In terms of packing, all you need is clean underwear and a loaf of bread.
If you were running away from your city house, it’d be easy. You’d just go to the lobby and sit underneath the row of mailboxes. Remember when your hairless cat took the elevator down all on his own and hid inside the slot where Victor Carnuccio’s packages go? That was so funny.
If you were scared in the lobby, watching lower Broadway pass, you wouldn’t need to be. Your mother would come down soon enough and cotton to your demands.
But you’re at your country house so it’s a little bit harder. A good place to hide might be: out back, behind Art’s trailer. You could also go around the side of the old church, but it smells damp and is at least a quarter of a mile farther, and you hate walking.
A nice person to bring with you, should you want a companion, would be your neighbor Joseph Cranbrook. He is a good kid, even though he acts crazy sometimes. (Like when he ripped your screen door off the hinges because you wouldn’t come out to play with him. Your dad talked to him like he was an adult who had made a mistake, which is how he always talks to kids and which is part of why you are running away.) Joseph may be chubby and sloppy now, his face always covered in barbecue sauce and his only virtues being that he owns a dinghy and had the idea to dress as a gorilla in suspenders for Halloween, but be forewarned that, ten years from now, he will still be short, but he will also be ripped, and he will join the air force as an outlet for his rage and you will run into him on Crosby Street your freshman year of college and he will be the first person you give a blow job to. You won’t finish, just administer one horrified lick, and he won’t talk to you again. He will turn out to be “engaged” to a girl name Ellie who is a good foot taller than he and lives in South Carolina. Something called Facebook will be invented where you can learn all of this.
When you run away, the point is not to escape. You aren’t actually trying to disappear. You just want to attract your mother. The great fantasy is that she’s somewhere, watching, like the mother in Runaway Bunny who becomes the tree, then becomes the lake, then becomes the moon. Your mother becomes the mini backpack and becomes the loaf of bread and becomes the bed with the Devon Sawa poster above it where you go to sulk after it’s all over. She knows. She knows.
And eventually she comes and you get the kind of attention you’ve been asking for when you hang around watching her talk on the cordless and flip through the J. Crew catalog circling things with a ballpoint pen. She says she understands, that once when she was your age she hid in a garbage can for an hour, but no one came for her except her father’s dental nurse.
Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand. You ride your sister’s tricycle back and forth on the porch, loving the sound it makes as it scrapes the lead paint from the floor. Your parents don’t believe you that it’s lead paint so you ask them to drive you to the hardware store, where you purchase a small kit to test it with. The kit contains a small tube, like a lipstick, with a spongy white tip that you drag across the area you suspect of being toxic. Then you wait, and if there’s lead in the paint the white will turn bright red. The test results come up negative, just gray from the dirt of the porch floor, and you are disappointed.
A GUIDE TO RUNNING AWAY FOR TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD WOMEN
None of your neighbors know you, so none of them would care. They are all over eighty-five, and they don’t have HBO. You could hurl yourself down the garbage chute and be found six days later, bleeding out into a pile of adult diapers, and it wouldn’t elicit more than a “Huh?” followed by a co-op meeting on how to handle disposing of the body.
If you don’t call your parents for a day, they assume you’re busy at work, helping a friend recover from a minor medical procedure, or fucking your boyfriend for seventeen hours straight. An hour squatting behind a religious structure won’t cut it anymore when it comes to getting their attention.