For me, at sixteen, my room is the heart of the house. There I hoard the flotsam that connects me to my past, post signs of my future like explorer's flags. I wrap the walls around me for healing and renewal. Haven, hideout, study, dressing room, repository, salon. My room, God bless it, mine.

The rest of the house (where I go to eat, talk, watch television, pretend that I'm ordinary) has colored walls and white woodwork. My room with green woodwork and white walls reverses this convention. I have learned that out in the world where I mean to go, people have white walls so that they can Hang Art. I have hung art, a Feininger cathedral in a ready-made frame that almost fits it. I found the print in a bookstore. The family is polite but they don't understand abstraction. They understand Maxfield Parish, which I like well enough but which does not advance my entry into the outside world.

Item: Closet. My mother says it appears to be on fire; she's laughing because it's full of reds, pinks, yellows. I'm laughing too, because already I've got one beige dress and one black plaid, signs of what I mean to wear when I'm older, to show I'm older—my closet will be full of those charred neutrals when the hot roses of my earlier teens have burned themselves out.

My father, if he ever looked into my closet, would say I had too many clothes, but I don't. It's just that I've stayed the same size for four years, so for the first time in my life I can accumulate. If I get two winter skirts a year, then after four years I own eight. I can stand at the open closet door and feel a sense of accomplishment, a foretaste of how adults get a houseful of stuff.

Of course accumulation sometimes backfires. I can't seem to outgrow my sixth grade Easter dress, a full-skirted gray and white nylon with a black patent leather belt. Every year my mother and I are sure it's throw-out time for that dress, but when I laughingly put it on, the damned thing looks plausible. I can't bring myself to wear it anywhere, but it goes on living with me like a senile relative.

The closet shelf holds six boxes of black and white reproductions of famous masterpieces, and three hats. The masterpieces were given to me by a family friend who heard I was artistic; I was flattered, but can't figure out what to do with them. Two of the hats are dress-up hats: the older one (I see now) a crude and tasteless inverted plate of white stiffened lace; the newer and smaller a sophisticated little scrap of a hat with a red fabric rose. The third hat is a boy's flat cap, plaid, with a buckle in the back. Seventeen suggested that such caps would be critical in last fall's wardrobe. False prophecy.

Underneath the fake-moccasin bedroom slippers, the old Keds, the white bucks matted with liquid polish, and the current, older, and oldest penny loafers are a pair of secret shoes I bought, last summer, with my own money, pink flats on season's-end sale for a dollar fifty. The secret is that I was pretending Buzzy Harrington and I were going to Bangor Fair, and that I was wearing my pink shirtwaist and pink flats, and the lights from the Ferris wheel were sending little confetties of light over our upturned amorous faces. My mother says that men don't know it, but they are all deeply moved by pink. The fantasy didn't quite work, though, until I actually had pink flats. Of course I didn't have Buzzy either, wasn't even close to it then, but at least he existed, and if he hadn't gone home for the summer when the Academy closed—well, who knows.

I've put Dad's old tennis racquet in the back of the closet too. Lately it's become clear to me that I won't play Wimbledon, since I hit the ball so seldom that I don't even want my friends to see me trying. My baton is in there with it, a heavy silver metal tube with white rubber bulbs on either end. Why do I have it? Who knows? In the late Fifties, every girl is a closet majorette.

Item: Bureau. Low, wide, of thick, heavy maple, highly polished. The importance of the wood lends weight to every object in the drawers, which seem always to be full of cool, serious air and the scent of fancy soap. My former bedroom set, currently Murphy's, though bought for me new seems frail by comparison: the drawers rattle out too carelessly, the wood is thinner. This furniture was used by my parents before we all shuffled rooms at Murphy's leaving the crib. This is adult stuff.

The drawers are graduated, the largest at the bottom; the contents are graduated in the opposite direction, growing more important towards the top. The bottom drawer is plain boring, pajamas and underwear; the third down is sweaters, important; the second holds my scrapbook, drawings, poems, the outward signs of the inward me. The top drawer—scarves and handkerchiefs to the right of the divider, letters and souvenirs to the left—has a secret in the handkerchief box: Buzzy Harrington's school photo. It's tucked into the middle of the bottom handkerchief. I look inside it before I go to bed. I know that Buzzy's white-blond hair is shining even in the dark, and his grin makes me feel safe through the night.

On top of the bureau there's a little plastic-framed picture of Jesus. You'd think I'd look at that for safety, but I don't. I got it in fifth grade Sunday School and I'm stuck with it forever, because how can you not have your picture of Jesus up? What would I be saying if I put it away? I can't bring myself to make that gesture. I keep the little Steiff animals, tiger and owl and camel, in the opposite corner so that the juxtaposition won't be so grotesque. It's the best I can do.

In the middle I keep my jewelry box, a gift from my father. My friends admire it. It's pink leather lined with pink velvet, and when you lift the lid a little ballerina turns and swings her legs in front of a mirror while a hidden music box plays "Hi Lili Hi Lo." Every now and then something I wish for unpredictably clicks for him ("Authentic girlish whim," he must say to himself) and I get it. I got a horsehair crinoline that way, and I don't think that even my grandmother would have splurged on that. The jewelry box smells serious too, like new fabric and mechanical parts. Most of the jewelry isn't much. I'm strong on Woolworth bracelets, bangles in mixed metallic hues, novelties with strips of mink or enamel hearts, though I buy them more than I wear them. The only good pieces besides my baby jewelry are a couple of rings that belonged to my favorite aunt—I wear the cat's eye one every day—and her amber beads (sherry colored and soapy smooth), which I regard as my greatest treasure. Except, perhaps, for the Cracker Jack ring that Buzzy found on the sidewalk and gave me for a joke.

Because this year all the girls are wearing such things, my grandmother has loaned me the little gold cross with the diamond chip that was her wedding gift from my grandfather. At this point in my life, I sometimes love my grandmother more than either parent, for I believe that she alone understands me.

Item: Bed. Maple. Matches bureau. My mother can't see why I want to use the gaudy old crazy-quilt my grandmother made, and says so about once a week: "I'd buy you any bedspread you wanted within reason," she says, "but no, you'd rather use that old thing." If I told her I use it because I adore my grandmother, we'd both be embarrassed. If I told her that it looks to me like a big Feininger abstract, she'd shake her head. If I told her that I'd begun to hear rumors about New York tourists buying up old quilts, I'd give away my secret picture of the future me. So I just say, "I like that quilt," and she says, "You must."

Our bedrooms aren't heated, so the sheets are clammy from October through March or April, but that feels natural. I stand over the hall register and let it blow hot air under my nightgown before I climb into bed. Usually, if I concentrate hard, I can dream about anything I like. That means that if I'm with Buzzy maybe four hours a day in classes and afterwards, and manage to dream about him even half the night, then that's eight hours, like a whole day's worth of lovely him. In the dreams we're generally more demonstrative than we are in the daytime (so far), but still respectable.

Item: Bookcase. Maple, but not part of the set. I was twelve when my father all of a sudden drove me fifteen miles to the nearest furniture store and bought me a bookcase. Every time I look at it I remember how honored I felt. It was the first piece of furniture I had ever owned, not just used, and moreover I was being recognized as a bookish sort of person. The bookcase is pretty full, what with my childhood favorites and the Modern Library editions I buy as often as I can, and a lot of paperback novels and plays. And yearbooks, of course, and school catalogues, which often have photos of people I like. The more expensive and racy hard-covers are, to the amazement of my friends, holiday gifts from my mother, who takes requests but apparently doesn't read book reviews: Peyton Place, for instance, and Lolita.

On the bookcase top, the highest surface in the room, I keep a ten-inch reproduction of "The Thinker", and framed photos of my four dearest female friends. I study their attractive, composed faces and marvel that they like me, for they're much better put together than I. They scold me and straighten my collars and tell me that my hair is parted crooked again and sometimes copy my test answers, though they don't need to. The sense of being owned delights me.

Item: Dressing table. This comes with the bedroom set but it ill suited to my habits except when I set my typewriter there to write something too private for downstairs. But usually it has doilies; a brush and comb set with brocade backs under plastic; perfume bottle full and empty, including a little box of fifty famous scents in glass tubes on which I always expect to impale myself; a couple of lipsticks and a green eye shadow stick; a lamp with hanging crystals. Some of my friends use pancake makeup, but I can't get into it. I have finally pushed the bench under the window because I can never remember to use it. When it's in place I just lean over it to brush my hair or slap on lipstick, too fast to make a sit worthwhile. Now and then, though, I drag it back, click on the lamp, and try on the teenage queen persona—which in the end fails to keep me entertained, though the lamplight is shadowy and fetching. Still, I like having a dressing table, I like it very much. It keeps my possibilities open. In the forthcoming world of white walls and hung art, glamorous is one of the things I still might be.

I am seventeen and staying at the Harringtons'. This is the first house outside the family that I've ever known intimately. Live-in intimate, I mean, knowing where the floor creaks and which doors have to be propped shut with a rock, and what time of day the sink fills up with glasses and ash trays. It is an emptier house than ours, not so padded with domestic bric-a-brac, and it feels less safe. When the wind off the ocean blows the curtains straight in, nothing falls off the windowsills, and nothing stops it.

Or maybe it just seems emptier because Buzzy is gone out of it; and maybe nowhere seems so safe anymore, in a world where a boy like Buzzy (who never said a mean thing, and always let the cat have his chair, and knew the periodic table of the elements and all the presidents in order; who when the sun bounced off his white-gold hair looked as though illumination came from inside) can by an unlucky slip of his fishing knife nick an artery and bleed to death just before he gets to harbor.

His mother wrote to tell me that she hadn't had a proper chance to speak to me at Buzzy's services; that she knew we'd been close and he would certainly want her to assure me that their home was always open to me. Could I perhaps spare them a week or so before I left for college?

I thought that there was nothing I would so willingly part withal, as Hamlet says, except my life, except my life, except my life. Freda Harrington's letter gave me hope that there were still things to want. My mother bought me two pairs of Bermuda shorts and I packed my suitcase with no quiver of misgiving about joining a household in crisis. I only knew that I was going to a place where nobody, probably, would be annoyed with me for grieving and think I should snap out of it.

If I'd come here to stay when I still saw the world as safe, would the coast feel different? Now it makes me think of people leaving, sailors and travelers. I look at the tides and remember that houses rise and fall and generations renew themselves. Flux is nature's habit.

When I arrived, Buzzy's mother was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, whacking the top of a Mason jar with a screwdriver handle. She was wearing pedal pushers and smoking; I hoped that my father, who had always told me with perfect confidence that nice girls never smoke, wouldn't be shocked and drag me home. Freda Harrington looked like a new kind of mother, no sign of girdles and aprons, and (even aside from the holy consideration that she was Buzzy's) I wanted, at once, to know more of her.

She took my father's hand with cries of gratitude—"Mr. Tracy, we so appreciate your lending us your precious Ann!"—and wrapped me in a soft, smoky hug. I was hardly aware of his driving away as, gazing, I followed her up the uncarpeted stairs to my room, where I lingered to absorb and unpack. Quite different from home, and yet it felt easy. The woodwork was dark, the papered walls bare. A pearly nautilus shell on the cedar chest was the only ornament. Fog was already rolling over the water, but the view, I could tell, would be stunning. On the other side of the wall behind my bed, somebody was listening to the top twenty, and I remembered that we had passed a closed door.

When I came downstairs Mrs. Harrington had the jar open and was measuring flour for a cobbler.

"Did you see anything of Kenneth?" she asked.

"Is that who's playing the radio?"

"All he does all day," she said. "He's twelve and it just about killed him—"

She swallowed a bit when she said "it," and so did I. Even the pronoun was harrowing.

"He won't go out," she went on shakily. "And Nancy, she's fourteen, she won't come in." She tried to laugh. "She stays down at the harbor until dark. My poor husband drives himself so, I never see him. Do I get lonesome! I'm awful glad you're here, but it's a mess of a house you've come to."

But it's Buzzy's house, I thought, and now it's mine. And I am going to love these people very much and forever. "It's fine," I said, "it's fine. Being here is what's important."

It feels, in fact, like the most important thing that's happened in my life so far.

I spend a lot of time learning space and layout. When Buzzy opened this kitchen cabinet, I tell myself, he saw this row of glasses, reached out to the middle shelf as I do, but automatically. Coming down the stairs each morning, he would have seen this; walking to the mailbox he would have seen that. When he said "home," this set of objects rose to his vision. I peer at family photos for a younger Buzzy, or I flip through children's books, hoping to see his name but finding only anonymous scribbles. Every towel and chair seems luminous from its probable contact with his body.

His family makes me welcome. Perhaps they hope that I will be the small gain to follow their great loss; or maybe my coming here is further evidence that their boy's charm was potent in the world outside the family. As for me, being with Buzzy's family validates me. My love wasn’t, and my pain isn't, a passing adolescent excess. The Harringtons take for granted its centrality in my life. The exchange of needs and charities that weaves us together is almost entirely silent: by shaping ourselves to negative space we acknowledge the design; Buzzy's name, unspoken, is as good as written across the sky.

I spend most of my time with Mrs. Harrington, which is fine with me. The others attract me as well, of course—the elusive Nancy, who is closest to my age; Kenneth, who when he shows up has such a look of Buzzy that I want to grab him even though he's only twelve and I feel like a pervert; Mr. Harrington, who hugs me ever night and says he'll take me out pulling lobster pots soon. But she's the one who has brought me here and who will, or will not, bring me again.

I try to help her in the kitchen. I love the slap-dash tone of this woman's housework. She is the first person I've ever known who leaves the clean dishes in the rack to air dry. So you can do that, can you, I say to myself. That's a kind of liberation. Of course dishes don't stay wet forever; her way makes sense. The other day, canning for the cat, she got tired of cutting up fish and began to shove them into the jar whole—heads, tails, fins and all. I teased her about it, but I think that I may keep house that way myself some day. It appears to save time for other stuff.

What we do with the hours saved by domestic slap-dash, my father would, with disapproval, call "running the roads." These rides are meant to show me the scenery, which they do, but we drive every day like people running from something, which we are, though it doesn't work. We shoot up and down amazing hills, whip around curves known only to natives, and at every roller-coaster turn magnificence lays itself out in coves and islands, sails and gulls. The world, now that I see a bit of it, seems sad but astonishingly lovely.

Ordinarily we stop at the cemetery just before we go home. The first day we said, "Well, if you'd like to" and "Of course I would," but now we just do it without discussion. As we turn off the road, whatever chat and joking we've managed dies into a tense silence. Or at any rate I find it tense, for though I want to make this visit, would hate to miss it, I'm awkward as a dog in a suit. The formality of Buzzy's inscription—Edgar Frances Harrington, 1940-1958, Safe in Harbor Now—fills me merely with blankness. I wait in vain for the tears that have leaked down my nose at a hundred inappropriate times. I myself saw Buzzy lowered into the ground, I know he's there, but staring at his gravel cover I can feel only a dry weariness. And what am I supposed to do about Freda Harrington, on her knees now and weeping into the grass? Reaching out to hold her is the first gesture of my adult life.

On clear nights I roll my shades back up after I turn the light out, and get into my bed by feel, one more sign of how well I know the Harrington house. I lie at first with my legs together and my arms tight to my sides, thinking of Buzzy in his little space, but soon I slip, absent minded, into the sprawl of the living. The blackness outside the window is the darkness of ocean and infinite space, not the darkness of the grave. There is more room out there than I know what to do with, but I believe, because I am here in this second home, that I will be able to occupy some piece of it.

§ § §

Ann Tracy grew up in rural Maine and was educated at Colby College, Brown University, and the University of Toronto. A professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, she has previously published two novels (WINTER HUNGER and WHAT DO COWBOYS LIKE?) and a reference book (THE GOTHIC NOVEL 1790-1830), as well as a book-length piece of non-fiction, HIGHER GROUND. She lives in Plattsburgh, NY.

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.

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