Eng. 412 (Creative Nonfiction) Early Memory Essay

This essay was an experiment. Professor Curry showed us an essay style that was five paragraphs long, with five sentences in each paragraph. I gave it a shot, and used lots of run-on sentences, so don’t read this if stuff like that drives you nuts. It was fun to write ‘em, though.
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There is an art to hiding from an angry mother, especially in a store. Although technically, mom wouldn’t get really mad until after searching the store for what probably seemed to her like hours, with me hiding and oblivious. Not that I blamed her. I loved to hide and clothing stores were my favorite, providing acres of prime locations for an enterprising youngster, keen on adventure and privacy. But the best, the truly best, were the circular racks dotting Sears, representing islands of safety and anonymity for a small child intent on hiding from the world and, by default, her mother.

I squatted down in an upright tunnel created from clothes and hangers, my cheek pressed to the cold metal of the round frame, the sharp odor of cleaners and that strange musty smell of new clothes permeating the air. My knees ached from skinning them on the rough industrial carpet, but haste was integral in getting into a rack unseen, and I considered the tenderness to be a small price to pay. My fingers crept out, gingerly parting the fabric that dangled down in front of me, searching out gauzy or filmy textures that would let me see while still allowing for decent cover. Peering out though a prom dress haze, I examined pairs of legs that strolled past my cave, suspicious of each curve of calf and bending knee, certain each time that the next one would belong to my mother and she would drag me out in a cloud of peach taffeta and keep me at her side so that anyone who wanted to look at me could, and there would be no hiding. I don’t like people looking at me, probably because I’m nosy as hell.

I loved not being seen. I loved to look at people who were not aware of being watched, the unguarded gestures and expressions and I would invent stories about them with such confidence in my imagination that I would begin to half-believe that the woman who just put back the suit jacket in my rack, the one with dried mud on her beige pumps and a run in her stockings, is really a monster who ate some of her children and buried the rest (accounting for the mud) and is now wandering through Sears looking for more, and trying on clothing is just a ploy to fool the unwary. I cringed back, heart pumping when she returned to my rack and began to rattle through it, in reality looking for another jacket or something, but for all I know she smelled my fear and was waiting for a chance to snatch me out, after all, I had no proof that she didn’t eat her children. I began to think that perhaps certain items of clothing in my rack were aware of my existence, and if I got too close to the section with the acid-washed jeans, the legs would twist out like tentacles and smother me in folds of denim and patches. I kept one wary eye on the jeans, and another on the woman’s muddy pumps.

It was inevitable that mom found me by achieving that particular shrill frequency in her shouts that acted like a leash on my sense of self-preservation and drew me out of hiding before she found me first and smote me with her burning blue eyes, or worse, the threat of telling dad. I crawled out past the scary jeans and prom dresses, wincing when my sore knees made contact with the carpet, trying to keep my head down so I wouldn’t have to see mom’s normally pretty face flushed with anger and worry. Her manicured hand looked almost claw-like when she reached down to pull me upright, and I was now certain that the monster had got me. She pulled me along between rack after rack of excellent hiding spaces, all the time complaining about my behavior, and there was no way I could tell her about how deeply satisfying it was to crouch in a hidden nook or cranny, someplace no one can find you, where people pass, unaware.

I’m a grown up now, and have turned my back on the allure of hiding in Sears. But some part of me, the part that crept stealthily behind curtains and into clothing racks to peek out into the world unseen, that part longs to throw away socially acceptable behavior and dive back into my steel and clothing caves. These days I have to find a different kind of rack to hide in. Behind textbooks are good. It’s amazing how invisible a student can be in a coffee shop at the tables in the back of a room, away in the shadowy corners where I can hide in plain sight.