Craving a nice set of devil’s horns? How about a mermaid’s bra with seashell cups? A sequined, bat-shaped bow tie, perhaps, or a pair or mummy’s gloves? You’ll find them all at Shirley’s Hardware in Vineyard Haven in the weeks before Halloween, when the storefront is adorned with blow-up monsters, booing ghosts, scarecrows, and tombstones like Here Lies Rick R. Mortis. While you’re inside, you may find yourself tempted by an eight-inch rubber scorpion; an eyeball nightlight; or a plug-in, Frankenstein’s-head candy bowl that erupts in maniacal laughter.
    
When it comes to Halloween gear, Shirley’s is the biggest game on the Island, with costumes, accessories, and decorations occupying nearly a third of the store’s shelf and floor space.
    
“It seems to be taking over,” says Mary McManama, a Shirley’s employee since 1972 and the person responsible for ordering and displaying the Halloween merchandise. In the weeks leading up to Halloween, don’t even try to talk to Mary, unless you’re seeking costume advice, which she’s always happy to give. A diminutive woman with a no-nonsense way of speaking and an accent that sounds as though she comes from Around Here, she’s in constant motion, checking the racks, putting items in their proper places, and restocking empty shelves as items fly out the door.
    
Halloween is Mary’s favorite holiday; it shows in her October accessories – bat earrings that dangle below her sensibly short white hair, and orange and black striped socks with Queen of Halloween embroidered on them in purple.
    
“Halloween is just about having fun,” she explains. “Other holidays have a lot of mixed emotions for some people. Baggage. Pressure to get the right gift. But Halloween is just about this: you get to be anything you want for a day out of your life – a princess, or the scariest thing on the Island. Even adults have fun with it.”
    
Shirley’s hasn’t always dominated the Island’s Halloween 
market. Years ago, when the store was located on the main floor of the old A&P building in Vineyard Haven, Robertson’s Five and Dime was upstairs, and Robertson’s – not Shirley’s – did a big Halloween business. When Shirley’s bought out Robinson’s, they inherited the other store’s stock, and a Halloween legend was born. Now Shirley’s Halloween sales total about $40,000, or about half its total sales for the month of October.
    
“October would be one of our slower months if it weren’t for Halloween,” notes Jesse Steere, who took over the ownership of Shirley’s from his eponymous aunt in 1992. “But the profit margin is pretty slim. It’s a very time-consuming business.” Mary spends days poring over catalogues to pick merchandise, and then it has to be ordered, stored, priced, and arranged, with other goods being moved off the shelves to make room. “If there’s $20,000 in profit,” says Jesse, “it doesn’t take long to eat that up in labor.”
    
But, Jesse says, “we do it for the community.” And Halloween allows him to keep people working who otherwise might have to be laid off. Like so many Island businesses, Shirley’s earns most of its income during the busy summer season.
    
What distinguishes Shirley’s from many other stores that sell Halloween goods, particularly the big chain stores off-Island, is that Mary selects every item the store stocks. Large discount stores tend to buy assortments of goods prepackaged by merchandisers. “Then you get all this weird stuff that nobody really wants,” says Jesse, “like purple and orange wigs. We want 100 long black wigs. We know what we’re going to sell a lot of, and what we’ll sell only a few of. The package deals just use you to get rid of stuff.”
    
Mary does her ordering in February and March, paying particular attention to price. She doesn’t buy a lot of licensed costumes – Disney characters, that sort of thing – because they tend to cost more. “Say you have two or three kids,” she says, “and it’s October, and you’ve got to make it through the winter on what you’ve got now – you can’t spend that much on costumes. I don’t get stuff that’s going to make people feel bad because they can’t afford to buy it.”
    
She stocks a few high-end costumes, but she focuses more on the less expensive ones and on accessories, so people can make their own costumes and then just buy the finishing touches – monocles, false eyelashes, black-out wax for teeth. “You can find a pretty little dress and then buy some wings, a magic wand, and a tiara, and your kid’s a fairy princess, but you didn’t have to spend $40 to make that happen.”
    
Even if you’ve never been to Shirley’s around Halloween, you might have spotted their ads in the Island papers. Often, they feature Jesse, a big guy with a football-player build, attired, for example, as a French maid or a scarecrow. Occasionally, Jesse’s head is cut and pasted onto a picture of another person’s costumed body – an idea inspired by Jesse’s daughter, who once used her computer to superimpose her father’s head onto the figure of a baseball player diving for a catch. But mostly, it’s really Jesse, all dressed up for the occasion.
    
Shirley’s probably doesn’t need to advertise to bring business into the store in October. Mary says that kids start coming in after school in September, when the store begins to put out its Halloween gear, to browse and get ideas. Then October hits, and the crowds flow in. “The off-Island Derby wives who don’t fish come in, too,” Mary says. “And they say, ‘Wow, this is so cool! We don’t have anything like this at home.’”