A Chair of One’s Own

It was New Year’s Eve, 2019, when the idea came to me: Before the next day with its closed shops, before the year turned over like an odometer, I had to have a chair.

But no. What I thought I wanted was two chairs. What I thought I wanted was to move the matched set—procured some years ago for $30 each at a hotel overstock warehouse—from our bedroom, to the library.

The library used to be my daughter Evangeline’s bedroom. A constant reader, Evangeline issued an edict when she moved out: Don’t change my room—unless you make it a library. We complied—because it was easy in a house full of books.

So, I moved out the old, hand-me-down bed that Evangeline had slept in, and I sat on the floor, talking to Evangeline by phone and video call, going through her books—culling some, packing up others to send to her in Nova Scotia. Then I merged what books remained with other family members’ collections, including the overflow from my office and my husband’s. Since the room still had to be a bedroom for about five days each Christmas, I put in a Murphy Bed. But that presented a new challenge. With the Murphy Bed pulled down, there wasn’t much space for other furniture. Closed, the space was just an empty, uninviting square.

What the room needed was somewhere to sit. Chairs. Just the right size of chairs.

Like the chairs in our bedroom.

“But I like those chairs where they are,” my husband said. (He’s always advocating for domestic stasis.)

“We never sit in them,” I said. “They just pile up with laundry.” (I’m always pushing for domestic change.)

“I want to start sitting in them,” said my husband. “Or at least in one.” Why, he wondered did they have to be moved? Why did I need to do it now? (His questions are always more irritating when they have the taint of reason.)

The truth was, I didn’t know.

I couldn’t have foreseen what was coming—the weeks and months of cocooning inside. The experts didn’t even know that yet. All I knew, when I closed the Murphy Bed back into the wall, was that our children had returned to their own lives, their own homes, and I wanted to live more fully in mine. And to do that, I needed two chairs. If I couldn’t procure them within, I would have to procure them without.

I would go to Ikea.

It’s Swedish for Angst

The display was familiar—Hadn’t I seen all these chairs online? Hadn’t I memorized this and all the other furniture categories on countless previous visits?—and also dizzying. Or maybe that was the bright lights. The weight of my winter coat in the overheated air. I walked the circuit, considering contours and upholstery colours, testing the floor models, Goldilocks style. If there were to be two of them, they couldn’t be too big. If they were to entice us into the room, they’d have to be comfortable. But the chairs that had seemed suitable online, were actually stiff and cardboard-flimsy. And though they might have been cheap, the combined price for two chairs was too much—two times too much—to spend. Especially on a whim. Wasn’t that all that this was?

I was feeling light-headed. I was feeling defeated. Maybe I was coming down with something.

I sank into the only item that seemed to nod at comfort, a giant stuffed armchair that couldn’t possibly fit in the library space with a mate, and I let my head drop onto the chair back.

There were things I was supposed to be doing. Soon, I was going to have to rewrite my novel—a thing that I had spent six years writing, sometimes working the hours of an articling lawyer, and for which I had received only a small advance.

True, I was still waiting on notes from my editor on this current draft, but I could be rereading. I could be researching. I could be writing something new. I could be writing something for money.

I could be doing better, more productive things.

The last thing I should be spending time or money on was the instant gratification of two chairs from Ikea.

My husband didn’t even want to sit in the room. He had a couch in his office, in the room next door. We had chairs in the living room and TV room and the two chairs upstairs in our bedroom, if only we would move the laundry. The library chairs were really about something else. Something I wasn’t going to find at Ikea. But now, I didn’t seem to be able to get up, leaving the chairs and the idea behind. I was stuck there, in that over-stuffed chair.

That’s when my phone pinged.

It was a text from a new acquaintance whom I hoped might become a friend. The kind of person I admired for her innovative thinking. For her self-sufficiency. Her message wished for more contact in 2020.

I felt my fraudulent self sink deeper.

I confessed that her text found me stuck in a chair in Ikea. A chair that—eyeroll emoji—I probably shouldn’t buy. I managed to pry myself out of it. I took a picture of the behemoth in all its slip-covered glory, and pressed send. Perhaps we could get a laugh out of this.

But here’s what my friend (I knew then that she was) texted back:

“This chair will not be your forever chair because it will sag weirdly in 4 years BUT it will be the one you can sink into for your book’s birthing time.”

It was true. My husband didn’t need a chair. I did.

Not a beautiful chair. Just a place to sink into. To consider my accomplishments, after I’d worked very hard. Or simply to sit, whether I’d worked hard or not.

Reader, I bought it.

A Chair is Not a Room

Like everyone, I know Virginia Woolf’s declaration about the room a woman needs in order to write. (And an income—but that’s another story.) I have such a room. My office is the smallest room in the house, but it’s cozy and has a door I can close so that I can focus on my work.

But an armchair makes no justification of employment or industry. It’s devoted to leisure—a leisure that is a right, and a certainty, and a solitary pleasure.

Before the concept of the man cave, there was the man and his chair. A sacred space within the home where a man could be at ease, sitting undisturbed with his whiskey or his beer or his coffee. Where he could read the paper, watch TV, and ponder and opine on the nature of the world. Who would Archie Bunker be without his chair? Or Frasier’s father Martin Crane, in his duct-taped throne? Or Atticus Finch, who “did not do the things that [other] fathers did [but] sat in the living room, and read”?

That’s what I spent those first weeks of 2020, doing: reading in my chair. I even—egad—watched a show or two. I thought a few big thoughts, and a lot of small ones. I let myself sink into my leisure.

And then, the pandemic.

Life has changed outside and inside our house. Two of our adult children we visit only distantly, except for the one occasion when they could test or isolate. Two others were forced home by the pandemic, and we are constantly making and remaking our ways to be four adults in a house together. The daughter whose room became a library we haven’t seen (except on Zoom) for over a year.

Sometimes I haven’t been able to read, or even to think—even in the library.

But the reading chair is still my refuge. A hideaway within a hideaway, when the world is looming too close and also drifting away.

It’s not my forever chair. When it falls apart, I’ll get another. Maybe the next one will have real upholstery instead of slip covers, and stuffing that doesn’t compress every time I’m in it. Then again, perhaps I’ll grow so fond of this particular chair, that I’ll insist on keeping it even when it’s stained and ripping at the seams.

Because it’s mine, and I have the right to sit down and let my mind wander. To be the indisputable centre. Outsized, and alone, and here for no one but myself.