Room: A Novel

“Could you begin by telling us, what did you miss most in those seven long years of captivity? Apart from your family, of course.” “Dentistry, actually.” Ma’s voice all high and fast. “Which is ironic, because I used to hate having my teeth cleaned even.” “You’ve emerged into a new world. A global economic and environmental crisis, a new President—”

“We saw the inauguration on TV,” says Ma.

“Well! But so much must have changed.”

Ma shrugs. “Nothing seems all that totally different. But I haven’t really gone out yet, except to the dentist.”

The woman smiles like it’s a joke.

“No, I mean everything feels different, but it’s because I’m different.”

“Stronger at the broken places?”

I rub my head that’s still broken from the table.

Ma makes a face. “Before — I was so ordinary. I wasn’t even, you know, vegetarian, I never even had a goth phase.”

“And now you’re an extraordinary young woman with an extraordinary tale to tell, and we’re honored that it’s we, that it’s us—” The woman looks away, to one of the persons with the machines. “Let’s try that again.” She looks back at Ma and does the special voice. “And we’re honored that you’ve chosen this show to tell it. Now, without necessarily putting it in terms of, say, Stockholm syndrome, many of our viewers are curious, well, concerned to know if you found yourself in any way. . emotionally dependent on your captor.”

Ma’s shaking her head. “I hated him.”

The woman is nodding.

“I kicked and screamed. One time I hit him over the head with the lid of the toilet. I didn’t wash, for a long time I wouldn’t speak.” “Was that before or after the tragedy of your stillbirth?”

Ma puts her hand over her mouth.

Morris butts in, he’s flicking through pages. “Clause. . she doesn’t want to talk about that.”

“Oh, we’re not going into any detail,” says the woman with the puffy hair, “but it feels crucial to establish the sequence—” “No, actually it’s crucial to stick to the contract,” he says.

Ma’s hands are all shaking, she puts them under her legs. She’s not looking my way, did she forget I’m here? I’m talking to her in my head but she’s not hearing.

“Believe me,” the woman is saying to Ma, “we’re just trying to help you tell your

story to the world.” She looks down at the paper in her lap. “So. You found yourself pregnant for the second time, in the hellhole where you’d now eked out two years of your precious youth. Were there days when you felt you were being, ah, forced to bear this man’s—”

Ma butts in. “Actually I felt saved.”

“Saved. That’s beautiful.”

Ma twists her mouth. “I can’t speak for anyone else. Like, I had an abortion when I was eighteen, and I’ve never regretted that.” The woman with the puffy hair has her mouth open a bit. Then she glances down at the paper and looks up at Ma again. “On that cold March day five years ago, you gave birth alone under medieval conditions to a healthy baby. Was that the hardest thing you’ve ever done?”

Ma shakes her head. “The best thing.”

“Well, that too, of course. Every mother says—”

“Yeah, but for me, see, Jack was everything. I was alive again, I mattered. So after that I was polite.”

“Polite? Oh, you mean with—”

“It was all about keeping Jack safe.”

“Was it agonizingly hard to be, as you put it, polite?”

Ma shakes her head. “I did it on autopilot, you know, Stepford Wife.”

The puffy-hair woman nods a lot. “Now, figuring out how to raise him all on your own, without books or professionals or even relatives, that must have been terribly difficult.” She shrugs. “I think what babies want is mostly to have their mothers right there. No, I was just afraid Jack would get ill — and me too, he needed me to be OK. So, just stuff I remembered from Health Ed like hand-washing, cooking everything really well. .”

The woman nods. “You breastfed him. In fact, this may startle some of our viewers, I understand you still do?”

Ma laughs.

The woman stares at her.

“In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?”

The woman looks down at her paper again. “There you and your baby were, condemned to solitary confinement—”

Ma shakes her head. “Neither of us was ever alone for a minute.”

“Well, yes. But it takes a village to raise a child, as they say in Africa. .”

“If you’ve got a village. But if you don’t, then maybe it just takes two people.”

“Two? You mean you and your. .”

Ma’s face goes all frozen. “I mean me and Jack.”

“Ah.”

“We did it together.”

“That’s lovely. May I ask — I know you taught him to pray to Jesus. Was your faith very important to you?”

“It was. . part of what I had to pass on to him.”

“Also, I understand that television helped the days of boredom go by a little faster?”

“I was never bored with Jack,” says Ma. “Not vice versa either, I don’t think.”

“Wonderful. Now, you’d come to what some experts are calling a strange decision, to teach Jack that the world measured eleven foot by eleven, and everything else — everything he saw on TV, or heard about from his handful of books — was just fantasy. Did you feel bad about deceiving him?”