I told this to my sitter’s oldest child, and he told the others. They all started crying and then the sitter started crying and then she hit me. She was a big woman and I was a little five-year-old kid, but I never told my parents what had happened because I assumed that I had done something terribly wrong. Apparently I didn’t bruise easily at that age. I kept staying at my sitter’s house until that spring, when my grandmother, with whom I had stayed on occasion, agreed to watch me on a regular basis for less money.

Anyway, I had done something horribly wrong. It may not have been the right thing to not tell my parents about being slapped across the face, but it has taken me decades to bring the notions of right and wrong to the notion of not causing more trouble than has already been caused. It’s taken me even more years to figure out how an irresponsible five-year-old can bring more torment to a woman whose life is already consumed with torment.

On one of the days that fall when the television worked, the newscast contained an announcement that the Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb. It was on a date made ironic by subsequent events: November 22, 1955. My sitter reacted violently—cursing or crying loudly enough that I asked her what was wrong.

“The Russians are going to kill us,” she said.

I may have asked her how they were going to do that. She told me about the bomb.

I knew what a bomb was, having seen them on TV during one of the TV’s good days. They were big black balls with fuses that blew up evil cartoon characters, cats mostly. Itchy and Scratchy come out of a proud tradition.

“I could stop the bomb,” I said. “I’d get a knife and cut the fuse.”

“It doesn’t have a fuse,” she said. “It has a big electrical cable instead of a fuse.”

“Then before it blew up,” I said, “I’d cut the cable with a cable cutter.” My imaginary version of the H-bomb—and hers, come to think of it—just sat there for awhile before blowing up, long enough to tinker with. My father had welding equipment in his shop and I was thinking of his cutting torch, which he had allowed me to watch in action through the dark lens of his welding hood.

I remember her exact reply: “How could you cut the cable of a bomb that’s bigger than this house?”

I had a sudden vision of electrical cable as thick as the neck of a horse. I decided to try a different tack. “They wouldn’t bomb Hailey,” I said. “They’d bomb Sun Valley.”

Even as a five-year-old, I had an inkling that the people in Sun Valley were more likely to be destroyed by the Russians than the people of Hailey, although at five my understanding was only that the people in Sun Valley were more important than we were.

My sitter looked at me, a kind of perverse triumph in her eyes. “If they bomb Sun Valley, the explosion will be so big that we’ll die too, only a little later than my husband and your mother and father.”

I stopped arguing with her.

How do you bring more torment into the life of a woman whose life is already brimming with torment? You take a position in her house as the oldest person she has to converse with, and then when she wants to talk about her fears of dying in a nuclear age at the hands of competing ideologies she doesn’t understand, you don’t offer her any viable solutions. You try, but your solutions are so pathetic, so cartoon-like, so lacking of understanding of the real situation that even she realizes that you’re only five years old. And then you tell her that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.