The Quiet Room Read Online Free

our endless demands for bathroom stops, we kids were being wickedly, deliberately, irritating.
    “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom again.”
    “I'm hungry.”
    “I'm Yugoslavia.”
    “That's stupid.”
    “You're stupid.”
    “Mommy, Mark called me stupid.”
    “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.”
    My father threatened, my mother suggested car-spotting games. But still we persisted. “I have to go to the bathroom, Daddy. I have to go to the bathroom.” Finally, after a couple of hours of this, Daddy snapped.
    “I don't want anyone to mention bathroom to me for the rest of the trip,” he announced in exasperation. Well, that held us—for about two minutes. Then in somber tones one of us shouted over the front seat: “I have to go to the bathroom—Bob,” and collapsed in fits of giggles. And for the rest of the trip we made our bathroom requests, not to our dad, but to our new imaginary friend. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob,” we shouted, knowing from the look on our parents’ faces as they tried to stifle laughter that we had won. “I have to go to the bathroom, Bob.”
    I was eleven years old, Mark was eight, Steven was five, and the whole Schiller family was on the move again. I had been born in Michigan where my father, a graduate student from the Bronx finishing up his Ph.D. in psychology at Michigan State had met and married my mother, the daughter of a prosperous department store owner. When my dad graduated and got his first job, the three of us moved to Chicago where Mark was born. When I was six, my father was promoted, and we all moved to Los Angeles, where .Steven was born.
    Now, five years later, Daddy was being promoted again and we were all moving east. For us kids, this trip was great fun. For two weeks, we were trekking past the Petrified Forest, to the Grand Canyon, through Indian reservations in New Mexico and the seemingly endless drive across Texas. We saw men in cowboy hats, had our pictures taken with oxen in reconstructed villages, played the license plate game, and—despite my father's warnings—continued to beg Bob for bathroom stops, especially when they could be combined with forays for hamburgers and fries at McDonald's.
    But underneath, we were all a little uneasy. We had loved California. Our house had been modern and bright and airy, and we had a big yard and swimming pool.
    New York seemed so foreign, and far away. Even my normally confident mother and father seemed a little unsure. They had decided Dad should accept the new job, had flown to New York, bought a house and returned in just a few days. So it was only partly a game when they began pointing out the most outlandish, tumbledown houses, teasing us and each other.
    “Is that it, honey?” my father asked my mother, pointing at one old farmhouse with a sagging front porch. “Is that what our new house is like?”
    And then a few miles later, my mother caught sight of a broken-down trailer. “Marvin! Marvin! That's it! That's it!” she cried excitedly to my father. And then, twisting around to address us kids in the back seat: “That's what our new house is like.” Later, they lapsed into stand-up comedy-type routines.
    “Did we buy the house with the bathroom?” my mother asked my father.
    “Yes, I think there's a bathroom,” he answered, deadpan.
    All the way across the country, they bantered on like this until, as we neared New York, none of us was quite sure what to expect. We all knew they were joking, of course. But all the same, we almost collapsed with relief when we pulled into the driveway of the beautiful old white Colonial with black trim and a big backyard.
    I ran through the house, eagerly inspecting the stairs up to the second floor, the family rooms downstairs and the bright bedroom that was going to be mine. “This is a cool house,” I told Mom and Dad.
    As it turned out, we were very happy in Scarsdale, the New York suburb where we settled. Mom and Dad made friends. I settled in