It’s still in its box. The box is on the rug in your tiny living room. The sisal rug is also new, its edges curled up at either of the short ends. It’s tan and ugly and hard, made of rope or something. It was on your list before you even entered the store because it was cheap.
You imagine the pieces composing the whole before you pry open the cardboard. In the store, it looked interesting, even though it was also cheap. Rather than four legs, it had a sleigh-like curve that somehow held the rest of the frame in a feat of Scandinavian ingenuity that defied gravity. But when you peek into the box, all you see is chopped driftwood.
Next to the box, on the rug, is the orange toolbox that you also bought at the superstore. It is spartan: a Phillips-head, a flathead, a hammer, pliers, a wrench. The box says the chair comes with an Allen wrench. You’ve heard of that before, you’re not sure from where, but you don’t know what it looks like or how it’s any different from the wrench in the orange toolbox.
You tear the cardboard past the label with the name — the Flørgengoüfen, or something — and shake the contents onto the floor. A small plastic bag full of metal pieces drops with a clatter that the hard rug does nothing to muffle. You wince and try not to think about the guy who lives below you and is enthusiastic about any reason to knock on your door. You try to make sense of the pieces, identifying their purpose in constructing the final product, but you lose track. This disturbs your focus enough that you tiptoe to the kitchen and put 15 pretzels into a bowl, licking the salt off your fingers.
You’re back on the rug, a blob of chewed pretzel stuck on top of your molars. You grind at it with your tongue in a futile attempt to dislodge it. You spot your reflection in an empty frame propped against another box. You can imagine the dimple on your right cheek showing, the one you inherited from your father. His used to fold into itself whenever you, as a toddler, announced the sudden urge to “dance a show” and he knew that meant he had to introduce you, an emcee to an audience of stuffed animals.
You try and fail to determine whether he’d be proud to see you, surrounded by pieces, attempting to make something that would support a human.
This is your first time living by yourself. In college, you shared a room with an extroverted, bulimic government major who lied about wetting the bed when she drank too much. In your one year since, you lived with an introverted artist who spread mud on canvas and left her pieces to dry on the tiny balcony, rain or shine. But you’re a graduate student now, and it seems important for you to have space to call your own. You didn’t realize that this meant you’d have to acquire things, build things, arrange things. Say what you will about the mud artist, at least she came with something to sit on.
The Allen wrench, it turns out, is a tiny crank with no further mechanism. You’re dubious about its ability to strengthen the chair’s structure. The instructions have no words, only stick figures and arrows and checks and Xs and Os. There’s a drawing at the beginning that shows two figures, sticky arms over one another’s shoulders, one sticky thumb raised, with a check next to it. Next to it, a lone stick figure sports a frown with an X over its body. You’re meant to put this chair together with another person, but you’re in a new city and the only person you know is Mr. Downstairs with his extended movie quotations and refrains of “If you ever want to hang out…” But that warning exists for the elderly and the weak. You don’t need a second.
You had a second. Morgan’s body returns to your mind as your hands are busy trying to twist the crank to join the L-shaped piece to the base. You usually keep these thoughts from reforming, happy to have forgotten them —and her — and troubled to find them returning. She had breasts, the only things you’ve ever classified as “supple.” She was 18 and you were 14, but she convinced you that you were mature for your age. You didn’t mind, then. You wondered if your breasts would look like hers someday. (They don’t.) You liked it when she put what little breasts you had in her mouth.
The two of you were on the same lacrosse team, she a senior and you a freshman. A previous summer spent at sports camp gave you two months to pay attention to her popularity. She laughed often and loudly, often at others’ expenses, but this was the time of life when cruelty usually paid off.
It was an exciting secret. During sleepovers, you told your parents that she needed to stay on the spare mattress on the lavender rug in your bedroom because she had a bad back. You weren’t totally lying, she had to wear a brace when she played sports. When you heard the creak of your parents’ door close shut for the night and the sound of David Letterman’s voice blaring from beneath it, you would pretend you weren’t coming down from atop your bed. You’d feign sleep, waiting to see if she’d fall asleep without you visiting.
But you both knew it would happen eventually. She had only ever come to you the first time, when she told you she needed a hug and slept better when she could cuddle. You were fascinated that someone found something in you to be attractive. To your knowledge, that had never happened before. You looked nothing like the women on TV or your brother’s wall. In a heartbeat you had become interesting.
You would have to go to her. You would hug and kiss and peel off t-shirts, but never pants. Neither of you ever tried because you were both too scared, grossed out and clueless as to what to do with it down there. You told her that her arms felt “like home” because you thought that sounded poetic. When she first told you that she liked girls, you said “So what?” because you knew it would make you seem beyond your years.
Thinking back, you don’t know whether it is something that ruined you in the way that you were supposed to be ruined as a child fooling around with an adult. Were you a child? She told you otherwise and you believed her because you wanted to believe her.
You swear aloud and shush yourself quickly, in case Mr. Downstairs is listening, when you get a piece of skin stuck between the Allen wrench and the screw. You think it’s a screw. Is it a nut? What is a bolt? The instructions only have a picture. You realize it’s the wrong screw/nut and parse through the others lying atop the rug. You realize you probably should have organized them into little groups to begin with, but the instructions didn’t suggest anything like that. They should have.
As you search for the correct screw beneath the coffee table, which you assembled yesterday, you can feel the grooves of the sisal rug boring into your knees. When you return to sitting, you run over them with your fingers and consider another bowl of pretzels. But you’re not hungry, and the glob is still stuck in your teeth. You just don’t want to think about him, which is the real reason you didn’t want to think about her.
Your father believed it ruined you. After months of visits, he walked in when you were both in your bras on your bed, celebrating because she had just been accepted to her first choice and it was in a city nearby. He looked at you with the same shock he sported the time you walked in on him peeing in your brother’s sink because the door to the toilet was closed.
You avoided him for the rest of the day, then the rest of the week. He never spoke of it, but your mother called you into their bedroom for a talk on priorities and putting family first. She told you that you owed everything to her and your father. She called you an ingrate — the word she saved for the direst offenses — and told you all that she would be taking away. You knew this was borne of the encounter, though you couldn’t figure out how and she was refusing to connect the dots. You were too terrified to ask her to. Someone found out. Did that make it true? As she spoke, you were wondering how he described it to her. You were wondering whether this meant you are automatically characterized differently to the world, accepting new words to describe you that didn’t apply before someone knew.
The back of the chair proves difficult. There are four lateral slats that are supposed to connect two vertical poles, but it takes you an embarrassingly long time to figure out that you’re trying to assemble them upside-down. He would have known right away, the same way he laughed when you thought pedaling your bike backwards would make you travel in reverse.
He had opened the door for you to speak to him again when he asked you to spend a weekend at home helping him paint the bench by the lamppost in the front yard. You didn’t dare ask him a question or otherwise open a line of conversation, even though you wanted to tell him that it was only her. You don’t really like women. You don’t really like anybody.
You should have told him. He was always a quiet man. You used to keep a list of his interests in your mind, but it was short: the Rolling Stones, the Russian language and how funny it was that his mother pronounced “shrimp” as “srimp.” But you both worked in silence. You wondered the whole time whether he really needed you or he just wanted to be near you again. You assumed the latter, but you never knew.
Two months later, when your mother had called to tell you he collapsed, you rushed to the hospital because it felt right. Rushing, that is. In the city, “rushing” just means going. In reality you locked your door, walked to the subway, and waited for the next local train while listening to Let It Bleed play faintly from a fellow commuter’s headphones because there was nothing else to do but picture him clutching his heart and falling to the restaurant floor. You assumed this was how it looked from all of the heart attacks you had seen on TV. You had never seen one in person before.
You rushed from a standstill until the train came, and even then, out of habit, you wondered whether you should wait for the next one to see if it were less crowded before catching yourself. You did finally get the opportunity to power walk across the maze of the hospital, until you found your mother and hugged her. By that time you were crying too.
The two of you entered the room together when the doctor approved. Your arms stayed linked as you approached his bed. “Hi Dad,” you said. “Do you see me?”
If you had been more than just another pair of hands painting that bench, the heart attack had made him forget. You could tell from the moment he looked at you. There was no grogginess in his eyes, as the doctor had warned. It was unquestionable.
He told you to leave. Your mother protested, but he continued to look at you with the kind of disdain that only someone who has left and come back can muster. You left. You couldn’t argue with a man in a hospital gown and goofy soled socks and drool caked to the side of his mouth and sky-blue sheets with little fleurs de lis all over them and wires that slipped under his robe and dirty fingernails and eyes full of filth. It was final. You left, and he died.
You make a mistake. The cushion is supposed to slip over the seat before you attach the arms, forcing you to undo the last two steps in the instructions. Why don’t instructions show you how to undo? Surely you weren’t the first to fuck it up.
Normally, when you think of him, you only let it go so far. You can think of his name but not his image. Or you can hear his voice, but you can’t muster up his smell: a mélange of garden dirt, aftershave and laundry detergent. But now, as you shove the arms back in place, he is entire. You wonder what you should say to him. You wonder if you can still call him “Dad” or if he’ll be upset. You decide to ask him directly, but by that point he’s gone again.
You feel your knees crack as you stand up and step back. The chair is made. You wonder whether you should test it or let it settle, which deep down you know doesn’t really make any sense. But can you sit on a chair that was just built, or is it like the soups that taste better the next day? If you sit on it and it breaks, you will scream. And yet it seems to be holding itself up despite the fact that you can’t figure out where three of the screws are supposed to go and you accidentally bored a hole through the wood beneath the cushion.
You take a breath. You sit. It stays together. And you think of everything else that fell apart.