By Anna Quinlan
@quinlananna

Today is a day it feels important to keep the house clean. I don’t know why, exactly, but on day fifty-whatever of quarantine, I’ve stopped asking myself why some days feel like this and other days feel unmotivated and sloppy. I’m just trying to take it one day at a time, to do what seems like it might yield some peace on that particular day, for that particular quarantine mood. I am too disoriented to search for reasons or assign meanings anymore. 

I’m going to be on top of things today. I load last night’s dinner dishes into the dishwasher and hit start before I begin cooking breakfast. I clear off the random toys and papers from the breakfast nook table, arrange the four placements into an evenly spaced rectangle, and reposition the vase of Trader Joe’s flowers perfectly in the middle. I remember that the word “tablescape” is a thing, and it makes the corners of my mouth turn up just a little. I arrange the breakfast dishes neatly in the sink while they wait their turn in the dishwasher.

Before my kids begin their distance learning school day, while they are spilling cereal and scattering toys on my kitchen tablescape, I quickly tidy the dining room-turned-school table and scoot the chairs back in neatly, one under each of the four sides of the table.

I am 38 years old, with two school aged sons including a nine-year-old who is now only half his life away from moving out—a friend pointed this out on his birthday—yet my life is still littered with tangible reminders that I don’t feel all the way grown up yet, and this dining table is one of them. It was my grandmother’s, handed down to me by way of my mother when my Gram moved into an assisted living facility many years ago. I am told that it is a “nice table” when I accept the hand-me-down offer, in the cautionary way that means, “you better take care of this,” and although I want to believe that I can be trusted with this responsibility I quietly know that I am barely capable of a passing grade. The table is solid teak, but the indoor kind, and something about a famous Danish furniture brand is mentioned. We move it into the dining room and probably spill something on it immediately. I vow to clean it with the proper oil, and never do.

My dad mentions that he has stashed some nice dining chairs in storage and would we like to have them now that we have a Nice Table? They are a darker wood, cherry wood maybe, with leather seat cushions surrounded by rounded brass nail heads. There are six chairs in total, two of which have armrests that don’t fit under Gram’s teak table but it’s okay because there’s really only room for four chairs in our dining room anyways. We tuck the armrest chairs into corners of other rooms in the house and arrange the other four chairs around the new dining room table. 

The Nice Table gets little use over the years, because the kitchen table always makes more sense; it’s always closer to the food, closer to the action, closer to Mom. But then a global pandemic hits the shores of California and our world comes screeching to a halt and all of the sudden my full-time outside sales job is to be done from home and also I am a homeschool teacher now. And just like that, the Nice Table is reinvented. 

Within days it’s covered in Chromebooks and headsets and notebooks and souvenir ballpark cups filled with markers. The papers seem to multiply while I sleep, and I give up on any real organizational system. I’ll settle for tidy. Multiple times a day I tidy.

This includes the chairs, which look so much more grown up than I feel, with their leather and nailhead trim scoffing at my leggings and bedhead. One chair for each side of the table seems simple enough, but they are never where they’re supposed to be anymore. The two chairs that sit in front of the laptops are always scooted impossibly far away from the table, used more often as awkward perches and quasi jungle gyms than chairs, really. Sitting still is not a strong suit for my young sons, Zoom calls be damned. 

It’s the positioning of the other two chairs that I can’t figure out, though. Not the first time I tidy, and not even the twelfth. But sometime during week three or four, I notice it.  

They belong tucked in neatly under the two long sides of the rectangular teak table, but they are always swung around to the corners now, jutting out into the walkway and daring me not to stub my toe. Every time I walk past the table I scoot them back to their proper side and tuck them back in. Over and over. Scoot and tuck, scoot and tuck. I do it dutifully at first, then mindlessly, then resentfully. Scoot and tuck, scoot and tuck. Why are these chairs never where they belong? Why is it so hard to maintain order?

And then one day, while I’m doing dishes for the thirty-seventh time as my kids are playing in the backyard, their school work successfully completed and the Nice Table abandoned until tomorrow, I turn around and see the mess of it all, but I suddenly see something more. I see the ghosts of us in those chairs, not where they are supposed to be, but where they are, sloppily out of place.

The chairs that are supposed to be tucked under the long sides of the table are swung out to the corners because that’s where I sit when I am looking over my sons’ shoulders, beckoned for again and again to spell the word, count out the numbers, navigate the website, fix the Zoom call. Between the two of them, I estimate that I get about four minutes between each summons. It’s a few sentences of an email. One work text. Three lines in a spreadsheet. Between each of my own tasks I am a teacher, a cheerleader, an IT guru, a referee, a fact checker, a spell checker, a counselor, a listener, an enforcer, a timer, a reminder, a mom. 

And that is my chair, jutting out where it does not belong. I am the one who keeps pulling it out to this spot, without enough mental bandwidth to care about the flow of traffic from dining room to kitchen when I am, at any given moment, in the middle of five of my own tasks and thirteen of theirs. I bop back and forth between my desk and the Nice Table, back and forth, again and again from 8:30am to 11:00am. There is no time or brain cells for tidiness during these hours. The teak and the leather and nailheads are lost on all of us in this mess. 

As I stand at the kitchen sink drying my hands, staring at our ghosts in the messy dining room, I soften. I hope that my children will have happy memories from this time. I hope they will not remember the specifics of the pandemic as much as they will remember that their mom was next to them. That she came when she was called for, again and again, pulling up a chair to sit beside them and solve the next problem, and the one after that. It may be messy, and frustrating, and choppily pieced together between emails and work texts and spreadsheets, but right now, those out of place chairs mean we are doing the best we can.    

Of course the chairs aren’t where they belong. Nothing is.

Photo by Ashlee Gadd.