Evening

ELLIE WISHED FOR ONE THING: A ROOM OF HER OWN. She had to share a bedroom with her sisters Linda and Martha, while Eunice and Wanda had another room for themselves. Ellie had one skinny bed, one skinny piece of wall for her pictures and two of the drawers in the bureau.

It was not enough.

She often imagined what it would be like if by some miracle her four sisters disappeared. She and Okey would go shopping for wallpaper for her room. They would walk into the paint and wallpaper store:

‘Okay, darlin’. See what catches your eye.” (Okey would call her “darlin’,” Ellie figured, if the other girls vanished.)

Ellie imagined hundreds of rolls of wallpaper on display, each with a little piece pulled down from the roll for a good look.

Ellie would walk among them all.

“Daddy, do you think I’m daisies? Or maybe rainbows?”

Okey would shake his head and laugh.

“Just get what you want, darlin’.”

Ellie would look slowly and carefully at each of the hundreds of rolls. Which design suited her best? Okey would patiently sit in one of the store’s chairs, his legs crossed, and wait.

Then Ellie would find the right paper. She’d pick up the roll and head toward Okey, smiling.

And in the evening, she would fall asleep in her own bedroom, surrounded by a wall full of owls—barn owls, snowy owls, mother owls, baby owls—and beneath the ruffled canopy of her big bed, she would dream.

This is what Ellie thought about as she lay awake in her skinny bed each night, surrounded by sisters who sneezed, grunted, ground their teeth and snored. To have her own room.

She would have liked a little lamp, too. There was just one overhead light in the bedroom, since Okey had said they couldn’t afford to put a lamp beside “every blame bed” in the house.

The overhead light made Ellie’s eyes hurt.

And she would have liked a bedspread with roses. She had seen one in a Sears catalog once. It had roses about the size of her hand all over the spread, and there were little red satin ribbons on the bottom corners.

Ellie wondered what kind of girl she would be if she had these things. She lay in bed at night, beneath her plain blue bedspread covered with lint balls, and hugged her pillow as she thought about it.

Owls on the walls, roses on the canopy bed, a pretty little lamp and Okey calling her “darlin””