Years before my sisters and I would eventually become a trio, there was only Teresa and myself. Born 17 months apart and raised like Irish twins by well-meaning parents with little-to-no understanding of (or use for) child psychology, neither of us can recall any early memories that do not include the other. This will make more sense in a bit.

Some time during the blurry years one typically associates with early childhood, we learned that our paternal grandfather was going to have a medical procedure and our dad, his son, would temporarily take his place during a particularly important bowling league tournament. In truth, we didn’t have all the details going in as it wasn’t our parents’ practice to explain next moves to either of us. In their world, adults would get an idea about something they wanted or needed to do and little thought was given to whether or not there was something in it for the kids. Life was not about us. So, that’s how the two of us found ourselves one evening having been mysteriously teleported to a bowling alley and staring in fascination as strangers in monogrammed shirts created thunderous collisions between pins and balls.

Unlike our quiet and orderly house, the bowling alley was a sensory overload of sights and smells. Cigarettes and floor polish and used leather shoes married with salty popcorn, sweat and what I would later learn was the hoppy aroma of beer. The hard orange and off-white benches of molded fiberglass and the Brunswick logo with its little crown were everywhere. This was also back when score recording was done manually with weird yellow pencils that could write on glass. And because no one had bothered to explain to us how an overhead projector worked, I remained convinced there was a giant disembodied hand living in the ceiling which was responsible for writing down all the scores displayed over each lane. Equally fascinating and terrifying.

That evening after we had greeted our distracted father doing his best to pinch hit for his father, Mom took each of us by the hand and, steering us neatly past the snack bar, stopped in front of a door with a little window high at the top and a sign on it that neither of us could read but which we would later learn was NURSERY. After a quick conversation with the impersonal and very unknown adult in charge and with promises to check on us “very soon”, the door with the window far out of our reach was closed and our mom was on the other side of it. I could hear the sound of her charm bracelet jingling and then fading as she walked away. It was unlike her to leave us in a place so completely off the grid and neither one of us had the intellectual bandwidth nor the emotional intelligence to feel reassured in the least.

You’re probably thinking I’m being a tad overdramatic about the whole thing, but it’s crucial to note that, by this time at ages 3 and 4, we had never had a babysitter before. Sure, we’d had overnights with grandparents or our aunt/uncle. And there were our very familiar and comforting post-Sunday School childcare workers who watched at least a dozen of us kids while our parents were at “big church” in the sanctuary. But no complete stranger or even friendly teenager had ever been left in charge of us before and certainly not on what was now clearly foreign soil. NOT EVER. My sister and I looked at each other in stupefied silence. We didn’t know it then, but this was to be our first Children of the Corn moment and all we had was each other.

When you are little and your everyday world is small and predictable, there are many creative ways that parents can introduce new and unsettling experiences into the mix, but this? This was not the way to do it. The room, as we turned to face it, seemed too big and empty of creature comforts, as most of furniture in it was for little kids and didn’t take up a lot of space. The walls were of cinderblock–painted white and washed out in the cold florescent light. There was a tiny set of risers to the right, presumably for us to sit on, but their emptiness offered the sad impression that they were holding space for a little choir that never showed up. All the toys, from the incomplete play kitchen, the baby dolls with missing clothes and/or limbs and even or the large wooden block set had suffered considerable abuse. Everything there seemed culled from someone else’s reject pile and held no appeal.

High up in the corner, a static-y black and white television had been bolted to the wall. “Rawhide” was on and and as the theme song played, one girl, who was clearly a hardened lifer when it came to this environment, sang all the words out loud with the air of a veteran. We were stunned. This was not a show anyone in our home ever watched. How much hard time had this little girl served in such a echo-y linoleum hell? Who could know these things and who even was available to ask? The woman in charge was focused on the fuzzy screen where a young Clint Eastwood was bringing justice while the volume bounced off the walls. This was a place where joy came to die and germs came to multiply.

These were not our people. Our people were on the other side of that door with the high-up window to prevent us from searching for them. My eyes had started to grow heavy and I could not find a soft place to land. Had we been at home, it would surely have been “lights out” for us by that hour and my sister, never a night owl, had already given up waiting for rescuers and was asleep in the wooden doll bed against he wall. It was a strange dichotomy to be in the presence of other humans and still feel terribly lonely. I wasn’t sure how to process it. When my mother finally came to get us, I felt an intense mixture of relief–but also–a spark of anger that someone who professed to love us so much could be so cheerfully obtuse to our fear. It was the first time in my life I remember feeling that subtle shift of understanding as to how thoroughly our parents had failed to prepare us for this trip to the unfamiliar. Unfortunately, it would not be the last.