by Jonathan Lethem
Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.
Another memory: my playmate Max’s parents had borrowed, from mine, a spare set of china plates. I spent a lot of time visiting with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s older brother. So I was present the afternoon my father destroyed the china set. Max’s family lived in a duplex, the basement and parlor floor of a brownstone, a palace of abundance . . . Max and his brother had separate rooms, and a backyard. All this would pale beside the spaciousness of our Darby farmhouse. That was the point.
The return of the china had become a running joke between our two families, or at least for Max’s parents. They kept trying to give it back, my father kept explaining that we really had no use for the second set; he claimed that it had been a gift, not a loan. In this my father struck them as facetious, when he was actually not only sincere but losing patience.
This day my father had swung by on his way home from Penn Station to pick me up. His work was taking him to Albany more often. While they stood in the kitchen, Max’s father took him by surprise, placing the stack of scrupulously cleaned china into my father’s free hands.
“You really don’t want them?” my father confirmed, in his dry way.
“No, please,” said Max’s father.
“Well, then, we’ll just do this,” declared my father, opening his hands. The plates dropped and exploded, slivers finding every corner of the kitchen and the living room carpet beyond. There, memory halts. Max and I were reduced to pen pals when my family moved.
The New York State Department of Housing and Urban Development was my father’s employer, and we went upstate to be closer to his work. The move, though, was sold to my sister and me as a kind of bodily impulse on my family’s part, like that of salmon spawning, to reject the hectic, compromising city in favor of a place where we could live. I was old enough to fantasize about the teenagerish collections of who knows what I’d cunningly display in a bedroom of my own, and how I would exclude Charlotte and her friends, and then how, later, with great ostentation, I would allow them to enter.
The movers poured our belongings into the new home. Its hugeness, the endless closets, the fact of the barn and garage: these performed a magic trick on our stuff. My father’s accumulations dwindled as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Charlotte and I ran through the house in a fever, counting the doors, including closets, attics, cellar. We lost count at sixty. We then chose our rooms. One room was appointed a den, another a guest room. My father singled out a room downstairs, formerly the doctor’s consulting office (my parents had purchased this house from the estate of a retired country optometrist), with one door and one window, otherwise a simple rectangle outlined with plain molding, and declared it the future site of the empty room. The room was empty now. So it would stay.
“What’s it for?” asked his eleven-year-old son.
“Anything we want it to be,” my father said.
“Can we play there?” asked his eight-year-old daughter.
“As long as you take your toys out with you when you’re finished, yes.”
He explained by means of a series of exclusions. I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother.
Then came a ritual cycle of first occupations, Barbies and G.I. Joes soberly scattered and collected under my father’s gaze. My mother ignored it. One Saturday morning she slept in, and my father led us in to sit cross-legged for a breakfast picnic on the smooth, cold floorboards, our Pop-Tarts raised above our heads to keep them from Arfy’s nipping bounds.
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Another memory: my playmate Max’s parents had borrowed, from mine, a spare set of china plates. I spent a lot of time visiting with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s older brother. So I was present the afternoon my father destroyed the china set. Max’s family lived in a duplex, the basement and parlor floor of a brownstone, a palace of abundance . . . Max and his brother had separate rooms, and a backyard. All this would pale beside the spaciousness of our Darby farmhouse. That was the point.
The return of the china had become a running joke between our two families, or at least for Max’s parents. They kept trying to give it back, my father kept explaining that we really had no use for the second set; he claimed that it had been a gift, not a loan. In this my father struck them as facetious, when he was actually not only sincere but losing patience.
This day my father had swung by on his way home from Penn Station to pick me up. His work was taking him to Albany more often. While they stood in the kitchen, Max’s father took him by surprise, placing the stack of scrupulously cleaned china into my father’s free hands.
“You really don’t want them?” my father confirmed, in his dry way.
“No, please,” said Max’s father.
“Well, then, we’ll just do this,” declared my father, opening his hands. The plates dropped and exploded, slivers finding every corner of the kitchen and the living room carpet beyond. There, memory halts. Max and I were reduced to pen pals when my family moved.
The New York State Department of Housing and Urban Development was my father’s employer, and we went upstate to be closer to his work. The move, though, was sold to my sister and me as a kind of bodily impulse on my family’s part, like that of salmon spawning, to reject the hectic, compromising city in favor of a place where we could live. I was old enough to fantasize about the teenagerish collections of who knows what I’d cunningly display in a bedroom of my own, and how I would exclude Charlotte and her friends, and then how, later, with great ostentation, I would allow them to enter.
The movers poured our belongings into the new home. Its hugeness, the endless closets, the fact of the barn and garage: these performed a magic trick on our stuff. My father’s accumulations dwindled as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Charlotte and I ran through the house in a fever, counting the doors, including closets, attics, cellar. We lost count at sixty. We then chose our rooms. One room was appointed a den, another a guest room. My father singled out a room downstairs, formerly the doctor’s consulting office (my parents had purchased this house from the estate of a retired country optometrist), with one door and one window, otherwise a simple rectangle outlined with plain molding, and declared it the future site of the empty room. The room was empty now. So it would stay.
“What’s it for?” asked his eleven-year-old son.
“Anything we want it to be,” my father said.
“Can we play there?” asked his eight-year-old daughter.
“As long as you take your toys out with you when you’re finished, yes.”
He explained by means of a series of exclusions. I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother.
Then came a ritual cycle of first occupations, Barbies and G.I. Joes soberly scattered and collected under my father’s gaze. My mother ignored it. One Saturday morning she slept in, and my father led us in to sit cross-legged for a breakfast picnic on the smooth, cold floorboards, our Pop-Tarts raised above our heads to keep them from Arfy’s nipping bounds.
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