I didn’t even know why we’d gone to this dinner party at the Wilhelms. We weren’t really friends with them. They were new people, had just moved into the Nobles’ house a few months ago when Carolyn and her family moved away to Florida. I’d been pretty good friends with Carolyn back in kindergarten, the way all of us around the block were friends, since we lived close together and had the same teachers at school, but we’d gotten split up in third grade and I hadn’t spoken to her very much since then. I didn’t really care when she moved away.
I think my parents went to this party just because it had been such a long time since we’d been invited to a party. When we’d first moved to the neighborhood, there used to be parties all the time around the block, especially in the summer, big outdoor shindigs where everyone was invited. They were always fun, lots of kids, and there were usually hot dogs and hamburgers, something you’d want to eat.
At this party, there had been nothing that kids would want to eat, only adult food, some kind of twisty pasta with white cheese on it that smelled like socks and salad that was almost all lettuce so I couldn’t pick out just the tomatoes like I usually did. I’d eaten a few mouthfuls of the pasta just because my father had given me one of his looks. I doubted he liked the food any better than I did, although I had seen my mother go back for seconds on it.
There wasn’t even anyone to play with, since my brother and I were the oldest kids there. The Wilhelms had a baby, a two year old girl they let walk all over the place, oohing and ahhing about how cute she was. The other people they’d invited mostly had babies, too. There were a few older brothers and sisters, but I was 11, and they all seemed like little kids to me. We didn’t know any of these other people. They weren’t from around the block.
It was strange, being in the Nobles house without the Nobles there, going to a party on the block but not seeing anybody else from the block, eating weird food and being surrounded by babies. It was like going back to a place we’d already been, but didn’t belong anymore.
After dinner, Mrs. Wilhelm brought out a ouija board. She made a big production number out of it, saying things like, “Okay, everyone, get ready to invite the spirits into our house to tell the future!”
Mrs. Wilhelm was flashy, loud: when she’d brought in the pasta she’d yelled “Okay, everyone dig in!” and then she’d totally dominated the dinner conversation talking about some foreign movie she and Mr. Wilhelm had gone to see. Mr. Wilhelm—a short, muscular man, with bushy eyebrows and a slight hunch that made him seem a little ape-like—hadn’t said much, but looked on with a look of attention and love.
All the lights were turned off in the living room, a candle lit, and the kids were herded into the kitchen with a babysitter the Wilhelms had hired. I wanted to stay with the adults, but it didn’t matter, since the babysitter let us all sneak over to the door and watch anyway. A group of five or six or the adults sat down at the table and put their hands on the ouija. Mrs. Wilhelm dared anyone to ask a question, again with lots of talk about not offending the spirits. No one said anything at first, but then one of the men asked if the Mets would win the World Series. There was total silence as the adults waited for something to happen. It was a little spooky that first time when, from where I was watching from the kitchen, the ouija began to move.
“Sorry, I think that’s a no,” Mrs. Wilhelm said, in her brassy voice.
It got silly after that, people trying to coax Eleanor Roosevelt from the spirit world and asking questions like at what age they’d become a millionaire and if they’d get lucky that night, which I figured from the way the adults all reacted had something to do with sex. They’d all had a lot to drink. I kept waiting for my father to say something silly himself. He loved parties, this type of situation was usually right up his alley. But when his turn came on the ouija board he let someone else ask the question. He also seemed to me to be more sober than he usually was at this point in a party.
The ouija board fun only lasted a half hour or so, and then the adults began to drift off, and the party went back to becoming a regular party. But as soon as the last adult left, a few of the kids ran in and took seats around the ouija board. They kept the lights turned out, and began acting just like the adults, trying to contact spirits and ask questions. They didn’t know what they were doing, though. They didn’t realize you were supposed to let the spirits move the ouija, so they were pushing it around themselves as they asked stupid questions about whether they’d get their favorite toys. They were laughing, having a good time.
I stepped back into the shadows, just on the threshold of the kitchen. No one could see me from where I was standing. I could still hear the kids in the living giggling, moving the pointer all over the board, calling out the letters in their little kid voices. “Whooo,” I whispered into the dark.
They all got really quiet. “What was that?” one of them said.
“Whoo,” I repeated.
“It’s nothing,” one of the slightly-older girls said. “Whoever’s doing that, stop. It’s not funny.”
I did it again, lower this time, more menacingly.
One of the little kids started crying. “Stop it,” the same older girl said. But it wasn’t anger I was hearing in her voice anymore. “Just stop it.”
“Whoooo,” I said.
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