“—your work’s so labor intensive!”
“The laboring is the whole point.”
“Don’t you ever yearn to be part of the bigger world?” She softened her voice to make her words less offensive.
“I ship my pieces all over the globe. I had an order from Singapore this week.”
“One order. After hours of work and sweat. Wouldn’t it be more fun to sell your designs—”
“Everything I make is one of a kind.”
She waved away my comment. “Whatever. You could write down one of your favorite one of a kinds and find inexpensive labor elsewhere—in fact, go to your Singapore office instead of shipping one item there. Imagine it! Wouldn’t that be better?”
“No.”
She looked over at me as if I’d just insisted the world was flat.
We weren’t going to bond. I probably disappointed her as much as she bored me. “I’m part of as big a world as I can handle,” I said. “I don’t want it one inch bigger. I think we’ve lost a lot with our busy lives today. I think we’ve lost community.”
“What do you mean? We’re going to a community flea sale for heaven’s sake!”
“When I was a kid, my mother knew the birthday for every kid in the neighborhood—and most of their mothers’, too. And every one of those occasions was celebrated. And bad behavior was chastised. Everybody was everybody else’s mother. If somebody was sick, or going through a bad pregnancy, or going crazy with a houseful of children, or caring for an ill relative, other people knew, and they pitched in as much as they could.”
“You’re romanticizing,” she said. “Your mother and her friends were probably stir-crazy most of the time. How gratifying can another casserole or cake be?”
I have fond memories of watching my mother experiment with the techniques of cake decorating, or making greeting cards. She was proud of what she called “spiffing up the calendar”—garnishing the ordinary face of our days. To me, that’s true art—or maybe the experts would classify it as craft because her products were indeed useful as well as beautiful. Either way, it’s a lost art. Not for lack of wanting it, but for simply having no time to do it. Instead, we go to flea sales and buy evidence of other people’s lives—people who lived that way.
“Not that I mean anything negative about your choice,” Carrie said. “I envy you the free time you have, the leisure…”
I tuned out her condescension. People like Carrie never invite me to comment in return on the quality of their lives. I’d have a lot to say, but politeness is among the endangered civilities I treasure.
I pulled into a long driveway. “Eureka,” I said, “the Motherlode.” Carrie promptly stopped worrying whether I was fully evolved and turned her eyes toward “The Community Attic,” a group sale that had infinite possibilities. She was almost salivating, and even I was excited by the prospects.
With over a hundred families taking part, the parking lot and playground of the elementary school was a solid mass of tables, boxes, trunks, cartons and anything that could be dragged onto this lot.
Carrie and I drifted apart. As always, I looked for the odd, the misshapen, and the downright ugly. The more convoluted, lumpy, bumpy, busy and ridiculous a piece is, the more fun I have with it, the more surfaces and angles there are to transform until, perhaps, there’s a face peeking from behind an ill-executed rosette, a rainbow on the picket fence of a chair back, a stenciled design on ill-fitting drawers that makes their lopsidedness an asset, a homely table painted in gorgeous and surprising color combinations so that time and time again, the swan emerges from the ugly duckling. Furniture’s fairy-tale ending.
I love pieces nobody else wants, the lepers and homeless rejects of the world of interior design. I restore their egos, give them value and self-assurance, and I turn a pretty penny, too.
While I sand and paint and seal, I think about the history of the chair or table or trunk I’ve adopted, about the hands that shaped these curved legs, and often my primary thought is: whatever did they have in mind?
It was a great flea market, and within an hour, I had filled the back of my pickup with three carved picture frames that would look great around mirrors when refinished, a hall table with a centipede’s worth of legs and supports—I could see a prism across those eventually, a trunk that looked as if something had gnawed its base for too long and a ridiculous tall and narrow chest, each drawer capable of holding one pair of socks. I hadn’t found a chair yet, however, and so back I went to the market.
Chairs are my favorite paintables. They offer so many opportunities with fronts and backs, arms sometimes, legs that can be amazing surprises in their shapes and ornamentation, and seats that can be recovered in bright new colors. All that sounds simple-minded, but every surface and angle is a new canvas for me—a facet that gets its own attention, an opportunity to do something inventive.
I saw a rocker that had possibilities, but you can go just so far with a rocker. The ones with nursery-based themes sell best, and I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of sweet at the moment.
I was about to leave when I saw it. In the world of orphaned furniture, this one was positively Dickensian. It sat amidst fussy furniture of the generic “old-lady” type. This chair had “doomed” written all over it, and was destined to become kindling if I didn’t take it home. It had never been fine and was made of cheap wood that had too easily become dull and nicked. Its seat cover was faded and frayed. But some well-meaning craftsman had attempted to carve what I thought was meant to be lovebirds on its back. They’d turned out more like amoebas bumping into a swollen heart, but you knew that desire if not skill had gone into them.
The young woman selling it didn’t hide her surprise at my choice. “Really?” she asked. “You want that?”
“You’d be surprised—with TLC and imagination…”
She raised her eyebrows. One of them had a silver ring through it. She was in her twenties at the most, around my kids’ age, and while she junk-sat, she was reading a textbook and running a yellow highlighter over passages. “I’d love to see what you see in it,” she said. “My cousin asked me if I wanted any of Agnes’s furniture. I loved the woman, and there was sure a lot, and since I’m in grad school, your basic starving student, and need just about everything…but even so…” She shuddered. “Too depressing. Why did people back then have such dark, heavy things around them? I even once asked her about that specific piece. She said it was special. Her own chair, made for her by her husband.” She shook her head, her curly hair bouncing with each movement. “He wasn’t much of a carpenter.”
But I was envisioning those lumpy birds painted a soft blue-grey, their wings detailed, their heads and eyes more clearly defined, and the heart made a high-gloss burgundy. I saw other places for burgundy highlights against shades of pearl and steel and the color of a day when the fog hasn’t yet completely burned off the bay. “I’ll give it an extreme makeover,” I said. “The works. You won’t recognize it.” I pulled out one of my cards. “Here,” I said. “Check out my website and you’ll see what I do.”
“The Furniture Orphanage,” she said. “Cute.” She almost smiled. She had another ring on the corner of her upper lip, and I wondered if her solemn expression was fear of the pain of stretching into a smile. A pity. I found myself imagining how I could do her over, and squelched the thought. There’s a reason for my attraction to wood. It’s quiet and amenable to suggestion and would never willingly stick rings through its sensitive parts.
“I’ll check it out,” she said. “I’m an art historian, or I will be someday. This—what you do—sounds interesting.”
“Your grandmother Agnes—”
“My cousin’s husband’s great-aunt Agnes,” she corrected me.
“Would that be Agnes Darby?”
“How did you know?”
I was immediately flooded with the conflicting emotions Agnes Darby’s name produced in me since her death. Sorrow for the loss of her, love of the memory of he
r, guilt at not having been there for her near the end, and an implacable anger at the young couple who shared her house, an unprovable conviction that they were involved in her untimely, rapid decline.
“It’s not that large a town,” I finally answered.
“You knew her?”
“Years ago, mostly. When my children were young. And then, of course, when we’d bump into each other. We stayed in touch, but didn’t see each other that much recently. I never was in her house—never saw this chair before.”
“I gather she…well, you know. She was old, and she failed.” She made it sound as if there’d been a life-test, and Agnes had flunked it.
“But you knew her, you saw her?”
“Only a few times after my cousin moved in. She seemed okay. A nice woman and then—” She shook her head.
“I tried to visit, but your—”
“My cousin. Or her husband, you mean?”
I nodded. “He told me she was upset and disoriented and ashamed to be seen that way.” And he’d told it to me in a voice with a chill in it as loud as a warning siren. Ellie didn’t matter to him. I didn’t like him or trust him. Joe, my husband, says I’m too quick to judge people, but I don’t see the point of being slow about it. I come from a long line of people who were quick to size up other people’s true motives. That’s why we aren’t extinct the way the slow sizer-uppers are.
Ellie didn’t matter to him, but she had mattered to me by epitomizing that civility Carrie thought was my daydream. Ellie Darby had materialized on a day when I was nearly hysterical with my two-year-old twin sons and my own ineptitude. We were in the park, Roddy sobbing with a scraped knee, Peter behaving like a manic dervish in the sandbox, screeching, whirling and spraying sand in a little girl’s face. I had Roddy on my hip, my free hand trying to calm Peter and the sobbing little girl—and her furious mother—and all of me failing so miserably I burst into tears of frustration and failure.
And almost as if we were in a fairy-tale, Ellie materialized, counseling patience and the long view and a solid sense of humor.
She sat down on the edge of the sandbox, an elegant woman who looked en route to somewhere other than a playground in her tailored suit and chic shoes, long, manicured hands gesturing, drawing pictures in the air as she smiled and spoke softly to my crazed son, a diamond set inside a gold many-petaled rose catching the light on her ring finger.
I watched the ring. There was something hypnotic about the way it caught the sun with each gesture. In any case, the sight of it calmed me. Years later, Ellie said she was leaving me the ring, and though I protested, she insisted. “My daughter doesn’t even like it,” she said, “but it always reminds me of that first day we met. I saw you watching it.”
Ellie talked Peter back into rationality, calmed the huffy mother and her little girl, and even the sobbing Roddy was too intent on the stranger to think about his injuries. I saw it happen, but I still don’t quite believe or understand it, except to acknowledge that Ellie had a calm intensity if there’s such a thing, and children recognized it.
About a week later, my doorbell rang and there she was, looking nervous. “I hope I’m not being rude or imposing,” she said, “but I couldn’t get you or the twins off my mind. And I thought…well, my grandchildren live eight hundred miles away from here, and I have all these grandmotherly impulses going nowhere. I think it’s unhealthy, so I wondered if you would be so generous as to let me share your children once a week or so?”
Nothing could have been more welcome—or presented more diplomatically. I was obviously falling apart. My father had died and my mother had moved to Florida where she cared for her older sister, and here at my doorstep was emergency assistance presented in a way that saved face for me.
And so once a week, sometimes more, Ellie Darby came to the house and spent time with the boys while I was given time out. Mostly I did errands and kept appointments, but I also often sat on a park bench and breathed deeply as I listened to the quiet.
She claimed the boys were her therapy. She’d lived alone since her husband’s death, and her daughter lived several states away. The boys adored her. Together they baked cookies, made gingerbread houses at Christmas, created secret clubhouses, and played word and music games. She loved presenting puzzles, and she was fond of saying, when someone solved it, “As I said, it’s Ellie-mentary, my dear Watsons!” The boys always laughed at the line, no matter how often it was repeated.
Best of all were the stories. “Don’t you just love fairy tales,” she said. “Everything always turns out right—you know the person in trouble is going to be heroically rescued, even if takes a little magic.” She’d winked at me. “I want to believe real life’s like that, too.”
The twins, with their strange gift of simultaneous thought, looked at her and said in unison, “We’d rescue you if you needed it.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“I know,” she solemnly replied. And then she winked. “And you know how I know?”
“It’s Ellie-mentary, your dear Watsons,” the boys said.
As it turned out, I hadn’t rescued her. None of us had, though we’d have wanted to with all our hearts. Joe says there was nothing that needed rescuing, that, to use his favorite term, I was “looking at the picture from the wrong side.” His point was that you can’t be rescued from pure old age and debilitation, but I have never been convinced that a natural process was going on in that house.
Of course, once the boys began school, Ellie’s visits became less regular, fitting into their ever-lengthening and more complicated schedules, and eventually, we became special occasion friends, although she spent holidays with her own grandchildren more often than not, and we became more and more casually entwined, phone-call friends.
On one phone call, I was surprised to learn that her nephew and his wife were sharing her home. It was a barn of a place, she said with a laugh that sounded less vital than I remembered, and the great-niece and her husband had money troubles, so the arrangement was good for all of them.
I’d heard Ellie talk and laugh and read stories in a variety of tones that fit the situations. The voice I heard that day didn’t convince me that she meant what she was saying. It almost sounded like code, like deliberate bad acting, like one of her puzzles for me to figure out. “I’ll come soon,” I said. “Next week, okay?”
“Yes,” she said with real enthusiasm.
I had two orders I had to fill before I could make the date, and I knew Ellie would understand. She was the first person who bought a piece of mine, a telephone table lacquered in soft lavender tones. She’d encouraged me to turn my hobby into a business.
“You’ll come rescue me, as promised,” she added.
I thought she was joking. Or maybe I just needed to believe that.
When I phoned to make the date, her nephew used that frozen voice to inform me that Ellie was “failing.” It did not ring true. A week earlier, she’d sounded mildly depressed, but otherwise normal. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“She’s old. It happens.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“Mrs.—”
“Can I help? When you’re at work, could I—”
“We’re usually here, and we’ve taken care of the times when we aren’t.”
I wondered why they were usually there. They were in monetary straits—weren’t they working, trying to get back on solid ground? “Would you tell her I’ll be by as soon as she’s ready for company?”
He sighed, as if conveying a message was an impossible burden, but with prompting, he promised. I didn’t like him, and I still don’t. Joe might say I’m too quick to pass judgment, but he also admits I’m seldom wrong.
When I phoned again, I was told she couldn’t have visitors for the foreseeable future, that her health, along with her mental faculties, was in decline and she was frequently agitated. I sent a card and a note, and flowers, and a box of cookies made with her recipe. My boys phoned and wrote, too. Ther
e was no response.
Despite Joe’s objections, I eventually phoned her daughter, because I felt she should fly in and check the situation. But Ellie’s daughter and son-in-law were celebrating their silver anniversary with an extended trip to Europe, staying in touch via e-mails and a barrage of cheery postcards. I didn’t want to interrupt their trip, which was going to end in two weeks in any case.
And then one week later, the obituary was in the newspaper. “The whole thing happened too fast,” I said.
Joe shook his head. “Maybe you’re looking at this from the wrong side again. Think how it must have been, then work forward, not backwards from a conclusion you’ve reached.”
I folded my hands over my chest and stood there silently, shaking my head.
“Surely a doctor was in attendance,” Joe said, “and would have known if anything was wrong. She was a terrific person, but life isn’t fair, Jen. Probably a blessing that she went so quickly.” And so we left it. He went to Ellie’s funeral with me, as did the boys, who came in from their schools for the occasion, and so did her daughter and grandchildren, all of whom seemed stunned and incredulous.
The niece and her husband, the squatters, remained aloof and chilly. But Joe, being Joe, reminded us all—again—to look at it from the other side. That always means his side, and his point of view. They were in mourning, he said, probably upset this had happened on their watch, and so abruptly, so they were not likely to be jolly and hail fellow well met.
I saw no evidence of grief, only of an impatience to get the service over with. The cuckoos, I still thought of them, occupying somebody else’s nest. And, in fact, they stayed in that nest, which had been left to them by their kindly great-aunt. I never heard from them about the ring, and the one time I phoned and attempted to find out, the wife, Deanna, informed me briskly that she didn’t know what I was talking about and that Ellie had lost her ring just as she’d lost everything because her mind was gone. Furthermore, she said in a voice as cold as her husband’s, I was harassing them, and she’d have an injunction taken out against me if I bothered them again.
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