The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful. In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. Her delivery transformed a banal portrait of moneyed life into a wry critique of that moneyed life. She was singing songs written by someone else, the notes explained, but she rewrote them with the way she sang. The lyric I burned a hole in the dining room table is tethered, in my mind, to the liner notes of a Billie Holiday album that I borrowed from the library in college. I loved to burn things, but I felt remorse over the table, which I also loved. The cabinetmaker, who smoked a pipe, supplied me with matches.
As a child, I burned a hole in the dining room table. This was after the cabinetmaker went to a nursing home and his furniture went away too. He had just visited a warehouse full of furniture made of unfinished pine. I hate furniture, my father once murmured. The ammunition box that I found on the curb and made into a coffee table is in the backyard, planted full of marigolds. They’re in the basement now, reduced to lumber. The apartment we just left was furnished with shelves that John made out of cheap pine. The tiny dresser sits atop my dresser, which is from IKEA. They’re in the basement, wrapped in newspaper. I still have the tiny corner cabinet with lattice doors, the tiny hutch with brass knobs, and the tiny dining room table with expertly turned legs.
He filled our dining room with his furniture and then he made tiny replicas of that furniture with the machines he brought in the truck. He arrived in a truck so heavy that it made a dent in the driveway. There wasn’t any furniture in the house where I grew up until a German cabinetmaker moved in with us. I hang curtains to hide the emptiness, but it remains empty. I’m sorry, I said awkwardly, we live here. Last week a Mexican woman with four children rang our doorbell and asked if our front room was for rent. We’ve been eating on our back stoop for three months. We just bought a house but we don’t have furniture yet. I think there are limits, I say, to what mass production can produce. We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last. What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying? We’re on our way home from furniture store, again.
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