Magic Room
Love is a many-splendored thing. This says nothing about its rationality. One-shot.

The Scream splits the evening calm.

She drops her toothbrush in the sink.

Not again!

She’s in the upstairs bathroom, the one sort of in the middle of the house.

I should be used to this by now.

She picks up her toothbrush and moves to the bathroom door to watch the show. Right on schedule, in fact, almost before she’s ready for it, they surge down the hallway past her: the long pounding strides of The Bad Dad close on the heels of The Baby’s frantic scurrying.

They are insane.

But she’s thought that before. As close as she is to each of them, there is a space between Those Two where even she, Angel Wife and Mother Bear that she is, fears to tread—a bizarre wonderland inhabited by fierce fighting finger-spiders; devious Bad Spies who, unfathomably, habitually encamp in the bushes surrounding the pool and whose very presence threatens the free world; and a tangled web of rules governing what’s funny and the names of things and whether sugar or syrup should be used on French toast.

But this particular game… Often, she finds herself simply awaiting the arrival of the police, alerted by some startled neighbor—surely the entire canyon rings with these shrieks; we should keep our windows closed—she’s mystified by the meaning of this game, much more by how it could possibly have developed.

The Baby—how long will we call her that?—has word cards; The Mom had made them herself—red-lettered flashcards that had kick-started the reading process. The cards are quite large; each one about five inches tall and long enough to accommodate whatever particular word was painstakingly printed on it by hand. The cards bearing words for household objects had spent a couple of weeks taped up all over the house, but the little girl’s favorite ones were the ones with names on them: ‘dad’, ‘mom’, ‘gramma’, ‘grampa’, ‘baby’. The technique had worked so quickly and so well that the amazed pre-school teachers often let the tiny girl read the day’s book to her classmates. Now, now they’ve been long superseded by real books, the cards are mere playthings, laid out on the floor to create wandering stories or stacked and folded and leaned against each other in tunnels for tiny tin automobiles.

Except for one card, one magic—black magic, probably—card with an awesome power: the card with the word ‘shoulder’ printed on it.

The game goes like this: The Bad Dad sits on the edge of the bed, reading the paper. The Baby sneaks down the hall from her room, ‘shoulder’ card held in trembling hands, and, crafty as any international art thief, positions herself just out of his sight, hidden by the spread newspaper. She pauses and takes in a shaky breath, then, thrusting the card up in defiant courage and, in a voice shaking with anticipatory terror, tosses out the opening gambit: “Shoulder!”

The paper jerks; the challenge has been accepted. “Shoulder?” The Bad Dad exclaims, as though startled. He pulls down the paper and peers fiercely over it at her. She takes a single step backward, delighted panic rising in her face. Then louder, indignantly, as though outraged or wounded to the heart or perhaps merely demented: “Shoulder?!?” In a single flurry of activity, the paper is tossed across the room, the card is dropped, The Scream begins, and the chase is afoot—around the table at the end of the bed, across the large room, scattering shoes and books and frightening The Cat, down the hall, and into The Baby’s room, where everything, including The Scream, dissolves in a tumble of bodies and giggles and not-quite tickling because The Baby doesn’t really like that.

But tonight something is different. Years afterward, after the house is empty of both of them, she is grateful that she was there to see it: it numbers among the handful of moments that tell her it was all real and as wonderful as she remembers.

The Baby reaches her room a split-second quicker than usual—she really is growing up, isn’t she?—and turns to face the charging figure while he is still in the hall.

“Magic Room!” she cries out, flinging out the spell out with valor and panache.

And, wonder of wonders, it works! The Bad Dad runs into the resulting force field and almost bounces back. He pushes against it, grunting and straining; he searches for a weakness around the jamb; he lies on the floor and tries to crawl under it. He fails.

The Baby’s face glows with pure astonishment. She’s actually done it! She’s conquered The Bad Dad, stopped him in his tracks and held him there, the biggest thing in her world, frightening in spite of his tenderness if only because of his enormous bulk.

And, then, the thing happens that The Mom keeps in her heart forever. Clear on the little shining face, a new era dawns: Personal Power. The Mom smiles.

The world has no idea what it’s in for, I think.