From the archive
Moxie's Room
Chad Poovey
For the past six months—since Charlie’s father won the promotion—the family had spent their weekends searching for a house.
So far, they had considered and rejected three or four dozen. None had seemed “a good fit,” in terms of style or price or location, and now, for the first time, they sensed the inevitability of compromise bearing down upon their hopes. Then, one Sunday afternoon, en route to yet another ‘open house’ in a gated community, a happy accident occurred. Charlie’s father made a wrong turn, then another and another: the little family unwittingly bypassed a monotony of subdivisions and found themselves, as if wafted by a fortuitous tailwind, cruising the leafy streets of a real, honest to goodness, old-fashioned neighborhood.
What a difference a mile or two can make! Here—unlike in the suburbs, where bland, anonymous people—strangers, really—came and went and flipped their soulless cookie-cutter McMansions every two years—here proof of stability and permanence lay on every side. It was most evident in the girth of the trees and in the variety of the houses. The tidy bungalows and Tudor imitations and Cape Cod salt boxes proclaimed that families, comprised of individuals, had slowly, gradually and very consciously created lives for themselves within and without those walls, generation by generation. A palpable sense of nostalgia, as deep and soothing as the shade from the vaulting oaks and ashes, lured Charlie and his parents on, past wide, sloping lawns lined with boxwoods, past walkways crenulated with rows of iris, past gazebos capped by frothy clouds of white and yellow spirea. They noted the many children at play and the bicycles trustfully left any old place; they felt, as if for the first time, the comforting allure of simple, decent, hand-made things: bird baths and wind chimes and flower gardens and dog houses and porch swings. There was even a diminutive library of sorts; fashioned like a medieval alms box, it stood on a fluted pedestal in the center of a small park; behind the glass doors an assortment of paperbacks testified to the collective taste and mentality: self-help books, cozy mysteries, chick lit, and last year’s best-sellers.
Charlie’s mother recognized this place from her earliest daydreams. Raised on an isolated farm, she had imagined that all city children lived in such neighborhoods. She envied them.
Charlie’s father was one of those she had envied—she knew that these swing sets and lemonade stands and tree houses had constituted the architecture of his childhood, an idyllic time he often said, and because she had been denied idylls, she wanted, more than anything, that her son should have them. Only the market was so tight now and the few available houses were so expensive . . .
Even so they drove on, by turns enchanted and despondent, until, at the corner of Harris and Cline Streets, they came to a stop. All at once, father, mother, and son beheld the house—the home—where it seemed their happiness had lain in wait. It was a red brick colonial revival with white columns and pine green shutters—grand and yet inviting—habitable proof of simpler and fuller and richer times. There was a gentility about it—a human touch—as though the otherwise stern, classical features had been beveled and burnished to a Rockwellian luster by a succession of births and holidays and reunions. To live there would demand a continuance of these worthy and graceful traditions—to step up, to play one’s part in the long domestic pageant. Charlie’s mother understood this at once. “What a lovely home that would be,” she said, accepting, at least secretly, both the privileges and the responsibilities entailed.
“Lovely’s right,” answered her husband. “You couldn’t buy a place like that to save your life. They never even show up on the market. They’re just handed down.”
At that very moment a man crossed the front yard. He was about the age of Charlie’s father, thirty-five or so, with a widow’s peak, thick black eyebrows and a sharp, decisive manner. He carried a hammer and a cardboard sign tacked to a wooden stake. At the edge of the sidewalk—just parallel with the car windows—he stopped, and with three efficient strikes, drove the sign into the ground. Then he stepped back, knuckled his hips and appraised his work. After adjusting one corner of the sign so that it was perfectly level, he turned and stared into the car.
“Wanna buy a house?” he asked. The strident tone of his voice made the question sound more like a dare.
Charlie’s parents consulted each other’s blank expressions. For a few seconds all they could do was stutter indecisively.
“Make you a good offer,” the man said.
Meanwhile, Charlie had begun to strain and squirm against the buckles of his car seat. “For sale, for sale, for sale. . .” he chimed.
The stranger’s expression suddenly relaxed. He winked at Charlie: “That’s right, little man,” he said. “That’s exactly what the sign says. For sale.”
“That’s very good, Charlie,” said his mother, even though she knew that he was not actually reading the sign, so much as recognizing its purpose. But that in itself was precocious and worthy of encouragement. His father joined in: “Nice work, Charlie-Boy. You’ll be reading books before long, no doubt about it.”
As usual, this went on for a while. By the time they finished, the stranger had shrugged and re-crossed the lawn, so that the sign now seemed taller than he was, while its message, spelled out in black capital letters upon a red background, held the little family spellbound.
“I’m the first one to read it,” said Charlie.
“That’s right, dear,” his mother said. “The very first.”
That settled the matter. None of them, mother, father, or child, actually said so, but all accepted the coincidence as indisputable proof that the house on Harris and Cline was destined for them. And the price was right—so low that they wondered at their luck. In fact, it seemed suspiciously low, that is, until another family—the Bensons—made an offer. The bidding war that followed validated their judgment and frazzled their nerves. Luckily, Charlie’s father had an ally in a fraternity brother named Dobbs who now sold real estate. In college, he had earned a reputation for cunning and self-assertion—qualities that Charlie’s mother so mistrusted that she had refused him a wedding invitation. But that was then. Now, in hindsight, it seemed that Dobbs had been training himself for this very challenge: his natural aggression, case-hardened by a decade of unrelenting brinksmanship, soon forced the Bensons to withdraw, and Charlie’s parents won the house on Harris and Cline.
They hardly knew how to receive the prize. It was one thing to dream about such a house and quite another to suddenly own it. For the first few days, they simply roamed the many rooms, the long hallways, the front porch, the four-car garage, humbled and daunted by the obligation, as tangible as the walls themselves, to wring the full measure of happiness from every square inch of their new home. But how, when there was so much of it? How, after sleeping on a Murphy bed for six years, did one utilize a butler’s pantry or a mud room? Accustomed to one bath, now they had a choice of three: coral pink, mint green or baby blue. There was a den, an office, and a sewing room. There was a full dining room for holidays, and a cozy breakfast nook for slow Saturday mornings. The fireplace was so big that Charlie could walk inside it and stretch; on either side, inlaid bookshelves rose all the way to the ceiling. Could they really fill them? Other features, however, seemed more accessible—namely the bay window in the living room where soon his mother would teach Charlie to read, and the sprawling back yard, ringed by holly bushes and shaded by maples, where one day his father would reveal the secrets of the fastball and the slider.
Best of all, there was a room all his own, a beautiful room with a pair of tall windows and walls of the palest turquoise. While his parents had finished their degrees, worked odd shifts, and saved their money, Charlie had slept without complaint in spaces hardly larger than a closet. But now things were different—with both parents home at night and secure in his own little kingdom across the hallway, he could develop his burgeoning selfhood and independence. That was one of the many things which inflated his parents’ pride—they often modestly bragged about his fully-developed interior life, that he was, as they liked to say, “his own little person.” So when Charlie claimed dominion over the turquoise room for himself and insisted that they not repaint it, that it remain exactly as they had found it, they happily indulged him: here was another example of that precocious individuality that secretly thrilled them.
Their only regret was that they had not found the house sooner. Already time was slipping away. In the fall, Charlie would start kindergarten, and the house, which they wanted so much for his sake, would be silent. Of course, he would make friends there, at school; that was some consolation . . . And his mother knew that even an independent child like Charlie needed friends . . . all children did. As a young girl, she had lived on intimate terms with loneliness: her older sister had died very young, leaving her an undemonstrative herd of dairy cattle for companions. She dreamed of a brighter, happier childhood for her son, though to be truthful, she was already somewhat jealous of Charlie’s future friends—she was certain there were thousands of them, each unconsciously awaiting the irresistible pull of his personality—thousands of competitors for Charlie’s attention, which of course, could be divided only so far.
But this was a sentiment she rarely admitted to herself and never to her husband.
There were other things she withheld as well, not from shame or vanity but rather because she could not bear to break the spell of their happiness. For example, there were aspects of Charlie’s room that, despite its charm, unsettled her. It had a certain smell all its own. Not an unpleasant smell, but rather, a familiar one—sweet and sticky and herbaceous—that she recognized but could not identify. Her husband, whose nose served as a mere ornament, was no help whatsoever, and so this otherwise pleasant smell came to puzzle and unsettle her, like the appearance of a stranger whom we think we have met, somewhere, but cannot place.
Then there was the room itself. On sunny days it seemed like any other, only a bit cooler, and damper and darker, because here, unlike in the master bedroom, the light arrived filtered and diffused by the budding leaves of the nearby oak. When the wind blew, and the tree tossed its head, restless shadows cavorted across the pale blue walls. The whole room seemed to move, to spin, to mischievously realign its parts until she was dizzy. On one particular afternoon, the room not only spun, but seemed to spin her as well. She had to lean against the window casement and clutch it for support as a cold draft swirled around her, bearing the strange-familiar smell. But it was a more concentrated dose this time—so potent that she was suddenly nauseous and feared she would vomit. If she hadn’t known better—that is, if not for her husband’s recent vasectomy—she might have thought . . . well . . . But that was impossible, so she closed her eyes and breathed, deeply—to the very bottom of her stomach—then counted to ten, to fifteen, to twenty. She opened her eyes, unlocked the sash, and raised the pane. The smell quickly dissipated in the warm spring sunshine. The neighbor’s spirea had started to bloom; along with its scent came the faint tinkling of a distant wind chime. She concentrated on these things as the last ripples of nausea subsided.
Then it came to her, just as forgotten names suddenly reappear. “Licorice,” she said. “Licorice . . .”
She never mentioned this episode to her husband. The unease she felt in Charlie’s room was a small matter, nothing compared to all that was otherwise so perfectly perfect about the house on Harris and Cline.
And Charlie had never seemed happier. Often when his mother passed his room, she would hear him cheerfully bantering to himself, oblivious to the shadows swirling on the wall and the smell that had so affected her. A single, odd word punctuated the murmur of his contentment like a heartbeat: Moxie.
She asked what it meant. Charlie waited until he had the final building block in place before he answered. “Moxie? Oh, Moxie is my friend.”
“Friend?”
He nodded.
“Oh—I see. He’s your make-believe friend.”
Charlie did not reply; he merely shrugged and protruded his bottom lip.
“Moxie . . . That’s really a very unusual name, isn’t it, Charlie?”
“Hmmm . . . I don’t know.”
“Well . . . how did you come up with it, Dear?”
“I didn’t come up with it,” he said. “Moxie’s mom and dad did.”
With that his mother folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb, wondering how his young mind could frame such a clever, and yet such an innocent answer. Charlie, who had already returned to his building blocks, offered her no clues.
That evening she described the episode to her husband. At length, he set his book aside, took off his reading glasses and leaned forward in his recliner. “Now, tell me again who Moxie is,” he asked.
“I just told you. It’s his imaginary friend.”
He tilted his head an inch or two and blinked. “Really? I didn’t know kids still did that. I mean invented friends for themselves.”
She shrugged. “It does seem . . . kind of quaint, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah . . . Almost old-fashioned.” A second passed. “Did you have one?”
“Me? No, I never thought of that.”
“Me neither.” He folded his glasses with two sharp clacks. “What do you think it means?”
She took her time to answer: “It could be that he’s just very imaginative.”
“Probably.”
“Or—”
“Or what?”
“Maybe he’s a little lonely.”
“Nah—he seems happy enough. Besides, you’re here with him all day. I wouldn’t sweat it. Probably normal.”
“Is it?” she asked. “I mean, it’s a little odd, don’t you think, that he would suddenly want a make-believe friend? He’s always been so self-contained—so content the way things were—with the three of us. And now he has this, this friend . . .”
“He’s fine,” her husband said, “just fine.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah—he’s independent, that’s all. Independent and very creative, if you ask me. So what if he has an imaginary friend? Maybe that’s just Charlie’s way. He’s always been exceptional. If anything, we ought to be proud. Besides, he’s happy. Anybody can see that.”
“Yes, but what kind of happiness—”
“No reason to be jealous. It’s just his imagination.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m absolutely not jealous. That’s ridiculous and insulting. I’m just concerned about his socialization, that’s all.”
“He’ll be starting kindergarten soon enough, and he’ll make real friends there. I wouldn’t worry.”
In the weeks that followed, both parents became quite well-acquainted with their son’s imaginary friend. They listened, usually with sacrificial patience, but occasionally with profound wonder as Charlie revealed the breadth and complexity of Moxie’s personality. He was a child of very definite, if anachronistic, opinions. He thought that while dogs could be mean if mistreated, cats were mean by nature, and that kindness was wasted on them. He admitted that girls could be friends, as a last resort, but one should never, ever, even if your life depended on it, tell a girl a secret. He insisted that no one, no matter what he did, should ever be slapped on the wrist with a ruler. And he was certain that nothing on earth was more painful and dangerous than the bite of a black widow. What’s more, the only remedy was a second bite by a daddy long legs in exactly the same place, under a full moon—no easy thing to manage, and that was why so many people died of spider bites.
Moxie’s accomplishments were equally arcane and bewildering: he could stand on his hands, make a kite from sticks and newspaper; he had even trained a pet goat to fetch his slippers.
Not content to play with Moxie throughout the day and then relate their adventures to his parents at the dinner table, Charlie chatted with Moxie late into the night while the couple tried to sleep. More than his voice, it was the painful curiosity that kept them awake—the need to know, to somehow share in their son’s imaginary life, that drew them from their bed and across the dark hallway. There they stood, each with one ear pressed to Charlie’s door, silently eavesdropping on his conspiratorial monologue about all manner of boyish things: the fate of the neighbor’s missing kitten, their plans for the next day, what to expect from kindergarten.
One night Charlie’s mother did not rise to spy on her son. She lay alone in the bed and stared at the black ceiling until her husband returned. “You’ll never guess what he was talking about,” he said. “I don’t know where he comes up with this stuff. He—”
“Don’t,” she told him. “Just don’t. One more word about Moxie, and I’ll pull my hair out.”
The video games did not interest Charlie for long. Nor did the new tablet. The neighborhood play group only bored him; he spent the entire two hours alone in the sandbox. His father was certain that soccer was the answer. But after only one practice session he admitted that Charlie was not a team player. He did not elaborate, and his wife was left to wonder what trick of solitude Charlie had played upon him. For a short time after that attempt, the necessity of a proper companion for their son led the anxious couple to the very brink of pet ownership, but then they prudently remembered the work involved in housetraining even the cutest of puppies, and besides a real live dog might not supplant Moxie but rather absorb the scant remains of Charlie’s affection, leaving none for themselves. Best to wait and allow Charlie to grow bored with Moxie or to outgrow him altogether. . .
Or so his mother thought, until the evening in late August when she was startled by the faint ringing of a small bell. It came from somewhere outside. She peered through the kitchen window and saw her husband at the end of the driveway. He was staring back up at the house, towards Charlie’s room. He wore a pair of black bicycle tights, square-toed shoes, black fingerless gloves, and a helmet with tiny rectangular mirrors affixed to both sides. A pair of bicycles stood waiting. One she recognized. It was a sleek, expensive racer that they had seen in a shop window. The other was a child’s bike, screaming red with arching pinstripes, white wall tires, and thankfully, a sturdy pair of training wheels.
She went outside to witness Charlie’s surprise firsthand.
“Charlie . . . Chaar—lie . . . Chaar—lie,” his father called. At last, their son’s silhouette appeared in the window. For an instant Charlie’s mother almost did not recognize him—or rather did not recognize his stance and gestures. There was a sudden, unsettling maturity in the way he slowly raised his arms and crossed them—an alarming solemnity in the slow, deliberative tilting of his head, a sense that while he had not grown, he had changed somehow in a matter of hours.
“Why is he just standing there?” her husband asked. “Why won’t he come down?”
She turned to him. “Ask Moxie.”
“Very funny.”
“It wasn’t a joke.”
“Well then, what should we do?”
“Looks like you’ll have to go get him,” she said.
Her husband squinted at her. “Me go up after him? It’s his bicycle.”
After much pleading on their part, Charlie did at last come down to receive his new bike and matching helmet. He crossed the front yard slowly, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his blue eyes calm and self-contained and yet somehow vacant.
“What do you think?” asked his father. It seemed his anger had cooled now and jelled into something like the determination needed for an especially tough job. “Isn’t this the one you wanted?” he asked.
Charlie nodded, but his blue eyes remained flat. He nudged one of the training wheels with his toe.
“Just till you get some more practice,” said his father.
“So you’ll be safe while you learn,” his mother added.
“It’s just—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“No, tell me.”
“Well—Moxie says training wheels are for sissies.”
“Moxie doesn’t know everything,” his father told him. He braced his hips and glared at his son, as though transmitting a silent challenge. Charlie stared back, his calm blue eyes locked in defiance. His mother quickly strapped the helmet on his head and persuaded him to ride the new bike, despite the training wheels. Both she and Charlie’s father followed him to the corner, then turned and obediently followed him back home, shouting encouragement and praise that he did not seem to hear. The pumping of his little legs and the wobbling of his arms as he steered—these seemed as forced and mechanical as the sprocket and wheels and handlebars of the bike itself. Charlie did not smile, and he did not laugh, and he did not return his father’s stare. Instead, each time he passed the house on Harris and Cline, he gazed up at the yellow rectangle of light beaming down from his window with eyes as flat and vacant as the panes themselves.
That was the only time Charlie’s mother saw her son ride the red bicycle. There were a few days when it seemed he might ride it—days when she forced him to leave his room and wait in the garage for his father to return from work, so they might ride together. But this never happened. After a few minutes, Charlie would stride through the back door and announce that he couldn’t ride today, that “Dad would just have to ride alone.” And so his father did. Charlie’s mother watched him race down the driveway, hunched over the handlebars like a man in flight. She asked no questions—she and her husband adhered to a pact whereby each allowed the other a separate relationship with their son. Her husband always returned just in time for dinner, sweaty and scarlet-faced, and smelling of wet neoprene. On such evenings, there was no conversation between the three of them, only the clacking of plates and the clatter of silverware. Afterwards, Charlie would announce that he “better go check on Moxie,” which called for his mother to lay her hand—gently at first, but with increasing pressure each time—on her husband’s forearm until their son was safely upstairs.
But one evening, just after Charlie slipped away, he said to her, in that quiet tone of his that denoted suppressed anger: “You could at least keep an eye on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re here all day, just the two of you. You could at least watch him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The bicycle. The air in his tires, that’s what I’m talking about. He lets it out deliberately. That’s the only explanation.”
“Who does? What are you talking about?”
“Charlie, who else?”
“Why would he do that?”
“So he doesn’t have to ride it—that’s why. I buy him a bike and he doesn’t appreciate it. And then there’s the pump. I can never find it. It’s never where I left it the day before. I know he hides it.”
“Randle. Listen. He hasn’t been in the garage. He hasn’t been downstairs. He was in his room until you came home.”
“Well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it?” he said. “You’ve pampered him—let him have his way for so long now that . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
She could have argued; there was much she could have said, but just then something entirely different came to mind, different and perfectly obvious.
“When you took Charlie to soccer tryouts, did he talk about Moxie?” she asked.
Her husband stared at the table and scratched his widow’s peak. “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.” He looked up at her. “Why? What are you getting at?”
“Just this: Have you ever noticed that Moxie never leaves this house? Charlie never mentions him when we’re somewhere else.”
“You mean he never takes his imaginary friend with him anywhere.”
“Exactly. For some reason Moxie never leaves that bedroom. Weird, isn’t it?”
“An imaginary friend that won’t go outside. Wonder what it means.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s something to think about . . .”
And so, throughout the night, they each lay awake and thought about it—Moxie’s apparent confinement. The next morning the couple agreed that Charlie might enjoy a week or so with his grandparents in the country.
It was a grim trip. Charlie sulked and pouted and barely nibbled at his Happy Meal. He stared out the window, impervious to the familiar enticements his parents so brightly presented: the fishpond and its flock of white geese, the milking machines, his grandmother’s cookies, even the promise of tractor rides with his grandfather. He brooded throughout the afternoon and, when they finally arrived, simply refused to get out of the car. For nearly five minutes the three of them sat there in the shadow of the barn, while the parents tried to negotiate with their son. Neither of them wanted to be seen struggling with Charlie, and it seemed he would struggle mightily if they did resort to force.
Charlie’s grandfather put an end to the stand-off. He simply sauntered up to the car, flung open the back door, lifted Charlie by the armpits, and in the same motion, threw him over his shoulder.
“You know, Dad, he’s not a sack of feed,” said Charlie’s mother.
But as always it was too late; she could never keep pace, much less forestall her father’s thoughtless efficiency; already he was lumbering toward the barn with her son draped across his shoulders, exactly like the feed sack she so vainly insisted he was not.
Charlie’s grandmother met them on the porch steps. She took off her readers and wedged a stubby pencil behind her ear.
“You’re late,” she said.
“A certain somebody has not been cooperating,” said Charlie’s mother. “I think he made fifteen trips back to his room before we could leave.”
Her mother nodded. “Oh well. They’re not always supposed to cooperate.”
Just then the tractor began to clatter from inside the barn. They turned and watched the old green and yellow contraption emerge from the shadows with a round bale of hay impaled on the fork like a huge and perfectly roasted marshmallow. The exhaust pipe sputtered, and the enormous tires pressed dinosaur tracks in the mud as it lurched across the barnyard. Charlie, straddling his grandfather’s knee like a sullen puppet, refused to wave.
“My, he does look glum,” said his grandmother.
“Just a phase,” said his father.
When the tractor had finally disappeared over the hill, Charlie’s mother hurried to the car and took out the tiny suitcase she had secretly packed for him and carried it to her old bedroom. After dinner, she and her husband made their excuses, and bracing themselves for a scene, broke the news to Charlie in the driveway. His face was as still and white and empty as a blank sheet of paper.
“What about Moxie?”
“Moxie’ll be just fine,” his mother said.
“What if he’s lonely?”
“I said he’ll be fine.”
“He doesn’t like to be alone.”
“He’ll be fine. Just try to forget him for a while. Maybe Grandpa will take you fishing if you’re good.”
“I’m always good.”
“Yes, Dear, most of the time you’re very good.”
“I wish Moxie could see all this.”
She sighed once, heavily.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Nothing. Goodbye, Charlie. We have to go now.” She quickly hugged him and found his back stiff, like a tiny fencepost. This was their first separation, and all the way home she silently catalogued the many hazards of farm life that she never mentioned to her husband and that he, luckily, could not imagine for himself—the bizarre and yet foreseeable accidents that might steal Charlie from them as one had stolen her sister.
The first thing the couple noticed, with Charlie gone, was the surplus time they could not fill. The evenings dragged by; the house on Harris and Cline now seemed a resplendent waiting room filled with slow clocks and last year’s magazines.
“I guess this is what it will be like when he goes to college,” predicted his father.
“He hasn’t started kindergarten yet,” answered his mother.
“Yeah, and we’re already empty nesters, thanks to Moxie.”
“Moxie’s a banned topic. I want to talk to you about Charlie’s room. I think we should repaint it.”
“Paint it? Why?”
“It’s just too dark–there on the north side of the house. And especially now that there’s so much shade from that oak tree.”
“Charlie likes that shade of blue. Don’t you remember?”
“It’s dingy.”
“Well, alright. Maybe we can touch it up. If we can match the color.”
“No. I don’t like that color.”
“You liked it before.”
“I don’t like it now. Besides, maybe we’ve let Charlie have his way too often.”
Her husband looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean just what I said.”
“It is his room after all—”
“Are you afraid to change the color?”
“That’s silly. Of course I’m not afraid. What’s there to be afraid of?”
“You tell me.”
“All I’m saying is that that shade of blue is perfect for a boy’s room. It’s masculine.”
She shook her head emphatically. “No. No, it’s too cold. It makes the room seem damp and clammy. Yellow is what you need. Something bright.”
“A lighter shade of blue. Sky blue.”
They compromised on mint green.
The next morning, they moved Charlie’s possessions—his bed and dresser and his abundance of toys—into the den, and the “makeover” of his room commenced.
But no sooner had Charlie’s mother climbed the ladder, a brush in one hand and a tray of paint in the other, than the trouble began. She was cold, of course, in that room, and soon had to step back down and fetch an old sweatshirt. Almost immediately a dollop of green paint jumped from the pail and spotted her sleeve. That was how it seemed anyway, as if it had simply gathered force and leaped upon her. Next, the expensive paint, which seemed so viscous in the can, invariably dripped like water from the brush; the drops somehow always landed on the narrow strip of exposed flooring between the canvas cloth and the wall.
And whenever she paused to review her progress, she realized how little of it there was for two, three . . . four hours; nothing but a splotchy band of opaque green along the woodwork.
The couple’s frustrations were aggravated by their insomnia. There were suddenly so many reasons for not sleeping in the house on Harris and Cline, so many annoyances they had never noticed with Charlie at home. The faucet in the little blue bathroom, for example. It dribbled. On the hour, Charlie’s father would tighten the knob and return to bed just in time to hear it start again. Occasionally, it gushed. Then there were cats—that’s what they had to be—cats in the bushes below Charlie’s room. They made the strangest sounds, almost like the giggling of small children. Doors slammed and the house—like all old houses, they told themselves—settled and creaked and complained all night long.
And then they each had their private reasons for not sleeping. With Charlie’s father it was the bicycles: he moved them from the garage into the hallway outside their bedroom—this so that he might finally discover why the tires went flat. Several times during the night, he would check the air pressure with his electronic gauge. The pressure always remained steady until dawn, when exhaustion overtook him, and the mysterious process repeated itself. And if he ever managed to fall asleep during the night, the bicycles would tip over, despite their kickstands, and yank them both awake.
Charlie’s mother had her own ritual: she would rise on the hour to see if the paint had begun to dry—which it never did—and then she was compelled to circulate the air with a box fan or raise the temperature with portable heaters. So, with the noise of these futile appliances, and her husband’s vigil with the bicycles and hers with the paint, and its fumes, and the laughing cats, and the leaking faucets, and the creaking boards, and the slamming doors, and the heat, which was never sufficient for her but overwhelming for him, and the fact they no longer spoke or if they did, they argued—with all this a good night’s sleep was impossible.
On Saturday morning, Charlie’s mother discovered a smudge of green paint on the top of the window casement. A minor imperfection, hardly noticeable, she told herself, but then a moment later, she changed her mind and dragged the ladder to the window. As she reached the top step, the familiar smell of licorice blossomed around her head stronger now than ever before; then as she blinked and gasped, something happened on the periphery of her vision, something she could not describe afterward. A small form—a shadow—an intimation of something she could never identify—hurled by her and disappeared on the flagstones. And immediately the cloudbank of licorice dissipated, or rather was consumed by the dank, rotten odor of moldering leaves and rank, fertile earth that now rose from some deep, occulted place. It was as though a family vault had opened at her feet and released a gust of stale air trapped for generations; as though the secrets embedded in the very foundation of the house itself had been exhumed and circulated. She was sick and cold and dizzy all at once. She clutched the ladder. She wanted to step down, but did not trust her feet. She wanted to scream, but vomit rose in her throat—if she opened her mouth . . . Just then the front leg of the ladder shuddered once, as though it had received a deliberate kick, and Charlie’s mother was thrown against the window. Only the mullions in the bottom half prevented her from falling completely through it; meanwhile, her elbow knocked a hole through the broad single pane above. The glass trembled for half a second, then fell like the shuttering of a great transparent eyelid; a brittle clatter rose from the flagstones below.
Charlie’s father saw it happen. After comforting his wife with a cup of tea and a promise to remove the smudge himself, he examined the ladder and found nothing wrong. “Maybe you didn’t lock the hinges in place,” he said. “That’s probably what happened.”
She was silent for a moment, slowly coming to terms with what she now understood. She knew, of course, that he would not believe her, or rather that he would not admit the truth to himself, but that no longer mattered. “I know how to use a ladder,” she said. “The hinges were locked. I’m telling you it moved.”
“Ladders don’t move by themselves. You must’ve—”
“I never said it moved by itself. I’m just saying it moved.”
“It could be your imagination.”
“Oh. My imagination. I see. I get it. And who imagines that the tires on Charlie’s bike go flat overnight. Who imagines that?”
“That’s different,” the husband said. “I can show you that the tires are flat. That’s an objective fact. It’s not my imagination.”
“And how do they get that way?” she wanted to know.
“That I can’t tell you, but I know they’re flat.”
“Can’t tell me or won’t say?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“You and I both know that there’s something wrong with this house, only you won’t admit it.”
“This is crazy. There’s no such thing as . . . as . . .”
“As what?” she demanded. “What?”
“It’s too crazy to even talk about. It’s nonsense.”
But Charlie’s mother realized now that she had known all along—she was just as guilty of self-delusion as he. She had chosen to see only the domestic pageantry of the house: the weddings and holidays and reunions; she had refused to consider the grim corollaries of loss and grief and pain that constituted a full half of its history. But now that she finally understood, there was no need for further discussion: talk, analysis, recriminations—these would only make Moxie more real. There was only one thing to do. “I’m not going back in that room,” she said. “And neither is Charlie.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s his room—”
“No. No, it’s not. It’s Moxie’s room, and he can have it. He can have it all to himself.”
“I think you need a break from this. Maybe we should go somewhere for the weekend.”
Charlie’s mother scanned the olive-green walls, the drips on the floor, the busted windowpane. “No,” she said. “I want you to call Dobbs. He got us into this house, and now I want him to get us out. Do it. Do it now.”
“Are you crazy? This is our house. This is where we live. We can’t just—”
“Then you stay in it. Charlie and I will go somewhere else.”
Charlie’s parents found an apartment in their former complex—not the same unit, of course; it was already leased again—but a smaller one that overlooked the pool. Not all of their belongings would fit here—a good many were placed in a storage unit; the rest would remain in cardboard boxes, stacked against one wall in the narrow hallway. The balcony was too small for anything except the husband’s bicycle. There it would have to stay, except during the rain, when it would go somewhere inside . . .
In the meantime, there was Charlie’s readjustment to consider. The first day did not bode well. Charlie raged and stomped and screamed and cried and then finally exhausted himself. He went to bed without speaking.
Late that night, Charlie’s mother woke and for a few seconds could not remember where she was. She had almost forgotten the banality, the monochromatic sterility of apartment living. Nothing was familiar. Rather than illuminate the room, the lights of the nearby parking lot, filtering through the cheap curtains, cast an indiscriminate pall over the cardboard boxes, the piles of clothing, the stacks of books, all the random clutter of their defeat. She did not miss the house on the corner of Harris and Cline—she hated it, actively, as one can only hate another person—but she also resented the familiar indignities of their refuge here, the things they swore to never again tolerate—the shoddy appliances, the lack of privacy, the galling knowledge that their money was essentially wasted . . . the constant, pervasive noise of other people’s lives. And not just their televisions and arguments and slamming doors but the small, insidious noises as well—the muttered conversations of strangers that leached through the flimsy panel of drywall and into their bedroom. She heard them throughout that long first night; she heard them but could neither place nor understand them, and so she was doubly tortured by a white noise that piqued her curiosity and denied it satisfaction.
But the next morning things were better: Charlie appeared at the breakfast table with a beaming smile.
“Well little man, are you ready for kindergarten?” his father asked.
Charlie looked up from his cereal and chewed for a moment before answering. At last, he spoke: “Did I ever tell you about Moxie’s compass?”
“There’s no reason to talk about Moxie now, Charlie,” his mother said. “Moxie’s happy in his own room at the old house.”
Charlie just smiled. Then he began to giggle and then to chuckle and, finally, to laugh out loud.
At last, his mother thought: at last, the spell was broken. She had not seen Charlie laugh for weeks.
“What’s so funny, Charlie? Tell us.”
“Yeah, let’s hear it, Charlie-Boy,” said his father. “What’s the big joke?”
Charlie’s face glowed and his blue eyes danced. “It’s a Boy Scout compass. It’s not very big, and it has a red arrow—”
“That’s enough, Charlie,” said his father. “Eat your cereal.”
“And it tells him all the directions. He can go anywhere in the whole world.” Charlie smiled—not a smile of happiness, but of self-satisfaction. “Yep. Anywhere he wants. Anywhere.”
“No, Charlie, don’t you remember,” said his mother, “Moxie always stays in his room at the old house. Remember, he never leaves. He likes it there.”
Charlie shook his wise little head. “Not anymore.”
His father tried next: “I think you’re a little mixed-up this morning, Charlie. You’re probably just excited for kindergarten.”
Charlie shrugged. “I know what he tells me.”
Each parent sought the other’s eyes. They silently agreed to ignore the bait.
But Charlie wasn’t quite finished. “Moxie hates that room now,” he said. “It reminds him of green beans. Moxie won’t eat green beans, no matter what. He says they’re icky. Icky-sticky-fee-fie-moe-micky—”
Charlie’s father slammed his palm on the table. “Enough,” he shouted. “Not another word. Do you hear me?”
Charlie answered by brandishing his spoon in the air like a baton. Then he began to hum Yankee Doodle Dandy.
His father leaned back in his chair, took a long, slow, deep breath, and then glared at his son. Charlie’s mother now saw him for what he was: a man completely out of his depth, a man whose only strength lay in his narrow skepticism, a man who lacked the imagination necessary to process their failure. He began to speak, but she cut him off: “Randle. . .” she said. “Please, let’s just—”
“Let’s just what? What? Go on like this? Listen to him. Look at us.”
They looked—the three of them—each one to the others and back again. No one spoke. No one moved. All was still in the tiny kitchen as the last moments of Charlie’s last hour alone with his parents slipped silently away.
Chad Poovey is a sculptor, printmaker, and fiction writer.
