Excerpt

One afternoon when I was thirteen, I lay on my bed engrossed in the adventures of Tarzan, the novels about whom I’d just discovered. My previous encounter with the jungle hero had been in his stupid movie characterization. Replaying on television, it obtained only my yawns. But now, astounded by this literary Tarzan’s intelligence and absorbed by the epic hero’s quest for a lost city, I felt a sudden intrusion into my mind. I looked up. Mother stood in my room, surveying me.

In my mother’s house you have to go through the bigger bedroom that was then mine to get to the service porch. Mother always seemed to need to go to the service porch for some reason. Consequently, she was always passing through my room, where she could hardly resist commenting negatively upon its sorry state (it was a disaster) or questioning whether whatever I was doing was what I was supposed to be doing. If I looked too relaxed, her brow wrinkled in concern. I should be struggling more with, well, something.

Not that she overtly, or consciously, objected to me enjoying myself. She just felt there must be something else I should be doing, because there were always so many unpleasant things to do in life. “You have to” do this, she would say. “You have to” do that, she would admonish me. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like. You have to make yourself, even if you don’t want to.”

Now, on her way to some chore in the service porch, she’d paused, her head tilted to see what I was reading. She frowned and studied me nervously. “Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

Typically unable to respond on the moment (for instance, “I am doing something”), I answered as a sulky and rebellious teen, “No!”

“What about your homework?”

“I did it.” I’d also vacuumed the living room. My lower back ached from dragging the stainless steel canister around and leaning over the hose.

Mother resumed her passage to the service porch with reluctance. I went back to my book. But she continued to traverse my room, each time casting increasingly apprehensive glances in my direction. Without looking up I could almost feel her neurons jumping nervously. I was relaxing, lying around and enjoying my read of Tarzan when I “should be” doing something unpleasant and difficult. That was life.

Ignoring Mother, I continued to read, immersing myself in Tarzan’s adventure while the early writer part of myself observed how the numerous threads of the plot wove together a fantastic tale. But my whole body grew steadily more rigid under my mother’s repeated passes through my room and her intensifying, bordering-on-hysterical scrutiny as she pursued countless missions in the service porch.

I began to anticipate her reappearances and jerk my head up, shooting angry red sparks at her as if by the sheer power of my glare I could forestall her disapproval, her imminent verbal attack, and erect a battlement between us. But with her every examination of me, her features appeared steadily more strained until at last she looked as if her face would capsize from stress.

I gave up reading and turned on the television. Or I ate. I don’t remember. But I never forgot the incident, and on the afternoon I binged on chili three years later, the moment came back to me. As I questioned how I could regain control of my eating, I realized that what I needed was a room of my own.

My own room would provide me with a refuge from my mother’s reign of voiced and unvoiced criticisms; her worries and all too vocal cross-examinations of me; her objections to or denial of my every feeling, thought and act; her hysterical outbursts at what she found wrong with me; and the venomous antagonism that was beginning to sear through me in response. Having my own physical room would afford me a parallel interior space of privacy in which I could experience pleasure and not have to defend myself or account to my mother for it or for anything else. Abruptly, I was certain that having my own room would also demagnetize me from the refrigerator.

As I finished the dishes, soaping off the last unlicked specks of spicy tomato salsa from the chili bowl, I turned my attention toward this objective.