Moments

This is the story of how I came to be a piece of furniture. Once upon a time I was a girl. Just the type of girl who loved to swim. The type who wore two braids in her hair because, otherwise, the curls would wrap themselves into ratty knots that drove my mother mad. I was the girl who once broke her arm jumping over a wheelbarrow, the girl with recurring dreams of being chased by horses after witnessing a young soldier being struck in the face by the momentous force of hooves, the blood sinking into the dirt beneath his still head.

At that time, I played mostly with the neighbor boy, Huntz, who was a year younger than me. His parents were lovely and always had treats for us, like salted licorice, even though the war made such things rare. In their home, the war seemed a far-off thing.

His mother would let me sit upon her lap and fold me in, softly, like fresh laundered towels, her hands smelling of potatoes. His father was constantly laughing, with a pipe sticking out from between his lips, he seemed to laugh from his cheeks which would become pink and shiny with the effort. The pipe lived there, in his mouth, and I imagined when he slept, his snores would escape through the small opening and ashy tobacco bits would flit about in the moonlight.

Huntz was alright, but it was his parents that I loved. They were the reason I would come every afternoon and play marbles, stealing glances through the windows while Huntz clicked the glass balls into each other, me watching his plump mother move about in the house. She glided around with the sense of possibility, the vigor of hope.

My own parents kept a bakery and, on one particular day, my father, coated with rye flour and sweat, would not permit me to go to Huntz’s house. He bade me to help my mother around the shop despite my protests. I did small things, like emptying ashtrays. The soldiers smoked more than anyone. They rarely noticed the thin, moonfaced little girl, stepping between them to switch out the dirty tin containers with the clean. Sometimes one of them would be lost in conversation and move to ash his cigarette before I had the new, empty can in place. I would use my hand to catch the grey falling cinder and then wipe my palm against my apron, my hand dusty and smelling of wasted time.

When Huntz and his mother stopped by the bakery, I had been helping all morning and I pleaded with my mother to let me go home with them. Huntz’s mother requested sourdough rolls and a honey cake and I pulled at the edge of my mother’s skirt as she filled the basket with breads. There were two soldiers sipping coffee in the corner, talking in low voices that would erupt into rumbling laughter every few minutes. Jan Meyers came in, delivering our eggs, and walked backwards through the small swinging door with crates in his hands. I heard my father greeting him and talking like men do to each other. I grasped onto my mother and watched her face as she worked, waiting for her to look down with exasperation, which would mean I had won my release. Just when I could sense her wavering, my father came from the back.

“Stop hanging onto your mother like an infant, you are too old for such behavior,” he said.

My cheeks warmed. I had a sense of every single body in the bakery. My father’s face, sweaty with work, and mother’s, worn away in fatigue, somehow made it all so real and humiliating. Huntz looked at me sheepishly. The soldiers were silent. I even felt the presence of Jan Meyers, in the back. But Huntz’s mother, she had a countenance of such compassion that, when I saw it, I ran from behind the counter and buried my face in her side, sobbing in self pity. My indulgent tears lasted only moments but I left my face in her skirt for fear of my parents’ admonishing.

When I finally lifted my eyes from behind the safe folds of fabric I saw my mother’s expression, not angry but pained. To illicit such emotion in her was rare. I followed Huntz and his mother to a table at the other end of the bakery and she let me eat a bit of honey cake while I made a pretense of recovering from my fit. I watched my mother’s every move. She and father had gone back to work and she ignored me now. I wanted to go to her. I wanted to sit with her and put my hands on her face, to follow the creases of her eyes and forehead with my fingers and feel the slight pulse of blood in the veins of her temple but could not find a way towards her, I could not find the momentum. So I stayed with Huntz and his mother at the little table and just followed her purposeful motions with my eyes.

The air raid sirens started only after the bomb hit. I could hardly differentiate their inhuman screaming from my own, beneath the caved-in roof. Those of us at the table were buried for thirty-four hours before we were dug out; but alive and dug out we were. Only ashes, smelling of rye and flesh, remained of the far end of the bakery where the counter and back room had been located. In the end there were no graves- only one small plaque, put up years later, where my parent’s names were listed with the rest of the dead.

But that is not when I fully transformed. That was merely the moment my insides hardened and I gained a capacity to store pain in secret places. The moment, so many years in the future, would be far less violent, unspectacular. Like the look from a mother to her silly child, the look she may give a thousand times over the course of that child’s life. The significance of insignificance. The tiny moment when small things converge just at the right time to make that time the time when everything changes.

So I sit here now, as furniture, in my own home, thinking on that day. I am pushed from table, to kitchen, to bedroom, like there is a manic decorator that cannot decide where to place me. Visitors address the people around me, look at the people around me, their eyes roaming past my uneven countenance, like the battered chair I have become.

That day I had baked a cake for my best friend’s seventy-fifth birthday, placing the green plastic cover over it to protect the frosting while I drove it to her house. After coffee and a game of dominoes I went alone to the hospital to get a biopsy of a suspicious spot on my lung. I went alone to keep the truth safe from reality. The surgery went well and I was up and about, thinking already about returning home. And in that moment, when certainty reveals itself as nothing, all the moments in my life collected and glued themselves to the insides of my arteries, so that they stopped up the flow to my brain. In this moment, so small, I am changed forever into solid wood and springs and dusty rotted stuffing. I am no good even to sit on, to rest weary bones. I am that chair, that gets put in the corner, the chair, possibly, you might put your purse or coat on, but nothing more than that.

Twenty some years before this, when I was fifty-one, I traveled back home for the first time since the bombing and I walked down the streets I had once ran through as a child. I pressed my palms against the bricks of the rebuilt wall of what once was the bakery, some of the bricks reused for this new structure. I moved my hand along to see if I could sense a warmness from the ones that had made up my home, some sort of sensation but there was only a porous coarseness against my flesh.

I stopped in a market to buy cigarettes and there was a man in there, flipping through some magazines and holding a pack of chewing gum in his hand, it seemed, he intended to buy. The way his face moved was so familiar and I felt a gritty sparking inside. Our eyes met and his recognition of me was undeniable, his face shook as if in tremor, his cheeks so much like his father’s. Putting down the magazine, he walked out of the store in such a hurry that he unintentionally stole that pack of gum. Huntz, even after all that time, could not look at me. I think he saw what I see now, when I catch a glimpse of reflection, and there is that drooping face, that old peeling fabric; the pain and consequence of the singular moment.