A Room of His Own完成209.docVIP

姓名：薛方方 学号：512141867 原文： A Room of His Own Unmistakable noises are coming through my bedroom wall. Now a scuffling, now a bumping, a long, drawn-out scraping. “John, are you moving furniture in there? Again?” I call. The wall muffles his yes but does not filter out of his voice the tinge of excitement. I am not upset by these impulsive rearrangements, just amused at their frequency. I remember my own feelings when I was 13 as he is——the startling, rapid evolution of body and mind and emotions, the need to invent and reinvent yourself through clothes, hairstyles and the arrangement and decor of your room. Amid the smothered thuds I remember how much John longed for the privacy of his own domain, how he took me aside two years ago when he was sharing a room with his younger brother, Robert. “Mom,” he said, “can I please have a room of my own? I could use Jeffs. He wont mind.” It was true that Jeff had graduated from college that past June and had flown from the nest. But would he mind if the place where he had spent countless hours growing up was yanked out from under him? Would he feel ousted from the family, barred from ever coming home again? But beyond his feelings, would I mind? That room was so much a part of our lives over the many years that Jeff had been our only child. In it I taught him to read; we constructed architectural wonders out of blocks and set up elaborate desks. It was where Jeff perfected his artwork and struggled with college applications. It was the place where I told him a thousand stories and where we had a thousand talks. As close as we were, though, the time came when Jeff needed a door between us, a space of his own to grow in. The door to that bedroom would be shut most of the evening, behind it the muffled sound of a radio or the clack of his secondhand manual typewriter as he banged out one of his marathon letters. I knew those letters to friends must have been filled with thoughts and opinions Jeff did not share with m