The Room Itself Wasn't Much to Look At

Now, the room itself wasn't much to look at, and I say that with all the love in the world for it. I shared it with Patricia and my sister Colleen, which meant that at any given time there were three girls' worth of everything crammed into a space that might have comfortably fit one and a half. Two twin beds pushed against opposite walls, and then a cot wedged between them that folded up during the day and came out again at night, and that cot was mine for most of my childhood. I never minded it the way you might think. There was something about being in the middle of things, between Patricia's steady breathing on one side and Colleen's restless kicking on the other, that felt like the right place to be. The walls were painted a yellow that had been cheerful once and had since gone the color of old newspaper. Mama had put up a border of tiny blue flowers near the ceiling, the kind that came in a roll from the hardware store, and a few of them had started to peel away from the corners by the time I was old enough to notice. I used to lie on my cot and look at those flowers and think about whether they were happier before they were stuck to the wall or after. Lord knows what I was doing philosophizing about wallpaper at age seven, but there you have it. We had one window that faced the side yard, and through it you could see the Boudreaux house next door, which was close enough that Vera Boudreaux and I could tap on each other's windows with a long stick if we needed to communicate something urgent, which we always felt we did. What we were communicating I couldn't tell you now. The important thing was the system. The window let in the Gulf air in summer, and Mama would hang a piece of cheesecloth over it to catch the breeze without letting in the mosquitoes, and the cloth would billow in and out all night like the room was breathing. Patricia had claimed the dresser, which was hers by right of age and size and the general force of her personality. Colleen and I shared a small chest of drawers that had belonged to somebody's grandmother and smelled permanently of cedar and something floral I could never quite name. I kept my library books in the bottom drawer because the shelves were full of Patricia's things, and I had learned early that a library book placed in a visible location in a house with six children in it was a library book in danger. There was a crucifix above the door, small and wooden, and a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall between the two beds. Mama had put them there and that was that. We prayed before we went to sleep, the three of us, in a mumbled sort of way that probably didn't carry much spiritual weight but felt like the right way to end a day. Colleen always fell asleep mid-prayer and would have to be nudged, and Patricia would sigh the sigh of someone bearing a great burden with tremendous patience. The floor was wood and it creaked in two specific spots that you learned to avoid if you were trying to come in late, which, when I was older, occasionally I was. The rug between the beds was braided and oval and had started its life as something else entirely, some collection of old clothes that Mama had made into something useful, which was the way she approached most problems. I'll tell you what I remember most, though, and it isn't the wallpaper or the cot or even the window with the cheesecloth. It's the sound of it at night, after the lights were out. Patricia turning pages by flashlight under her covers. Colleen already gone, breathing slow and even the way only children can. The ceiling fan turning. The Boudreaux's dog barking once, twice, then stopping. The Gulf somewhere past all of it, doing what it always did, which was exactly whatever it wanted. It wasn't a quiet room. But it was the kind of room that taught you to sleep anyway, and I've been grateful for that ever since.