This is my story, "Hide and Seek" for those who want to read it...
I wasn’t afraid of the game itself. What I was afraid of was the anxiety of hiding under the bed, waiting…alone with your thoughts…nothing to do, but wait. Oh what a horrible feeling that was.
I hid in the closet of my pastor when I was nine one April afternoon. I pulled a roll of ugly pink carpet around me, curled up in a little ball, and waited. I let my childhood drift before my eyes…A slow batch of houses with faceless owners, people my parents knew but to me, they didn’t have faces anymore, just soft voices, poets, cars, and 1970’s style kitchens.
These people, whom my parents entrusted me and my little sister to, were now just strangers. This idea made me more anxious. There I waited, in the pitch black of the closet, lying on the winged tip shoes of my Presbyterian pastor. All sense of time escaped me. Minutes had turned into hours and seconds into minutes. My nine-year-old mind had finally grasped the face of the first stranger. Her hair was long and auburn and her face was melting together in my mind to form the face of a worn and tired liberal. I had remembered their son would try to beat me up, while I had tried to pick up their cat. Their cat’s name was “cat” and even that name to my nine-year-old brain seemed so stupid. My cat’s name was Spoo. Now that was originality!
My parents had dragged my sister and I to the tired liberal’s house…off the Merritt Parkway. The drive always seemed so long and dark on the Merritt parkway and moon was always full and large while we drove in the red BMW. The house was always filled with adults but no toys or kids…. just their son, who to me seemed so mature and scary to me. I always remembered that he was handsome, even at the age he was and the age I was. He seemed to have a grasp on what was going on while my sister and I knew practically nothing. We had, in fact, been on this Earth for a few short years, so maybe it made sense. We didn’t know how to play pool, much for the fact that the pool table was far too big. We didn’t know how to turn the TV on, and while our parents indulged in their macrobiotic feast of fish and seaweed, our stomachs yearned for hamburgers and colas.
It might have been in hour in the dark. I remembered the little league practice today with the boys and shrugged off the memory. They had put me in Triple A, the worst league for little league. If I knew the word bastard, I would have called the entire Darien little league association all bastards. Just because I was a little girl, I couldn’t play with the big boys. The bruise on my arm from the fly ball started to hurt.
The memory of Popsicle twister pops and pancakes and a green minivan had suddenly been remembered. That family lived off the Merritt too but in the other direction from the worn and tired macrobiotic liberal. I always missed my parents so much when they dropped us off their but this house fed us so well. No macrobiotic seaweed…they had Skippy peanut butter. Skippy peanut butter was gold to me as a child.
The door to the closet was suddenly opened and there was the pastor’s son and my little sister, standing before me. I closed my eyes and held my breath. Surely, I was noticeable. But they had not seen me and just closed the closet and I was left in the dark again. How long was this going to take? The anxiety was getting to me now. I was hungry enough to eat one of my pastor’s shoes. They would never find me now. No one ever checks the same spot twice until they’re an idiot.
My mind began to drift again to the family with Pro-RC-AM racing, my favorite Nintendo game. We slept on a fold out couch and the oldest son had given me fuzzy dice because I loved them so much. Fuzzy dice to me meant the ultimate maturity and cool. Sitting on that fold out couch in their dark and scary house, staring at the TV…Nintendo music and computer noises blaring. I had two boys yelling at me to press A.
This was the 1980’s.
We didn’t have Nintendo till I was seven, when my father, in his last dying days, went out with us to Walden Computer on the Post Road and purchased his two daughters a Nintendo system and our first game, Super Mario Brothers 3. In Super Mario Brothers 3, you could make Mario turn into a raccoon using a special leaf and he could fly. The plot was ludicrous with the pirate ships with mini cannons, flying raccoons, and weird lands of ice and turtles. I wasted away my childhood with that precious box but when my father laid down his American Express for Super Mario Brothers 3, a purchase of sixty dollars for his two daughters that he would never live to see grow up; money was all he had to make us smile.
Through the cracks in the door, the sun was setting. The voices in the old Victorian house had ceased and the only sound now was my breath on the carpet. They must have stopped searching. I closed my eyes and positioned myself for a nap. Sleep grabbed hold on me and there I was, asleep with my face in my pastor’s dress shoe.
I dreamt of the dark of the closet, dark now and nothing else. The faceless strangers were standing in their driveways waving as my family drove away from them in the red BMW. Red, because my father let me pick the color and I wanted Red because it was my favorite color at the time. I always sighed a great relieve to be back in the arms of the family car and my parents…back to the house with the bridge and the brook running through the yard…where everything was normal, nothing had changed, and the anxious feelings would subside.
The closet door finally opened again to the Pastor himself and his wife. I opened my eyes to the bright of the lamp on their nightstand.
“Oh Emily, here you are! It’s so good to see you, we didn’t know where you were!”
The windows outside were filled with twilight. Had I been in this closet all day? I didn’t ask questions and stumbled to my feet.
As I picked at my lasagna the Pastor’s wife had made, I could only picture the strangers with their Nintendo games, Computer screens, and pool tables; all of them memories by material possessions and not by real human characteristics.
I put my milk glass down slowly on the table.
“When’s my mom coming back?”

So while Ross, me and Nathalie all lay in bed together (it was kinda nice actually...not sexual at all, just friends getting together and being friends) I was feeling kinda lonely for some reason and it was nice to have them all in my bed with me hugging me while i slept. All i night I had dreams about Bard being like as big as a State U. and everything was crazy...there were thunderstorms, people gave me their driver's licenses (dont ask me why) and i dreamt of trains, swimming, tornados (ive been dreaming about tornados almost every night) and a muttering transsexual that owned a diner and Fred Flinstone was really attracted to him/her...
Maybe it's college that has made me go crazy...but I doubt it. I have always been this weird...and college has told me to bring it out more...
So I have all these papers to write and I have almost eight pages of my Don McLean paper done and its due in six days. I haven't started my Tolstoy paper and that's due tuesday and as for philosophy...did somebody say "too many papers?" but I am not going to start that paper until Wednesday when everything is done, done, and also done.
It's true, I do miss the good ole fashion seduction...but I keep telling myself that i'll be in Maine soon and maybe some counselor will take pity on you...that would be just what i need. To stop dwelling on the past and to move forward...to think logically (sure you liked Blake a lot but when are you ever going to see him again???) or (Johnny Garrison is a motherfucker and waiting for a letter is stupid)
I wrote this great story about hide and go seek...it's actually a true story about how i hid in my pastor's shoe closet while playing hide and go seek with his son and they never found me until five hours later. It goes into this whole thinking of how Hide and Go Seek always scared the crap out of me because you were alone with your thoughts and all you could do was lie there and think about your life and what was going on with it. If i find a spare break...i'll type it (its in my journal, my real journal) and post it.
Maybe this sunday when i go to West Point, everything will be okay...but who knows..with all this work I should be doin i shouldn't go at all...oh well...i need a day to relax (if you can relax at West Point) and today isnt going to be one of them...i promised myself nine pages of my paper and to start the Kruetzer Sonata paper (which shouldn't be hard, that story was awesome) and to read some Rawls (ohhh man I hate everything about THAT guy)
Note to all: Double Delight Oreos (peanut butter and chocolate cream) are...orgasmic!