Short Story: Queen Ann
Clarence
The thickness of the air fell hard on my frame, cloaking me like an intangible, leaded weight. I breathed deeply, hoping the oxygen would rid me of the room’s heaviness, but the musty soup of the air suffocated rather than relieved me. The dungeon was so dark that the afternoon light was indiscernible in the perpetuating state of night. One overhead light was lit. Its efforts to illuminate were waning. It’s face flickered with a fearful knowing; like the faces of the Egyptians at the moment before God unleashed the Red Sea, the light knew the ocean of darkness loomed around it.
I focused my attention on the task at hand. Chairs were lined up against the basement wall like doomed soldiers in front of a firing squad. Their legs were packaged in plastic wrap, protecting their feet from the stains of the Georgia red clay eking out from the sutures in the floor. Each chair was crafted with its own artistry, each one glaring emptily back at my face. Margaret said to pick one or some. Does my sister realize she has charged me with being one of the chairs’ saviors? An inheritance is a looming burden disguised as a blessing. Pick one? This commodity fetishism arises at the price of death. Thanatos showed his mercy by consuming my father swiftly after my mother. Now we perform our danse macabre around these possessions auctioning them off like spoils to the living, but all we truly inherit is the bones of the deceased, souls transferred into a chair, a side-table and a footstool.
The nature of our endeavor appeared to have little effect on my sister. Despite being wet behind the ears in dealing with the proceedings of the deceased, she managed her efforts with waggish authority. Like a child conducting a toy train fixed to a circular track, she was always moving but never in any particular direction.
“What do we do with all of this?” She said, scampering over to me with a box in hand. I surveyed the contents of the box in question. A myriad of pill bottles of varying prescriptions filled the inside.
“Trash,” I answered.
“Actually, I talked to one of the nurses at the Hospice center, Iris, she kinda pulled me aside, told me that the expiration date on prescriptions aren’t really set in stone so you can keep them longer than you think. So I thought maybe we should hold on to these because when all the medications start running out and food and stuff, they might come in handy in the future.”
“You’re just like Dad. You never let go of anything.”
“I think that's more like Mom. Iris also said that she had never seen a patient stay in hospice care that long. Guess mom just wanted to survive.”
“They also say that the aggressively inclined manage to fight death, not wanting to surrender. It’s doubtful that mom wanted to continue to live with cancer, but every bone in her body would fragment and fracture under her skin before she would submit herself to being out of control.”
“Has anyone ever told you how morbid you are?”
“If you want to keep the pills then do so,” I digressed and continued my chair selection.
At the end perched a wing chair. The pattern paraded itself in front of me like a bombastic woman of class explaining why her value was considerable to the rest. The fabric displayed a hunting scene, not of the huntsman and his party, but of the wretched creatures being hunted. Two Pheasants curled around one another in a whimsical stance, ready to spring from the chair if I ventured too closely. I approached carefully and dared never to touch it. The cream colored upholstery was sullied with umber stains, as if some pheasants had already been slain, and the once lush mint-green velvet that backed the chair now resembled the walls of an infirmary.
My sister sprung up behind me. I jerked back to the chair half expecting the pheasants to have vanished. My sister spoke with childlike wonder, “That is a Queen Ann, ball-and-claw chair. I’m not too fond of the fabric, but you could always reupholster it to match the style of your house.”
She flitted off to another piece to study it. I remained still, in judgment. Boxes of picture fames and prints of antiquated paintings and sweaters that reeked of Guerlain Vetiver were seated on the line of chairs, but Queen Ann remained unburdened, as she had been all my life.
Before her basement days, the chair stood proudly in the main room, which we called the great room, in our old house. Her status was established with her placement by the fireplace. The great room was the core of the house and was never occupied and like the fireplace, was never lit. When I was little I would trap the air in my lungs and bolt through the room to escape the unnerving air. With each step into the room the stale breath locked inside me pained my body; my nerves waged war on my will begging me to inhale the must of the room. Never once did I relent. There were rules for that room spoken and unspoken and holding my breath was my law. Keeping the room in its unalterably pristine state was my mother’s. The chair was a symbol of privilege and I was forbidden to sit in it. The one memory I have of the great room being alive was on the occurrence of a party, the night I sat in the chair.
The room smelled like the smoke of Cuban cigars and the bitter notes Chevas Regal. The smoke clouded the room compromising my vision, so I slinked through the room carefully. I saw my mom. She glittered. Her charisma overcame me, halting my advancement. I sank into the chair. She stopped glittering. As if my action had alerted her, she turned her neck around to take me into account. She strode over to me, snatching me from the chair and extracted me from the great room. Once in the confines of my room, she removed her ivory gloves and grasped my hands reprimanding me, “These fingers, on my Queen Ann chair!” she scolded. I stared at my fingers. In that moment those hands, that I thought were clean, oozed and sweat with a sickening grime, tracing the wrinkles on my palms and growing under my fingernails.
The dirt on the chair, like the dirt on my hands, appeared out of nowhere. The chair’s diagnosis was terminal, but even in this piteous condition I refused to touch it. I kept my white gloves on.
I turned slightly to my sister, “I don’t need any of these.”
“None of them?” she said in astonishment. “I am trying to delegate this furniture evenly, but I can’t do that if you don’t pick anything”
“It’s furniture. There is no monetary value to be obtained from it.”
“Monetary value? Some of this furniture is over a hundred years old.”
Her voice rang in my ears. This process was the last surviving spite of my parents.
She continued, “You should take Dad’s guns. They make me nervous.”
She held a glass box, rimmed in copper and lined with a red satin interior. A six shooter revolver and a pistol were fastened for display. I opened the lid and removed the pistol. Its weight was substantial. My father took several things in life very seriously, guns and politics. The politics he used, the guns he didn’t. Instead, they were exhibited on the wall as a symbol of intimidation. They were a bluff. Like his beloved politicians, they were mounted high on a platform, quelling resistance and boasting strength all while roosting untouched in their shiny glass world. My dad’s countenance was a cryptic series of smoke screens; his temper was at the whim of my mother’s command. And without her force in this world, his foundation was split. The death certificate read, “Failure to thrive.”
I picked up the case and set it on the stairs. My sister nodded with a foolish look of approval. My selection had undoubtedly granted her a false sense of progress. She remained silent but pointed to the next victim, the grandfather clock.
The grandfather clock stood before me like a judge to a jury. The warm yellow wood structured its face and a plate of glass showcased its innards. The clock was harnessed with weight driven pendulums, which ticked in varying sequences. The clock’s ability to keep time had ceased, and I stared at its failed organs in contentment. In its previous life the clock’s cry carried to the edges of the house and reverberated in the steel of my bedframe.
At fifteen minutes the first sequence always began. The startling tone of the first chime curled my fingertips into my palms leaving throbbing dents in my skin. At the half hour the second chime rang out, reminding me of the grandfather’s ever-faithful presence. The third chime of the hour raised the follicles of hair on my arms and laced my spine with the chill of its echo. The last stroke sang like the funeral march at a veteran’s memorial, succinctly and slowly it wound down the hour.
My father was great in his exactness and timeliness. Life ran like the clock. Every meal was executed at the top of the hour: seven, eleven, and five. My room was located on the opposing side from kitchen. I had five chimes to get there.
Three, four, five, I fell into the table to stop the speed of my race. I was fourteen-years old, and my body had begun the ungainly process of maturing. Adapting to my compromising disproportions and gauche demeanor were a daily struggle, and that day they had failed me. I slammed into the dinner table jostling my mother’s china and spilling water from one of the drinking glasses all over my plated dinner. My mother looked up, not at me, but to my father. There was no interim; my father’s wrath knew no lesser degree then the stage of complete ferocity. He stood abruptly, yanking the seat beside me back for me to sit down. I obeyed. Sitting down I kept my hands mended to my sides. I looked down at my plate marinating in my beverage.
“You can just enjoy your meal as is,” he said stridently.
I picked up my fork and scooped up some soaked rice. The drink had done its damage, dissolving the rice to a pulpy paste slipping through the teeth of my fork. My father never met my eyes. My sister slipped in after me, yet her scolding had been tempered my mine. I don’t remember what my father did or said to her. I didn’t look up. All I remember was the look of my reflection mirrored in the pool of liquid on my plate. My features transformed by dirtied particles of food. The china’s pattern underlined the image of my face, unable to separate its elegant scrollwork from my reflection. It weaved through my face binding its essence to my existence like the vines of a rose bush curling through the iron bars of a corroded fence.
Pulling myself from my memory, I opened the latch of the clock and peered inside, waiting. Waiting to see if the incalculable value of the clock would alter my insidious distaste for it. I investigated his face; the grandfather looked fixedly into my workings as I had done to him. He listened to my soul ticking in a wavering, imperfect rhythm. Try as I may I could not steady its beat; I could not perform in exactitude. I could never be the grandfather clock.
_____________________________________________________________
Margret
Dutch women in their little wooden shoes matched down to the ocean’s entrance carrying their baskets and babes in hand. I gazed at the brush makes, at the wondrously dabbed color and simplistic charm of the seascape. A loud snap yanked me out of my Dutch world and back into the concrete tomb, which housed my parent’s processions. I timidly surveyed the origin of the sound. I saw Clarence. He had been so silent I thought he had abandoned me several minutes ago. He stood like a sphinx, fixated at my parent’s grandfather clock. In his hands he held a long-pointed stick. Confused, I looked to the clock to notice that the minute hand had been plucked from the face.
“Clarence, what the hell! Do you have any idea how much it costs to fix those things?”
“You can still tell time, you just won’t know it as exactly as you may prefer.”
“Kinda defeats the purpose don’t ya think?”
“All this ‘stuff’ is exactly that, ‘stuff’. Everything in here should be sold, destroyed, wiped out of existence and all its history with it.”
“Listen, I realize this ‘stuff’ doesn’t really bring back favorable memories for you, but you can’t just discard it like trash.”
He glared at me, and slipping the minute hand in his back pocket, he turned and left. Clarence didn’t recognize those chairs as capsules of time, those paintings narrations of culture and art, and this sewing machine an antiquated tradition of craftsmanship. They spoke of their time and space and of every life, which they inhabited.
No. 66, the model’s mark was carved into the side. My hands followed the contours of my mother’s Singer sewing machine. The pattern of the wood resembled the stripes on a tiger’s back, and the burnt-brown, polished surface felt like skimming the top of a cool, calmed lake. Taped to the top was a manual containing the machine’s instructions. The title read, “Oscillating hook, for family use.”
Family use.
My mother purchased the machine from an elderly woman at a flea market. The woman was ninety-nine-years old. Ninety-nine. If I survive to ninety-nine I think I might just ask the good Lord to take me on home. She spoke about the machine with her hands; with each mention of a part she mimicked the action. “To set the needle you turn the balance wheel over toward you until the bar moves up to its highest point in the sleeve,” she instructed, threading the needle imaginatively in the air with her withered fingers. Occasionally she trailed off, speaking of the generations and generations clothed by the machine. She gave birth to twelve children and made every scratch of their clothing by hand. “I had two babies draped over one arm and ran a hem through the lever with the other,” she told my mother and me. My mother criticized her “lack of restraint” in having so many children. To her, it was economically unwise, but to the woman, she believed “children were like buttons; you can’t have too many,” and with a marriage to a doctor thirty years older than her, she was capable. “Doctor Riley takes William and Judah with him in the buggy—this was back when doctor’s made house calls to their patients and addressed them by name.” I loved how she called him “Doctor Riley” and spoke of him as if she’d see him when she went home that night. I wonder if she ever made it to a hundred…
I placed the manual back on the machine. The burden was too heavy to lift alone so I turned to something more manageable.
A cardboard box lay beside the machine, and the mystery behind its contents begged for investigation. I dug through the packaging paper to unearth its treasures. Stacks of China stood tall like Greek columns within the box. I recognized the spiraling flowered pattern. Mrs. Groot’s china.
The homes on our street were packed cheek-by-jowl, all brick with white-washed fences and green shutters, save for the home abutting ours, which was crafted in wood with Carolina blue shutters. Mrs. Groot haled from Gelderland—a word which always merited a chuckle from me as a child—in the Netherlands. Her countenance resembled a Hummel figurine, and when she walked her robust belly swayed back and forth and jiggled as she sang and laughed. My mother despised her on account of her home, yet Mrs. Groot, oblivious to her ill conceit, gave my mother one piece of her china every day along with a loaf of bread. The bread was discarded, but the china was stored and untouched. Twenty-four plates, twenty-four cups, twelve saucers, six bread-and-butter dishes and two small serving bowls. She was our neighbor for a little over 2 months, and during that duration my mother acquired a complete set of Royal Copenhagen china from Holland that was well over 100 years old. I asked my mother why she never used the dishes if they were so valuable. She responded by pointing to a chip on one of the plates. Instead, we used the china my mother inherited from her mother. Dinner was always an event for our household. The table was set brilliantly and every delicacy was served in cut-glass cutlery; not even a jelly jar was permitted on the table. There was only one night I recall seeing any sign of disorder in the arrangement.
I came rushing into the dinning room and took my seat. Confused I looked to my brother and father whose countenance mimicked each other. They both stared down at their plates. Water ran over the tablecloth, but no one bothered to clean the mess. My mother let out an exasperated sigh and rose from the table. Sensing her annoyance I matched her movement.
“No, no I got it,” I said to assure her. She allowed my offer and sat. I went over to gather up a dishtowel. The only sound I heard was the soft pat of the water dropping to the floor in a succinct rhythm. My father, seeing me returning to the table, hopped up and strode over to my seat. I smiled.
“Here let me hold the legs while you sit, don’t want anything else broken.”
“Thank you,” I replied. I guess I really did enjoy all those delicacies.
Returning to my search, I looked for the broken plate and tediously removed it from the glass tower. I was going to use the plates. I stood suddenly with renewed purpose and marched up the stairs, plate in hand. I jumped in my car and shot out to the store. I had a list: buttons and thread, Palmolive, and glue (for the minute hand). The automatic doors slid open letting the cool air from the store escape. I leisurely strolled down the aisles, starred selectively at the thread and decided on green (Clarence’s favorite color). This process was a challenge for him, takes him back to memories best left forgotten… but buttons always help.
As I pulled up the driveway I noticed my neighbor (who moved in to Mrs. Groot’s old house) running around outside my parent’s home like a chicken with its head cut off. I parked the car and approached her.
“Where have you been? I called fifty billion times!”
“I apologize. I was at the CVS. What’s wrong, Janice?”
“I heard a horrible noise! Something loud! Bang! I went and rang your doorbell and looked inside and tried the windows and I’m concerned and I know the rest of the neighborhood is probably going to come over too and look—”
“Thank you for your concern I will see what the problem is.”
I closed the door on her face and set my groceries on the kitchen table. A glass box with a red interior sat opened on the table along with the minute hand. I pivoted slowly toward the basement door, turned the knob and waited, listening. I heard nothing. I carefully descended the stairs. Each stair moaned under the pressure of my feet, and the unsettling stillness of the air whispered for me to reverse my movement. The last step paralyzed my frame. The sight stole my breath and struck my heart with the agony of betrayal. A massacre of wood and glass. The grandfather clock lay face down with splintered shards jutting out of its back. The chairs’ upholstery was shredded and mutilated. The china was so desecrated that nothing remained but a dust of white powder. My father’s tools were propped up against the wall. All around me were corpses of my parent’s valuables. No mercy had been allotted. I collapsed to my knees into the dust of the dishes, feeling the sharpened edges of the remaining pieces dig into my kneecaps.
“You don’t see it now, how could you, but one day you will realize that I loved you enough to not allow it to continue. It cannot be inherited.”
I lifted my head to see him. My brother’s eyes dazzled in sadistic wonderment, and a crooked, childlike grin was smeared from cheek to cheek. His chin was lifted in a superior stance as he gazed down with a flippant stare. There he sat, like a king on a throne, in the one piece of unharmed furniture, the Queen Ann chair.
The thickness of the air fell hard on my frame, cloaking me like an intangible, leaded weight. I breathed deeply, hoping the oxygen would rid me of the room’s heaviness, but the musty soup of the air suffocated rather than relieved me. The dungeon was so dark that the afternoon light was indiscernible in the perpetuating state of night. One overhead light was lit. Its efforts to illuminate were waning. It’s face flickered with a fearful knowing; like the faces of the Egyptians at the moment before God unleashed the Red Sea, the light knew the ocean of darkness loomed around it.
I focused my attention on the task at hand. Chairs were lined up against the basement wall like doomed soldiers in front of a firing squad. Their legs were packaged in plastic wrap, protecting their feet from the stains of the Georgia red clay eking out from the sutures in the floor. Each chair was crafted with its own artistry, each one glaring emptily back at my face. Margaret said to pick one or some. Does my sister realize she has charged me with being one of the chairs’ saviors? An inheritance is a looming burden disguised as a blessing. Pick one? This commodity fetishism arises at the price of death. Thanatos showed his mercy by consuming my father swiftly after my mother. Now we perform our danse macabre around these possessions auctioning them off like spoils to the living, but all we truly inherit is the bones of the deceased, souls transferred into a chair, a side-table and a footstool.
The nature of our endeavor appeared to have little effect on my sister. Despite being wet behind the ears in dealing with the proceedings of the deceased, she managed her efforts with waggish authority. Like a child conducting a toy train fixed to a circular track, she was always moving but never in any particular direction.
“What do we do with all of this?” She said, scampering over to me with a box in hand. I surveyed the contents of the box in question. A myriad of pill bottles of varying prescriptions filled the inside.
“Trash,” I answered.
“Actually, I talked to one of the nurses at the Hospice center, Iris, she kinda pulled me aside, told me that the expiration date on prescriptions aren’t really set in stone so you can keep them longer than you think. So I thought maybe we should hold on to these because when all the medications start running out and food and stuff, they might come in handy in the future.”
“You’re just like Dad. You never let go of anything.”
“I think that's more like Mom. Iris also said that she had never seen a patient stay in hospice care that long. Guess mom just wanted to survive.”
“They also say that the aggressively inclined manage to fight death, not wanting to surrender. It’s doubtful that mom wanted to continue to live with cancer, but every bone in her body would fragment and fracture under her skin before she would submit herself to being out of control.”
“Has anyone ever told you how morbid you are?”
“If you want to keep the pills then do so,” I digressed and continued my chair selection.
At the end perched a wing chair. The pattern paraded itself in front of me like a bombastic woman of class explaining why her value was considerable to the rest. The fabric displayed a hunting scene, not of the huntsman and his party, but of the wretched creatures being hunted. Two Pheasants curled around one another in a whimsical stance, ready to spring from the chair if I ventured too closely. I approached carefully and dared never to touch it. The cream colored upholstery was sullied with umber stains, as if some pheasants had already been slain, and the once lush mint-green velvet that backed the chair now resembled the walls of an infirmary.
My sister sprung up behind me. I jerked back to the chair half expecting the pheasants to have vanished. My sister spoke with childlike wonder, “That is a Queen Ann, ball-and-claw chair. I’m not too fond of the fabric, but you could always reupholster it to match the style of your house.”
She flitted off to another piece to study it. I remained still, in judgment. Boxes of picture fames and prints of antiquated paintings and sweaters that reeked of Guerlain Vetiver were seated on the line of chairs, but Queen Ann remained unburdened, as she had been all my life.
Before her basement days, the chair stood proudly in the main room, which we called the great room, in our old house. Her status was established with her placement by the fireplace. The great room was the core of the house and was never occupied and like the fireplace, was never lit. When I was little I would trap the air in my lungs and bolt through the room to escape the unnerving air. With each step into the room the stale breath locked inside me pained my body; my nerves waged war on my will begging me to inhale the must of the room. Never once did I relent. There were rules for that room spoken and unspoken and holding my breath was my law. Keeping the room in its unalterably pristine state was my mother’s. The chair was a symbol of privilege and I was forbidden to sit in it. The one memory I have of the great room being alive was on the occurrence of a party, the night I sat in the chair.
The room smelled like the smoke of Cuban cigars and the bitter notes Chevas Regal. The smoke clouded the room compromising my vision, so I slinked through the room carefully. I saw my mom. She glittered. Her charisma overcame me, halting my advancement. I sank into the chair. She stopped glittering. As if my action had alerted her, she turned her neck around to take me into account. She strode over to me, snatching me from the chair and extracted me from the great room. Once in the confines of my room, she removed her ivory gloves and grasped my hands reprimanding me, “These fingers, on my Queen Ann chair!” she scolded. I stared at my fingers. In that moment those hands, that I thought were clean, oozed and sweat with a sickening grime, tracing the wrinkles on my palms and growing under my fingernails.
The dirt on the chair, like the dirt on my hands, appeared out of nowhere. The chair’s diagnosis was terminal, but even in this piteous condition I refused to touch it. I kept my white gloves on.
I turned slightly to my sister, “I don’t need any of these.”
“None of them?” she said in astonishment. “I am trying to delegate this furniture evenly, but I can’t do that if you don’t pick anything”
“It’s furniture. There is no monetary value to be obtained from it.”
“Monetary value? Some of this furniture is over a hundred years old.”
Her voice rang in my ears. This process was the last surviving spite of my parents.
She continued, “You should take Dad’s guns. They make me nervous.”
She held a glass box, rimmed in copper and lined with a red satin interior. A six shooter revolver and a pistol were fastened for display. I opened the lid and removed the pistol. Its weight was substantial. My father took several things in life very seriously, guns and politics. The politics he used, the guns he didn’t. Instead, they were exhibited on the wall as a symbol of intimidation. They were a bluff. Like his beloved politicians, they were mounted high on a platform, quelling resistance and boasting strength all while roosting untouched in their shiny glass world. My dad’s countenance was a cryptic series of smoke screens; his temper was at the whim of my mother’s command. And without her force in this world, his foundation was split. The death certificate read, “Failure to thrive.”
I picked up the case and set it on the stairs. My sister nodded with a foolish look of approval. My selection had undoubtedly granted her a false sense of progress. She remained silent but pointed to the next victim, the grandfather clock.
The grandfather clock stood before me like a judge to a jury. The warm yellow wood structured its face and a plate of glass showcased its innards. The clock was harnessed with weight driven pendulums, which ticked in varying sequences. The clock’s ability to keep time had ceased, and I stared at its failed organs in contentment. In its previous life the clock’s cry carried to the edges of the house and reverberated in the steel of my bedframe.
At fifteen minutes the first sequence always began. The startling tone of the first chime curled my fingertips into my palms leaving throbbing dents in my skin. At the half hour the second chime rang out, reminding me of the grandfather’s ever-faithful presence. The third chime of the hour raised the follicles of hair on my arms and laced my spine with the chill of its echo. The last stroke sang like the funeral march at a veteran’s memorial, succinctly and slowly it wound down the hour.
My father was great in his exactness and timeliness. Life ran like the clock. Every meal was executed at the top of the hour: seven, eleven, and five. My room was located on the opposing side from kitchen. I had five chimes to get there.
Three, four, five, I fell into the table to stop the speed of my race. I was fourteen-years old, and my body had begun the ungainly process of maturing. Adapting to my compromising disproportions and gauche demeanor were a daily struggle, and that day they had failed me. I slammed into the dinner table jostling my mother’s china and spilling water from one of the drinking glasses all over my plated dinner. My mother looked up, not at me, but to my father. There was no interim; my father’s wrath knew no lesser degree then the stage of complete ferocity. He stood abruptly, yanking the seat beside me back for me to sit down. I obeyed. Sitting down I kept my hands mended to my sides. I looked down at my plate marinating in my beverage.
“You can just enjoy your meal as is,” he said stridently.
I picked up my fork and scooped up some soaked rice. The drink had done its damage, dissolving the rice to a pulpy paste slipping through the teeth of my fork. My father never met my eyes. My sister slipped in after me, yet her scolding had been tempered my mine. I don’t remember what my father did or said to her. I didn’t look up. All I remember was the look of my reflection mirrored in the pool of liquid on my plate. My features transformed by dirtied particles of food. The china’s pattern underlined the image of my face, unable to separate its elegant scrollwork from my reflection. It weaved through my face binding its essence to my existence like the vines of a rose bush curling through the iron bars of a corroded fence.
Pulling myself from my memory, I opened the latch of the clock and peered inside, waiting. Waiting to see if the incalculable value of the clock would alter my insidious distaste for it. I investigated his face; the grandfather looked fixedly into my workings as I had done to him. He listened to my soul ticking in a wavering, imperfect rhythm. Try as I may I could not steady its beat; I could not perform in exactitude. I could never be the grandfather clock.
_____________________________________________________________
Margret
Dutch women in their little wooden shoes matched down to the ocean’s entrance carrying their baskets and babes in hand. I gazed at the brush makes, at the wondrously dabbed color and simplistic charm of the seascape. A loud snap yanked me out of my Dutch world and back into the concrete tomb, which housed my parent’s processions. I timidly surveyed the origin of the sound. I saw Clarence. He had been so silent I thought he had abandoned me several minutes ago. He stood like a sphinx, fixated at my parent’s grandfather clock. In his hands he held a long-pointed stick. Confused, I looked to the clock to notice that the minute hand had been plucked from the face.
“Clarence, what the hell! Do you have any idea how much it costs to fix those things?”
“You can still tell time, you just won’t know it as exactly as you may prefer.”
“Kinda defeats the purpose don’t ya think?”
“All this ‘stuff’ is exactly that, ‘stuff’. Everything in here should be sold, destroyed, wiped out of existence and all its history with it.”
“Listen, I realize this ‘stuff’ doesn’t really bring back favorable memories for you, but you can’t just discard it like trash.”
He glared at me, and slipping the minute hand in his back pocket, he turned and left. Clarence didn’t recognize those chairs as capsules of time, those paintings narrations of culture and art, and this sewing machine an antiquated tradition of craftsmanship. They spoke of their time and space and of every life, which they inhabited.
No. 66, the model’s mark was carved into the side. My hands followed the contours of my mother’s Singer sewing machine. The pattern of the wood resembled the stripes on a tiger’s back, and the burnt-brown, polished surface felt like skimming the top of a cool, calmed lake. Taped to the top was a manual containing the machine’s instructions. The title read, “Oscillating hook, for family use.”
Family use.
My mother purchased the machine from an elderly woman at a flea market. The woman was ninety-nine-years old. Ninety-nine. If I survive to ninety-nine I think I might just ask the good Lord to take me on home. She spoke about the machine with her hands; with each mention of a part she mimicked the action. “To set the needle you turn the balance wheel over toward you until the bar moves up to its highest point in the sleeve,” she instructed, threading the needle imaginatively in the air with her withered fingers. Occasionally she trailed off, speaking of the generations and generations clothed by the machine. She gave birth to twelve children and made every scratch of their clothing by hand. “I had two babies draped over one arm and ran a hem through the lever with the other,” she told my mother and me. My mother criticized her “lack of restraint” in having so many children. To her, it was economically unwise, but to the woman, she believed “children were like buttons; you can’t have too many,” and with a marriage to a doctor thirty years older than her, she was capable. “Doctor Riley takes William and Judah with him in the buggy—this was back when doctor’s made house calls to their patients and addressed them by name.” I loved how she called him “Doctor Riley” and spoke of him as if she’d see him when she went home that night. I wonder if she ever made it to a hundred…
I placed the manual back on the machine. The burden was too heavy to lift alone so I turned to something more manageable.
A cardboard box lay beside the machine, and the mystery behind its contents begged for investigation. I dug through the packaging paper to unearth its treasures. Stacks of China stood tall like Greek columns within the box. I recognized the spiraling flowered pattern. Mrs. Groot’s china.
The homes on our street were packed cheek-by-jowl, all brick with white-washed fences and green shutters, save for the home abutting ours, which was crafted in wood with Carolina blue shutters. Mrs. Groot haled from Gelderland—a word which always merited a chuckle from me as a child—in the Netherlands. Her countenance resembled a Hummel figurine, and when she walked her robust belly swayed back and forth and jiggled as she sang and laughed. My mother despised her on account of her home, yet Mrs. Groot, oblivious to her ill conceit, gave my mother one piece of her china every day along with a loaf of bread. The bread was discarded, but the china was stored and untouched. Twenty-four plates, twenty-four cups, twelve saucers, six bread-and-butter dishes and two small serving bowls. She was our neighbor for a little over 2 months, and during that duration my mother acquired a complete set of Royal Copenhagen china from Holland that was well over 100 years old. I asked my mother why she never used the dishes if they were so valuable. She responded by pointing to a chip on one of the plates. Instead, we used the china my mother inherited from her mother. Dinner was always an event for our household. The table was set brilliantly and every delicacy was served in cut-glass cutlery; not even a jelly jar was permitted on the table. There was only one night I recall seeing any sign of disorder in the arrangement.
I came rushing into the dinning room and took my seat. Confused I looked to my brother and father whose countenance mimicked each other. They both stared down at their plates. Water ran over the tablecloth, but no one bothered to clean the mess. My mother let out an exasperated sigh and rose from the table. Sensing her annoyance I matched her movement.
“No, no I got it,” I said to assure her. She allowed my offer and sat. I went over to gather up a dishtowel. The only sound I heard was the soft pat of the water dropping to the floor in a succinct rhythm. My father, seeing me returning to the table, hopped up and strode over to my seat. I smiled.
“Here let me hold the legs while you sit, don’t want anything else broken.”
“Thank you,” I replied. I guess I really did enjoy all those delicacies.
Returning to my search, I looked for the broken plate and tediously removed it from the glass tower. I was going to use the plates. I stood suddenly with renewed purpose and marched up the stairs, plate in hand. I jumped in my car and shot out to the store. I had a list: buttons and thread, Palmolive, and glue (for the minute hand). The automatic doors slid open letting the cool air from the store escape. I leisurely strolled down the aisles, starred selectively at the thread and decided on green (Clarence’s favorite color). This process was a challenge for him, takes him back to memories best left forgotten… but buttons always help.
As I pulled up the driveway I noticed my neighbor (who moved in to Mrs. Groot’s old house) running around outside my parent’s home like a chicken with its head cut off. I parked the car and approached her.
“Where have you been? I called fifty billion times!”
“I apologize. I was at the CVS. What’s wrong, Janice?”
“I heard a horrible noise! Something loud! Bang! I went and rang your doorbell and looked inside and tried the windows and I’m concerned and I know the rest of the neighborhood is probably going to come over too and look—”
“Thank you for your concern I will see what the problem is.”
I closed the door on her face and set my groceries on the kitchen table. A glass box with a red interior sat opened on the table along with the minute hand. I pivoted slowly toward the basement door, turned the knob and waited, listening. I heard nothing. I carefully descended the stairs. Each stair moaned under the pressure of my feet, and the unsettling stillness of the air whispered for me to reverse my movement. The last step paralyzed my frame. The sight stole my breath and struck my heart with the agony of betrayal. A massacre of wood and glass. The grandfather clock lay face down with splintered shards jutting out of its back. The chairs’ upholstery was shredded and mutilated. The china was so desecrated that nothing remained but a dust of white powder. My father’s tools were propped up against the wall. All around me were corpses of my parent’s valuables. No mercy had been allotted. I collapsed to my knees into the dust of the dishes, feeling the sharpened edges of the remaining pieces dig into my kneecaps.
“You don’t see it now, how could you, but one day you will realize that I loved you enough to not allow it to continue. It cannot be inherited.”
I lifted my head to see him. My brother’s eyes dazzled in sadistic wonderment, and a crooked, childlike grin was smeared from cheek to cheek. His chin was lifted in a superior stance as he gazed down with a flippant stare. There he sat, like a king on a throne, in the one piece of unharmed furniture, the Queen Ann chair.
"Evolution of Argument"
Passion and rage rise out of nothing.
The evolution of every exchange.
Words are abandoned to be buried in loose soil.
Volume, instead, is awakened from slumber.
Logos your tragedy is at hand.
Croaking replies to accusations of the insane.
Control slips through cracks in the floor.
Two voices collide never stopping for breath.
Arms are employed by speech’s retirement.
Twinges of pain surge from figure and heart.
Hate and hurt are weighed and measured.
Silence stills one hand before the other.
Footsteps diverge and diminish from hearing.
Birth pains of conversation ease to a halt.
Yet, ears hear hard for the footstep’s return.
The evolution of every exchange.
Words are abandoned to be buried in loose soil.
Volume, instead, is awakened from slumber.
Logos your tragedy is at hand.
Croaking replies to accusations of the insane.
Control slips through cracks in the floor.
Two voices collide never stopping for breath.
Arms are employed by speech’s retirement.
Twinges of pain surge from figure and heart.
Hate and hurt are weighed and measured.
Silence stills one hand before the other.
Footsteps diverge and diminish from hearing.
Birth pains of conversation ease to a halt.
Yet, ears hear hard for the footstep’s return.
"Would You Think Me Great Sir Critic?"
Would you think me great, Sir Critic,
If my paintings were hung in a columned hall, on stark white walls
With lighting clean and diffused?
If I was that girl wearing that pearl,
Vermeer’s esteemed muse.
Would you think me great, Sir Critic,
If after reading my works of poetry,
Kilmer retracted the claim that he’d never see
“A poem lovely as a tree”.
Would you think me great,
If my fingertips grazed black tie keys
With melodic rhythm and poise.
Poor Beethoven’s works discredited
As a madman’s ambient noise.
Would you think me great,
If singing in Cathedrals evoked praise from the saint
And tears from the sinner.
If my presence graced the stage for an operatic duet
With Pavarotti, the grand tenor.
Would you think me great,
If my theories and equations
Halted cancer’s greedy touch
With an educated hunch
That would make Albert Einstein blush.
Would you think me great,
If to error was not my way
Would you think me great, Sir Critic,
With your title stripped away.
“Stereotyped”
I’m a Christian so I’m judgmental,
But I’m an artist so I’m open-minded.
I’m skinny so I don’t eat,
But I’m a baker so I’m obese.
I’m a middle child so I’m invisible,
But I’m American so I’m outspoken.
I have a boyfriend so I’m in love,
But I’m a female so I’m just emotional.
I teach aerobics so I’m fit,
But I’m southern so I’m lazy.
I’m blonde so I’m stupid,
But I’m in college so I’m educated.
I’m a dancer so I have rhythm,
But I’m a white girl so I can’t dance.
I’m a writer so I’m crazy,
But I’m published so I’m credited.
I’m a hippie so I do drugs,
But I’m conservative so I’m clean.
I am all that you think I am,
Just a stereotyped identity.
But I’m an artist so I’m open-minded.
I’m skinny so I don’t eat,
But I’m a baker so I’m obese.
I’m a middle child so I’m invisible,
But I’m American so I’m outspoken.
I have a boyfriend so I’m in love,
But I’m a female so I’m just emotional.
I teach aerobics so I’m fit,
But I’m southern so I’m lazy.
I’m blonde so I’m stupid,
But I’m in college so I’m educated.
I’m a dancer so I have rhythm,
But I’m a white girl so I can’t dance.
I’m a writer so I’m crazy,
But I’m published so I’m credited.
I’m a hippie so I do drugs,
But I’m conservative so I’m clean.
I am all that you think I am,
Just a stereotyped identity.