Hide and Seek

When Jeffrey was six years old Mr. Valini killed a chicken, and because Jeffrey was afraid, he locked himself in the bathroom. He climbed up on the edge of the tub and watched out the window, but there was only the inside of the sun porch. Mr. Valini knew that Jeffrey was afraid so he brought the dead chicken to the window and held it up by its legs. The wings hung open and there was no head at the end of its neck. Jeffrey started at the bird and hated Mr. Valini. Then he came out of the bathroom and played with his cars in the driveway. He made roads with gravel-barked curves, then guided his logging trucks around them, lying with his head on the ground to make the trucks look large and real.

Mrs. Valini was Jeffery’s babysitter. She had men relatives who came in from work at the sawmill and seemed too big for the kitchen chairs when they sat at the table. They drank black-looking wine, talking in a language Jeffery couldn’t understand. The kitchen smelled like the wine and like beans cooking.

Mrs. Valini also had giant gladioli growing against the side of the house, and a room Jeffery was not allowed to go into. One afternoon, when he was supposed to be taking a nap, Jeffrey edged along the hall toward the secret door. He made himself shadow thin so that, even if someone came, he would not be noticed. He turned the doorknob very slowly and looked inside. It was just a living room with the shades pulled down.

Sometimes Jeffery played dolls on the sunporch with his sister Diana, when there was no one around to see him. His friend, Philip, caught him with a doll once. It was necessary to pull out some of the doll’s hair to show he wasn’t really playing with it.

At home Diana hung around the boys and no one seemed to mind. They played “Red Rover Come Over” in the yards between the houses, or tried to shove each other off the clothesline platform.

One day Jeffrey’s friend, Derick, found an important-looking piece of paper in a gutter drain. He folded and unfolded it carefully, showing the writing to Diana and to the others. Jeffrey got a pencil and paper from the house and tried to make important looking writing, but when he showed it to Derick and Philip, they just shrugged and went on throwing rocks at some boys across the street. Later that day Derick stole a hammer belonging to Jeffery’s father.

The next afternoon Jeffrey’s father stood on the front porch and yelled down the street at Derick’s mother. Derick’s mother stood on her front porch and yelled back. Jeffrey stayed in the house for two days until Diana said it was safe to come out. After a short fight (Derick and Philip against Diana and Jeffery) they all went down to the train station to kick chips off the ice blocks and wait from Derick’s father to come in from working on the tracks.

Sometimes when they were sprawled in the dirt under Philip’s house, they would tell about things. Derick told about riding a handcar on the railroad with his father. Philip told about sleeping in hay in his grandparent’s barn and about teasing a bull that was supposed to have killed a man once. Jeffrey could never think of anything to tell.

At school Jeffrey couldn’t play with Derrick or Diana. They were in second grade and he was only in first. He tried to play with the other children on the playground but he could never tell who was “it” or who had the ball. He would start out running around like everyone else. Then he would get tagged and have to be it for a long time. After awhile he would stop behind one of the school building posts and Miss Fin would say that someone else should be “it” for awhile.

When Jeffrey was seven years old his parents took him on a bus to the city. He was going away to a school for blind children. He knew he couldn’t see very well because in Miss Rein’s class, he had to hold the reading book up vey close to his left eye and squint to get the gray word shapes to turn into letters. The other children could hold the book away and read much faster. He tried hard to read like the others. Once he even made up words for the shapes he was supposed to read. Miss Rein didn’t say anything. She just went on to the next person. After that Jeffrey’s stomach hurt when he was called on to read.

The day they left for the new school they got up before it was light. It was so cold his mother had him dress beside the oven. All day the bus hummed and swayed, sucking him down into sleep, so that later he could hardly remember the ride.

They stayed in a hotel room with a drunk man next door who offered Jeffrey a glass of chocolate milk. He was not allowed to accept it.

After dinner his mother and father bought thick rubber-smelling balloons which they chased around the room, laughing, and trying to keep them from landing on the furniture or the floor.

In the morning they went together to a building with dark hallways. There were children, running around or standing up against the walls, and grownups writing things on papers.

A woman with deep lines beside her mouth and stiff yellow hair came out into the hall to ask Jeffrey’s parents a lot of questions. Then she took their papers into an office, where, one by one, she rolled them into a typewriter and typed on them.

Jeffrey never could remember going from the office building to the dormitory. It seemed to him that he was just suddenly there, standing in the middle of a room with blue walls, five beds, five dressers, and five long wooden lockers.

His mother was lifting clothes from a suitcase onto the top of a dresser. She began putting his socks and his underwear into the drawers. Then she hung his pants and shirts in a locker.

Jeffrey sat down on one of the beds. No matter how hard he squeezed his fists, he could not keep himself from crying.

When Jeffery arrived home for Christmas it was night and raining. There was a tree in the living room with colored lights and blue-grey needles that tasted good when he bit into them.

He sat on the couch looking at the tree. The lights were arranged so that they made one side of it seem fatter than the other. While he was deciding whether or not to change them around, he fell asleep.

In the morning he and Diana woke up very early. Derick was knocking on their bedroom window. They got up and went out the back door in their pajamas. Philip was there too. They sat in a row in the fog, dangling their legs over the side of the clothesline platform.

After a while Derick told about a girl at school with a burn all over her arm from her mother having thrown hot grease on her. Philip said that Mr. Hooper had given him two dollars to throw a sack of kittens in the millpond. Diana wanted to know if he had rally thrown them in. Philip said no, he had let them go but not to tell Mr. Hooper.

Jeffrey told about having swimming lessons in a room that echoed when people yelled. He told about “the Rope”, how it hung from a tree next to the dining hall, and was thick as a man’s arm How he and Leonard Munson were the only boys their age who could climb it. Them he stopped talking. Without wanting to, he was remembering lying in bed in the dormitory after Leonard flicked out the light. And how there was no one to come and look under the bed to make sure something terrible wasn’t there, just waiting for him to fall asleep.

He pulled one foot up into his lap and began picking at some loose rubber on his tennis shoe. Several cars passed in the street. A cat came around a corner of the house with something in its mouth. Jeffrey slid off the platform and went into the kitchen. He sat with his chin on the back of a chair, watching his mother’s floured hand rolling out dough.