一人の日和

I READ recently that the construction of Princess Diana’s wedding gown, one of the more elaborate get-ups anyone has worn in my lifetime, required 25 yards of silk taffeta, 100 yards of tulle and at least 10,000 mother-of-pearl sequins and beads.

All of which sounds like overkill for a costume you only wear once, until you compare it with the effort expended at my house in recent weeks on a Halloween outfit. Things started to ramp up in mid-September with the announcement one night at dinner that everyone was going to be a butterfly. “Who’s ‘everyone’?” I asked my daughter, Clementine, who is 12. “You know, everyone,” she said, glancing up from the costume supplies list she was making. “All my friends.” The group costume. This is one of those middle-school girl conceits so familiar to anyone who ever was a girl herself that would be nearly impossible to explain to visitors from outer space who had just come down their gangplank with a lot of questions about the customs of earthlings.

It has something to do with wanting to be part of a pack at the very instant when you feel yourself starting to grow up and break away. In other words, matching costumes is a way of saying, “These are the people that I’m closest to. Today, at least.”Or, as Rachel Simmons, the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl” (Penguin Press: 2009) puts it, “Halloween is the middle-school equivalent of prom. It’s a public ritual, where your date is your best friend.”

Among my own friends, however, those with seventh-grade sons report little interest in dressing alike. “At this age, the biggest effort any of mine would ever make was to wear a hat, at the most, and call it a costume,” said my friend Stephanie, who has three boys. While there are exceptions to every rule (my husband remembers a year when he and his friends dressed as sperm cells, which involved wearing identical white nylon stockings over their shirts), the group costume is something you mostly see among middle-school girls.

With my oldest daughter, I remember the year of dressing like Barbara Eden’s character in “I Dream of Jeannie.” With my middle daughter, it was girls in identical football jerseys, shoulder pads and black eyeliner marks on their cheekbones. I suspected that group was in it mainly for the makeup. “Why butterflies?” I asked Clem. She sighed. It is very hard to have a mother. “Wings,” I said, reading aloud from the list. “Netting,Hidden Cameras, ribbon, tights.” I personally have never seen a real butterfly in tights. How could you fly in tights? They’d be so constricting. But whatever. “Pink tights,” Clem said, clarifying, “Other people, though, might be different colored butterflies.” It was rumored, for instance, that Clem’s best friend, Trixie, was considering a purple butterfly costume.

A few days later, Trixie’s mother offered to take a carload of prospective butterflies to the butterfly-equipment store after school so they could pick out matching wings. Trixie’s mother, who also probably never saw a butterfly in tights, suggested the girls pin their wings back. “You can be specimen butterflies,” she said.

After politely vetoing that idea (it is very hard to have a mother), the girls returned from the store with ribbon, sequins, wings and miles of netting. That night, Clem got to work right away, sewing a pink butterfly skirt. She and Trixie found the pattern on the Internet. It looked pretty complicated – individual crumpled puffs of netting, sewn all along a length of satin ribbon sash. This inaugurated a new era in our household. Scraps of fabric and ribbon were all over the place. A big bag of netting blew across the floor, like a tumbleweed, every time the kitchen door opened. A pair of enormous, gauzy wings – nylon stretched across a taut metal frame – were draped permanently across the back of the couch. And no one but Clem ever knew where the scissors were.

There were a number of fittings, with Clem strapping on her wings to butterfly around the room cautiously, so as not to take out the dog’s eye with a sharp wing tip. Princess Diana rehearsed for months, too, to learn how to avoid tripping over her 25-foot-long train.By mid-October, however, I noticed that work on the butterfly costume appeared to have ground to a halt. “Your costume seems like a lot of work,” I said to her one night. Then I added, cautiously, “How are all the other butterfly costumes coming along?” That’s when I heard the bombshell: not everyone was going to be a butterfly, after all.“What happened?” I asked. “A splinter faction of silkworms?”“Superheros,” Clem said briefly.I remember when a similar crisis beset the “I Dream of Jeannie” girls; a subset of the group split off and wore Harry Potter costumes at the last minute.

We still have a stuffed Hedwig owl around here somewhere, in fact. I don’t think the genies and wizards were ever close again.But the next night, I found Clem sitting on the couch with a laptop, furiously typing as she simultaneously monitored Facebook for butterfly-superhero status updates and kept an eye on a second onscreen window where a stream of text messages scrolled by as relentlessly as CNN subtitles.“So, what are the superheros going to wear?” I asked cautiously. “Tights,” she said, reading aloud this bulletin as it appeared onscreen.“Like the butterflies?” I asked.She typed something.I waited.She looked up.“Just like the butterflies,” she confirmed.