Audio Essay: In Small Spaces

Erin writes about her childhood in small spaces and how it has prepared her for the current pandemic in obvious and not so obvious ways. Thank you so much to our friends at the superb podcast Our Plague Year for presenting this essay.

When I was a kid I really liked small spaces. Perhaps part of it was because I was small myself. I’m still small. In our current plague times, alone together in our houses, being in small spaces has new meaning. These meanings have taken me by surprise. Me! Who is used to being small. What exactly are we doing in here?

For as long I can remember I have been the shortest of my peers and just about everyone else. I vividly remember going to the pediatrician as a child to get measured, and the careful way the nurse drew each additional little point in blue pen on the growth chart. Year after year, the dots connected into first a gently rising slope and then a shallow curve that quickly crested and flattened long before the range of thick lines considered “normal”. Those lines, with their steep climb toward the top of the page, mapped a future that would be forever out of my reach. I marveled at the strange words “35th percentile”. That’s me? I thought. I also remember the barrage of standardized tests I took that placed my relative intelligence on a curve above and off a different set of charts. How is it that those lines on a page, then and now, define our lives?

Those pediatric plot points came as no surprise to anyone around me. I come from a small family. And by small I mean very very small. We are borderline medical diagnosis small. My adult height is just one inch above the cutoff for now inappropriate words like “midget” and “dwarf”. My mother is smaller than me. I never had a chance at any other body.

As a kid, I knew I was small but I never realized how small. I don’t think my mind could compute it. I’d see my parents next to normal size people and feel sorry for them. I’d see my older brother in school plays and understand why he got beat up all the time. It would only be in pictures, and later smart phone videos by friends, that I realized that the tiny thing I was looking at was me. I hardly recognized myself in those moments.

Being small and functionally oblivious about it had its advantages too. As a kid I could climb counters easily. I still do. To the eyes of adults, I probably stayed cuter for longer. I’ve always looked much younger than I am. 

In the summer of 1984, when I was 6 years old, Mary Lou Retton became America’s darling, winning the women’s gymnastics all-round gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics. I remember being in a hotel room in Virginia Beach, on our yearly family vacation. I stood about 6 inches from the television, my long hair wavy with salt water just the way I liked it, my small bathing suit filled with sand from tumbling through the waves, which I did not like. There was Mary Lou Retton! I was fascinated by her American flag leotard, the way the design of the stars and stripes lay asymmetrically across her body. There she was, one striped arm raised, one starred arm raised as she stuck her vault, landing it for the perfect 10 that gave her the medal. 

I want to do that.

Did I say it out loud? Did I just think it? I don’t remember, but soon after, I insisted on taking gymnastics lessons, my parents driving me 20 minutes out backcountry roads to a private gym. I competed on a traveling team in my own sparkly asymmetrical leotard. In gymnastics, it was good to be small. A broken collarbone in first grade didn’t dampen my determination, but a broken hand in fifth grade did. I couldn’t hold my clarinet correctly with the cast on. So I quit gymnastics, my life taking its first turn towards its adult direction.

Mary Lou Retton though! She was the first time I remember identifying with someone outside my family. She was strong; she had a big smile; she was small. It was the beginning of a long attraction to and love for small celebrities that continues to this day. At different points in my life I have wondered if Edith Piaf, Dolly Parton, or Judy Garland would take me under their metaphorical micro wings and be my iconic small mothers. 

But I wasn’t meant to be a gymnast. And I wasn’t a very good musician in those days. I had begun to write poems. I was good at school. But what I was really good at, consistently good at, the defining moments from my childhood, were small spaces. I made entire worlds under my bed. Below my desk. In my closet. I would build minuscule castles out of tissue boxes in the corner of my bedroom, making an average-sized space into a shoebox, as if I could not claim its entire middle class riches. I would imagine the space below my desk as the small cockpit of a rocket ship bound for important interstellar explorations. It might look like a closet to you, but to me it was a remote cabin on an uninhabited island. Over and over again I would build, dismantle, reimagine, build again. The joy of these spaces is my primary childhood memory.

Part of this joy was in the preparation. I’d save empty tissue boxes for months, surreptitiously grabbing them when they almost, but not quite, empty. I made sure my closet floor was always clean. I routinely vacuumed under my bed. 

I’d make detailed lists of supplies so that when it was time to make my move, I was ready. My childhood priorities were clear. First, I would need books. Lots of books. Books like “My Side of the Mountain”, “Island of the Blue Dolphins”, “Julie of the Wolves”. Books that taught me about survival without parents. Next, I would certainly need light. A flashlight with fresh batteries was best, perhaps a nightlight if the small space had an outlet. But never I used candles. Too dangerous, their burning scent giving away my location.

I have a vague memory of feeling very victorian as I arranged a chamber pot for use, if necessary. I gathered food. I have always loved prepared meals and canned food, even at a very young age. So I snuck Campbells Chunky Soup, Chef Boyardee, and Lunchables from the pantry.  I collected small Ziplocs of KIX, the closest thing to a sugar cereal we were allowed. 

Comfort was not my goal. Fortitude, solitude, simplicity were my aims.  I brought only spartan bedding with me. A pillow, a single blanket. I did not plan to sleep. Instead, I wanted to stay up as long as possible, long after the rest of the house had turned in for the night. I wanted to be awake, to live in my small space! I wanted to revel in the limitless possibilities of my imagination, something I felt was inversely enhanced the tighter the walls around me.

It’s funny to remember now, since I am a professional musician, but I never brought any instruments into my small spaces. Just books and canned foods. I do remember once bringing a cheap fisher price compass to my closet, but I’m not sure why. I did not intend to leave the island.

After all had been prepared, the spaces outfitted, I closed my bedroom door tight. I shoved a towel under my closet door, blotting out the unwanted strip of light slipping in from outside. I tucked a blanket in my desk drawer and solemnly drew it over the opening, imagining myself like the Mercury astronauts I’d seen in the movie “The Right Stuff”, waving a poignant goodbye to earth and family. I drew up the drawbridge, finally safe and secure. 

Because of my size, I was not cramped below my desk or in my closet. Because of my size, I moved easily about under my high, big-girl bed. My mother had attached a long curtain of lacy fringe around the bottom of the bed frame. I finally found it useful. 

How long did I stay in these spaces? This has also passed from memory. Both from age, but I also suspect from the nature of how time moves when we’re confined - whether consensually or not. It ceases to matter. It loses any recognizable shape and resists attempts to remember in a traditional way. It takes on an unpredictable viscosity, behaving in ways that make no sense. I never brought a clock into my small spaces. I was happy. I was safe. I had everything I could want. Who needed time?

When I left the house I grew up in, it surprises me not at all that I became a traveling musician. In a sense I turned my childhood dream spaces inside out, traveling vast distances with the small box of my guitar, carrying a modest suitcase of provisions. Travel has never been scary because I can make my home anywhere. I am happy with very little.

It has only been as someone in their 40s, with the inclination and space for self-reflection that I have seen these happy childhood spaces in their full resolution. I was hiding. I was barricading. Though I did it with much creativity and wit, I was escaping to the only places I felt safe. A door behind a door behind a door. I’m not ready to tell you why, perhaps another essay at another time, but believe me. I know why.

Now we are in living in a pandemic, or “the pando” as I like to call it. Calling it that makes me happy. “The pando”. It feels necessarily mischievous. Calling it “the pando” brings echos of lighter words like panda, pancake, pantomime, pantaloons, a making of a safe childhood space out of a scary time.

I find myself thinking a lot about my small childhood spaces now, my happiness in them, and my resourcefulness in creating them. At various points in this plague, we have all been forced to live in our own small spaces, and I am finding my childhood skill set to be invaluable in this moment. 

My house, a small cottage on a river in rural western Massachusetts, has always been a haven, a verdant, solitary place to come home to after traveling through the crowded cities of the world. Though I have been in long-term committed relationships, it has been almost 20 years since I have lived with a partner. There’s no room under the desk, and I like it that way.  

So here we are in the pando, with its prohibitions on social closeness, restrictions on communal eating, with its lack of a schedule or a future we can plan on. This all feels familiar, and I’ve been able to meet these conditions with a practised resilience, creativity, and wit, honed in my childhood of small spaces. To be honest, these past few months, I’ve been as happy as I’ve ever been.

But I also can’t help worrying that my current contentment staying at home is also like my childhood of small spaces in other ways. Has the pando given me the opportunity to hide? The excuse to barricade? A convenient escape from a world that often makes me anxious? Have I made another door behind a door behind a door?

Maybe you can relate. 

Here we are. Alone together. Below our desks, in our closets, under our beds. Again. Making the most of a hard time, and wondering if it’s safe to come out.