OKAY, FINE. here we go. let’s see if i’ve lost my touch.
i want to say up front that no babies were harmed in the making of this story, unless you count psychologically, in which case i honestly couldn’t tell you. i don’t even know what psychologically harms ME half the time. i just go about my life and then suddenly out of nowhere my brain will be like HEY BITCH!!! IN 2005 A BOY REFERRED TO YOU AS BEING “BOLD PRINT,” AND IT WILL ECHO IN YOUR HEAD FOREVER.
and it will!!!! thanks chris.
anyway, during my college years one of the many jobs i worked was babysitting the kids of one of my bosses. they were actually extremely cute kids, and i assume they will grow up (have grown up??? i’m 1000 years of age now) to be extremely dope teens. their names were maisie and penelope and they lived in a little brooklyn brownstone across the street from a park, which is pretty much the life i’d envisioned for myself when i moved to new york.
it is not the life i got.
i lived in a one-bedroom with three other people, and one of those people was my roommate’s boyfriend who was NOT paying rent and ALSO, by the WAY!!!!!! turned out to be USING MY TOOTHBRUSH for like a month which IS DEFINITELY!!! AGAINST!!! THE GENEVA CONVENTION!!!!
i don’t dislike a lot of people, but hoo boy i hated that guy.
at the time maisie was like, five-ish? and peneleope was like … two-ish. she wasn’t quite at speaking age but she could toddle around, you know? (i know nothing about babies. in hindsight: why did this family hire me, i was SO unqualified.)
i liked babysitting for them a lot, because maisie was my favorite genre of kid, which is Five Year Old Weird Girl. weird girls are always the best generally, but when they’re five they are at the height of their Weird Girl Powers. their brains are unparalleled. everything they say is absolutely coco bananas and it is the bEST. maisie’s favorite activities included:
playing “Monster Mash,” by which i do not mean dancing to the song, i mean a game in which she pretended to be a monster who wanted to eat me, and then would chase me around the house shouting at the top of her lungs about how hungry she was and how she wanted to like, grind my bones to make her bread, and then when eventually i let her catch me she would clamber up and pretend to eat me, making happy eating sounds until i hid the limb she was eating, free myself, and run away again. eventually all my limbs would be “gone” and she would declare herself the winner.
the winner of what???? i don’t know. eating dinner. being a monster. just whatever.
sitting in the bath and making up extremely elaborate stories about her rubber ducks, explaining them to me as she went. they were usually variations of evil scientists or spies or once, memorably, the entire romanov family after we watched anastasia. also, peripherally related, one time she got out of the bath and i opened a towel for her to walk into, and she walked around me in this slow contemplative circle, tapping her chin, measuring my arms with her hands. when she had made a full circle she went, “hmmm. yes. you have just the wingspan i’ve been looking for,” then got into the towel and NEVER MENTIONED IT AGAIN.
WHAT IN THE SWEET HELL WERE YOU BUILDING???
playing “hide the object.”
what is “hide the object,” you ask? well. in this extremely fun and definitely not rigged game, either me or maisie would stand in the kitchen and count to ten, and when we emerged we had to find an item that was hidden. we did not know what this item was. it could have been literally anything. we were on an honor system to admit when the item had been found.
maisie could have had knuckle tats reading FUCK THE HONOR SYSTEM for all she cared about it, but that’s neither here nor there.
(i lost this game a lot.)
anyway, one day i went into the kitchen and counted to ten, and when i emerged, maisie was standing in the middle of the living room, looking enormously pleased with herself.
“okay maisie,” i said. “what did you hide?”
“you’ll have to seeeee,” singsonged maisie, in a way that indicated she had stolen my entire family fortune and had no plans to give it back.
i looked around. everything seemed to be in place, which was odd because maisie liked to try to throw me off the scent by fake-hiding enormous and hilarious things. one time she tried to hide a whole table by draping a blanket over it.
i poked around the bookshelf; nothing. looked under the couch; nothing. maisie started laughing in a way that alarmed me slightly.
i stood up and looked around the room.
it was … oddly quiet. eerily quiet.
“hey maisie,” i said, with trepidation, “where is penelope?”
maisie smiled in a way that implied she had a second, sharper row of hunting teeth.
“you’ll have to find her!” she cackled.
honestly, i do feel that this was … partly on me. like, in hindsight, it feels somewhat inevitable, given maisie’s Weird Girl tendencies and the fact that age 5 is the prime age for older siblings to be like, “hey, fuck this baby actually.”
but at the time, i did have have the wisdom of age. i was 20 and the BABY was MISSING.
“maisie,” i said. “maisie, we can’t hide penelope in Hide The Object because she’s not an object. she’s a person.”
“she’s a baby,” corrected maisie, dismissively. “anyway you have to FIND her. those are the RULES.”
those were the rules, though.
luckily for me, it was at that exact moment that penelope made the loud, hilarious baby sound that is not a cry and not a laugh and not a shout and not really anything at all except their lil baby mouths going BLARGLBLARGLBLARGL.
i feel neutrally about babies but i love that sound.
i’m like HELL YEAH, BABY!!! BARS!!!
where penelope was, it turns out, was the shoe closet. maisie had tucked her into the back corner and covered her with stuffed animals. penelope was very happily mouthing at one of them, in the dark, no idea at all that she had been like … kidnapped, kind of.
i pulled penelope out of the closet, clutching her to my chest, and said to maisie, “we’re not going to play Hide The Object anymore. how would you like it if someone put you in a closet and didn’t tell anyone where you were??”
maisie got a look in her eye that implied she’d been waiting her whole life to pull her magic invisibility cloak out of her barbie trunk, and that’s how the game of Hide The Maisie was born.
guys, it was literally just hide and seek, but i didn’t have the heart to tell her.
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
prguitarman
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
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