Thinking Inside The Box

In preparation for our 2018-2019 sabbatical, I ordered a wheeled duffel bag from Amazon. When it arrived in an oversized box, I dragged out the collapsed duffel inside. Then I looked at the enormous box and thought, Man, this box is so huge, I could fit in this thing! And so it began…

My husband was out of town at the moment, due back a mere 36 hours before we were to get on a plane to begin our year away. I kept the box in our living room where my lovebirds could enjoy it when they were out for one of their daily flights and enjoy it they did, perching on it and nibbling on the cardboard, and performing unspeakable birdly acts on the box’s outside surfaces.

The night that my husband was due to return home, I thought it would be funny to hide in the box and have him ‘find’ me inside, his Amazonian wife! This is not as crazy as it sounds (the hiding, not the Amazonian part. I’m no Penthesilea) as I figured I’d be in the box for no longer than a minute or two. My husband travels frequently, has done so for almost 30 years, and his travel routine and return are reliably predictable: I monitor the real-time progress of his flight, he proceeds expeditiously through the airport as a trusted traveler and he catches a cab. His arrival home is calculable within 5 minutes, barring a traffic snarl. He always insists on bringing his keys, so I needn’t worry about having to answer the door. Plus, despite appearing almost functionally deaf to my family while watching TV,  I can still hear a car door slam in the front of our building, in this case indicating the arrival of his taxi and, tonight, the signal for my entry into the box. 

To be certain of a smooth and effective hiding-away, a rehearsal seemed prudent. I tossed a couple of throw pillows into the box (yes, there was plenty of room) and got in. I then closed the box flaps in their logical order and found that the two outer flaps did not stay closed. Plot flaw! I got out of the box, grabbed some masking tape, then fashioned some makeshift handles out of the tape and affixed them to the inside of the larger box flaps. Voila, I could be completely contained and hidden from view, lying in my box and clutching my masking tape handles. Not pitiful at all.

In the distance, I heard a car door slam. Within a minute he would be opening the door to our suite!

I scrambled into the box, successfully employed my box handles and laid in wait, curled in cardboard. I imagined him entering the house, calling “hello” when I didn’t greet him at the door as usual whenever he returns from time away. Upon hearing no response, he would surely walk into the living room and see the box lying innocently on the floor. “What is this doing here? What is it?”, he would ask, perhaps aloud but perhaps not. Ever curious, he would pull back a box flap and find his silly but oh-so-adorable wife hiding inside. She is crazy fun! 

There I lay, waiting. I heard no further sounds, so figuring it was a false alarm I emerged from the box and grabbed my iPad. I checked my email, ran through a couple of Italian lessons on Duolingo, then played a word game. Keep that brain nimble, you know. Another car door slammed! Back into the box I went. I continued to play, then read, on my iPad, as I waited… 

I lay crouched in that box for about 35 minutes. I started to get concerned, not to mention a bit crampy as I tried to get comfortable. Of course, there was something called “a couch” not more than 2 feet away from where I lay, but that was no fun and besides, after being ‘as One’ with this box for so long at this point, I was physically pretty uncomfortable and not feeling very Odalisque-y. In retrospect, greeting my returning husband as an Odalisque would have held much more entertainment value for him than my box stunt, but my mind still needed more word games and language exercises and so I did not realize this at the time. In the box I remained.

Many things passed through my mind:  this was actually beyond stupid, I thought. I should get up and out and just forget this idiotic prank. I had scads of things to do and there I was, huddled in a box and waiting. But in for a penny, in for a pound (1 pound = 35 minutes or 1.74 Canadian Dollars).

On I played in my box, my word games keeping my mind busy and helping to stave off looming dementia. Because nothing says “not demented” like lying in a cardboard box while waiting for your husband to return from a 9-day business trip instead of continuing to pack up the household for a yearlong sabbatical.

Another door slammed in the distance. I lay concealed and waiting, my iPad stored in the corner of the box interior, wedged upright between my knees and the southeast box wall (yes, I had spent a moment deciding my orientation in the room in preparation for my triumphant moment of discovery). Surely, The Moment has arrived…

…and the doorbell rang. Oh, well, that’s that, I thought. I rose from the box for the last time, stepped out onto the floor towards the door, and suddenly felt lightheaded. The second thing I felt after the lightheadness was the cardboard box start to slide out from under me as I stood with one foot in the box and the other foot on the smooth cork floor. I fell hard, my hip landing on the sharp edge of a file box in the hallway. Hip throbbing, I scrambled to standing and lunged for the buzzer to admit my husband. He entered, we embraced.

He walked into the living room to see how the packing was progressing, disappointment etched in every line as he espied the big ol’ box a-lying there, a few streaks of bird excrement decorating an outer surface. “What’s this box doing here? What is it?” He flipped open the flaps and saw that it was empty but for a couple of throw pillows and some straggly pieces of masking tape. I answered, knowing that he was bemoaning his wife’s failure to get rid of such a cumbersome item. “Oh, my new luggage arrived. Stupidly big box, right?” “And why are you limping?” “Oh, I had a little fall..”

The following day, he broke down the box and put it out for recycling.

Nothing was said about any of this until a few weeks into his sabbatical. We were at dinner, in Italy, in a

fancy-ass Renaissance-era villa in the hills of Bellagio overlooking Lake Como, and someone asked me what I was working on during my time there. “I’m writing recollections of past trauma for a blog,” I replied, “but there’s some funny stuff, too. Like how I hid in a box that delivered the luggage that we brought here!” I then shared the story with our table mates, their mouths agape. One fellow kept saying, “Oh, no, you didn’t,” every few minutes when I reached the hiding part of my tale. Oh yes, I did! No one was more surprised than my husband, who stared at me as if he’d never seen me before – certainly he hadn’t seen me in the goddamned box. I am sure that was the moment that he fell in love with me all over again, but that may have been down to the romance of the setting and the limoncello. Perhaps we will never know. I do know that he wanted me to post this piece on Boxing Day (December 26 in Canada and other observant locales), but here it is today. One never could box me into a specific time frame, or anything else – apparently, I have to do that myself.