Heather stopped filming and clanged through a couple of drawers filled with silverware and utensils before handing a pair of large shears to Mandy. After unraveling the gooey bands from Kim’s wrists, she led him to the sink and ordered him to wash his sticky hands. As Kim stood at the sink, Mandy broke Kim’s self-imposed state of suspended animation by suddenly calling out from behind him, “Hello, Mrs. Larson!” Mandy was waving with exaggerated enthusiasm toward the window above the sink. Kim finally saw their neighbor, goofy old Mrs. Larson, engaged in her daily obsessive/compulsive ritual of picking up every dead leaf and scrap of litter from her lawn, as she looked up and waved back. Kim had forgotten not only that the windows were open, but that because the kitchen was as bright as the overcast, gray afternoon, the illuminated interior of the house would be clearly visible from outside.
Mandy slapped Kim’s squishy, plastic-coated rear and cheerfully commanded, “Wave to Mrs. Larson, Baby!” Instead, Kim ducked below the level of the kitchen counter, reminding himself that Mrs. Larson was nuts anyway, reassuring himself that she could not have seen anything. “You’re pissing me off again, Baby,” Mandy seethed. “You can’t spend your whole life hiding,” she sneered derisively. “After all, if you don’t behave, you’re going to be a movie star,” she added, glancing to confirm that Heather was filming again. “I’m sure your geek friends will love to see our video of how baby Kim spent her summer vacation in diapers. You could be the next Shirley Temple.”
From behind the camcorder, Heather suggested, “If Baby is more comfortable on the floor where she can’t be seen through the windows, then maybe we should just let her crawl around the house.”
Mandy was obviously delighted. “Yeah, excellent!” she shrieked. “Babies are supposed to crawl anyway.” She bent over Kim, who cowered against the kitchen cabinets. “So start crawling, Baby,” she instructed. “We don’t have all day.”
Heather skipped through the dining room and sat on the living room floor. As she aimed the camcorder back through the dining room at the door to the kitchen, she said, “I’ll get some baby’s-eye-view shots as you guys go by.”
Kim placed his still-wet hands on the linoleum, rose to his knees and crawled from the kitchen across the dining room toward Heather, thankful that the rest of the house was carpeted. As he reached the living room, Kim hesitated and surveyed the room in an effort to avoid looking at Heather and her camera. He was relieved that the large picture window facing the street was above his head, but realized with chagrin that the narrow windows that framed the front door offered a view of the entry hall to anyone who might be on the front porch. He decided that he would crawl quickly past the front door to the stairs that led to the bedrooms just to be safe.
Kim was also intrigued by his lilliputian perspective on the world. Although he occasionally sat on the living room floor to watch TV, he could not recall having this same sense of smallness. At eye level, the cluttered surface of the coffee table seemed as broad and long as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The worn, over-stuffed sofa soared up from behind the table like a soft mountain of cushions. The pole lamp in the corner could have been a standard bearing a bank of floodlights at a baseball stadium. Even the reclining chair he had inherited after his father abandoned it, along with the family, seemed as insurmountable as the cliff face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.
Just as Kim spied a miniature plastic arm sticking out from behind the stereo cabinet, solving the week-old mystery of the disappearance of Brittany’s “Baywatch Barbie,” he felt another slap on his ass. He looked up dumbly at Mandy, who towered over him like the fifty-foot-tall woman in a sci-fi flick, and realized another advantage of his low-angle viewpoint – he could see up the leg of Mandy’s emergency-red shorts to where her white cotton panties, speckled with tiny red roses, caressed the gentle mound where her thighs joined.
Mandy smacked Kim again. “How dare you peek at my underpants, Baby!” she scolded, pretending to be indignant. “When I want you to see my panties, I’ll show them to you, Baby,” she teased. “Now come on, get upstairs.”
As planned, Kim scuttled on all fours across the entry hall and up the carpeted stairs to the second-floor landing as fast as he could, while Heather captured video footage of his waddling, diapered butt from behind and Mandy rattled on about wardrobe items that might be suitable for an outsized baby. Kim awaited the girls on the landing, loathe to enter Heather’s personal sanctuary without her, then crawled behind them into Heather’s room.