Grief in the Days of Time Machines
My mother banged on the inside of the door, more in panic than to any useful purpose. Who would hear her but me, and I already knew where she was. My grandmother was not at home, and my father was working in his woodshop in the basement. The physical distance was a problem, but a far worse problem was that my father was profoundly deaf and would not have heard her had he been in the next room.
“Melanie!” my mother cried out. “Unlatch the door!”
I heard the alarm in her voice, and it frightened me. I had done something wrong. Something very bad. I put my small hands on the black latch and pulled it. Nothing happened. I tried to turn it as I would the knob to the door of my room. Nothing. My mother gave me instructions: “Put your hand underneath the latch and push up.” I tried, but I was not strong enough or, perhaps, not tall enough. It was a summer day, and the inside of that closet must have been stifling. But that also meant that the bedroom window was open, and through it my mother heard something that let her know our neighbor was in her backyard.
“Run to the window and tell Mrs. Kostakis you need help, Melanie!”
Dutifully, I climbed up on the bed so that I could see down into the adjoining yard. There was our elderly neighbor, puttering around in her garden.
“Hi, ’Takis!” I yelled down to her, using my standard abbreviation of the name I could not pronounce.
She looked up at me and waved merrily. “Hello, Melanie!”
I paused, uncertain what to say next.
“Tell her your mama is locked in the closet!” my mother called out.
But before I could speak, our neighbor stood and walked back into her house.
“She’s gone,” I told my mother.
My poor mother. There seemed nothing to be done but to tell me to go find my father, yet the baby gate was up at the top of our stairs, and I believe she must have feared my falling more than she feared being trapped inside of that tomb of clothing and boxes.
Mama began to beat on the walls of the closet, as hard as she could. She began to jump up and down in the tiny space, landing as hard and as heavily as her slender frame and the cramped quarters would allow. I started to cry. And that is the last thing I actually remember. What I know from my mother’s telling is that somehow my father felt the vibrations through the house. Or maybe some psychic-daddy sense kicked in and told him he needed to check on his family. So he came upstairs, unlocked my mother, and order was restored.
I was never again exactly the same, though. I had developed a fear of being locked inside a small space—a fear that seemed strange, given that it had not been me who had been confined. Afterwards, I wept and kicked at the sight of an elevator and insisted always on taking either escalators or stairs.