Chairs
by Ada Wilde
When I was growing up, my father built chairs. He worked all hours of the day—early, late, any time, really. I didn’t see my father much because he was always so busy crafting new designs and carving intricate details into high backs, low backs, and all the backs in between. He made seat-back chairs, too. Ones that looked like squishy grandma faces or dough pushed through the seams of a frozen biscuit tube. These made me laugh. They made my little brother, Jimmy, laugh too. My father also made seats. He worked long hours on those, carving the perfect cradle for all kinds of butts—big butts, small butts, medium and oblong butts. Our father often used his own butt as a mold, sitting, standing, and shifting in the seat bottoms until the depressions felt just right.
Though we weren’t allowed in my father’s chair-building workshop, I always found a way to spy on his latest designs. My favorite projects were the ones where he worked with leather. I called them leather days. On these days, I would slip across the side yard of our towering apartment building, creeping past the neglected azalea bushes and tip-toeing around the drooping dogwood tree on the corner. When I got to my father’s work shed out back, I would peer over the jagged, wooden frame of the side window, trying to avoid splinters in my pinkies. Watching my father work was how I got a really good look at him. He was strong when he was stretching leather, like the strongest chair builder that ever lived. The rhythmic motion of his arms and the tiny pulses of his muscles worked in tandem as he wrestled flaps of leather, tugging them until they hugged the foam squares. The punch of his nail gun resounded through the shed and inside my head like the sharp snap of a rubber band to skin.
Sometimes, when the window was cracked, I could smell the smoky scent of leather wafting out, a hint of burnt cherries on a good leather day. I liked the cherries because they reminded me of visiting Grandpa in the mountains. He was stoic like my father, smoking his pipe while I stood downwind to catch a sniff. I remember the quality of the air, tangled in smoke, the dew’s misty droplets still fresh on the ground, undisturbed in the hours before the sun woke. I looked like I was hopping from stone to stone to avoid the wet grass, kicking my feet through loose gravel in search of sleeping bugs. Though really, I was trying to get a whiff of Grandpa’s tobacco—Captain Black. Cherry blend. That’s what the container said, anyway. I remember because the label had a picture of a ship that Jimmy liked.
Chair building sounds grand, but the problem with my father’s profession was that he wasn’t around all that much. And because our mother had died two years earlier from a cancer in her left boob, Jimmy and I were pretty much on our own, although I guess we were kind of on our own before that, too. But after our mother died, it got worse, and we sometimes thought of our father as not so much a father as a ghost—a ghost chair builder. Everyone assumed our home was full of chairs. But, ironically, it was completely devoid of them. During these days, the no chair days, as I liked to call them, Jimmy didn't laugh that much.
Then, one afternoon in early winter, something strange happened. I was on my way home from school when Jimmy came running at me fast, his face all twisted in something awful, his eyes strained with embarrassment and fright. I’ll never forget it because a string of snot in the shape of Florida was slipping down the edge of his left cheek. I thought he was upset because it was the first day of winter break, the second death anniversary of our mother. Jimmy cried on this day every year for an hour or two before passing out from exhaustion, his head pressed into the crook of my arm or resting heavily on my thigh. But today was different. Jimmy was different.
Despite November and the chill in the air, his hands were sticky and hot as he pulled me quickly through the last three blocks to our home. When we passed Maria’s Bakery, I smelled biscuits, and at the Corner Store, I smelled sweet, curling fingers of smoke. Jimmy, Jimmy, what’s wrong? I asked over and over, but Jimmy wouldn’t answer. He just ran faster, dragging me behind him like an old blankie.
And then I saw it. Beyond the edge of our street and past the tangled, contorted faces of onlookers was my childhood home. The home where Jimmy and I lived. The home where my father lived and worked. The home where mother lived before her boob killed her. But at that moment, as the late afternoon sun tilted wearily from day into dusk, I couldn’t see a home at all; the only thing I could see was my father’s chairs. Every last one pinched between our house and the rest of the world.
Jimmy and I stared in horror, and I felt small and strange, like a bug stuck in the crack of a sidewalk. I tried to count the chairs but gave up. There were high backs and low backs and all the backs in between. There were seat-backs that looked like squishy grandma faces or dough spilling through the cracks backs, only this time we didn’t laugh. There were chairs with leather seat bottoms, some finished and some not, and I swear I could smell burnt cherries. But what Jimmy and I didn’t see that day was our father, the great chair builder—the builder of all those chairs. And after that day, the day of the chairs, I like to call it, we never saw him again.
Ada Wilde is an aspiring writer and MFA candidate at Pacific University. When she is not reading or writing, Ada is outdoors, wandering through the mountains that surround her home in beautiful Durango, Colorado.