but no one had the courage to go in.   When that ceased to be fun, we decided to play hide-and-go-seek in the dark.   We turned off all the lights while one of us stood at the bottom of the stairs and counted to thirty.   It was black-cat black once the lights were out, and the hiders scrambled blindly around, trying to find a nook to squirm into.   I found the bathroom by the cool hollow sound of it and I felt my way down the hallway, counting the doors.   I stopped at four.   Not three.   Three rooms from the bathroom was Lindy's room and no one in their right mind would hide in there.

I entered and felt my way to the closet door, always to the left in every room.   I opened it and crawled in, closing the door behind me.   I sat on the floor and held my breath.   I felt a shuffling to my right and something brushed my arm.   I remembered giving a small scream.   "Who's here?"

"Just me."

It was my cousin Ingrid.   Darn, we'd both found the same hiding place.   But I wasn't about to leave and try to find another.   I didn't want to be the first one caught.   It was a pride thing.

"We can both hide here," I said.   "Just be quiet."

I don't know how long we were in there.   It was dusty and cold and everything was muffled.   I could barely even hear the party downstairs.   I shifted my position several times, growing unusually sleepy and tired, like the way you feel at the end of a long car trip, wrapped in a bubble of light sleep, the noise of the outside world still buzzing close to you, not letting you completely fade away.   It was strangely sad.

I finally said sleepily, "Do you think they forgot about us?"

No answer.

I heard a thump coming from the bedroom, then a shaft of light appeared at the crack under the closet door.   "No fair!" I whispered to Ingrid, suddenly awake and indignant.   "No lights!   That's the rule!"

The closet door flew open and all my cousins were clustered there, looking down at me as if I were dead, or the very least mortally wounded.

"Are you all right?" one of them finally asked.   "We've been calling for you for the past half-hour!"

"What's going on?" I said, standing stiffly and squinting against the light.   "Ingrid and I were just hiding.   What happened?"

"I wasn't in there," Ingrid said from the back of the group.   "I'm right here."

I looked to my right in the closet, and no one was there.   My skin prickled.   I looked back at my cousins, then looked beyond them to the room, at all the broken furniture and boxes of things Uncle Lester never used.

I had mistakenly entered Lindy's room.   I had been hiding in Lindy's closet.