When we moved back to the States, our furniture was many weeks behind us. So my sister and brother and I are living in this gigantic new house, in a new neighborhood, in a town where everyone talks funny, and we don’t know anyone. We declared a kind of detente for those weeks we lived without furniture (i.e., without tv and without friends). We put on a different play every night for our parents, and would spend all day “rehearsing” (although I suspect that what we rehearsed bore no relation to what we actually performed, as I recall it was mostly ad-libs). Points to our parents for sitting through each of those performances.
I also remember we played a game called something like “Magic Machine.” Two of us would get in the closet and count to ten, and the third would rearrange the boxes and bags that constituted our “toys,” and then when the closet doors opened, we’d play some scene (“office” or “beach”) depending on how the room was rearranged.
When the tv came, detente was over. We got bikes and roller skates and friends, too, so there was no need to be nice to each other anymore.
When we were little, my brother, sister and I played a game called “Caca!” which means “poop” in French. It was basically hide-and-seek in the dark, hiding in the large basement playroom we had, but when the finder found the hiders, the hider got to yell out “Caca!”
Somewhere around this time, to taunt my sister (who couldn’t have been older than about 5) my brother started whispering “J likes liver” in the dark… it would get her so mad!
Similar to Campion’s story, when we first moved to Germany and all our stuff hadn’t been delivered yet, and we didn’t have TV, my dad invented a game for us involving a paper bag and Koosh balls, similar to basketball. We would run around the living room, jumping over the obstacle course of furniture (it was a furnished apartment) and trying to get all the Koosh balls into the bag.
My sister and I have had a long running feud since we were little. I hated her then and I hate her now. God she was a bitch to me.
I remember when I was around 6 years old and she 9, my skull was just about cracked open from one of her little pranks. We slept in the same room, our beds on either side of the room. In the middle of the night in the pitch dark, she woke me up saying she was scared and would I please come over and hold her hand? That in itself was weird, she’d never wanted to hold my hand before, but, being the accommodating child I was, I got out of bed and held her hand.
When I went to let go she held on tighter. This made me pull backwards with all my strength and of course that’s when she let go. I lost my balance and reeled backwards, falling and then hitting my head on the steel rail of my bed on the opposite side of the room. It cut my head but luckily didn’t do worse damage.
I can still hear her laughing while I my mom was cleaning up my bleeding head. I was yelled at for getting out of bed and she got away scot-free.
There were many instances of things like this when I was growing up. Just because she’s my sister doesn’t mean I have to like her! And I don’t. 