Closing the Door on the World of Her Youth

My room.

The Andrea shrine.

The place where I spent my formative years. A child’s and teen-ager’s 10-by-15-foot haven.

I haven’t lived in my parents’ house for nine years. Still, I have always assumed my room would remain the way it was when I was 16. And it has, for the most part.

Except for a few extra boxes in the closet, my room has looked as if I had never left. The same posters adorned the walls, all my books lined the shelves, clothes that no longer fit or that were years out of style hung in the closet.

I figured my parents liked it that way.

Many of my friends had lost their rooms. Their parents had moved into smaller houses or had turned their rooms into storage areas.

I had sympathized with these stories. But it was with the knowledge that my parents would never do such a thing to my room.

I was mistaken.

Recently, Mom and dad cheerfully informed me that they were converting my room, my self-decorated hideaway, into their own personal Pleasure Dome.

I was aghast.

“You wouldn’t, you couldn’t!” I said to my mother.

I pictured a Jacuzzi and waterfall where my bed and night stand sit, my parents sipping champagne and laughing while I tossed and turned on the living room couch.

I felt usurped, evicted. I sulked. I moped. I pleaded.

It was to no avail. I lived in another city, my sister had her own apartment, and Mom and Dad were prepared to knock down the wall between our rooms, add a few more windows and a king-size bed, and create a huge private Love Nest. A Pleasure Palace. A Room With a View.

A few weeks ago, reconciled to my room’s fate, I traveled grudgingly home to Tucson to empty the drawers and shelves. It was not a task I relished. My room in Tucson is about the size of my entire apartment in Los Angeles.

Mom and dad had agreed, at least, to keep my books--dozens of pretentious college texts on radical feminism and French philosophy.

Tackling drawers, I knew, would be daunting because I had saved anything even remotely sentimental--old key rings, dozens of letters, a withered corsage from my eighth-grade graduation dance, a framed picture of my first hamster, Laverne.

I’d lived in that room for 17 years, and it had undergone many changes.

When I was 12, I went through a plant phase--I had 63 plants covering my shelves and dangling from chains and hooks on the ceiling. I named them all. One by one they had all died. Only Stan, a stubborn spider plant, remained--and has flourished since I moved out. I wondered where Stan would sit after my parents took over.

Sorting through my mementos, old notes and diaries, I found myself on an unplanned, bumpy trip down memory lane. Although some of my adolescence had been fun, much of it was filled with discomfort, self-doubt, and the common difficulties and self-obsession of growing up. At the time I had thought my trials and tribulations were unique; now I’m not so sure.

I used to spend hours locked in that room--one wall of which was painted dark burgundy, the other three bright white--listening to Pink Floyd records, staring at the ceiling, writing long discourses on the meaning of life, gossiping with friends on the phone.

“I saw HIM today,” I had written on more than a few pages of old diaries. Who he was, I have no idea now.

I read letters written to me by my first boyfriend, who had broken up with me a week before the senior prom. My dress and I sat home that night. I thought I would never recover.

I looked at pictures of me with my best friends from high school. I’ve lost track of many of them.

In the back of one drawer, I found a carefully concealed bag of my “illegal” possessions--the things my mother would kill me if she knew I had--a pack of cigarettes, match books, birth control. I remembered the fear of my parents finding out what I was really doing in my life, and the excitement of feeling rebellious.

As I sat amid books, bags and papers, a million feelings washed over me. Maybe it was best that I was dismantling my room. It was time.

At my parents’ home, I don’t have to worry about paying bills, or about whether the toilet flushes or the faucet drips. At 26, I go home and I become the child again--I’m still liable to sit in my room and stew about being forced to set the table or feed the dog.

Over that weekend, I managed to pack two big garbage bags full of stuff. To my surprise, it felt good. Time to stop hoarding, I thought. I decided to save a few meaningful letters and keepsakes, and the rest I sentenced to the curb. It was cathartic.

I looked at my sleeping dog, Harriett. She now is old and moves slowly, when at all.

Everything was changing, I thought, scratching Harriett’s head. When I had found her 14 years ago at a 7-Eleven, she was an energetic springer spaniel who couldn’t stop running in circles.

Harriett and my room were the last vestiges of an era, I thought. Soon they’d both be gone.

When I left my room the last time and headed back to Los Angeles, it still looked a lot like my room. The posters and books were still there. But construction will begin soon, and I’m not sure how it will look next time.

And I’m not sure I want to know.