My domain is spacious and airy, the only room on the fourth floor of our enormous house, a thousand square feet belonging only to me. Up here, I experience firsthand all kinds of weather: the sun slanting across the room and catching at my eyes when I am reading on my bed; the heavenly feeling of being cloud-caught when the sky billows; the white noise of slapping rain, drops sometimes landing on my face when I am at my desk working away and a window is slightly ajar; fresh spring breezes that toss up from my mother’s gardens the scent of sweet alyssum, and rustle my pillowcases, my notebooks, the journals to which I subscribe—artistic, political, and literary—and leave all over my room, stretched open like dancers in wide pliés to the pages I am currently reading.
A Turkish rug runs from my desk at the north-facing windows to the door, and the entire south wall is filled up with long shelves chock-full of books. Over the years, I have arranged my collection by publication date, which provided an interesting historical scope; alphabetically by authors’ last names, which was dull; alphabetically by title, but so many titles began with The that I found it disconcerting to run my fingers over the spines and read The, The, The, The, The, The, which began to sound like thugh, as if I were a slow boy sounding out a difficult word. Currently my books are arranged in a crescendo of colors based on the covers. Books with red covers are grouped together, and books with blue covers are grouped together, and those with white covers, and green covers, and mustard-yellow covers, it goes on and on because books are wrapped up in more colors than you might realize. This visual coordination is very pleasing to my eye, and I put on the top shelf a violet gem of a book, slim and small, that glistens like a miniature stained-glass window behind which there might be some kind of treasure.
That violet book, called The Summer of My Shimmerlessness, is my favorite, although I have never read it. But as this summer might prove to be the summer of my own shimmerlessness, it is first on my list of “Books to Read.” I turn sixteen soon, and from what my sisters have told me, and from what I have learned from reading, sixteen is monumental; one hill climbed, a new vista to see, and I want to climb that hill on my own two legs, see the vista that surrounds, breathe in fresh air. But, as always, in the wide-awake hours, I am forced to compress, down to nearly nothing, my expectations about what I desire.
Through the tall rectangular windows that reach the ceiling, I can gaze north, east, and west, and see rolling grass, soaring beeches and dwarfed willows, and the pond, lichen-encrusted, its water burred by the skin of algae the gardener forgets to scrape away, home to primordial koi. When Hercules is let out of my room to do his business, I hear him racing down the long winding staircase, his paws outstretched until he bangs through the doggy door. Then he is a blur of white fur against the blue-green grass, barking at the tall trees and small bushes, skidding to a stop to find me at the glass. He barks and barks, gets busy digging a hole, then trots off into the silvery beeches to find something: a lost pink ball, a desiccated beetle, a mouse fastened between his jaws and still squirming. Once he buries his find, he looks back up at me and bows, his little daily gift to his owner and master who loves him so much.
I have refused all the technological advances my parents offer up—television, phone, radio—and instead I rely on the written word and on my own imagination. Why should I torture myself by allowing in the outside world that I can never, will never, visit. I like imagining I live in very olden times, am Plato or Socrates or Marcus Aurelius, and have only my eyes to clue me in about what might be important and my brain to work through what I learn and observe. And I do intently observe from within my room all that unfolds out there, that spins in my head, that I experience in my dreams.
From my cloistered vantage point, I have spent many happy hours looking out over our oceanic backyard, to the speckled stone fence that surrounds our property, and then beyond, to a wide street with miniature houses, or at least that is how they appear to me. I have been told that those houses, much smaller than our palatial homestead, are of normal size, comfortable residences for families of four. I have never been able to assess that truth for myself, as, of course, I have never walked that street, or any street. My binoculars are well worn from all my investigating. Life out there is like watching a soap opera for the deaf. I track happiness sheltered between clasped hands, see the wounding anger that sparks from bodies when half of a couple stomps off and leaves the other behind. I have seen friendships dissolve with a pointed finger in a face, and love bloom with one glance. I am good at interpreting the source of pleasure, upset, the onset of veneration or lust. I notice emotions the way others notice the weather, which I have already said that I notice as well, along with birds. I am a birder par extraordinaire; all of my sightings written down in a notebook simply labled Birds.
However, when I stand at my windows with my binoculars pressed to my eyes and the street is empty, and remains empty for hours and hours, it is then I realize I am a prisoner, always dressed in one of the many pairs of pin-striped pajamas I own. When I am surrounded by that silence, when from down below my sisters, Veronica and Helena, are not engaged in a sisterly debate, and my mother is not calling out one thing or another, and my father is not yet home for the night, and when the birds have ceased shuffling between brown branches and tsking when they settle into their nests for the night, and the weather is doing whatever it does, I feel the fear haunting those who love me. Beware! Beware! I always hear everyone thinking, worried that I might suffer a fatal cut and my blood will flow unstaunched until I am emptied out. I will not lie—I worry too.