Fiction | Tripping Backwards into Heaven
"Mom used to say all our furniture had soul..."
Mom used to say all our furniture had soul, or at least they could if they were treated right enough. “More people have sat in that chair than there were leaves on the tree that made it,” she'd say, pointing to the family rocker. “It’s had a behind planted on it for longer than you kids have been alive. Look, there, see? That scratch on the leg, that beautiful little scar? Me. How about here, on the arm? Your dunce of a father. And what of this awful line running down the spine, do you know who’s responsible for that?” And I’d say no and she’d smile and say, “you.” She loved to tell us that all those dents and stains are part of us, so like it or not, that chair is, too. That's why she treated everything so nice, why she dusted and washed and shined our things every week even if you couldn't tell the difference when she was done. “After all, you wouldn't throw me away just because I got a few wrinkles on my face, would you?”
I never really got it much. The way I saw it, she cared more for them than her own son, day in and day out cleaning every little bit of every little thing until the sun set. I’d ask her to play and she’d tell me she’s busy, I’d jump on a couch and she’d get all upset over nothing. It was like I’d been forgotten among a house of wooden siblings. But when she finally up and died, I didn't have much of a choice. I took all that furniture in with me. There was no one else to do it — her brothers were already gone and so was dad (”I hope he's not waiting,” she said on her deathbed. ”I hate how he always waits for me.”) and Judy was smart enough to run off to live a better life in some other country somewhere, which left me in my little apartment for one packed dense as a hoarder's with furniture three times my age.
A month or so after the funeral, I brought my boyfriend over to look at everything. We've been together near four years now, but he lives a bit away so we don’t see each other all that often. He's nice. I think I like him.
"They're beautiful," he said, going around the place like a museum, staring close at the tables and chairs I resented. In her last months, mom didn’t have the energy to clean much of anything, no matter how much she tried. The dust she hated finally won and took her place, but he didn’t seem to mind none.
He stopped at a stool up on top of a desk so high that you could see its underside. “Look, it’s you,” and he pointed up to it. I came up behind him and sure enough, looked myself square in the face.
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’ve gotten uglier.”
On the bottom of the stool was the crudest drawing of a boy there’s ever been, done up in crayon. They were smiling.
“I think you drew your future,” he said, then went on to the next. Sometimes he says things like that. I figure he must know a different me.
He had a comment for everything. He asked about a little hole in a desk, laughed at a pile of glue stuck to a lamp, stared for too long at pockmarks in a mirror; I told him how Judy used to stay up till dawn studying and tapped her pencil straight through the desk, how when I was young I broke a light-bulb and thought I could fix it up with glue, how dad and us kids would flick water on the mirror and have races with the droplets. He kept going and I kept answering, endlessly tripping backwards through time, until he came to that rocking chair mom loved so much.
“And this?”
“Dad liked to pretend we were on a roller-coaster,“ I said. “Lean it so far back that we’d scream because we were sure we’d fall over and giggle because we knew he wouldn’t let us. And when she was younger, before her legs could reach all the way down, Judy would try to get enough momentum so as to jump off and clear the entire porch. We joked that one day she’d forget to come back down, jump all the way to the stars.”
“How about your mom?”
I took a good look at the chair, scars filled with dust.
”Mom would rock us slow and tell us stories until even she couldn’t keep her eyes open and we’d all fall asleep together, the night crickets our alarm to wake up for bed. She’d tell us how she was rocked in that very same chair on that very same porch when she was a child and the very same crickets came calling. She’d tell us about how grandma helped make it and met grandpa while sitting on it. Sometimes she’d tell us something scary, like how the creaking of the legs wakes the spirit of a headless Indian who died on our land, and sometimes she’d say something sweet, like that there was a family of badgers who used it when we weren’t, but whatever she told us it was always stories. She loved her stories. Real or fake, memory or no, it didn’t matter, so long as she was telling them.”
When I finished remembering, my boyfriend was quiet for a minute. For once he didn’t have anything to say. ”It’s an ugly thing, ain’t it?” I said. “I bet even the junk store has too much self-respect to buy it.“ I thought he’d laugh like he always does, but he didn’t. He just stood there staring at the chair, looking like he might cry. Did I say something wrong? Did I remind him of what I shouldn’t? Seeing that face so sad, I got overwhelmed with a want to touch him, feel him, let skin be on skin to let us both know that I’m here. I didn’t get the chance.
Before I could move an inch, he dropped to his knees and started wiping the seat down with his hand, all that dust from time and neglect collecting up on his palm. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there like a fool and watched. I watched his skin turn gray as he smacked great clumps of age off his fingers to the floor. I watched his back curl and the sun catch his hair golden. I watched the color return and the scars come back. I watched my apartment for one become a home for many.
Then I wetted a kitchen rag, knelt down beside him, and got myself to work.
