Julie R. Enszer
My Mother’s Furniture
House
Moving back to my childhood home with my wife, our two dogs and cat, was a fluke. Our newly rescued pup ran afoul of the law, or at least the local animal control; he could no longer live in our home; he was banned from the county. Exiled from our loving arms for eighteen days, he lived in a crate. I visited daily bringing him treats, taking him on walks, lying with him and crying, while we dithered about where to live. Rent a house somewhere? Buy a small cottage in Michigan or West Virginia? We explored every option, but nothing was quick and easy. My father was moving out of the family home, a two-story colonial in the city, to a ranch in the township. Could we live on Handley Street while we sort this all out? I asked him one day. Yes, he said. Our fate was sealed. Two days before Thanksgiving we drove to Michigan in two separate cars. I picked up our outlaw dog on the way, the cat sat in the passenger seat; my beloved drove our aging Saint Bernard. Fourteen hours later we were all together, safe, in my childhood home.
Royal Blue Couch
For a spell, my mother collected couches, shoehorning as many as possible into the living room and the family room. At one point, she had six couches in the 1,500 square foot house. When we arrived, there were only two. The royal blue was designed to seat three. I cannot remember when my parents bought it. Perhaps when we moved to Handley Street. Perhaps earlier. I have no memories of the house without that couch. It must have been forty years old and it felt like it. The cushions, hard, uncomfortable. The springs broken. It was like sitting on a bench with an overused, crushed, matted cushion. When your bottom finally reached the couch you were nearly lying on the floor. The fabric was worn, not quite threadbare, but that was in its future. I knew the first day we arrived the couch was uncomfortable. I did not know I would sit there every day for nine months. I did not know it would be left in the house for the next owner.
Full Bed
When we arrive, we camp out in my childhood bedroom; sleep in my childhood bed. A full-size mattress on an antique frame. Mother had the set refinished in the early 1980s after my father’s grandmother died; my mother was the only family member that wanted the set. I remember the transformation from dark and musty to clean and bright. The set filled one of the bedrooms in the three-bedroom colonial: a full-size bed, dresser, and vanity with a large round mirror. Each of us kids called that room our own at some point in our lives.
Now here I was in my mid-forties, smashed on a full size bed with my wife of nearly twenty years. Our mastiff pup happily jumping up on the bed trying to join us for sleep. Barely enough room on the bedroom floor for two dogs, the cat. When we woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, one of the critters always yelped as a dark foot landed on a paw or tail. I told my wife, In a day or two, my dad will move permanently to the new house, we’ll take the queen bed in the master.
Master Bed
Except, even in the master was not a queen. Another full-size bed, where my parents slept together for over forty-five years. It had been a decade since the beloved and I had slept on a queen-sized bed. We had smaller dogs then. The past years have been on a king, particularly since the law-breaking new pup is a bed sleeper, happy to cuddle up or sprawl across a bed. My parents’ bed smelled like them. Why wouldn’t it? Forty-five years. Even though my dad boasted it was a new mattress only ten years old. We slept on it for a month. On the last day of the year, we went to the furniture store and bought a king size bed with a Hollywood frame. I knew everyone in my family would mock the extravagance, but I could not sleep on a full one more second.
Closet
After my mother’s death, I spent the first week clearing her closets: shoes, coats, sweaters, jewelry and make up. For eight or ten hours a day, I shoveled clothes into garbage bags to donate and piled used make up—rouge, foundation, eye shadow, lipstick—into garbage bags to discard. I could not throw out her possessions fast enough. The labor of cleaning, sorting, discarding was exhausting but less draining than crying. There was sadness at her death, but not enough sadness to stop the cleaning frenzy. It was almost as if that was my mourning—to discard her things.
The summer after her death, I came home for a week to help my father. I cleaned more of the house: more clothes, more towels, more jewelry. All of the things she hoarded, I organized then discarded. Some donations, some giving to friends and other family members, but so much went to Goodwill or to the curb as rubbish. It made me feel good to put her life in order posthumously. I wanted my father to have a home that was more orderly, less cluttered, less filled to the rafters with things of my mother. I wanted him to have a second act in his life, with his new lover, a man; after forty-five years of marriage, my father is gay.
Pots and Pans
When I graduated from college, all I wanted was for mother to give me things to help me furnish my early apartments: a royal blue couch, a burgundy upholstered chair, a set of pots and pans. My mother would not give me anything other than money. She was generous, but not generous with her possessions. These are my things, she would say, I worked and spent my money on them. Around me, my friend’s mother unloaded their used household items on their children, my friends, as they upgraded, downsized and simplified. Not my mother. She held on to it all. Wedging a bit here, stuffing items there.
Twenty-five years later, I could have anything she owned but I wanted none of it. There was something liberating about being able to donate or throw away everything that she wore, everything that she touched, everything that she loved but would not share.
Antique Bedroom Set
Early in our stay, the outlaw mastiff jumps on the antique bed, breaking one of the hooks where the rails attach to the baseboard. We put the box springs and mattress on the floor; store the frame off to the side of the room. One day I take the frame to the local furniture refinisher—the best, most expensive one in town. With a moment of remorse, I want to care for something my mother loved; something she knew and constantly affirmed had value. The man in the shop tells me the bed frame is not worth what it will cost me to fix it. I tell him, I don’t care, I want it fixed. He fixes it. I move it with the dresser and vanity to my father’s new house. It fills his guest room. When we visit the beloved and I will sleep again in that small full-sized bed. Someday, I will arrange transport for these three pieces to whatever home I am living in then. This bedroom set, now repaired again, is my inheritance; most of what working families own has little value, but this set links me to previous generations.
Cabbage Roses
Mother loved mauve. If she could, I think she would have decorated the whole house in mauve. She also loved roses, particularly cabbage roses. Two accent chairs featured for years in her living room combined these passions: painted white wood with an upholstered seat and back featuring mauve cabbage roses. They were not to my taste and already moved to my father’s new home when we arrived. Relief.
A few months later, my father tells me his boyfriend wants them reupholstered. I am surprised at how rage wells within me. The chairs are perfect, I think. The chairs are the perfect expression of mother, I think. I think: If you do not like them, you should sell them, give them to someone who will love them. You cannot take her things and upholster over them for a new life. I do not say any of this. Clearly he can.
Curio Cabinet
When we finally have a date to depart the childhood home, and we are serious about emptying the house so it can be listed for sale when we leave, the small curio cabinet that has sat in the front room, next to my desk becomes my target. I empty the china treasures inside—tea cups and saucers, plates, angels with bells. I give a few items to people who might treasure them and donate the rest. I photograph the cabinet and create a listing on Craigslist at a reasonable price. It is not money I am after; I want someone to love this cabinet like mother. After months of discarding her possessions with glee and rage and anger and sadness, now I want to honor her, placing these final things in homes where people will love them as she did.
Someone responds to the online ad immediately. I strike quickly in response; we text back and forth. The price is fine, but she doesn’t have a car. She lives in the next town over, a 25-minute drive. I grudgingly agree to bring it to her.
I load the cabinet into the car on a gorgeous Michigan summer day and drive the highway with the windows open. When I arrive, the woman doesn’t quite have enough money for the cabinet or for the ten-dollar delivery fee we negotiated. She also does not have any teeth. She is younger than I but looks at least twenty years older; life has been hard for her. She tells me that she wants to put her son’s trophies in it; her son died earlier this year, and her grandmother died just today. The litany of grief and suffering feels too much, but standing at the curb, taking out the curio cabinet, which I had wrapped carefully in my mother’s towels, I know I cannot imagine the pain of this woman’s life. I also know mother would never approve selling her treasure to the woman who stands before me. Still, I take her money; she carries the cabinet away. Driving home, I realize I cannot keep the money. I donate the cash to the local homeless shelter before I even return home. If she were not dead, if my mother were hear to tell this story, to see these actions, she would not know where to direct her rage at me first: selling her treasured curio cabinet or wasting the money on charity. I can hear her say: You could have gotten something nice for yourself with that money, Julie. You kids never knew the value of a dime.
Dining Room Table
When we live on Handley Street and my wife works from home, she sits at my mother’s dining room table. Nearly pristine after years of wear, the dining room set was still well-loved, well-used. I marvel at how mother cared for it. She vacuumed weekly yet there are no nicks or dings to the base. The table top is unmarked after years of protection by custom-made pads with felt and cushions that unfold over each section, each leave as the table expands or contracts. During our months in the house we manage not to damage it; a triumph. Most wooden objects in our life carry some tell-tale scratch, some circle of sweat from a glass of Diet Coke.
On the final day before moving, my cousin’s son and his girlfriend move the table with great care from Handley Street to my dad’s new digs. They carry it carefully into his basement where his boyfriend wants it for family card nights. I am glad to be leaving town; I never want to see my mother’s dining room table in someone else’s basement. She endured so many indignities; what a blessing she never has to see this one.
Glassware
I love my father. I want him to be happy, but when I go to his new house where he lives with his gay paramour and see my mother’s furniture—her cabbage rose chairs, her multiple buffets, one in a light oak the other red oak—I feel rage and loss and grief. When I see my mother’s glassware on the table, when I see my mother’s desk in my father’s new office, I miss my mother. I hold for a moment or even longer the anger she would have, seeing her beautiful things being used without her.
Perhaps while discarding clothes and shoes and make up, I should have also burned her furniture. Perhaps it was my responsibility as her daughter to ensure that no one had any happiness with her furniture outside of her. That might have been the only right and proper way to honor mother. That would have made her happy. She would have felt that just and right. Her things were hers; they were not to be shared.
Now the moment to honor her wishes, to continue her irrational actions, is gone. Here is her furniture. In a house she never saw. In a life of my father she never imagined. Her furniture, her glassware, her table, her chairs. Here are her things being used not by her, not in the ways she intended. I am sad for my mother. My father and his new lover are using them as if they are their own. Which, of course, they are.
Cedar Chest
When I departed Saginaw as a seventeen-year-old in the late 1980s, I wanted a cedar chest. Honestly, I wanted a hope chest. Like the women in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, I wanted a cedar chest to hold household linens: embroidered napkins and sheets, hand knit throws, a homemade quilt, and crocheted pillow cases. I wanted linens that would last a lifetime and go with some mythical china and crystal in my future.
My mother’s cedar chest always had an old record player on top of it. I never saw her open it. Later I discover she kept fabric in it. She purchased more fabric than she ever sewed, and she stopped sewing at some point, perhaps when it became cheaper to buy clothes than to make them. Still the cedar chest smells inside and is in perfect shape outside. I wanted it as my hope chest. I wanted to sew pillowcases and embroider them and store them in the chest. I wanted to gather table clothes and cloth napkins to save for my future home. My mother would never allow that. It was her chest, hers. If I wanted one, I would have to get a job and earn money and buy my own.
I left Saginaw with a footlocker from K-Mart, a set of cotton/poly blend sheets for an extra long twin (what was in the dorms at Michigan) and navy blue towels. My mother said the footlocker was just like her cedar chest. I knew that it was not. Nearly thirty years later, the cedar chest that I coveted is now mine. Not only mother’s but my grandmother’s cedar chest, too.
They seem like an anachronism. Does anyone still receive one as a gift in her young womanhood? Do young women gather sheets and napkins and tablecloths and quilts and save them for a future family? Does anyone embroider? Crochet? Quilt? Sew? In truth, sheets and napkins are more disposable than they ever were for my grandmother and my mother. Who has a quilt that lasts a lifetime?
In my mind, I have been filling my mother’s cedar chest for years and years with the things I want in my life that my mother never had: hope for a better day, a cheery disposition, the ability to take difficult news and information and not turn it into depression, the ability to see people as good. All the things that mother never had I store in her cedar chest. I want to build my adult life with these things.
Perhaps by preserving these two cedar chests I am yearning for a time that has passed, a time that will never return. The cedar chests will not carry the linens of my future, though they carry a connection to my past. The era of cedar chests may be over; young women may not have them or want them. That is fine, each generation deserves its own talisman, its own objects to fill with hopes and dreams and desires. What vexes me still is: who will care for these two cedar chests when I am gone?
Upholstered Chair
When I was a child, my mother refinished a chair. I remember her labor on that wooden chair. The thick orange goop that removed the old stain and paint. The hours of sanding. Then washing and staining. She took it to an upholsterer and had them put on a new seat. Thick burgundy wool over a solid, buoyant cushion. The chair sat in the living room for years. At some point, my father took it up into one of the bedrooms now converted into his office. He sat on it while he worked on his computer. When we come to live in the house to save our dog, my cat Vita takes the chair as her day bed.
It is one of the pieces of furniture that I had wanted as a young woman for my own. I planned to move it when we moved out, but it was tucked away in a corner and amid the chaos of packing and loading the U-Haul, I forgot about it. I took it in the car to my father’s new house. He will use it. Perhaps someday I will move it with the antique bedroom set. I am not sad about not having the upholstered chair in my new home. My mother’s furniture brought her no lasting joy, no satisfaction in life. Her furniture was beautiful and pleasurable in moments, but it never made her happy. I know from living in her house, sleeping in her bed, using her dishes, that my own happiness will never come from something of hers. Now that I finally have some of her possessions in my home, I know that just as they never made her happy, they will not make me happy either. I can care for her furniture but must make different choices for life.
Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is the author of five poetry collections, including The Pinko Commie Dyke with illustrations by Isabel Paul (Indolent Books, 2024), and editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. Enszer publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. More at www.JulieREnszer.com.
