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.
“You have to come back,” said Charlotte. Her voice was cold. “No,” I heard her say, with the mouthpiece covered. “No, he can’t have the phone, I don’t care. Tell him to come out if he wants the phone.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Rupert wants to talk to you.” My mother’s birdlike cheeping evaporated from the background.
“What’s taking him so long?”
“He’s getting dressed.”
My father got on the line. “Okay, college boy, I’ve been deputized to insist you give us a gander at this lady of yours. I’ve heard good things, but I’d like to see the new paradigm assert itself under my own roof.” His flippant mode was even more ponderous than his ponderous mode. I promised we’d arrive in time for New Year’s Eve. My sister called from the parking lot of Darby Donuts the next day, to tell me: Rupert had implemented a new policy of shedding clothes at the empty room’s threshold. Zoe had detected a corroded dribble down the clapboard outside the empty room’s window: urine.
I’d called from New York on Christmas Day, then treated my parents to radio silence. They believed we’d be traveling up from New York City, but Deanna and I had closed ourselves again in the quieted dorms, needing nothing but our versatile bodies. When the last day of December brought a snowstorm, we set out hitchhiking on Route 9 at one in the afternoon — early enough, we thought. But rides grew scarce in the whiteout, and the sky was dark by three thirty, our feet frozen from trudging with our rucksacks out of the centers of villages, seeking an acceptable spot to begin thumbing again. To get warm we quit for a while in Pittsfield and spent the last of Deanna’s parents’ money on dinner, open-faced roast beef sandwiches au jus, at a place called Dewey’s. I couldn’t know if my parents understood how long ago I’d run through the funds for my daily needs at college.
Deanna and I began working the diner’s parking lot, petitioning drivers there to spare us the open road. Within an hour, though it felt much longer, we found a merciful soul, a middle-aged man in a bow tie and hunter’s cap, to drive us into Darby, three across in his pickup’s cab, our bags, already drenched, bungeed in the back. Shame sealed our lips, the journey home a surreal plunge through a cyclone of white, sound-tracked by radio hymns.
Neither Deanna nor I wore a watch, but the Samaritan’s dashboard said it was twenty before twelve as we disembarked. Was this a plan? No, it never was. Some unplans are destined to be remembered as if they were conspiracies. My father must, at the sight of the headlights in our driveway, have rushed from the empty room and begun dressing in the hallway. He stood in the corridor buttoning his cuffs when Deanna and I stomped out of the mudroom, through the kitchen door.
“Happy New Year, revelers!” said my father. Arfy clung to my leg.
“Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.
My mother perched on the staircase. “When you didn’t show up she called some friends,” she said. Then, “How do you do, I’m the mother.” Deanna went far enough up the stairs to take my mother’s hand and bow. I said, “Well, we did show up!” trying to meet my father’s exuberant tone, and failing.
“Your sneakers are soaked,” my mother said. This was true of both of us; Deanna plumped down beside her rucksack to pry them off, though she had difficulty even undoing the laces. “Actually, everything’s soaked,” I said. Our jeans hadn’t dried despite the Samaritan’s blasts of engine fumes. “You feel like throwing this crap in the dryer?”
My parents fell silent. “Let me show you the world-famous empty room,” I said, and, before my father could speak, added, “No clothes allowed.” Deanna shrugged and began peeling away her outer layers. My girlfriend was a specialist in rising to occasions.