By Lindsey Griffin
An IBM employee sold us our bedroom furniture in the midst of a home makeover. When we met him, the empty walls in his ranch had recently been painted wine and mocha. Paintings of lions leaned against cabinets. We sat on his new leather couch while he offered us beers. The dressers were in the garage. They belonged to his ex who hadn’t bothered to pick them up for a year and so were accumulating spiders.
The ad for our dining room table advertised “Comfortable seats for long conversations,” and the couple selling it were yoga instructors who needed more space for classes. It took two trips to transport the table and chairs—the couple’s first—to our house and when we returned for the last load, it was dark. In the driveway, the couple sat in the two remaining chairs, backlit by their front window—the empty yoga room. They were drinking wine.
“We just need a minute” the woman said and lifted her glass.
Our split box spring belonged to a couple downsizing at the behest of their professional organizer, our bookshelves to an ophthalmology fellow moving across country, our living room to a family of four. As we carried off the sofa, the woman counting our cash confided that her husband had loved napping there.
I could go on.
I’ve never felt attached to these pieces of furniture, though I remember anticipating that I would. My husband and I acquired them through Craigslist ads in a week’s time after a move from Miami, Florida, to Rochester, Minnesota. We were renting our first house, and I’d believed, mistakenly, that the sooner we had furniture, the sooner we would belong. I weeded and mulched the flowerbeds. I built a vegetable garden. I cleaned and arranged extensively. But the house seemed filled with the residue of other people’s lives, and I never could shake the sense that we, too, were just passing through.
This tension between the human desire to shape and control the environments in which we exist in order to feel safe and connected and the reality that no amount of housekeeping can stave off transience and fragility is a theme in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Rightly so, the novel explores this tension through objects and by challenging common perceptions of home and homemaking.
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Marilynne Robinson[/caption]
In the novel, the protagonist, Ruthie, and her sister Lucille are raised by their grandmother, Sylvia Foster, after their mother drives a borrowed car off of a cliff. Sylvia is an expert housekeeper, who despite a life of loss, continues to carry out the daily activities of rearing children with grace and reverence.
When Sylvia dies, her youngest daughter, Sylvie, comes to raise Ruthie and Lucille. Sylvie has been living the life of a transient and is never able to adjust to her mother’s home. She doesn’t unpack her suitcase, sleeps fully dressed and in shoes, prefers to eat in the dark, cheap food she has foraged. Despite her best intentions, she is no housekeeper. She believes housekeeping is about the accumulation and ordering of things, but finds no value in the activity. Eventually, the objects of the home are destroyed or abandoned allowing the redemptive possibilities of loneliness and transience to surface.
For my husband and me, the life of our furniture is brief. Before we move to an apartment in Denver three years later, I sell that table to a baker. I put the couches out by the curb. Two are picked up. The third is taken for a joyride by drunk teenagers who later deposit it in a neighbor’s lawn a block away. When the angry neighbor visits us on the eve of our departure, our truck already packed in the driveway, she wants to know what we were going to do about the sofa.
It is a conundrum. We have never loved this sofa. Our dog has eaten the underside of the cushions. There are jelly stains and crayon marks from the children who owned it first. We have never found it suitable for napping. My husband and I carry the sofa into the alley beside our house.
A friend, upon hearing our plight, arrives with a ceramic saw and an idea. It is dark, but at this point it is easier to disassemble the couch and recycle its parts than to have it hauled away. So, by the headlights of our car, my husband begins sawing off an armrest. I dismantle the other. It is strangely freeing. Then we work on the sofa frame, piece-by- piece, until there is only foam, torn fabric, and severed wood.
This post is part of our annual Lit Counts series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop—is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 6 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!
Lindsey Griffin is a member of the Book Project and an editor for the museum of americana, a literary review. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, Image, Saw Palm,
