“YOU GIRLS VOTE ON a color and Daddy will buy the paint,” Mother said. She dumped a carton of Velma’s books on my bed.
It was moving day at our apartment, but only Velma and Theodore were moving. He was going to have Velma’s little bedroom for himself and Velma and I were going to share the bigger room.
It seemed strange already without Theodore’s toys all over the floor, without his trucks and cars and the little ship inside the bottle. Velma carried in some more of her things and I looked at them as if I had never seen them before. Everything did look different when you put it in a new place. We had pushed the beds and night tables around all morning until we decided where to put them.
“Blue!” Velma and I said together, when Mother asked us to vote on a color for the walls. At least we both had the same favorite color. Daddy pushed Velma’s dressing table against the wall and Velma carried in the stool that went with it. I sat down on the stool and looked into the heart-shaped mirror while Velma arranged bottles of cologne and dusting powder on a flowered china tray. When she left the room again, I picked up one bottle after another, reading the names of the scents. White Shoulders, Evening in Paris, Tabu. The names were pretty stupid, but I picked up an atomizer and squeezed it and then my left arm smelled wonderful.
Everything was going to be different, I thought. For one thing, I was going to have to try to be neater or Velma and I would have some terrible fights. She had warned me that morning that she couldn’t possibly sleep in a pigsty. She always liked her room to look like a picture in a magazine. Theodore never cared about things like that. When Mother made him clean things up, he would always push everything under his bed: socks, toys, empty cookie boxes. I have to admit that I never cared much either, but now with new paint and new curtains...
Then I wondered what would happen at night if I wanted to read and Velma wanted the lights out so she could sleep, or if she wanted to listen to her radio when I wanted to sleep. Theodore had always been able to sleep with the lights on and the radio playing, and he never said anything to me about touching his belongings or cleaning up the room.
I went down the hallway to the little bedroom that was going to be his now. Theodore was throwing a pair of his pajamas into a drawer. They were all rolled up in a ball.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I folded them neatly for him, the way Velma folded hers. Then I helped him tack his picture of Lucky the dog actor over his bed. “You’re really going to like this room,” I told him. “It will be nice and private and special. You can decorate it any way you want to. It may be a small room, but it’s nice and cozy.” Secretly I believed he was going to miss me and be very lonely.
I opened another drawer and began to fold his underwear and his socks too. Then I went to the closet and opened it. Junk started falling out all over the place. “For heaven’s sake, Theodore,” I said. “You’re a big boy now. You don’t want to live in a pigsty, do you? Look at all this junk. Why don’t you just throw some of this stuff out if you don’t need it?” I hung his shirts on hangers and lined his shoes and sneakers up in a neat row under them. Then I looked around the room again, with my hands on my hips. “Don’t you want to move your bed next to the window? Don’t you want to be able to look outside in the morning without getting up?”
“No,” Theodore said. “I like it over here.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “That’s the worst place. Look, your closet door is going to hit the back of the bed every time you open it. And look at those books! Theodore, you can’t have books lying all over the place. Wait a minute. I’m going to let you have my nice collie-dog book ends, because I can share Velma’s now. I’ll be right back.”
I went back to my room and began to look for the book ends. Velma was standing on her bed knocking a nail into the wall for her picture of two white kittens in a basket of wool. Mother and Daddy were measuring the windows for the new curtains. It was really going to look lovely, I thought. Mother had said we could get new bedspreads to match the curtains. We were going to the store that week to pick them out.
I looked among the cartons and books and games on the beds until I found the collie-dog book ends. I marched down the hallway again to Theodore’s new room. His door was shut. I was going to knock when I saw there was a crayoned sign tacked up.
PRIVIT PROPPITY
T. BRAVERMAN
KEEP OUT
THIS MEENS YOU!
Well! I said to myself. If that’s the way he wants it. What do I care? I would have helped him fix up a perfectly nice room, something he could have been proud of. But if he wanted to live in a pigsty, I decided, that was his problem. I turned around and brought the book ends back to my room.
That night, after Velma and I climbed into our beds, I thought how quiet it was and how strange it seemed to look across the room and not see Theodore, a little round lump huddled under the covers.
Velma said, “Do you want to read?”
I shook my head. “I’m too tired. Do you?”
“No. Let’s talk instead.”
Talk? Velma and I hardly ever talked to each other. What in the world would we talk about? “Okay,” I said, a little worried that she would want to make a list of rules and regulations for keeping our room neat.
“If you want to, Shirley,” Velma said, “you can use my cologne sometimes. Evening in Paris is my favorite.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And you can borrow some of my other things too,” she said. “If you ask me first.”
“All right.” I remembered the mystery of Velma’s dresser drawer, where the lipstick and nail polish had appeared from under a pile of underwear.
“And,” Velma continued, “you can ask me things, if you want to.”
“What things?”
“Oh, you know, like about problems you have. And about the birds and the bees and stuff like that.”
I lay there for a while, thinking about that. There wasn’t anything I wanted to ask Velma. Not yet, anyway. But I felt strangely happy. Velma was offering to be my friend. “Okay,” I said, “and you can borrow some of my things too. If you ask me first,” I added.
Later, when the lights were out all over the apartment, I turned around in my bed and looked across the room. In the moonlight I could see Velma, looking a little like a ghost because of some white lotion she put on her face every night to fight pimples. Her head was covered with shiny pink curlers and she hugged her pillow with both arms. My sister.