Let's Go Play at the Adams'

its secret integrity against the grown-ups' environment, the one in which they were powerless.

But age and knowledge corrode. There had come the time when they no longer believed in

kings and queens, when new models were needed, and the game moved on.

It moved on, Barbara said. It moved on idly, whimsically, almost as if it were an accident

(which she thought it was not). Still, from the kids' point of view, it would be that one day they

were playing this game, the next day they were bored and irritable, and the third day they

were playing something new (which was not new at all). They withdrew into the hills and

woods and became their ex-kingdom's harried guerrilla fighters, its Resistance Movement. And

then that got boring-hadn't Cindy said they hadn't played much until now?-and then Barbara

came along.

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And then I came along, Barbara said. Something in the sentence attracted her. And then I

came along. It was all so bitterly clear. I am the fourth level of the game.

The parents were gone; they were to be gone for quite a while by children's standards. Now

the children could, now they could-what? Who knows? And the only thing to prevent it was silly

Barbara, dumb Teacher, who had come flouncing onto the scene in a blue summer dress and

not much else. How easily the children's impatient imaginings and the opportunity of

Barbara/target would come together with a bang. Now they could really play the game.

If they could. If they dared. And they dared.

But what was the fourth level of the game? Something chilly and dark passed just behind Bar-

bara's immediate attention and then waited somewhere in the out-of-reach part of her mind.

An intimation.

She thought.

OK, I am their new toy. Like Terry said. I walk, I talk when they let me. They can move my arms

and legs. They can even dress and undress me if they want. But how do they play with dolls?

One could imagine and find no harm in the imagined scene of a~ child like Cindy-in tantrum- -

hurling her doll across the room in fury. Tears would pass: if the doll was broken, someone

would fix it or buy her a new one. Cindy would thereby learn not to break things anymore. But

what if one were suddenly the doll itself? At the thought Cindy's face grew huge in Doll

Barbara's imagination; Cindy's clear, curious, simple eyes became as threatening as a cat's in

their uncaringness.

Again one could see and find little harm in Paul's marching his toy soldiers to the dungeon and

tieing them to twig stakes with string and shooting them on command. ·Paul was working out

his boy aggressions. Anyhow tomorrow morning, metal-smart and cast-to-attention, they would

be ready to fight and lose and be executed again. Real soldiers, real people, of course,

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are only executed once. Once. In Barbara's mind, Paul suddenly became even more a horrible

little boy.

And in the woods, in the disused tenant-house gathering place of Freedom Five, hadn't Cindy

said they took prisoners and hostages and tortured them for secrets? Even here, little enough

harm. Erotic play, discovery, a sorting out of values. The next day, the next raid, the prisoners

would be back intact, surly and unwilling to tell, and hence ready for torture again. But if the

prisoners, if the prisoner were real?

At this point the logical step was obvious. At the fourth level of the game five kids just-before-

teen or crossing through their teens, were going to torture Barbara to a slow death. Barbara

dismissed this out of hand. She wasn't a toy; they were not free to do as they wished, and the

world of spankings, punishment, and authority remained. It only troubled her that they might

think about it.

- She was also troubled as to why they should think about it

In play, children acted out life as they believed or wanted it to be--that had been back in

freshman year that she had learned that-but if what Teacher Barbara had been taught was

true, why did these children want to believe life to be this way? The rope, the adhesive tape,

and all the hurt went into the thought.

Children's materials are all the materials they can see and imagine and imitate. Their whole