My pathological attachment to inanimate objects, like furniture and houses, is rather legendary in my household. Objects represent certain people and certain times and they can bring me great joy, great pain, or the kind of catharsis that comes from drowning in whatever emotion the object represents. I'm fairly sure all of my Havisham-esque tendencies began with a piece of my parent's bedroom set.
When I was a small child, I used to love to explore the wilderness that was the top of my mother's dresser. My parents had a pine bed, with matching nightstands and two pine dressers; arrangements of this sort immensely popular in the late 1960s. The glossy, dark quad possessed an aromatic arboraceousness which strongly emanated from it even though the wood hadn't held the form of a tree in quite some time.
The "female" dresser was nine drawers long, far longer than me at the time. I loved running my hands over the slickery surface of it. Mom placed an antique dresser scarf on both her dresser and mine, each embroidered with care by someone who liked flowers and small stitches in pastel colors. Her ivory linen quietly underscored and strikingly juxtaposed a fancy lighted General Electric makeup mirror with a sliding plastic switch. When powered on, it showed what your face might look like in the bright broad daybreak of a scrambling sunlit metro or in the slinky soft swelter of a dusky dimlit disco. There were also Home and Office settings which alternately bathed the skin in pink and green luminosity. I'd put my little face up to the warmth of the bulbs and move the tab deliberately back and forth, casually conjuring a new me in each setting.
Mom loved makeup and I'd open, inspect, smell and sample all of the cosmetics displayed at the ready. Avon products were especially hot back then, and in my mind I can picture both her A-branded treasures as though they were a 1977 beauty buffet, and me, always trying to decide which to savor first.
She had eyeshadow in the boldest colors of amethyst purple and deep sea green. I used to sponge them on my lids but my seven year old hand was no match for their grown up glimmer, and I came out looking bruised instead of beautiful.
She had the Avon Great Blush Frost Stick in a shimmering shade of dark pink, simply called "Rose". Application required a light touch and because my little fist couldn't grasp the toilet paper tube sized cylinder all that well, I'd ineptly paint it on in one of two ways, clown circles or Indian stripes, neither style truly suitable but both instantly glamorous, at least to me.
She had Maybelline eyeliners that she'd wear down to small stubs which I would eventually pocket as a pre-teen; shiny silver metal packaging surrounding a "Nautical Blue" pencil in a fat little scroll. I'd call my father on nights where I was invited to sleep over to friend's houses in the early 1980s and ask him to please deliver to me what I needed; and he knew that meant my sleeping bag, my toothbrush, and one of those castoff silver bullets.
Mom's lip products included an array of Bonne Bell flavored balms, a tube of "Raspberry Ice" Avon satin lipstick and a "Candy Apple" pout maker of unknown origin. The red one tasted awful and although I was tortured by my craving for the color, I couldn't stomach its waxy, plasticine smack.
When Mary Kay parties became popular, Mom came home with a whole menagerie of baby pink-hued compacts and potions. I was dazzled by the social shopping haul and spent weeks studying and getting to know the MK brand as the new items were placed next to the old standards. There were smooth triplet eyeshadows in a case which sounded a satisfying snap upon opening and closing, a clear gloss with a wand that tasted like strawberries in champagne (which I'd realize later when I actually *had* strawberries in champagne) and lip colors which were applied with a tiny retractable paintbrush which seemed like the height of sophistication. In my 9th grade school photo, I'm confidently wearing all of it.
Among all of her cosmetics, the dresser also held Mom's jewelry, a brass footed oval with red velvet lining hiding diminutive tiny treasures, and a couple of my crude attempts at plaster of paris pins which were horrid and would never be rightly tacked onto a wooly lapel. However, their place on the center stage of Mom's dresser was even better as far as I was concerned.
There was one picture that I recall, a windy snapshot of Mom and Dad at the ocean in Florida. Both of them sported khakis and navy blue sweatshirts in an era predating by decades, the trend of matchy and staged family beach photos. Dad had on sunglasses and a Yankees hat. Each was barefoot and smiling. I used to look at the picture and think we as a brood had the best thing going. Then, one day, I saw that Mom had used a brown marker on her hairline in the photo. It looked harsh and contrived and phony and I demanded to know what she had done. I remember that she said she didn't like the way the gust blew her hair off of her forehead. I didn't understand. I thought it was the most beautiful picture in the world. Later, the photo disappeared, and not long after that, Mom moved out.
Her dresser didn't immediately accompany her so I spent hours sitting in front of it, confused and lost. I repeatedly and ritualistically ran my teenaged hands over it, trying to summon that feeling of our mother daughter bond and childhood evenings at the makeup mirror. I opened and closed the drawers, something I wouldn't have done had she still been at home. Upon doing so, I found other things that had been left behind; like her retainer from high school, spiny and small like a pink and silver crab buried underneath the sand of my elementary school artwork and out of season clothing.
When Mom came back for the dresser, my parents made sure I wasn't home but when I returned and saw the hole it had left in the bedroom, I noiselessly crouched down in the grand expanse of nothingness and, like a dog, desperately whiffed where it had been. As I knelt, stunned and seasick like I was on floorboards of a sinking vessel, I felt my skin peel back until my heart was exposed and it rolled out beside me. Seeing it there, next to the space it used to live in, I knew nothing would ever be the same.
And soon thereafter, the dresser was sold.
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