The Runaways

The day we decided to run away, we had suffered a terrible injustice at the hands of our evil and wicked housekeeper/babysitter, Hattie (nowadays I suppose she would be a “domestic engineer/care provider,” but back then she was just a plain old housekeeper/babysitter). We only used the term “evil and wicked” on those days when some terrible injustice had been suffered; normally she was “our pal Hattie.” Unlike many children, my sister and I did not run away at every little excuse; indeed, this was the first time we seriously contemplated the possibility (I say seriously because, of course, we had contemplated it many times and even had a plan, which will unfold below).

We had been scolded and sent to our room for some crime, which I recall had to do with sneaking food — well, candy actually — that we weren’t supposed to have. In any event, we felt terribly abused and indignant and thus decided the time had come to put our plan into action.

Robin was somewhere around nine, so that would have made me about seven. We were therefore highly sophisticated and did not want to leave anyone with the misconception that we were whiny, pouty little babies who didn’t like being told “no.” A carefully worded good-bye note to our soon-to-be-bereaved parents ought to do the trick. As best I can remember, the gist of the note was that we were so terribly sorry to have put Hattie to the trouble of disciplining us for having a little snack, which we took only to stave off the pains of starvation until dinner time; and we certainly didn’t want to be the cause of any unhappiness to dear Hattie, who of course was allowed to have a snack any time she wanted; and since it was so obvious to us that our parents couldn’t really afford to keep us since we weren’t even allowed one little piece of candy, we felt it was in everyone’s best interest to leave our “warm little home” (we got that from Little Women) and strike out on our own, no longer being a burden to anyone.

Propping the note on our dresser, we packed our things in our Barbie Wardrobe cases. I left Barbie behind so that there would be room for my rubber band gun, my white plastic sunglasses with the “diamonds” in the corners, a note pad and two pencils, and six pieces of Bazooka bubble gum (unwrapped because I always unwrapped them to get to the comics). Robin, of course, took her Barbie and all Barbie’s clothes and didn’t have room even for one other thing. (I told her not to be thinking she was going to get any of my Bazooka bubble gum.)

Bags in hand, we sneaked down the stairs and out the front door ever so quietly. Hattie must have been in the kitchen because there was a delicious aroma coming from that direction which gave us pause for just a moment; then, resolutely, we turned our backs on temptation and marched off down the street.

Our plan was this: We would go down Riverside Drive to the bridge and cross over the river to the park. Then we would have to go all the way back across the park, clear to the other side, which was quite a long way (especially when you were seven). At the other end of the park was the Museum of Natural History, where our Aunt Ginnie worked as an archeologist. (She was only there when she wasn’t out “playing in the dirt” as she called it. We thought it must be a wonderful job to get paid for digging around in the dirt.) We often went to the museum, whether or not Aunt Ginnie was there, because it was the most wonderful place in the world. There were about a thousand rooms to explore (or maybe not quite that many).

One room had all kinds of animals — real, live animals! — and you could sometimes pet them. (Once my sister and I saved some baby bunnies from certain death and took them to the museum, where they were cared for....but that’s another story altogether.) In one room there were a bunch of old bones and pieces of clay pots, and on the wall was a mural showing cavemen and cavewomen and cavechildren, and scary-looking animals. There was even a dinosaur skeleton, which you think would be scary but really it was just big. One thing we always wanted to do was climb on top of that old dinosaur and slide down its big, long tail.

There was a planetarium where you could sit in the dark and look at stars right in the middle of the day! And there was a booth, too, where you could put in some money — a nickel or a dime — and a little bird food would drop into a cup. As soon as that food dropped down, a chicken would pull a string that rang a bell, and the food would drop again to where the chicken could eat it! It was the world’s smartest chicken. And there was a room that had a whole bunch of plain old rocks and stuff sitting around, and it didn’t look at all interesting until you flipped a switch, and the light went out and a magic purple light came on, and all of a sudden the rocks sparkled and were all different colors, and you could see things that you never could see with the regular light on! Plus it made your shirt glow.

But the best room of all was the mummy room. It wasn’t really just a mummy room; there were all kinds of things — Aunt Ginnie called them ‘artifacts’ — from mysterious places far away. But the best thing, the only thing we really cared about, was The Mummy.

It was a real mummy from Egypt, which was on the whole other side of the world. The Mummy was lying on a table under glass, and next to it stood the esophagus (which my brother named it and which we persisted in calling it, no matter how many times Aunt Ginnie said, “Sarcophagus, children, sarcophagus.”). The ‘esophagus’ was interesting, too, with all kinds of weird pictures on it, but it was really The Mummy that held our attention. Every time we visited the museum, we made up elaborate stories about The Mummy. Our favorite was that he was a great and powerful king who wasn’t really dead but captured by evil magicians and mummified so that the usurpers could steal his throne. If we could but release him from the glass cage and unwrap him, he would come back to life and bestow upon us immeasurable treasures (and candy).

Anyway, back to The Plan. We would go to the museum and, just before closing time, hide ourselves away somewhere (I thought we should hide in the esophagus next to the King, but Robin was just a little reluctant to be in the Mummy room with all the lights off). Then, after the museum was closed and we were alone, we could come out of hiding and explore. We figured we could live there pretty much forever; we would be regular tourists during the day, hide at closing time, and have the place to ourselves all night long!

Food wasn’t a problem, either, because they had a soda machine and candy machines there. The only problem was, we only had about thirteen cents between us, and Robin was pretty sure that wasn’t enough. What to do? As we walked down Riverside Drive that day, we spotted the gas station at the corner by the bridge. Of course! We would get a job there and earn some money, and then we could buy candy and soda at the museum. If we ran out of money, we could always go back and work during the day and then be back at the museum before closing time!

Boldly we approached the man who was working on a car. The car was up in the air, and the man was actually standing under it. I walked right up to him under the car while Robin, being older and maybe a little wiser, stayed back where she couldn’t get hurt if the car happened to slip off that pole that was holding it up.

I explained to the man that we were running away (Robin looked like she would have kicked me when I said that, except that she would have had to get under the car to reach me) and that we needed a job to earn some money for food. He looked at me and then at Robin, and then back at me, with a very serious look in his eye (although he must have had a nervous tick, because his mouth wouldn’t quit twitching). He was sorry, he said, but he didn’t have any work for us to do. However, he could offer us a deal.

He said that he thought we shouldn’t run away, because our parents would be very unhappy (with that, Robin and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes — that was, after all, the whole point of our running away in the first place). He said that if we would go home, he would give us a surprise. Of course we had no intention of going home now that we had started on our great adventure, but we were curious about the surprise, so we asked what it was.

The man went into an office and came out with a whole row of suckers, the kind where the wrappers are all connected in a big, long chain. They were green suckers, and there must have been a hundred of them! Well, maybe more like twenty. But anyhow, enough suckers to last us for probably three or four years.

I looked at Robin, and she at me. Hmmm. We would have to have a lot of money to buy that many suckers. Plus there wasn’t anywhere else to look for work between the bridge and the museum. The museum would be there forever, so if we took the suckers and went home, and then another time decided we must again leave, we could always put The Plan into action. After carefully considering all the pros and cons of the deal for nearly a full minute, Robin took the suckers and thanked the man kindly, and we turned around and headed back up Riverside Drive toward home, Barbie wardrobe cases held tightly in one hand and each holding one end of the sucker chain in the other.

We both probably ate two or three suckers between the bridge and our street and were feeling quite pleased with ourselves as we approached the house. Catching a glimpse of Hattie shaking a rug out off the side porch brought us up short. There were a few things we had to consider.

Since Hattie was nonchalantly shaking out a rug, we deduced that she hadn’t yet discovered our note of farewell, which was a good thing, since we weren’t leaving after all. We had to sneak back into the house (if she hadn’t found the note, she probably hadn’t been up to our room yet and didn’t know we had sneaked out) and destroy that note.

However, since we weren’t supposed to have candy (which had got us into this situation in the first place) until after supper, we couldn’t very well traipse into the house with a whole string of suckers trailing behind. If we got caught on the way to our room, it would most certainly result in the loss of our bounty. Therefore, before sneaking back into the house, we would have to find a suitable hiding place for the suckers. None of our usual places would do, because our brother Donnie knew all of them, and our suckers wouldn’t be safe. We were definitely not going to share them with him. No, it had to be somewhere nobody would think to look for anything.

We crept up to the hedge in front of the front porch and crawled into “The Hedge Hole” — the space between the hedge and the porch where we couldn’t be seen from anywhere and where we had, in the past, devised some of our best schemes — and set about coming up with the perfect hiding place. I thought we should climb up the maple tree and tie the suckers to a high branch, but Robin reminded me that Abby Thornton was always climbing trees and might find our suckers, and knowing Abby, she’d eat them all before she came back down. Robin then thought we could climb on top of the garage and hide them in the rain gutter, but I suggested that if it rained they would be washed away and we’d never find them. We were stumped. Sitting with our chins in our hands, staring out through the hedge, we absently watched a squirrel running back and forth across the yard, collecting whatever it is that squirrels collect and taking his plunder back to his nest in the tree out front.

The tree out front! The tree with the squirrel hole just far enough up where Robin could reach on her toes and I could almost reach if I jumped. Why couldn’t we put our suckers in the squirrel hole? The squirrel wouldn’t mind because he put all kinds of weird stuff in there — pieces of paper, leaves, acorns, buckeyes... No, it was perfect. No one, but no one, would look for our suckers in the squirrel hole, not even Abby. And the squirrel wouldn’t eat them, because they were, after all, wrapped up in plastic.

Since Robin could reach and I couldn’t, I stood look out for her as she ran to the tree and stuffed our precious suckers into the hole. The squirrel was on a branch over her head scolding her the whole time, which made me very nervous — I didn’t want Hattie to come out to see what was wrong with that stupid animal.

After she had safely tucked our suckers away, Robin and I crept along the side of the house until we were under the kitchen window. Just as we figured, Hattie was in the kitchen humming a song and fixing dinner so it would be ready when our folks got home from work. We knew she’d be in there for a good long time, so we ran back to the front of the house and in the front door, careful to not let the screen bang. The front door was right there by the staircase, so it wasn’t any problem slipping up the steps to the safety of our room -- deftly stepping from the third step to the fifth in order to avoid the squeaky fourth step.

The note we left was still propped right where we left it, so we hid it in the closet (thinking we could use the same note if we ever ran away again because it was, in our opinion, a work of art). When Hattie came to tell us we could come down, we were sitting on our beds with our hands in our laps, like angels (Hattie looked at us very suspiciously since we weren’t known to be angels very often).

You might think that we lived happily ever after with our almost-lifetime supply of suckers and that was the end of the story. Sadly, it wasn’t so.

When our parents came home that night, they had a surprise for us — we were all going to the Cincinnati Zoo the following day, which was Saturday. The Cincinnati Zoo was a wonderful place, almost as interesting as the Museum of Natural History, and we were very excited. When we returned home late Saturday night, we fell into bed exhausted, and on Sunday we spent the day telling Abby Thornton all about the zoo and making her jealous. Monday came and we went to school; the rest of the week followed, and by the next weekend Robin and I had forgotten all about our suckers. I don’t know how many weeks passed before we remembered, but when we did and Robin went to fetch them, there was nothing left but a bunch of plastic and some sticks that were pretty chewed up. That’s when we figured out that squirrels could chew right through plastic.