By Lula Talenfeld ‘ 25
Staff Writer/Events Director
I used to share my sister’s room. Now, it is just hers and she’s about to turn 17, but the curtains are still the same. Ikea, blue, polka dots, sheerer than we expected so the black-out shades behind them are always pulled at least halfway down. Most days she sleeps until noon. I think if life didn’t happen so fast she would sleep until four, accepting her nocturnal fate. Sometimes I wonder if one exists because of the other – sleep, or black-out shades. But the shades would still exist without her. I think she is strong enough for her sleep schedule to exist without them, too. I can’t sleep until noon anymore unless I am too hungover to realize that life is happening without me. I didn’t know my body could ever feel this way so I remind myself it is still me, existing. And life will keep existing without me. Not her, though.
Our room used to be the shade of blue that you imagine the sky to be when you think about the sky. Our sky still exists but only on one wall, reduced to a backdrop for the mountain of unnecessary necessities that sit on her desk. If you look closely enough, you can find scraps of her poetry in the peaks and valleys of the clutter. She – really my dad – repainted the rest of the room a white that you imagine the clouds to be when you think about clouds. I remember when she relished in this room that brought the outside in, carving out her own little corner of the world. But you can only hide in the clouds for so long. Years later, she – really my dad – painted the wall across from her bed an alternating purple and green, cut by thick diagonals that used to be painter’s tape. Now the colors just touch. The purple and green are shades too intense to exist in nature. I don’t think she likes them anymore.
At this rate, my dad is tired of agreeing to help her with painting projects that he will complete by himself. Equally as tired from all the non-painting she has done over the years, my sister has taken the logical next step: posters. Pink Floyd Marquee ‘66, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a framed illustration of a girl with giant goggles and horns coming out of her ears that my mom got for her in Paris. The posters are huge. They do not go together at all – in color or in theme. They seem to climb up the slanted walls of her bedroom, each with corners peeling off due to the tape that was too-hastily slapped on their backs. It is like they already have one foot out the door. Like they would escape if they could. But there is something too comforting in the clashing nature of this room to leave. Between the posters, she’s taped tiny things that are likely more important than the big things. Polaroids, prose, politically-charged stickers. Everything together draws even more attention to the purple and green. I wonder if she was trying to enhance the wall or cover it. Or, more likely, she forgot she cared at all.
The wall to the left of my sister’s bed is adorned with irregular circles and triangles and squares of painted chalkboard. I don’t remember if it was before or after my dad said he would never paint again that he drove to Home Depot for her newest paint request. On one of the rectangles she wrote “Mushrooms,” and under it, “By Sylvia Plath.” It begins, “Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly / Very quietly,” and the rest follows. It does not read from top to bottom or even left to right. The chalk-white words jump around the room, from black shape to black shape, screaming metaphors of women and mushrooms that you would never hear if you didn’t step far enough inside to notice. I don’t know the poem enough to know if she wrote the whole thing out. But I do go into her room enough to know that she never touched it again. Since scratching the words into the paint she has not erased or added one, which seems to defeat the very purpose of chalkboards; to create something impermanent in the permanence of it all. But she holds onto the words, even as the chalk starts to fall off the letters, creating microscopic puddles of dust on the bookshelf below. There’s some metaphor in this, probably also about women, or maybe at least teenage girls.
There are three bookshelves in her room, all spilling over with books I should have read by now and probably will never make the time for. There are books on every surface – the dresser, her bedsheets, our old floorboards, my pink Hello Kitty boombox that only plays cassettes. There are books under things, too – a tissue box, a pink wig, overpriced painting supplies. Sometimes, the books end up in the bathroom when she decides it is time for a two-hour bath. They are splashed with slightly more water than the pages can handle. They stay folded open while the ink slowly starts to bleed through, waiting for her to pick them up again. The most recent victim of the bathtub splash was my mom’s first edition copy of Americanah, my sister’s summer reading that she started a week before the first day of school. She is the fastest reader I know. I try not to get jealous. I wonder if she knows she is smarter than me. I wonder if she ever actually finished that book.
Her favorite habit is putting things down and never touching them again. By stepping into her room – if you’re skilled enough to get through the obstacle course of laundry – one might guess the occupant is someone old enough to have lived for decades. Why else would they have so many trinkets, if not to hold a scrapbook of memories they can spend countless hours ruminating over later? Necklaces displayed to the side of empty gift boxes that used to hold them, crystals from the crazy ladies in town, rolled-up posters she will never hang, self-portraits in every medium you can imagine, a globe, a container of nail polish – half of which is undoubtedly mine. A grey space-heater fan even though it is still in the 70s outside which means it is still in the 80s in the attic. A regular black fan to counteract the grey one. A plant she waters with the stolen kitchen glass my mom has been begging her to bring downstairs for weeks. It’s nearly impossible to tell where the furniture ends and the possessions start. To me, it looks like an unfounded pursuit to have no surface left uncovered. But whether the objects hold some deeper meaning is up to her; she appreciates these things just because they are. A white spool of thread and no needle nearby. Art. A maroon vase full of dead roses. This is how she exists in a space – making a room out of things no one else would have thought to collect. And it will all be there, it seems, forever.
