Drunk adults and eight-year-old spies
I was a very sneaky little kid.
Like most girls my age, I devoured “Harriet the Spy,” a book about an 11year-old girl who took copious notes of everything she saw, and what other people said and did. She was going to be a writer one day, and she knew all this information would inform her career. Of course, nothing went according to plan. Her notebook was stolen, and her friends and classmates discovered what she really thought of them.
Like Harriet, I knew I had to pay special attention to everything that happened to me, because one day I would need this information. Unlike Harriet, I didn’t write them all down because I didn’t want my friends and family to know what I really thought of them. Instead, I convinced myself I would just remember it all.
Yeah.
I learned early on that parents spoke two languages: the one they used with their kids, and the one they used with their friends. One was far more interesting than the other, so I would perch myself at the top of the stairs whenever my mom was on the phone in the kitchen to find out what was really going on in the world.
Our house was creaky, and you had to know the right places to walk to sneak into position. “Slithered” would not be the wrong word here. I’d crouch into a ball, desperate not to be ratted out by a sister, and parse my mother’s conversation for certain words, particularly my own name because the only way to survive childhood is to ascertain the importance — to you — of everything that happens.
I was like the original Google search engine.
I would know who she was talking to by figuring out which husband they were complaining about, or which kid. If somebody was sick and her voice would drop to a whisper, I’d know it was cancer or something equally scary. Nobody got
divorced back then, though, trust me, from the things I heard, I knew they wanted to. Or so I thought. I would be much older before I understood the benefit of venting.
Of course, I couldn’t do much with the information. If she’d said something that embarrassed me, I could only rage inside.
If she embarrassed my sisters, I was OK with that.
The best bits were finding out what other people’s kids had got caught doing, and we would never be told because it somehow might rub off on us like smallpox or wet paint.
Someone caught “in a little bit of trouble” could be school detention or jail. Spying gave me important information.
Every year at Christmas, my mother would drape a huge red tablecloth over the dining room table, and overlay it with a white one. It was pretty. It also came down almost to the floor.
They would have parties, and I would come downstairs after bedtime for a glass of water, explaining that it had to be kitchen water because bathroom water tastes bad.
I’d wait until they forgot about me, then carefully climb under the dining room table and up onto the chairs.
I learned a lot huddled in my tented bunker, scarcely daring to breathe.
Nobody cared about drinking and driving back then, so the booze would flow and I’d learn why a couple who had been there last year wasn’t invited back, which spouse would have to cajole their better half into their coat so they could leave before they became next year’s uninvited couple, and I could almost see my mother deadeye my father when he got louder and louder about a perceived slight from 10 years before. These drunk people in fancy clothes fascinated me.
It’s probably just as well I didn’t keep a notebook.