So Many Empty Chairs

“What on earth is that?” He asked, hitting the breaks to avoid driving into it. Right square in the middle of the driveway sat the largest shipment they had ever received. She jumped out before the car fully stopped and ran over to examine her prize: knowing that atop the pallet and beneath the layers upon layers of plastic and padding was her parents’ old oak dining room table, safe in California after its long trip from Washington, DC. They went at it with scissors, the hot fall sun on their shoulders as the piles of packing materials grew and the table came into view. After traveling from house to house with her parents for nearly half a century, it now had a permanent place as the very first dining table in their very first home.

They stood in the sun admiring it, and she pictured brunch with friends, saw herself whipping up a batch of French toast with her favorite Semifreddi’s cinnamon bread. She imagined carrying birthday cakes with candles ablaze, hosting potlucks and family meals, and finally having a place to gather.

The little pub table that had held so many meals in her tiny studio apartment had two small, bar-height stools. So that wouldn’t do. The chair hunt had begun.

“I’m really not finding anything good online,” she told him one night, after doom scrolling through countless furniture websites and Craigslist offerings.

He mused, “something good will turn up.” And it did.

A neighbor was putting their house on the market and set four lovely old chairs on the curb. They packed them into the little hatchback and carried them home. The bones of the chairs were beautiful: oak to match the table with small flower wood carvings on the back. The next two chairs were acquired while on a dog walk, from the kind woman on the corner of Madeline St. The tedious three blocks home, with one chair under each arm and the dogs pulling after squirrels, was worth it. All six chairs got a good washing in the driveway, and then out came her mother’s old orange-handled scissors and her newly-acquired upholstery tool, which reminded her vaguely of a weeding folk. Thus began the chair collecting, and with it, a new favorite DIY hobby: reupholstery.

As she ran her hands along the thick upholstery fabric, a light winter rain falling outside, she remembered afternoons with her mother wandering through the enormous fabric store in Rockville, MD. They would meander through the subdued tones of drapery, marvel at the sparkles in the bridal section, and finally settle on the giant tables with towering piles of remnants. The names of the fabrics did not slide off her tongue the way they did her mother’s - silk, chiffon, and the dreaded polyester - but fabric stores still felt like home. Now she could introduce her husband to that world as together they chose the fabric for their dining room chairs. They watched as it was cut from the bolt and folded up for them to take home: thick, colorful, and with a vaguely southwestern pattern. The perfect bright and cheerful fabric for a crowded table.

Another giant box arrived, this one full of upholstery foam which expanded as soon as she unwrapped it, like one of those bath sponges that puffed up and turned into a dinosaur. She carefully traced and cut the foam, wrapped it with Dacron padding, and then stretched and stapled the fabric. The paper patterns of her mother’s day were replaced with YouTube videos, where amateur and professional upholsterers professed their preferences for foam thickness, sung the praises of fancy staple guns, and guided her though the project. Her hands were covered with blisters, and she herself filthy from stripping the chairs down to their frames.

“Do you know what chairs seats used to be filled with?” she asked him, wiping bits of dust and pieces of straw from her brow. “Straw!”

The chairs were finally ready, just in time for the start of Spring and the world to pause.

After the initial shock of it all, the pause felt more like one’s breath being held. The world was filled with that sense of panic, the desperate need to breath whilst deep underwater.

“When will we be able to see our families and friends again?”

“I don’t know.”

For a year and a half the chairs sat empty, collecting dust and shoved aside as the dining room table became her office, the pretty patterns replaced by a boring brown desk chair. The table that was going to host so many meals held quiet dinners for two, often amidst zoom meeting or with the sad drone of a news reporter in the background.

With nowhere to go and no one to see, she turned back to upholstery. A friend no longer had room for a goose-neck rocker, another neighbor was letting go a big solid rocking chair with lion heads on the ends of the arms. Someone else gave her eight folding director chairs. She pulled the threads from the faded and dirty backs and seats to make a pattern for new ones. Day after day, she cut and sewed, the chair collection growing as the quiet evenings stretched on. She wrote to a long-lost friend in Maine, now a poetry professor, reconnected after more than a decade. “There must be a poem in this, Noel, all these chairs and no one to sit in them. Tell me please that there’s some sort of poetry there?”

Many months later she woke from a dream: she was in Santa Cruz, in the waves, learning to surf. It wasn’t nearly as fun as it looked, not a graceful glide across the water but instead a pummeling and desperate (but grateful) reemerging into the blazing sun. It was nearly summer, and the world was about to awaken.

They dogs watched suspicious from their perch on the sofa as they frantically wheeled the desk chair into the back room, cleared piles of paper from the table, and tidied up mountains of fabric. The Highwomen sang:

“I want a house with a crowded table,

And a place by the fire for everyone

Let us take on the world while we’re young and able

And bring us back together when the day is done”

A song she had heard countless times before now brought her to tears. He held her close as her sobs were interrupted by little bursts of laughter. “We can finally see everyone again. I’m so happy!”