by Julie Prince
New York apartments are pretty small, especially if you’re of moderate means. We have two incomes, to be sure—who doesn’t at least try to have two incomes these days? But I work in a school and my husband works in sales, and ain’t too many folks buyin’ anything much.
We get by—cancel that—we more than get by; we’re pretty lucky. We have a little money in the bank, we don’t worry about paying the rent every month, we don’t wonder where our next meal is coming from. And we are even managing to send our daughter to college, though we do dread tuition bill time.
College, that’s right. Daughter Everett is off at college. Leaving behind a…GASP…!
Empty room.
Like I said, our place is on the small side. It’s got a living room that’s comfortable enough for our modest tastes, though I’m quite certain it’s not even one-quarter the size of Beyonce’s shoe closet. We have one bathroom which we also share with the cats. Having one bathroom is a bitch, especially when there’s a litter box in there, but you get used to it. And it has a kitchen that actually provides a sliver of space to squeeze in a little round table where you walk in. That’s where I write.
I mean, that’s where I used to write. More on that a little later.
It has three bedrooms. “Three?” you say. “That’s not too bad.”
You’re right, it’s not. But the “master” bedroom is half the size of our living room (which makes it one-eighth the size of Beyonce’s shoe closet. I did the math), and Everett’s bedroom is substantially smaller than that. And then there’s Zack’s bedroom. The little brother always gets the short straw in the bedroom department. You have to be careful in Zack’s room. If you bend over to tie your shoes, you might hit your head on the opposite wall.
…As I said, Everett is away at college.
Now, you probably know where I’m going with this. But before you jump all over me, let me just say this: Throughout the second half of her high school career, my very independent Everett waxed rhapsodic at the prospect of college and of moving out of the house. “Forever,” she’d say. “Forever and ever and I’m not ever moving back.”
She didn’t mean it in a negative way, believe it or not. It wasn’t as if she was fleeing from a bad situation or anything like that. Indeed, when she was mulling over topics for her college application essay, she actually complained that she had not experienced enough adversity in her life. Everett’s second cousin Sarah’s mom died of a brain tumor when she was in her early forties. “Sarah wrote about that,” said Everett, and did I detect a hint of longing in her voice? “And she got a full scholarship.”
There’s an empty room, did I mention that?
As they will tell you in any middle school meteorology class, things move from an area of high pressure to low. Everett’s empty room (and the drop in pressure was palpable the minute she walked out the door) was drawing me in from my own—well, from the “master” bedroom. The high pressure area I share with Peter.
Who’s a dear guy; he is. But he’s a night owl. He’ll stay up until one or two o’clock in the morning and sometimes even later, even though he has to get up at six thirty. He’ll doze off on the sofa in front of a Netflix movie and when he wakes up and comes to bed, he always, always, bumps my corner of the bed with the side of his leg as he walks around it. He says he doesn’t, but he does.
And he snores. Loudly. When I bring this up in an adversarial fashion, he retorts that I snore, too. I will grudgingly admit that this could be true. But there is no way possible—there are no laws of physics that would support it—that I snore with the same volume and the same resonance that he does. I’m simply not a freak of nature.
And whether or not I snore is beside the point.
I’m a light sleeper, too. One of the kitty cats scratching in the bathroom litter box down the hall will wake me up, especially if I’m in a shallow arc of the REM cycle, which is actually most of the time.
Now, the snoring is not Peter’s fault. And the light sleeping is not my fault. It’s just how we are. And while moving out to the sofa to ride out the rest of the night has always been a less-than-perfect option, what with the cats moving in on me about five AM for a little early breakfast, it has been my only option.
I need to sleep.
I also need to write.
“How was your day?” Peter will ask as he tromps through the kitchen, home from work. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, and I will wonder the same thing. We’re spouses, after all. We’re supposed to care about how each other’s days went. But there are times when I wish he would just pay a little mind to my knitted brow and my flying fingers, just trying to eke out a few sentences before they evaporate to the heavens and are gone forever. It’s all so fleeting, ya know?
“You’re writing again?” Zack will often make a point of asking when I’m tapping away as he comes in for a glass of Pepsi or a third bowl of pre-dinner cereal. As if I haven’t been sitting in the same place at the same time doing the same thing almost every day for the past four years.
Zack didn’t want his sister’s bigger bedroom. Yes, of course I offered it to him first. He’s my baby. But he said, “No, thank you,” without even taking too long to think about it. Maybe because he’s lazy and doesn’t want to go through the effort involved in moving all his stuff down the hall. Maybe because he’s a boy, and just doesn’t feel ne needs all that much more space in order to hunker down in his bed and play his X-Box. Maybe because he enjoys hitting his head on the opposite wall when he bends over to lace up his sneakers.
Maybe—maybe he could tell I wanted it.
So, several weeks into Everett’s first semester (OK, one-and-a-half weeks into it) I called her and told her that I wanted to turn her bedroom into my bedroom. “Of course, Honey,” I hustled to add, “It’s still your room…well, sort of.” And it would be, for whenever she comes home for the holidays or decides she wants to come up for the weekend. Everett can come home at any time and treat the room as if she never left. She can spill the contents of her overnight bag across the floor. Leave a melty bowl of strawberry ice cream on the bedside table. Accidentally close a cat in the closet. Business as usual.
Everett’s closet holds just a few things—her gold graduation gown, a couple of prom dresses—and her bureau is practically empty. It’s just topped with a few school souvenirs and a small painted box containing “earrings without partners.” Hey! I can spread my clothes out a little bit!”
“Yes, fourteen drawers should be enough for anybody,” said Peter.
There’s a desk in the room. An IKEA desk I assembled myself way back before the kids were even born. I did it without any help and even put together the accompanying swivel chair as well, and there were only a couple of pieces left over. There’s an old clunker of a computer sitting atop it which takes about twenty minutes to fire up and is so full of virus that everyone pretty much gave up on it ages ago, even tech-savvy Peter.
The first thing to do was to shove that big dusty computer monitor and keyboard right out of the way to make room to set down my sleek, slim, and tidy netbook.
And there’s a pretty white day bed. That’s where I go now when the snoring gets bad. Which is pretty much every night.
The bed is right next to the desk…
I might have to move the furniture around. The uncontrollable desire to take a nap is my number one writer’s block symptom. I can’t let it be quite that easy to just fall off a desk chair and straight onto a mattress.
But the desk is what I’m really liking right now. The desk, my netbook, and a closed door.
When Peter or Zack interrupts me in the kitchen—when they can’t manage to wait out one of my all-too-rare two-minute bursts of inspiration—I can get snippy. Which will elicit a response from one or the other, usually along the lines of, “Oh. Ex-cuuuuse meee!”
Or, “You take yourself soooo seriously.”
Which, actually, I do.
And is, the point exactly.
It took me a while to realize that, to realize that it is perfectly OK to take my writing seriously. If I don’t, then who will? And now I have a place, a little cocoon, which will allow me to do just that.
I won’t be in there all the time; I promise. And if you need me, you know where I am.
Just please knock first.