All The Heavy Furniture

(The Visit)

We visit on a Saturday and I

search for you

in all the

heavy furniture,

you, the young woman who

taught me how to drive over that

breathtakingly

narrow

bridge,

who drove me to

Super-X

and bought me Trojans

“just in

case.”

I spot you in places,

familiar in your art room

scattered with zines —

me, swinging playfully like a teen, indoors, in your

hanging basket

chair,

knocking things down,

eyeing your work with

envy, but also,

breathless

admiration.

We talk about the lost decades,

as if we can regain them, cup them in our deeply-creased hands, and

share the

aloneness of them,

speaking almost simultaneously of

big fears, of

small omitted facts that,

if known,

might have

alleviated

“things”

(or, then again, might not have alleviated

anything at

all).

We visit, and I catch glimpses of you, still,

of the girl you

were

in your cast-down glances (shame plus humility plus — that saving grace — wry humor that comes from

understanding we remain

inextricably connected),

in the lilt of your voice,

in the eye-roll-cum-spittake you offer when we happen upon

the men, upstairs,

behaving badly

(eyes glazed,

bellies poking unattractively from

tee shirts, above jeans and

socked feet).

You walk me to the guest room, which seems

both familiar and foreign,

signs of you flashing and

disappearing,

missing in the weighty

couches

(there must be six or more in your home, in all — not cheap Ikea ones with chintzy cushions

giving way after a few seatings,

their skeletal innards poking at one’s sacrum,

as does our

recent

acquisition),

find you utterly missing in the

armoires and recliners,

groove-worn wood and rich leather

scarred by love and strife and thirst and

general usage,

faded rings bleached into surfaces,

born of coffee cups and water glasses

placed

wittingly

there,

no attempt to erase them, scrub clean, or

prevent further damage.

Rather, you (appearing again) have

accepted them there

as more-than-okay,

mere proof of life,

of children at home,

of house guests arriving

year after year

by choice,

echoes of weekend mornings

before the fire

reminding me of the purest

utilitarian purpose of

furniture.

I don’t sleep.

The heat rumbles like a truck idling outside, or a

running

generator.

“Go and check,” my husband grumbles sleepily, and I

do,

moving to the window to stare out at the empty street,

watching for bears

and other things that

might flash and

disappear.

In the morning

you are there, sitting by the fire like an old friend,

a poetry book in your hand.

“Listen to this,” you say and

read aloud,

familiar again.

When you stand, you are someone new,

older and beautiful,

without inhibition or

reserve,

braless, with your nipples

revealing now and again, unapologetically,

from beneath your

brown tee shirt, as you offer

up berries and syrup and

almond cream.

Yes! I think, yes,

as I pack my bags,

as I descend your foot-worn stairs,

eyes grazing strokes of

color you have painted morning after morning,

on newsprint

until familiar if broken faces emerge,

faces now tacked

almost haphazardly to your

walls.

(Never again will I slip tissue down

my bra to try to

mask things, or soften who I am, as if men have

ever hid the silhouettes of their dicks,

bulging from beneath cotton khakis,

instead of

flaunting

them).

On the way home,

Buffalo Springfield plays as

the trees blur by in their impossible apricot and crimson

hues.

I suddenly think of the boy

who died in a car crash in high school

when he simply leaned down to change the

song.

I think of the years he never had,

no thirty-year gaps in friendships,

no whiskey sipped, no chatter giddy with

recapturing,

no lamenting the soft paunchy swells, nor mourning

the lost

elasticity of his

skin.

I imagine the rooms in his house,

empty of

heavy couches,

of coffee-ringed armchairs,

of the lack of indentations in the carpet where

heavy-footed prints might have

fallen

year after year.

We pass by Suffern by

Sloatsburg, speeding past the

sign for a town I’ve never been which bears the

laughable name of Ho-Ho-Kus.

I say it over and over again —

Ho-Ho-Kus,

placing the emphasis on each of the three

different

syllables,

wondering,

did I ever even know that boy’s name?

Gae is the author of several novels for readers of all ages, though shelved as tween and young adult. You can read more about her and her books at gaepolisner.com