The Martins invited us all for dinner New Year’s Eve, for roast beef and “boiled” potatoes—no gravy, no ketchup, something called “chutney.” Glad Mom made a pumpkin pie to take or I’d of starved.
Out to dinner with my baby brother in a highchair drooling something yellow (mashed up bananas) and something green (mashed up peas) and them combined in front of him when he refused to swallow any more and threw up the last ten mouthfuls about. I concentrated on the pumpkin pie.
The chutney wasn’t bad but it wasn’t ketchup.
The Martins are learning to play Bridge so the parents stayed at the Martins’ house and all us kids got to come home—I mean, to my house, Lewis in charge, but the only thing Lewis wanted to do was watch TV.
A game of hide-n-seek in the basement, pretty scary at night with all the lights off and only a flashlight and the person who was “it” up on the landing waiting ‘til we hid to turn the last light off and call,
Apple, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie,
If you’re not ready holler Aye!
Anyway, we were going down the block, Gary and his buddy Randy in the lead, two houses ahead of us on the icy sidewalk plotting something, whispering and then laughing and looking back—
Lewis was keeping track of the rest of us, me, Brenda and Ellen sometimes in front, sometimes behind in single file mostly since the shoveled sidewalk wasn’t wide enough—
When Gary ran back and wanted the key to the front door.
“Why?”
“’Cause. I know how to open it.”
“Why?” Lewis was suspicious.
“’Cause.”
“You’re not stealing the knob off the TV, I’m in charge, you watch what I watch.”
“No—because—it’s a surprise.”
See, Gary’s thirteen and I’m only nine, to get his way he sets the TV to what he wants and then swipes the knob so I can’t change the station. But Lewis is seventeen and Gary can’t get away with this with Lewis.
But—a surprise?
Oh boy, we’d better—
A surprise on who?
Ellen is eleven and Brenda’s a year younger than me and they’re girls and Randy and Gary can’t be nasty to girls so I’m starting to feel like it’s a threat to me—
The surprise is on Brenda. As soon as we stopped on the front porch the porch light went off, then the one light in our living room went off too.
A sudden racket of giggles and gasps.
When Lewis found the switch and the light came back on, there’s Brenda blushing, holding her breath, plunked down in my baby brother’s playpen. Gary singing, What a baby! What a BIG baby! And Randy going, Wah! Wah! Wah! They ambushed Brenda and put her there.
Lucky Brenda was smallest and lightest or it would have been me.
The game—
The places I remember hiding before (but I was smaller, I fit in better): The clothes chute with the bars of its door. But unless I was dressed in brown or black, unless I found something to cover my face, that’s the first place the person would shine the flashlight.
In the cabinet under the laundry room sink. It was difficult even then, someone had to help shove me in, and hard twisting my head around the drain pipe loop.
The fruit cellar under the stairs. But the fruit cellar door squeals like a stepped-on cat, too loud and easy to hear from the top of the stairs.
Behind the bag with my dad’s tuxedo. Too much noise and the empty hangers beside it would clang and give me away.
Therefore I decided on the creepiest, most secret place: The storage space like a cave under my brother’s “train board.” You have to enter from the furnace room. It’s the hardest place to get to but I knew Randy would never find me. In the furnace room, the far side of it, my father put up a shelf for Lewis’ “chemistry project,” all kinds of glass tubes, “vials” and small rubber hoses for “siphoning.” Dusty now since Lewis decided he didn’t like chemistry.
But underneath was an opening to the space in the other room, close to the foot of the stairs, a long storage room built under the big board Dad nailed up for Lewis’ HO train town (two mountains and a train station). Beneath it, walled off, full of boxes.
And no way to get in except through the furnace room.
Randy wouldn’t know about that.
I decided to climb in there.
I heard Brenda scream and Ellen’s wise-guy laugh—whatever you claim, she always chuckles like she knows better—and Randy’s voice saying, “Ellen, what makes you think I wouldn’t look under the ping pong table first?”
And squirming a little and trying to back up, to crawl backwards, I heard much closer a SWOOSH! A big box sliding down between other boxes.
Landing across the backs of my legs.
Heavy, not easy to move, it was firmly wedged in place.
“Help!” I called. Dirty, grimy, sweating in the suffocating dark, on my hands and knees, I didn’t have any room to turn around, I couldn’t reach behind me. “HELP!” I yelled louder.
My brother yelled back, “Where are you?”
“Under the train table!”
“It isn’t a table.”
“You know what I mean.”
“How did you get in there?”
“The way you showed me.”
“I didn’t mean you should go there!”
“Gary!”
“I’m not crawling in there.”
“GARY!”
“You can just crawl back out.”
“I can’t, I’m stuck, a big box fell.”
Silence. I think I heard people’s footsteps going up the stairs, I think everybody was leaving me, I think—
No, a thin beam of light from the flashlight over the top of the boxes. I felt the box pinning my legs wiggle, then my brother pulling on my left foot—both feet—until a shoe came off.
It took Lewis to finally get me out (furious at me for being so stupid), Lewis with a claw hammer prying off one of the side panels. Getting sweaty and dirty and missing some of his TV program.
“Happy New Year!” I said when I got out.
He wouldn’t answer.
—