Mischief and Alarms

Sometimes, I try to remember exactly what mischief I'd gotten up to, what secrets I'd already kept to myself by the time I was your age. Sometimes, it feels as though I were never your age. I have a few anecdotes I've retold so often that I've worn them soft as chamois, but events that seem perfectly ordinary to have involved me at five or six, at seven or eight, are weird to imagine happening to you. Surely, I was always older than you are, somehow. Surely.

The first neighborhood my family lived in, until I was almost eight, was a close-set street of single-family ranch homes with little yards, the kind that proliferated in suburbs all around the country during the mid-twentieth century, although not quite the sort of sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivision that became most common later. This was working middle-class, white America in the 1960s. Most of the houses had stay-at-home moms with multiple children living in them, and the prolonged neighborhood play sessions, particularly in the summer months, could tumble up and down the block.

The families whose kids I played with the most were the Howlands and the Klimbecks, whose houses were, respectively, directly across the street from and adjacent to ours. This may have been because I was the least mobile kid on the block and often couldn't leave the house at all. Roaming the neighborhood in a wheelchair was supremely difficult, as even the single-story houses had entry steps and narrow doors. I valued most the children, like Colleen Howland, who were content to hang out in our yard or house and play with me for hours, but occasionally I was upright and agile enough to join the golden summer horde that roamed from home to home. The Klimbecks and the Howlands counted several children apiece, and the ones nearest my age were all girls.

I was little, I was frail, and I was often the only boy. This made me something of a pet but also something of a target for the slightly older girls. During one game of hide-and-seek at the Howland's, when I was six, I burrowed into the clothes at the back of a bedroom closet, only to find myself trapped. I was discovered by a pair of eight year-old girls, who then stood shoulder-to-shoulder, barricading the door. One of them shone a cumbersome flashlight down on me in my nest. The other ordered me to pull down my pants or they wouldn't let me go. I pulled down my pants. The flashlight beam glared at my privates, and the two girls laughed. Then they ran off, while I scurried to hitch up my pants and get out of there before they came back. I was utterly perplexed and had no idea why they laughed. I don't remember feeling shame, but I remember feeling powerless.

Although my evangelical parents shunned any alcohol or tobacco, at least half the adults in the neighborhood smoked. Therefore, we children were often nabbing cigars and cigarettes, which we took into garages, basements, sheds, or bushes to play around and pose with, amusing each other. Sometimes, if we had also snatched matches, and we convinced ourselves, with much whispering, that it was safe, we would try to light up, and then pretend to smoke. We never inhaled, or at least I never did, just filling our mouths and competing to blow out circles, which none of us did well. I don't recall ever getting caught blowing smoke, although once I stood by mute while one of the girls from down the street got abruptly strapped by her mother for attempting a cigarette theft from a purse. Writing this now, it strikes me that, although I remember most of my childhood fondly, nothing fixes a moment in the memory like a feeling of alarm.

My alarm was not always induced by other children or by adults; sometimes, my play was interrupted by the world. I was probably the only kid to break a leg playing in a sandbox, as well as the only one to find himself truly, helplessly petrified at the top of a backyard slide, too terrified to go down. I would not budge, convinced that I would shatter when I reached the ground, and one of the other kids had to run to find a mother for help. Eventually, one of the mothers arrived and lifted me down. It was something that I kept to myself, like being trapped by those girls with the flashlight or watching that friend get strapped.

When we moved to the new house in the swamp woods, with the little creek running alongside, there was a lot more outdoor room but many fewer kids and almost no girls in the neighborhood. The two boys I played with my first year there, when I was seven and eight, were much more adept at stealing cigarettes than the kids in my prior neighborhood had been, also beer, and they had a trick for disguising the telltale smells on their breath. It all depends on knowing your environment, and they were the indigenes as far as I was concerned.

First, we would steal a pack of Marlboros from John Schober's father, from the carton he always kept in the coat closet. Then we would filch a couple of bottles of beer from one of the cases in the garage of old man Grigolet, who forgot to shut his back door half the time. (The three of us were seven, eight, and ten.) Then, in the long summer twilight, we would slip down to the creek, where the trees crowded over us, to smoke, sip, and spit like Huck Finn, although I was the only one of us who yet knew anything about him.

After a while, when we knew we would need to be getting back to our houses soon, we would yank up fistfuls of onion grass from the swampy ground right beside us, and we would chew on them vigorously, even swallowing the slurry. At last, we would saunter off in our separate directions, green stems sticking jauntily from our teeth, an awful taste of raw onion in our mouths.

My mother used to sternly warn her children, in those years, that if we ever smoked, she would smell it on us instantly, and we would be sorely punished. But I would smirk to myself when she said so, knowing how many times already I had crept back from the woods, stinking more of mud and onion than anything else. If she wondered, she never asked.

When I think of that eight year-old's smirk now, I wonder what you might already have had cause to smirk or have felt alarm about. I probably don't want to know, but I do know that I don't know. I do.