The Room with Brown Paneling

Some wounds won’t rub out with polish, they’re etched into our walls and our lives.

What they called the ‘den’ of the one-story ranch had walls covered in cheap brown paneling. The fake kind, with fake wood-grain printed on, and fake ‘kerf’ cuts at intervals of varying width colored in a dark brown vertical stripe. Short, ring-shanked nails, with heads not much bigger than brads, fastened the brown paneling to the walls.

The little boy who lived in the small house with his mom and baby brother and sister sometimes found a nail lying on the faded corduroy sofa cushion, or put his hand between the cushions only to feel one amongst the crumbs. He would then scan the vertical line of nail heads until he found the empty hole; and if he could reach, he would push the little nail back into place with his fingers.

A bad check and a car wreck

The little boy was standing in the room with brown paneling when he found out his mom was in jail for writing something called a ‘bad check’. The man who he knew wasn’t really his father had told him that. That night, the man stayed with the little boy and his brother and sister, even though he hadn’t stayed with them for many nights. He stayed because their mom was in jail. She was “learning a lesson,” he told them all. The next day, his angry mom insisted it was just cheaper for him to stay with the 3 kids for one night than to bail her out of jail.

And the little boy was standing in the room with brown paneling when he found out his older friend, and sometime babysitter, had been in a terrible car wreck and was dead. That horrible news had come from the same man. The little boy knew it was true because his adoptive father had come from the wreck scene in green coveralls. He’d been the one driving the rescue ambulance to try to help the boy’s friend — who was only 16 when he died. And the man whose last name the little boy still had told him there were two boys killed in the wreck because they had hit a phone pole that almost cut their car in half.

The little boy got a little dizzy when he heard this news. His knees wouldn’t work and he fell against the fake brown wood, causing one nail with circled rings to pop halfway out. He remembers seeing it. It made him feel strange to see the nail on the day his friend died.

A suicide attempt

But the first time his mom tried to kill herself with too many pills, the little boy wasn’t standing in the room with brown paneling. That day, he was riding in back of the ambulance with his brother and sister. His not-father was driving. The little boy overheard a voice on the ambulance radio say his address. He knows that because he had just learned how to write it on the top corner of a pretend envelope at school.

Ambulances can go fast. It seemed no time passed between the little boy hearing the voice telling the address (before he could even think what his address on the ambulance radio could mean), and they were crunching into the gravel driveway — where another ambulance was already sitting. The boy and his brother and sister saw the red lights going in circles on top.

Someone had left the back door open. The little boy got out and ran in — up the brick steps and into the room with the brown paneling. Two men in their dark green uniforms were wheeling a stretcher with his mom on it from the hallway into the room with brown paneling.

He could see her dark, curly hair. There was a white sheet tucked up under her chin. Underneath the plastic tubes in his mom’s nose, her skin was oddly gray — not much darker than the sheet. He thinks she tried to smile at him as she rolled past, but her eyes rolled back kind of funny, like when she drank too many beers, and the little boy couldn’t tell for sure.

But in his haste to run in, he got right into the path of the men pushing so that they scratched the brown paneling with the rolling stretcher when the wheels went sideways, trying to avoid him and line up with the door.

Brown shoe polish won’t fix some wounds

Weeks later, his mom tried to use brown shoe polish to rub out the scratch. But he could still see it from the corduroy sofa across the room whenever he sat there. There were other stretchers — but that was the only time one scratched the fake brown wood-grain off the wall. And the little boy couldn’t fix the scratch the way he could put the little nails back in when they popped out. The persistent scratch in the room with the brown paneling wasn’t the only persistent wound that couldn’t be fixed by shoe polish.

That room with its ridiculous fake brown wood-grain and missing nails became the symbol of sadness and grief for the remainder of the little boy’s life. Depression is a room walled in cheap brown paneling.