Recently, one of my housemates received a chair in the mail. A 1970's art deco chair, faux-white snakeskin with a chrome bottom. The chair was not in a package, but rather completely assembled. No stickers, no packing slips, nothing attached to it. It sat there right outside the main door, fully put together and just hanging out waiting to be used. Or maybe it was already used? Could whomever delivered a couple Amazon boxes with it have simply been returning the chair, as if they borrowed it? I dragged the boxes and chair inside, perplexed.
I sent a picture to my friend, inquiring if he knew anything about the chair. Initially, he did not. A few moments passed where I began to make some sort of connection with the chair. It looked remarkably similar to one of the chairs in my bedroom. In fact, it looked exactly like that chair. What sorcery is this?, I asked myself. Someone did borrow the chair! Could she have just bought the exact same chair? Given the rare style, how could that be possible?
I found out later that she did, in fact, purchase the chair after researching the model of the one in my bedroom. Neither chairs are mine, so she probably had the model already in mind when she looked to buy the other one for her own space.
The chair in my bedroom does not sit in front of a desk. It is not used for human posteriors, nor the bottoms of any other beings for that matter. It is used as a tossing location for the clothes I may have just worn, or those in weekly rotation to stay cool or warm around the house. Shorts, sweatshirts, maybe some socks. Basic things. It became the convenient place to keep my clothes from laying on the ground, something which I have grown to despise.
In the months prior to coming here, I was tossing clothes into a laundry basket in a bedroom in New York City. The bedroom was small, but ample enough to fit a small chair in the corner by the window. Over the course of every week, a small mound of fabrics piled up in that chair. Some would tumble off and under the bed, potentially lost until someone decided to sweep the floor. Eventually, I sat a small laundry basket on the chair, better able to capture everything tossed its way.
Before New York, I was doing the same thing in Columbus. A high-back chair right by the bed. No laundry basket this time. Enough chair to go around for everything to stay off the damn floor.
I often wonder if this chair use is hereditary.
The most significant chair of my youth sat right in the kitchen. The kitchen itself presented a mild conundrum, as it was rather tiny. Possibly just the right size for someone living alone, or perhaps a couple, but not for the four of us. There was a small table in the kitchen that seated four, but in reality could only seat two at a time, unless someone took the time to pull the table out from against the wall and fridge while adding another chair. That didn't happen often with us, save for a few dinners when I was young. We didn't have a dining room, so it was either this table or somewhere else to chomp on food - usually my sister and I on the floor using the coffee table and my parents on the couch using separate TV tray tables. The kitchen table sat with one long side flush against a wall, one of the chairs squished between the table and the refrigerator.
The chair for the edge against the wall actually sat at the far end of the kitchen, right next to the microwave stand and side door exit. It was a good place for the chair, away from almost everything and out of the way of pedestrian traffic. Once we ceased eating in the kitchen as a family, this chair became much like the one in my current bedroom and the others before it. Not a single person sat in that chair. And why should they? It wasn't near anything. Perhaps if you enjoyed sitting while waiting for your popcorn to pop. But that never happened. This chair had one purpose and one purpose only -
The resting place for my mother's enormous pocketbook.
I'm not quite sure of the modern terminology for such a thing. Handbag, purse, hell if I know. But what I do know is this thing had a lot of pockets. It sat firmly in the place many bottoms would. Only they did not, because they weren't allowed to. At least that was the unspoken protocol. This chair was for the pocketbook. That's it. Maybe an umbrella draped over the back. If you accidentally left something on the chair while the pocketbook was out with my mother, that something would be on the table when she returned. What if I needed an extra chair for guests coming over? You get another chair from somewhere else, that's what. This was a chair of impenetrable fortitude. It sat there, looking at you, taunting you, daring you to cross it. Do something to it. Move it? No. Put her pocketbook on the table? Don't even think about it. Put some of your belongings on it? Who the hell do you think you are?
I try not to imagine what would ravage my mind if I were to wake up one morning and the chair by my side is gone, with my clothes on the floor. Who the hell...