Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

Karen and Kevin, before and after their parents’ divorce, always had their own rooms: enormous rooms with low, stained ceilings, dirty matted shag carpet, accordion-style closet doors that had come off their tracks, sliding windows in aluminum frames that stuck and shrieked and developed a weird, whitish rust, like salt deposits, that came off on your hands. One room like that was bad enough, but two was killing. All through their childhood Karen and Kevin had continually migrated into one room or the other, they resisted each having a room of their own, they understood in their bodies, if not in their minds, that two bodies in one room defeats the room, but one body in one room is defeated. And so each kept sneaking into the other one’s room—sneaking, because throughout their childhood there was always someone holding the opinion that they shouldn’t share a room, whether stating it directly or not.