The first night of the locked door, so many years ago, after my aunt had gone to the hardware store per my request and bought me the lock, I initially sat close to the door’s edge, talking to her. There were many fast sensations that night—the nervous feeling of door-checking, the flash of terror realizing I was stuck, the sound of my aunt’s questions and Vicky hiccuping in my uncle’s arms, but mostly, primarily, the room took shape around me. It was even better than it had been when I had control over the opening and closing of the lock myself on Taylor Street in Portland; in Burbank, the moment the door clicked shut, and the bolt engaged, objects became meaningful in their spots. Or they returned to meaning, they became, again, meaningful, when earlier they had been haphazard and without weight. With the limit of the door in place, the room became obviously where I was, and where I would then stay for the course of the next ten or so hours. In the mornings, before the task passed to Vicky, my aunt could be counted on to knock and unlock at six-thirty a.m. when I was supposed to get up, and sometimes she even did it earlier if she was awake, worrying I might be hungry, or thirsty, or lonely, or sad. She found, she told me, that the sight of the knob on its horizontal setting gave her a bad feeling, “like being on a sinking ship,” she said, one morning, in her shell-pink bathrobe, greeting me with anxious eyes. But my ship was well. At least in this way, I had found a kind of resource for myself. I left the window a crack open in case of fire, but I didn’t have any impulse to jump, and did not worry that I would fling myself out in the middle of the night. Vicky was safe as pie in her bassinet, and during the day I could even enjoy her and play with her without fear that I would kill her as soon as the grown-ups fell asleep.
When I think back upon that transition, besides Aunt Minn’s and Uncle Stan’s kindness toward me, which was obviously very important, the door lock was the other crucial component that allowed me to adapt more or less successfully to my new life in California.
(This was the essay I sometimes wrote in my mind as a counterpoint to Vicky’s.)