2003, I move into an apartment, one with a tiny view of the Empire State Building, and I can barely get enough money together for the broker’s fee and the security deposit and the first and last month’s rent, but I do it, and it’s a triumph. I can’t afford furniture, though. I have a mattress and a small kitchen table that is basically a card table and two chairs and that’s it. I end up dumpster-diving in the neighborhood. Two blocks away, outside a senior citizens’ home, I find a decent bookshelf, real wood, no nicks. Briefly, I imagine death on it, a resident passing away in the night, her children picking over the china, the jewelry, the sepia-toned family photo albums. Does anyone want this bookshelf? No. I hoist it on my back and head home with it, stopping every thirty seconds to rest. It’s tall, this bookshelf, and it almost hits the ceiling of my apartment. I dust it, and then I paint it white while standing on a stepladder. When I’m done, I wipe my hands on my jeans and smile. Overnight the bookshelf dries. I move it against the back wall of the apartment, and I put all my art books in there, organized by color. Then I invite my mother over to see my new place.
The first thing she notices when she walks in is the bookshelf, bright white, and she asks me where I got it. I tell her the truth. “It looks nice,” she says. “I just need to do that ten more times and then I’ll have a whole apartmentful of furniture,” I say, and then I regret it, because I don’t want my mother to feel bad that I live that way, even though we’ve always lived that way, on the edge of broke. She sits down at the kitchen table. I pour some wine into a jelly jar and slide it toward her. For a few minutes she riffs on being alone, missing my father. My mother has been a widow for fifteen years, but she still likes to moan about it whenever her love life gets a little dull. Before she leaves she says, “I can give you furniture,” and I say, “Mom, it’s fine,” and she says, “No, really, I have a few pieces for you,” and I don’t even know what she’s talking about, a few pieces, she’s got nothing to spare in her life, and I say no again, and then she gets a little hostile about it and says, “I can give my daughter furniture for her new home if I want to,” and finally I agree, and she says she’ll send a guy over with it. After she’s gone, I drink the rest of the bottle of wine by myself.
A few days later a man shows up with a van. I venture out to the street to see if I can help him carry anything. He’s wiry and all jazzed up, with this lean, electric, weird energy. His hair is in tight little curls. He introduces himself as Alonzo. “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” he says. I ask no questions. My mother has had a lot of friends in her life. She’s been a political activist for more than thirty years, involved with every possible shade of leftist organization. We had people coming in and out of our house all the time. Someone helping her out could mean anything. Friendship was fluid.
A woman exits the passenger’s side. She’s a healthy, big blonde, probably twice the size of the man, both taller than him and wider. “This is my girl visiting from Virginia,” he says. She waves at me. He does not mention her name. He opens the back of the van. There’s a lamp in there, a small end table, another bookshelf, nothing too impressive, but also a lounge chair with an ottoman, actually gorgeous, black leather with a wood base, an Eames, or a good knockoff, anyway. I haven’t been home in a while, but I’m pretty sure my mother just gave me half her living room.
Alonzo and the woman move all of the furniture except for the lamp, which I carry myself. The woman seems to shoulder most of the weight of the furniture while Alonzo quietly directs her. When they’re finished, she says to me, “If y’all ever want to sell this chair, let me know. I love it. This is just my kind of chair.” There’s a genuine hunger in her voice. This thing would make me happy; this object would please me. How lucky she is to know what satisfies her. I nearly give it to her then, but I’m too strapped; I need it for myself.
Instead I scrounge in my purse for a tip but Alonzo waves me off. “Your mother took care of everything,” he says. He hands me his business card, which has a bunch of job titles on it. He’s a carpenter, a DJ, and a motivational speaker. He also does bodywork. “You call me if you ever need anything,” he says. “I do it all.” I feel like he has everything figured out. I put his business card in my kitchen drawer: my first business card in my new home.
The next week my mother comes to see how her furniture looks in my apartment, and she asks about Alonzo, but really it seems like she’s asking about his girlfriend. “Did he take care of you? With that girl of his?” she says. “Who is he to you?” I say. “He’s just a friend. He likes to help people. It’s what he does,” she says. “I don’t know anyone like that,” I say. “Well, then,” she says, “you’re hanging out with the wrong kind of people.”
Three years pass. I’m nearly thirty-two years old. My mother gets a new boyfriend, and eventually they break up because she finds out he has another girlfriend in Miami, and she says, “That’s it. I’m done. That was the last one.” During that time my brother gets married to a wonderful woman, and she looks like a princess at the wedding, and it makes me believe in the possibility of love. Even if it doesn’t exist for me, it could exist for someone else, and I take comfort in that. I sleep with one of my brother’s friends at the wedding and he sneaks out early in the morning without saying goodbye and we never see each other again, until I happen upon his picture in the wedding announcements section of the paper a few years later and I think, Good for you, but also, Fuck you—even though I am not entitled to the feeling at all.
Also during those three years I get two raises at work. Eventually I’m able to pay off the debt from the graduate program I never completed. After that, I buy proper wineglasses and new bookshelves and a kitchen table, but I keep the lounge chair and the ottoman because I like them. New furniture feels grown up. Also I mostly stop doing drugs, which feels extra grown up. Not in any twelve-step kind of way. I simply couldn’t take the hangovers anymore.