A Box to Hide In by James Thurber

Published in the print edition of the January 24, 1931, issue. James Thurber, who died in 1961, was a cartoonist, a writer, a journalist, and a playwright.

This story opens with a man asking a grocery clerk for a box – one large enough to crawl into and hide. When none is available, the question is posed (unsuccessfully) at several other groceries. One confused clerk asks “Whatta you mean?”

Enjoy…

I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her
sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and
lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mIne was.
“Have you got a box,” I asked, “a large box? I want a box to
hide in”
“You want a box?” he asked.
“I want a box to hide in,” I said.
“Whatta you mean?” he said. “You mean a big box?”
I said I meant a big box, big enough to hold me. “I haven’t
got any boxes,” he said. “Only cartons that cans come in.” I
tried several other groceries and none of them had a box big
enough for me to hide in. There was nothing for it but to
face life out. I didn’t feel strong and I had this overpowering
desire to hide in a box for a long time.
“What do you mean, you want to hide in this box?”, one
grocer asked me.
“It’s a form of escape”, I told him. “Hiding in a box, it
circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish.
You don’t see people, either”.
“How in the hell do you eat when you’re in this box?” ,
asked the grocer. “How in the hell do you get anything to
eat?”.
I said I’d never been in a box and didn’t know, but that
would take care of itself. “Well”, he said finally, “I haven’t
got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that cans come
in.” It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark
and the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I turned
out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets
dark.
I could have hid in a closet, I suppose, but people are always
opening doors. Somebody would find you in a closet. They
would be startled and you’d have to tell them why you were
in the closet. Nobody pays any attention to a big box lying
on the floor. You could stay in it for days and nobody’d
think to look at it, not even the cleaning woman.”
My cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me
up. I was still feeling bad. I asked her if she knew where I
could get a large box.
“How big a box you want?”, she asked. “I want a box big
enough for me to get inside of”, I said. She looked at me
with big, dim eyes. There’s something wrong with her
glands. She’s awful. But she has a big heart, which makes it
worse. She’s unbearable, her husband is sick and her children
are sick and she is sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it
would be if I were in a box now, and didn’t have to see her
I’d be in a box right there in the room, and she wouldn’t
know.
I wondered if you have a desire to bark or laugh when
someone who doesn’t know walks by the box you’re in.
Maybe she would have a spell with her heart if I did that and
would die right there. The officers and the elevator man and
Mr Grammage would find us.
“Funny, dog gone thing happened at the building last
night”, the doorman would say to his wife. “I let in this
woman to clean up 10-F and she never came out, see? She
never there more than an hour. But she never came out,
see?” So when it get time for me to get off duty, I says to
Crimmack in the elevator, “I says what the hell you suppose
happened to the woman that cleans 10-F?” He says he didn’t
know. He says he never seen her after he took her up. So I
spoke to Mr Grammage about it. “Sorry to bother you, Mr.
Grammage”, I says, “but there’s something funny about that
woman that cleans 10-F”. So I told him – he said we better
have a look. And we all three goes up, knocks on the door,
rings the bell, see, and nobody answers
So he said we’d have to walk in. So Crimmack opened the
door and we walked in. And there was this woman, cleans
the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor, and the
gentleman that lives there was in a box.
The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard for me
to realize she wasn’t dead. “It’s a form of escape”, I
murmured. “What say?”, she asked dully? “You don’t know
of any large packing boxes, do you?”, I asked. “No, I don’t,
she said.”
I haven’t found one yet. But I still have this overpowering
urge to hide in a box. Maybe it will go away. Maybe I’ll be
all right. Maybe it will get worse. It ‘s hard to say.

END

James Thurber (1894–1961) created some thirty volumes of humor, fiction, children’s books, cartoons, and essays in just about as many years. A founding member of The New Yorker staff, Thurber wrote and illustrated such enduring books as The Thurber Carnival and My Life and Hard Times.