Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

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.

These episodes were grim and perfunctory. Mostly the empty room sat empty.

At summer’s end Charlotte and I started at Darby’s sprawling public school, an isolated compound encompassing a terrifying twelve grades. When we brought a new friend home, the room was glossed as a symptom of our in-progress expansion into the vast house, or as a “famous” oddness of my father’s charm. Within a year, the empty room was a social asset, like my father’s collection of comedy LPs or his back issues of Playboy , like my mother’s attractiveness and her willingness to provide fresh-baked blondies during wintry Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie marathons. The empty room counted among the “cool” things imported from my urban existence, no matter that it was the symbolic opposite of that vanished life.

My father created a sign-in sheet at the empty room’s door. My mother spent her afternoons managing it. This was the first thing she complained of when my father slogged in for dinner. If he arrived in time to personally hound kids from the room — always checking to make certain we’d faithfully emptied the space of baseball cards, Archie anthologies, Slim Jim wrappers, what have you — he’d honor us with an arched eyebrow and one of his verbal captions: “Multifarious Doings, I Presume” or “Goings-on, Unspecified, Ensued.” Once, cigarette smoke was detected, the residue of a spontaneous radical act by my friend Mike’s annoying friend Buzz, the empty room now the default hangout for a clan of Darby High boys I hadn’t even particularly wanted to impress. My mother flushed us out, Mike and Buzz to their homes and me to my “real” room. When my father returned, she sent him in for a sniffing tour.

“This fails to pass muster at any number of levels,” he began. “The empty room is like a living organ in our family’s house.” My father’s interpretive monologues were getting arcane. We tuned him out before he’d finished articulating nuances of some new policy. “The lung could be seen to be the empty room of the human body, not mere negative space. By filling and emptying with the stuff of the world it stands as the most aspirational organ, in a literal sense.” Charlotte, who had hoped to see me dramatically punished, quit the scene in an arm-flapping show of vexation. My mother wandered off.

Under the Reagan cuts, Hugh Carey’s administration reluctantly disassembled HUD. In the months before my father was fired, my mother colonized the empty room, setting out on her great delayed project of transcribing the oral histories of our grandmother and seven great-aunts, whom she’d tape-recorded for her thesis in anthropology at Hunter. Charlotte and I ceded the room readily. We’d situated our lives elsewhere, mostly in the cars of our friends, or in the booths or parking lot of Darby’s doughnut shop. My mother, wearing large headphones and operating her special tape player by treadle, labored on her project with an air of private fury like that of a sweatshop seamstress. But she never failed to remove her desk after each time she worked.

Months before I left for college my father quit driving to Albany every day. He’d been haunting the “corridors of power,” in his words — more specifically the lunch counter of Allworthy’s, the greasy spoon where the department had lunched and where some of his old colleagues now convened, mourning careers they’d taken for granted. Judging by the haul amassing in the attic rooms and garage, and the gilt-framed Hudson River School knockoffs cluttering the walls of the living room, he’d begun scouring the capital’s dusty junk shops.

He brought little inside the empty room itself. A Penguin Graham Greene, a saucer stacked with five or six Oreos, a vintage transistor radio with a miraculous knack for receiving Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson’s Mets broadcasts all the way from New York, albeit wreathed in crispy static. For a brief, angry spell it was my parents who reactivated the sign-in system, vying over the clipboard at the door, my father’s original hand-ruled grid now a grainy blur in umpteenth-generation photocopies. When his claim on the room ultimately trumped my mother’s, she set up an office in the guest room upstairs.

I registered this in passing. After I left for freshman orientation I made short work of whichever parent answered the phone, then asked them to pass the receiver Charlotte’s way. The extra length of cord my mother had installed meant that the wall-mounted kitchen phone could be stretched, barely, to slide under the closed door of the empty room. I heard Arfy whining and scratching at the door.

“It isn’t the fact that he’s always in here,” she said. “Or that half the time she’s upstairs in her pedal-operated time machine. It isn’t even that they never speak a word to each other. It’s that every time either one tries to tell me what to do they start with ‘your mother and I feel’ or ‘your father and I want you to understand’ or some other stupid fucking bullshit that makes me want to puke.”

I convinced them to pack Charlotte off on a Trailways bus to visit me during fall break, claiming we’d be treated to Thanksgiving dinner at a Northampton hotel by my girlfriend Deanna’s family. In fact, Deanna and Charlotte and I spent that week scuffling around the vacant dorm corridors, eating fast food and ramen, listening to R.E.M.’s Murmur and smoking marijuana morning, noon, and night. Deanna was the first person I’d met who smoked marijuana like it was cigarettes; she was the first person I’d met who did a lot of things. I’d been certain she and Charlotte would get along. I felt my first pang of jealousy at the bus station, just moments after Charlotte pulled her duffel from the undercarriage.

“So you’re the fun one,” said Deanna, putting her hand into Charlotte’s hair and mussing it upward into a tangle. “No wonder your brother likes me.”

“I can think of a bunch of reasons he’d like you.”

“You wanna let me do something about that hair?” Deanna mimed scissors. Charlotte widened her eyes.

On Thanksgiving Day the three of us took psilocybin mushrooms and sprawled on a dirty, marijuana seed — infested section of carpet in the middle of Deanna’s floor. Occupying Deanna’s dorm room for the drug trip, while the rest of the universe, so far as we knew, enacted a normative Rockwellian Thanksgiving, recalled my father’s notions of the suspension of ordinary life within the bounds of the empty room. But Charlotte and I didn’t speak of this. For dinner we’d bought cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, just for the squalor, but felt no particular appetite. At four in the morning our flaming synapses crumbled in flames and we sagged on the carpet into catlike slumber.

Charlotte failed to hide her tears at the bus station. For a few weeks more, before the fatal New Year’s visit, I could flatter myself that my parents’ world was a place both immutable and dull, a snow globe I’d been lucky enough to escape, and which remained Charlotte’s misfortune to endure. I was the one engaged in chrysalid transformations. These made early December seem as remote from September, when I’d first met Deanna, as Darby’s mileage from the moon. What right did my parents have to do anything but stand stock-still for my barely attentive scorn?

When I called to say I’d be spending Christmas with Deanna (we would visit New York this time) my mother sobbed. The women of my family were on a crying jag. “Well, you can’t have Charlotte this time,” my mother said, astonishing me. I heard my sister in the background, saying, “Let me talk, Zoe.” Charlotte had begun calling them by their first names around the time our father got fired. I still said Mom and Dad.