The Red Retro Chair

Posted on February 5, 2004 in Residences Writing Exercises

This is another piece written for my Wednesday group. I had members write about an object in their living room and then describe how it fit in the living room.

Part the First

I bought it — did I buy it? — I think it was left behind by a previous tenant who hadn’t forseen that retro would be a style in the years to come. I claimed it as my own, made it my friend on winter days when I sat in it watching the mix of snow and freezing rain turn the elms into monsters. The big red retro chair is what I called it: fat, a yawning seat befitting those hours when I just wanted to reflect and imagine myself as a pebble in its mouth. The surface shone brightly: I suspected that it was made of Naugahyde. Every cat I have owned treated it as a sacred place, a stupa around which they permitted themselves to dash in circuits or rest upon, but never scratch or bite. I didn’t have to train them to do this. The chair told them that this was not to be done, not even on the back. Other overstuffed chairs and couches allowed our felines to molest them, to tear off strings, to open their secret places but the big red retro chair always stared them down. No claw, no tooth defaced the big red chair. When they wanted to crouch on one of the square arms, they either jumped singly from the floor or climbed up my leg or raised themselves via the step ladder of an adjacent bookcase and leaped into the comfort. The chair was neither warm nor plush: it filled the craving of sitting.

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Part the Second

Everything depends on the red retro chair. Positioned across the innermost corner of our living room, it faces the empty center of the room where the cats drag their toys and sit, staring out the sliding glass door at the cactus I’ve planted in terracotta pots made from the clay of Baja. The chair is lord of the room, but an inclusive one, inviting conversation from the two beige-fabric dining room chairs and the yellow butterfly chair that we’re using until we can afford to place a sturdier partner for the red retro chair.

A long sloped ceiling — dripped stucco that we were sold as a “cathedral ceiling” — hangs over the forum. Two mobiles hang in front of a mirror: five pairs of moving eyes and a string of tin skeletons. Beneath the mirror, our tiny gas-powered fireplace belches. In front of that stands the red chair’s principal rival: a white clay leopard that we bought in Mexico. The leopard crouches on the tile apron. The cats like to treat it as one of the family, a member who is always there for company and never steals from the food bowl. The leopard sets the mood and the standard for feline decorum in the living room: I’ve often found the four of them — three of the flesh and the fourth of the fire-hardened earth — laying in a circle, all on their sides, all with their legs half-folded, their faces pointed to the center which I presume to be the ineffable comradery possible in their worship of Bastet.