Do They Haunt You, My Beguiling Belongings?

The art of stacking one’s furniture into a giant pile is a
truly underappreciated householder’s skill. There are reasons to do this. It’s
not some arbitrary entertainment like stuffing a hundred co-eds into a phone
booth or arranging cheerleaders into a giant pyramid. Not to malign those
entirely healthy enterprises, mind you.

Specifically, if one is having a new floor put into one’s
house, the traditional method for doing this, I have recently come to discover,
is to stack up all the furniture from one side of the house into the rooms on
the other side of the house. Then, after the guys have laid the new floor on
that side, you take all the stacked-up furniture and switch it to the other
side. But you don’t have to move the stuff that’s off the floor. So clothes are
left forlornly hanging in the closet, looking like they miss the shoes and
dirty-clothes piles that used to occupy the space beneath them. Mirrors and
framed posters are left hanging on the walls, looking pointless without the
furniture that used to define the spaces: the over-the-couch space, the
between-the-hutch-and-bookshelf space. Hanging plants are left hanging over
empty, colorless air, abandoned and loveless.

A half-empty house is one thing, like with one room empty,
or two rooms empty. But when it’s the entire bottom of the house that’s empty,
and the entire top part is full, that’s just eery. It brings to mind flood
victims and sewage overflow and the possibility of an infestation of anacondas
or other low-lying dangerous pests.

So there we were, moving every stick of furniture, every
tchotchke, every standing lamp and pile of books out of the bedrooms and into
the living room. Furniture tends to be boxy, so that’s not too hard to stack.
But what about all the other stuff? Throw pillows. Blankets. Cd’s. Giant enamel
butterflies. Eighteenth century gas lanterns. Delicate origami creations. A
banjo. You know, the things you have lying around for whatever reason. Smaller
things you can put in boxes, but awkwardly shaped things have to stand alone. A
Christmas tree stand holding up a sewing mannequin, that statue of a naked man
contemplating some unknown thing that seemed like such a buy that time in Peru.
Those, you have to arrange around your neatly stacked boxy furniture. Then the
guys come.

I can’t help wondering about the lives of these floor
installer guys. They go into people’s homes and see all their stuff piled up
like some Jersey City art exhibit. They don’t see the little stuff, like your
collection of plastic widgets that hold the bread bags closed, but they do see
your collection of broken vacuum cleaners. They don’t see the tiny stash box
that contains the lock of hair which was the first haircut of your first
serious boyfriend, which his mom gave you. She thought you two were meant to
be. Well, you kept the lock of hair anyway, and its been thirty years. They
don’t see that. But they do see an arrangement of willow branches and eagle
feathers bound with a rawhide handle and meant to bless a sacred Native
American something-or-other. You only keep it because you are afraid you’ll be
cursed by the stranger who gave it to you, for a reason you no longer remember,
if you throw it out. They don’t see your collections of great American classic
books and antique salt and pepper shakers. No, those are neatly packed in
boxes. What they see is an unfinished upholstering project with its springs
jangling out in all directions, looking like something you dragged out of
someone else’s trash. Which it is.

You want to post signs all around your pile, proclaiming,
“What you see before you is not representative of my inner being!” and “These
items are on their way to Goodwill, I swear!” But you don’t. You let the floor
guys come and think what they think. Don’t pretend they don’t think anything
about it. You know they do. Installing floors isn’t that thrilling; they need
something to contemplate all day.

Then the floor guys come, and you meet them. They are
Mexican teenagers.

You try to imagine how this sort of person would regard your
odd-shaped objects that don’t fit in boxes, but you cannot. The next day you
have to come and restack your belongings on the other side of the house. You
can’t help it—you find yourself trying to arrange the things artfully, in a way
that might make you seem intriguing to foreigners in the rosy bloom of youth.

So they come and they go. You get a new floor, but all they say is adios.