What Happened (Part 21)

 

The doorway to the Kitchen is simply a ten foot opening; a metal threshold marks where the wood floor ends and the speckled linoleum begins. The way this room is now would startle my youngest sibling, I think, who never knew it so. It is bright, airy, clean, and uncluttered.  The walls and roof are a cheery canary yellow, the curtains over the sink and around the window looking out to the driveway have a rustic farm motif featuring roosters and coffee-mills, and the myriad cabinets and drawers gleam with copper colonial-style handles. The kitchen table set is an old Formica-topped model with metal tubular legs and a chrome edge banding its rounded rectangle.   The only other piece of furniture is the old high chair (metal of course, with a multi-colored teddy bear pattern on its vinyl back and seat) that sits under the golden sunburst Westclox.  There is an oven set in the wall, a stove and vent-a-hood set in the counter, and a refrigerator/freezer, standing next to the sink.

[Something like this.]

It is the gap between sink and refrigerator that most concerns the boys, and they inspect it first.  The only thing there is the heavy, wooden, round, almost yard-wide Chinese checker board on which Mom and her friend Maggie (Aunt Margaret? No.) sometimes play. Mike double checks the kitchen chairs to make sure I am not reproducing his ploy.  They look under the kitchen sink, but find only the pipes, a clutch of cleansers (scandalously unsecured by today’s standards, but somehow we never did drink bleach—we were sensible lads, Mom had lectured us about the dangers, and we policed our younger members) and far off around the corner under the countertop the gleam of the electric coffee urn, a working relic of Pop’s entrepreneurial days, hauled out at family gatherings when a single pot just won’t do. Attention is turned to the pantry. 

The pantry is a tall thin closet with four shelves for food, a space at the bottom for a plastic bin for potatoes, and a space to the side for the broom, scoop, ironing board, and the clothes pin bag. The top shelf is for spices and canning supplies, the next shelf is canned goods of a shorter nature like tomato sauce, the next is cereal and taller can goods, and the bottom is for coffee, crackers, and way in the back, liquor bottles.  The pantry is a popular hiding place because you can hide standing up and there is a crack under the door for light.  They fling open the door in expectation.  I am not there.

Bafflement reigns. Mike asks Kenny if he checked everywhere.  They go back to the start to look again, this time even searching places in our room, where it began.  Under the bed, behind the headboard, in the closet (which, although it opens with a rumble like thunder, can be eased open quietly with a practiced hand), behind the door jangling with belts hanging on the inside knob, all these places are examined.  Every room is investigated again, but I am not to be found.

They end up in the kitchen again, stumped, intrigued, and a little mad.  Finally they have to give the seldom-used cry of “Ally, ally, oxen free-o!”  They are astonished and appalled when I pop out of the cabinet under the oven, because this is the cubby for the trash can. Admittedly it was not then the foul hole it eventually became (the walls were clean and there was a lid on the can), but we are conditioned not to have anything to do with garbage, and no one imaged I would have the fortitude to do it. It is, in short, a victory won by playing against our accepted conceptual norms.  My triumph is greeted with the usual mix of admiration and aggravation, and then it is time for lunch.