Commonplace: In the Chair

I have an intense recollection of a particular summer day. I'm very young and I'm playing hide-and-seek in our house with my older brother.It's that time in the evening in southern California when the air outside is still light, but shadows in the room fill completely.

The house we lived was small even then for a Californian house "? less than 1,000 square feet "? but because I'm small too, even this diminished space seems large to me.

I'm standing in the doorway to the bedroom I would go on sharing with my brother for another fifteen years.

The last of the light has almost gone from the room, as if the light had been condensed out of the air. And my knees actually begin to knock out of fear. I'm afraid of what isn't in the room. I fear my own absence.

When we're away, the chair in the vacant room improvises a sitter, the doorway a passing figure, the bed a trysting couple. That late afternoon, my room was exposed. I knew the house was haunting itself, as all houses are haunted by the ordinary and the commonplace.

Years later after my father's funeral, I returned to that house. My father and I had shared it since my mother's death three years before. My brother brought me back in his car, dropped me off at the curb, and drove away as the house welcomed me inside once more.

That day and over the next few days, I deliberately sat and waited as the late afternoon light drained out of each of the rooms in turn. Each was similarly occupied. Each room emptied in its own way.

I have continued to live in that house. I live there alone accompanied by what fills the rooms. The French Provencal furniture was a wedding gift to my parents from my father's youngest brother. He died last year, the last of seven sons. The china clock with gilt trim was my grandmother's; it was made in Ansonia, New York in 1896. My mother's father painted the seascapes that hang in the living room. There is a cut-glass dish in the closet over the stove. It has never, in my memory, been anywhere else.

There is nothing remarkable about the china clock, the painting, or the furniture. But they do represent a permanence that is separate from the stories I could tell you about these things. The commercial charms of the clock, the middle-class aspiration in the furniture, the waxy surface of the paintings, and the mute facets of the dish reveal themselves, their insignificance failing catastrophically as camouflage.

These things accumulated offhandedly now seem to be manifestations. My uncle Arthur bought the furniture in my house for my parents in 1953 in an act of such silly generosity that each time my hand brushes the back of one of the dining room chairs, Arthur's gift still comes as a shock.

The next time you're alone in your room, look at the indifferent and intractable chair across from you. Unlike you or me, who can be so easily distracted, it's never less than itself.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Nat Welch. It was used under a Creative Commons license.